Celestina's Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature 9780822396239

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Celestina's Brood

Celestina's Brood Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literatures

Roberto Gonzalez

Echevarria

Duke University Press Durham and London 1993

@

1993 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the

United States of America on odd-free paper

Xi

Designed by Cherie Holma Westmoreland Typeset in Joanna by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. The publisher and author gratefully acknowledge the support of The Program for Cultural Cooperation Between Spain's Ministry of Culture and United States' Universities.

Roberto M. Gonzalez Gonzalez

(Cienfuegos, June 14, 1918 - Bradenton, April 4, 1986)

in memoriam

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Preamble 1.

Celestina's Brood

2.

The Life and Adventures ofCipi6n: Cervantes and the Picaresque 45

3.

Poetry and Painting in Lope's El castigo sin venganza 66

4.

Calder6n's La vida es sueiio: Mixed-(Up) Monsters 81

5.

Threats in Calder6n: La vida es sueiio

1:303-8

7

114

6.

Reflections on the Espejo de paciencia

7.

Poetics and Modernity in Juan de Espinosa Medrano, Known as Lunarejo 149

8.

Socrates Among the Weeds: Blacks and History in Carpentier's El siglo de las luees 170

9.

Guillen as Baroque: Meaning in Motivos de son 194

10. Plain Song: Sarduy's Cobra

Notes

239

Index

273

212

128

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank, first and foremost, Reynolds Smith, editor at Duke University Press, for encouraging me to bring together this collection and Gustavo Perez Firmat and Maria Rosa Menocal for not letting my spirit flag. More appreciation than can be expressed here is due to Georgina Dopico-Black for all kinds of help in the preparation of the manuscript, particularly through her intelligent observations about form and content, and for her warm encouragement when all seemed futile. Many thanks also to Peggy Preciado for typing the manuscript into the computer as well as for suggesting changes. Jay Williams, who read with patience and a probing eye for Hispanisms, should be commended for her discernment and kindness. Sandra Guardo, as usual, not only helped with the technical aspects of preparing the final typescript, but also kept annoyances and interruptions at bay. Isabel, as always, kept my life in some semblance of order. We often forget that our work is done in close touch not only with texts, but also with people. If our profession is not quite a movable feast, it feels sometimes like a cruising conga line, with stops in very cool as well as very hot places and even in very cool hot places. I have very fond memories of people associated with each of the pieces included in this book, many of which, at one point or another, took the form of lectures or papers delivered at conferences or at various institutions by speCial invitation. The one on monsters in La vida es sueiio dates back to my doctoral dissertation (Yale, 1970), which was directed by my now colleague Manuel Duran, to whom I also owe crucial clarifications while preparing other essays contained here. As if completing some sort of baroque figure, my doctoral dissertation inspired a piece by Severo Sarduy ("Un Art Monstre," Baroque 81, Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1981), whose work I study in the last chapter of this book. My work on monsters also reminds me of the halcyon days of Structuralism and brings to mind a production of Calderon's play at Cornell, in which I was a speCial consultant, and which featured

x

Acknowledgments

Christopher Reeve as Segismundo. Segismundo to Superman does not seem like an illOgical sequence. I remember carrying to Havana, in a memorable trip, Harry Sieber's book on Lazarillo, the review of which led to my piece on Cervantes. Reading it was a comfortable refuge from the hectic events around me, and the frenzied writing of an unpublished (and probably unpublishable) cahier d'un retour au pays natal. The essay on Lope evokes fun-filled trips to Yankee Stadium with Robert E. Kaske, one of the most uncompromising readers of difficult texts I have known and a man filled with a Rabelesian joie de vivre. His recent death adds a touch of melancholy to those memories. The essay on threats in Calderon evokes the bar at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, where a friend's Ouan Luis Hernandez Giron) mock fulminations about another suddenly clarified lines of La vida es sueiio that had always seemed superfluous and even somewhat ridiculous. The essay on EI siglo de las luces is linked in my mind to wonderful, if very cold, evenings in New Hampshire in the company of my friends, and now compadres, Willy and Linda Luis. The piece on Guillen, which I had been planning for many years, was finished with the gentle but firm prodding of Vera Kutzinski, to whom it owes more than I could say. The essay on Espejo de paciencia arose from an invitation by Enrico Mario Santi to lecture at a symposium on the emergence of Cuban nationality at Cornell, which culminated, as all good conferences, with a great party at his house. The concluding essay on Cobra, which is part of my book La ruta de Severo Sarduy, makes me nostalgiC for many a summer afternoon in Senlis, in the company of Severo Sarduy, a dear friend whose works have been a real challenge to me. The study of Lunarejo I wrote at the request of Mercedes Lopez Baralt, of the University of Puerto Rico, who is also a very cherished and admired friend. I read a first version of it at a very convivial symposium (if the redundancy is allowed) of Peruvianists at the University of Wisconsin, invited by Margarita Zamora, once a student and now a prominent colleague. A fuller version was read later at the University of Seville, owing to an invitation by distinguished colonialist Carmen de Mora, a warm host. The opening essay on Celestina was finished while teaching a seminar on the topiC at Yale, but I had been plotting it for over twenty years, during which time I must have bored my friend Giuseppe Mazzotta a hundred times talking about it in our walks around the Hamden reservoirs.

Acknowledgments

xi

Virginia Jewess was good to look up some information for me in Italy for the piece on "Threats in La vida es sueiio." Finally, I would like to thank my dear friend Harold Bloom for reading the entire manuscript. Thanks are given to the editors of the journals and books in which the previously published essays appeared. These are: "On Cipion's Life and Adventures: Cervantes and the Picaresque," Diacritics 10, no. 3 (1980), pp. 15-26. Reprinted in Cervantes, ed. Harold Bloom (New Haven: Chelsea House, 1986), pp. 99-114. "EI 'monstruo de una especie y otra': La vida es sueiio III, 2, 727," Co-Textes (Centre d'Etudes et Recherches Sociocritiques, Universite Paul Valery, Montepellier, France), no. 3, Special Issue on Calderon: Calderon: Codigos, Monstruos, Jeones, ed. Javier Herrero (1982), pp. 27-58. "Poetry and Painting in Lope's EI castigo sin venganza," Magister Regis: Studies in Honor of Robert Earl Kaske, ed. Arthur Groos, with Emerson Brown, Jr., Thomas D. Hill, Giuseppe Mazzotta, and Joseph S. Wittig (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), pp. 273-87. "Threats in the Theater of Calderon: La vida es sueiio, I, 303-8," in The Lesson of Paul de Man, special issue of Yale French Studies ed. Peter Brooks, Shoshana Felman, and]. Hillis Miller, no. 69 (1985), pp. 180-91. "Reflections on Espejo de paciencia," Cuban Studies 16 (1986), special issue on "The Emergence of Cuban Nationality," ed. Enrico Mario Santi," pp. 10122. "Reflexiones sobre Espejo de pacieneia," Nueva Revista de Filologia Hispdnica (El Colegio de Mexico), vol. 35, no. 3 (1987), pp. 571-90. "Poetica y modernidad en el Lunarejo," to appear in a special issue of Revista de Estudios Hispdnicos (Puerto Rico), directed by Mercedes Lopez Baralt. "Socrates Among the Weeds: Blacks and History in Carpentier's El siglo de las luees." Massachusetts Review 24. no. 3 (1984). pp. 545-61. Revised version in Voices from Under: Black Narrative in Latin America and the Caribbean. ed. William Luis (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984). pp. 33-53. "Socrates yerbero: Los negros y la historia en EI siglo de las luces." Filologia (Universidad de Buenos Aires). ano 22. no. 2 (1987), pp. 75-99. "Guillen as Baroque." CaJJaloo, "Nicolas Guillen: A Special Issue," ed. Vera M. Kutzinski, vol. 10, no. 2 (1987), pp. 302-17. "plain Song: Sarduy's Cobra," Contemporary Literature 28, no. 4 (1987). pp. 437-59; reprinted in Modern Latin American Fiction, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House. 1990). pp.401-20.

Preamble

As I reread this book and inevitably become my own critic and historian, I see that a brief history of my critical education may help the reader understand how I came to work the way I do and what it is that unites the essays collected here. Like nearly everyone of my generation I began studying literary history and philology in the traditional way. As an undergraduate in the 1960s my desire was to know as much as possible about literature, which meant learning literary history and reading as many of the major and minor works as time allowed. Knowing literature then was a largely unproblematic process, organized by the diScipline ofliterary history. Shocked into bilingualism by exile, I had become enthralled with language and language learning and had picked up French and Italian in addition to my Spanish and English. These were the four traditions to which I devoted myself with unremitting passion. I thought it proper to cover the entire range of each of those literatures, which appeared to me like parallel buildings, with a foundation in the Middle Ages, rising up through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Modem Era. There was no question but that the modems did not measure up to the classics, and less attention was devoted to them. Latin American literature barely entered into the picture then, and the most modem Spanish author we read was Federico Garcia Lorca. I absorbed a good deal of Menendez y Pelayo, sometimes diluted in other historians, and much Lanson, pressured by a French professor who thought his history of French literature should simply be known by rote. In Italian my professors harked back to even earlier eras of pedagogy. In their classes one read Dante word by word and was forced to memorize whole cantiche. The fare was heavy on Petrarch, Boccaccio, with some Manzoni. But no modem poetry. There was no question of engaging in much interpretation of the works by these authors, which were incommensurate monuments, to the understanding of which one made discrete contributions at best. It was

2

Preamble

unthinkable to question the authority of someone like Menendez y Pelayo. My first encounter with close reading and interpretation came in a class with Cambridge Hispanist Edward M. Wilson at Indiana University. One of a distinguished group of English calderonistas, Wilson dared to read plays like La vida es sueiio [Life is a DreamJ with minute attention to detail, oblivious or clearly set against received wisdom. Under his tutelage Calderon's plays, those old chestnuts from bachillerato, suddenly came alive as poems of magnificent beauty and subtlety. The wife-murder plays, which had so shocked Menendez y Pelayo and others, suddenly appeared as critiques of the honor code, cast in a poetry of very precise symmetrical splendor. Although I had experienced much more in terms of criticism by the time I wrote them, the two pieces on Calderon contained in this book are a belated homage to the great teacher Wilson was. With him I learned to distrust the authoritative and authoritarian Spanish historians and critics. At Yale's Spanish Department I was immersed again in Romanisches philologie, particularly in poetry courses with Gustavo Correa, who had been a student of Leo Spitzer, and Jose]. Arrom, a literary historian in the grand manner, who had devised a historical construct for the study of the whole sweep of Latin American literature. It would be disingenuous to claim that reading poetry with Correa was a pleasant experience, but it was a formative one for sure. With him I first encountered hermeneutics and read not only Spitzer, but Curtius, Auerbach, C. S. Lewis, and a great deal of estilistica. Correa had been a pioneer in myth criticism, and his interest in theory was a good and timely example. But the way out of conventional Hispanism was through Manuel Duran, a student of Americo Castro who did not share the master's dogmatism, and whose linguistic and literary range are legendary. A Catalan by birth and conviction, Duran has a cosmopolitan view of culture that provided a bridge for what followed. For it was at Yale, of course, in the late sixties that I, along with not a small number of others like me, experienced the arrival of Structuralism. Regardless of what happened later, criticism has never been the same in the American academy, and the change has been for the good (though not all that issued from Structuralism was good). The French influence injected philosophical specula-

Preamble

3

tion into a tradition that, because of its strong ties to England, distrusted philosophy. In addition, the French maltres penseurs were powerful writers all, from Levi-Strauss to Derrida, and particularly in the case of Barthes. Suddenly, academic criticism seemed flatfooted, inelegant, unfashionable. This was more pOignant on the Spanish side of things, for the so-called Boom of the Latin American novel took place in Paris at the same time as Structuralism and its aftermath were enjoying a Boom of their own on the same Left Bank. An abyss suddenly opened between what had been written, say, before 1965, and what came after, both in fiction and in criticism. Two Latin American writers of note participated in both movements: the poet Octavio Paz and the novelist Severo Sarduy, who was a full-fledged member of the Tel Quel group. Paz's view of Structuralism was more critical than Sarduy's, but he was still strongly influenced by Levi-Strauss in particular. Sarduy rode the wave of Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and finally the dispersal of the Tel Quel group as a kind of gadfly. My friendship with him, which dates from 1968, gave me access to all this activity on the Parisian side, while at Yale, and later at Cornell and then again at Yale, I lived the vortex of the American movement. In the United States the Structuralist heyday was short-lived, to be replaced by Deconstruction and various branches of Marxism. The latter, particularly in the case of Latin American literature, spent itself looking for an authentic political arena and analyzing and vaunting ordinary works and minor new writers. Deconstruction intensified the speculative, philosophical element that Structuralism had brought to criticism. I was drawn to it mostly through Borges, rather than Paul de Man or Jacques Derrida, and in great measure because I had become tired of the scientific pretensions of semiotics and repelled by its cacophonous jargon. Deconstruction seemed to be working from within literature itself, and I practiced it before it had a name. Though I learned more than I probably know from de Man, Derrida, and others, I was drawn eventually to the work of Foucault because he seemed to be the only one who included literature in a larger discursive economy, one that allowed me to see the novel in a context that was not literary in the narrow sense, but that also allowed me to see nonliterary forrns of narrative as literary. This path led to my Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 1990) and to essays on the

4

Preamble

likes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes. The essays contained here follow a different path and are concerned with somewhat different issues. What Structuralism and its aftermath displaced from the Spanish scene was estilistica. with which it had much in common through Saussure. their common source. But the difference in approach and style was fundamental. Estilistica analyzed a text to celebrate the linguistic performance of a given subject whose dexterity determined his or her value as a writer. In the hands ofDarnaso Alonso. this method had produced some valuable criticism. but its pathos and even bathos was insufferable. Structuralism and its sequels. all united by the notion of text. at the very least distanced poetic performance from individual self. displacing creativity to linguistic fact. psychoanalytic language. or the effects of difference. Even if some of this disguised a phantasmiC subject who would not say his or her name. at least the critic did not appear as a mere eulOgizer of a creative self, but as someone who set into motion literary language to allow it to reveal that which made it work. In Deconstruction this meant showing discrepancies and contradictions. rather than praising the continuity ofintention and form. Those ofus who have worked on living writers know that this is more often than not far from amusing to them. When applied to the classics in a tradition. it can and has irritated many people. The critical controversies of the past twenty years. as is well known. have shaken up the canon of various literatures. In the case of the Latin American countries. where the connection between the national literature and national ideology is very strong. there are huge battles still to be fought. Younger critics like Carlos]. Alonso. Anibal Gonzalez Perez. and Julio Ramos. from Puerto Rico. and Efrain Kristal. from Peru.. are beginning to carry our very daring work in this direction. Ramos has been bold enough to deconstruct Marti. The essays in this book are concerned with two general issues: modernity in the Hispanic literary tradition and the Baroque as the expression of the modem. Celestina is not baroque. to be sure. but the fact that some of the most daring Latin American works today have gone back to it Signals that Rojas's work is the point at which what they consider akin to them began. The book ranges from the dawn of modernity in Celestina (1499) to the most experimental recent fiction in Spanish: Sarduy's Cobra (1972) and Fuentes' Terra Nostra

Preamble

5

(1975). In the Baroque the essays attempt to come to grips with what several influential Latin American writers have pronounced to be the first Latin American artistic movement. This concern is articulated most explicitly in the pieces on Silvestre de Balboa, Juan de Espinosa Medrano, Alejo Carpentier, and Nicolas Guillen. Recourse to the Baroque, the so-called Neobarroco, is the recovery of that which appeared farthest from the modem, more aligned with the most retrograde elements of Spanish culture. But the Latin Americans were able to focus on the bizarre elements of baroque aesthetics and discover in them a source as well as a tradition. Picking up on their interests, I deal ultimately with the issue of monstrosity as identity, with the recognition of self as a reflexive perception of difference, and with the broader question of Latin American uniqueness and Originality as reflected in literature. In Espinosa Medrano the lunar, the birthmark, is the difference; in Guillen it is his blackness. In Sarduy it is the question of sexual role and takes the form of tattoos and castration. In Calderon it is the ambiguity of the young characters. In Celestina the mark is the scar on the bawd's face. Monstrosity appears in the Baroque as a form of generalized catachresis, one that affects language as well as the image of self and that includes the sense of belatedness inherent in Latin American literature. In my own case the monstrosity lies perhaps in the very use ofEnglish, a language that I continue to feel like a familiar medium not quite my own, the way I imagine the Baroques felt about poetic language. One of the topiCS I engage here is precisely the relationship between language and self in the Baroque, which turns out to be language as self, meaning that there is no hidden residue of being after the linguistic display of baroque poetics. Another, related topic, is the constitution of characters in baroque theater and poetry. I hope, of course, that the essays I offer here are judged by how they illuminate a given text or movement, not by how faithfully they adhere to this or that school of criticism. The essays cover about twenty years of work, from my doctoral dissertation in 1970 to the fall semester of 1991, when I finally wrote my article on Celestina after much procrastination. As a collection, this volume is perhaps more like a map or itinerary of interests and obsessions than an integral book. I still rejoice in some of the inSights and also recoil before the obvious weaknesses. They all seem mine, how-

6

Preamble

ever, and I own up to them with both pride and humility. Although I do not go as far as my very dear friend Harold Bloom in this, I have come to believe that he is right and that one's method has to be oneself; however, I believe this to be true because in doing so one inevitably joins anyway a more general flow beyond the 1. This collection, therefore, is like a one-man show, united by the thread of a life, more than thirty years of which have already been devoted to the study oflanguage and literature.

1. Celestina's Brood

1 [T]he wit with which racy words and concepts are strung together in this book is almost a national catastrophe, because it does not allow one to handle without caution one of our greatest classics. -Ramiro de Maeztu

Fernando de Rojas's Celestina (1499) is the most suppressed classic in Spanish literary history, and one of the least known outside Hispanic letters. An account of the readings to which this disturbing work has not been subjected in the past hundred years could of itself constitute a monograph. A book in which perverse desire drives the characters, Celestina still awaits a Freudian analysis, as well as an interpretation according to Bataille's theories linking eros, evil. and literature. A story in which lower-class characters bring about the downfall of their masters, Celestina has yet to be subjected to a rigorous Marxist reading.! A text in which rhetoric figures so prominently, Celestina has still to undergo a de constructive dismantling. While it is true that there has been some incisive commentary recently from what could be loosely termed a poststructuralist perspective, what have prevailed in Celestina studies, beyond the ordinary fact-finding and source-hunting scholarship, have been existentialist interpretations, inquiries dependent on Americo Castro's propositions about the role converted Jews played in Spanish cultural history, debates about the sincerity of Rojas's piOUS intentions as stated in the prologue, and many discussions about the work's genre. 2 None of the major statements of the century about the origins and nature of the novel deals with Celestina, though Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo included a study of Rojas's work in his Origenes de la novela and Hispanists see it as a precursor to the picaresque. 3 But Georg Lukacs, Erich Auerbach, Michail Bakhtin, and Northrop Frye ignore it altogether, as do others, like Ian Watt and Julia Kristeva. As

8

Celestina's Brood

a literary model, Celestina has suffered a similar neglect. While Cervantes has an infinite number ofimitators in and out of the Hispanic tradition, and Tirso's Don Juan spawned a rich literary and musical following, there are few obvious heirs to Celestina after the beginning of the seventeenth century.4 In fact, one could say that the last truly worthy follower of Rojas was Cervantes himself in two of his Novelas ejemplares [Exemplary Stories], published in 1613 (see chapter 2 of this book). Except for the work of Menendez y Pelayo, and a few other academics, it was not until the Spanish Generation of'98, which did so much to explore and exploit Spanish literary myths, that Celestina was taken up as a force to contend with. Even then, the extent of the reappraisal was limited. There is a beautiful rewriting in Azorin's Castilla (1912), where Calisto and Melibea appear as a very domestic married couple with a daughter named Alisa, after her maternal grandmother, and a nice estate. As is characteristic of Azorin, the emphaSiS is not on drama or tragedy, but on the tranquil banality of life and the quiet passage oftime. After a lOving description of the house and garden, Calisto appears and watches as a hawk enters the latter, pursued by a young man who meets the daughter. The story told by Rojas in dramatic, even tragic terms, will be repeated as part of nature's plan to replenish the species. 5 In Azorin the disquieting elements at the core of Rojas's work are neutralized. Ramiro de Maeztu, on the other hand, writes a powerful essay that emphaSizes the most disturbing aspects of Celestina, particularly what appear to be its radical immorality and lack of a Christian sentiment, a conception of the world so fatalistic as to be post-Shakespearian. Rojas, according to Maeztu, is a man who has abandoned the faith of his elders, Judaism, but has not accepted that of his nation, Catholicism. At a point in history when he must decide between the two because of the expulSion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, he writes a work that challenges both religions and exudes despair as well as a complete moral relativism. 6 But that was the extent of the reappraisal of Celestina by the Generation of '98 and the thinkers and writers that followed. Azorin never wrote a whole book on Celestina like his La ruta de don Quijote. Miguel de Unamuno did not feel compelled to write anything resembling his Vida de don QUijote y Sancho about Rojas's masterpiece, and Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote no book comparable to his Meditaciones del QUijote about Celestina.

Celestina's Brood

9

It is indeed an ironic paradox that a culture that has produced writers like Juan Ruiz, Rojas, Mateo Aleman, Cervantes, Quevedo, Caviedes, Valle Inclan, and Cela, and that in painting boasts of the likes ofVeIazquez and Goya, has had precious few critics willing to take on the most radical features in those artists's works. Spanish can boast of a Juan Ruiz, a Rojas, and a Quevedo, but there is no Nietzsche, Freud, or Bataille. It is not simply a question of prudishness. The repression of Celestina is due to its possessing a quality that Cervantes was the first to note, in the most-often quoted statement about the work: "Libro, en mi opinion, divi-[no] Si encubriera mas 10 huma-[no]" ["would be a divine book, in my view,lifit concealed more the human"]? I take human in its broadest and most caustic Nietzschean sense to mean a congenital immorality, a depravity so deep-seated that only through careful suppression or sublimation can social life endure. Hence, at the origin of modem Spanish literature, in the beginning of what is a rich novelistic tradition, there lies such a shocking, unadorned vision of humankind and of literature itself that it cannot be easily imitated. In fact, except for the many minor works cited by Menendez y Pelayo and others, which tend to wind up as pornography, Celestina is more often than not averted. This is the reason for Celestina's paltry brood, and perhaps why the figure only reappears in the most recent and experimental Latin American fiction, particularly in four works: Aura (1962) and Terra Nostra (1975) by the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, "La increible y triste historia de la candida Erendira y de su abuela desalmada" ["The Incredible and Sad Tale ofInnocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother"] (1972) by the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Cobra (1972) by the Cuban Severo Sarduy. My title is a pun that plays precisely on the dialectics of infertility and dissemination present in Celestina. It alludes to the bawd's array of potions, ointments, cosmetics, and other drugs with which she brews the philters that will incite others to passion, the paraphernalia to restore hymens and change the appearance of bodies in general, as well as the trappings of her witches' craft. These are skills, substances, and objects that do not lead to reproduction, however, but only to love and pleasure. Though Celestina is often referred to as Mother by her charges, she is childless. She is, at best an aunt, as others call her. Celestina's role is maieutic, rather than maternal, but what she helps bring about is only pleasure or pain or

10

Celestina's Brood

both and ultimately death, never life. A mistress oflove, Celestina is hardly the agent of social restoration and continuity. She is the enabler in a commerce of bodies, desires, and reputations that is the opposite and sometimes the parody of the rituals through which society renews itself courtship and marriage. Celestina's brew works against the brood. In fact, her brew may very well be intended to heighten our awareness and see through the concert of lies that would make up the foundation of those rituals. Celestina's brew is meant to let loose the demons. Her lack of reproduction is also a most powerful critique or representation. There is no faithful mimesis obtained with the brew. In fact, the brew beclouds the mirror and distorts all reflections. The bawd creates an impasse in transmission, an interruption in reproduction, because she is concerned only with the process, not with the result. This impasse is one of the main themes of the work; an impasse within the work that may account for the work's own impasse in literary history, for the scarcity ofits brood. What really is Celestina's brood? It should be obvious, as my epigraph from Maeztu indicates, that a work as salacious as Celestina could not easily become a national literary monument, particularly at the time (Romanticism) when nation-building led to the creation of literary canons. If, according to Maeztu, Celestina is a work that taught Spaniards "how to live without ideals" (p. 145)-one, according to Menendez y Pelayo, redolent with an "Epicurean pessimism" (3:385)-it could hardly be touted as the expression of national identity, as was Don Quijote. One could hardly expect statues of the old bawd to spring up in Madrid's plazas, alongSide those of the mad knight and his squire. Yet, it is clear evidence of Celestina's powerful appeal that the work endures, even as a kind of subterranean classic, condemned to the nether regions of academic specialization. My hardly Original point of departure here is that Celestina inaugurates literary modernity in the Spanish-speaking world, or to use Menendez y Pelayo'S revealing metaphor, that it is the "seed" of modem literature, particularly of the novel, that most modem of genres. But I would add that Celestina inaugurates modernity by taking at once to its very limits the radical critique of all values subtending modem works. Celestina's brood is, in that sense, all literature written in the West since 1499. The scarcity of the obvious brood is due to the totality and finality of Celestina's inaugural gesture: a work that has not only

Celestina's Brood

11

opened the dark abyss ofmodemity, but appears to have filled it all with its gloom, can have no heritage. Even the most recent imitators of Rojas flinch, as shall be seen.

2

It bears repeating unambiguously that Rojas produced an essentially secular, pessimistic, and drastically negative work at the height of the reign of the Catholic Kings. It is a work that deals with sex, corruption, violence, and general human depravation expliCitly, and in which the conventional gestures of acquiescence to the generally accepted morality and religiOUS doctrine are so perfunctory that only the naive or pious could not see their disingenuousness. It is also a work that eschews genres and styles, an amalgam of traditions, a hybrid of comedy, classical dialogue, tragedy, and sentimental romance, in which characters who represent the nobility, or at least the ruling commercial bourgeoisie, commingle not merely with lower-class types (such as peasants) but with the dregs of SOCiety: whores, pimps, thieves, and thugs. These characters speak untrammeled by modesty or decorum. The protagonist, whose perseverance in evil and essential humanity, in the sense mentioned, is such as to elicit admiration, is an old whore and gobetween, who runs a brothel and arranges for the illicit sexual dealings of people from all ranks of SOCiety, including the church. 8 Previously, tragic characters, or characters with Celestina's elevated sense of self, were male and noble. It is impossible to exaggerate how innovative it was to have Celestina be the protagonist of this work and not be simply a comic figure. This is the endUring and indisputable breakthrough of Celestina: that tragedy, or as close to tragedy as can be expected in a world no longer meaningful or heroic, is embodied in an old whore and go-between. Celestina's is the only grandeur in the work, even if sullied by her evil dOings and the tawdriness of her world. In that world, as Dunn has observed, the exchanges between people that constitute human society are largely ruled by greed. 9 All characters ultimately engage in this commerce, in which it is not only goods, but as Mary M. Gaylord has rightly seen, words, that are the most coveted commodity: "Celestina's genius lies not only in

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Celestina's Brood

her acute sensitivity to the desires of her fellow human beings, but in her recognition of the fact that human desire-physical, sexual, metaphysical-is in large part a hunger for words, a hunger which seeks not only to express itself. but also to satisfy itself verbally."l0 From this comes Gaylord's most remarkable insight that Celestina stands for language, the quintessential mediator: "In the Tragicomedia, language is the means by which a beginning reaches an endfor Celestina, the manto and cadena; for the servants, sex and money; for Calisto, the possession ofMelibea-, but it is also that which fills the space of the play's entertainment (entretenimiento, literally a holding between) and of life. In this sense, Celestina-as the means, the medium, the medianera-is language" (p. 8). But is Celestina truly a vehicle, a relay in that commerce of goods, bodies, and words? What is her true role in the practice of that commerce, and what are its consequences? If commerce rules Celestina, and that commerce is ultimately one of words, conveyors of pleasure and value, then the skein, the girdle, and the chain, those often-discussed objects of exchange in the work, are primarily related to language. They are its emblem. Let us see what they reveal about mediation, exchange, and desire in Celestina. Much has been written about the three objects, which evidently perform functions beyond their ostensible use. The skein is Celestina's pretext to enter into Melibea's house; the girdle is the article of clothing Melibea agrees to send Calis to to relieve his toothache; and the gold chain is the final gift Calisto gives Celestina in payment for her services. Of the three, the girdle is the one that most obviously acquires Significance beyond its primary use, as it becomes the object ofCalisto's enraptured adoration in a memorable scene. But the chain, over whose possession Celestina eventually dies, is equally important. And there can be little doubt as to the skein's relevance the moment one sees it in relation to the other two and takes into account the rest of Celestina's activities, namely mending virginities, in which thread, and other instruments associated with sewing are used. Javier Herrero has unveiled the historical and cultural sources and connotations of the skein and the girdle, linking them to the language of camallove and witchcraft. He sees Melibea's girdle as "simply one more case of this magical binding which was a commonplace of popular witchcraft in the Spanish Renaissance and

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Golden Age."11 A. D. Deyermond has taken the case a bit further by showing that there is a Significant sequence or pattern of exchange: "girdle is exchanged for gold chain, just as skein had been exchanged for girdle."12 This pattern would explain for the critic the behavior of the characters, who upon coming into contact with the bewitched object, begin to act in ways that are apparently atypical. Melibea surrenders soon after she touches the skein, Calisto goes berserk when he comes into contact with the girdle, and Celestina relaxes her wariness when she gets the chain. To Deyermond this pattern accounts for the odd actions of the characters, which are caused by the pact Celestina makes with the Devil: "If ... we accept that the Devil entered Calisto's body as soon as he touched the girdle, just as he had done with Alisa and Melibea on contact with the skein of thread, then his frenzy becomes explicable as part of a pattern" (p. 8). And "What of the chain and Celestina? As soon as she has received it as a reward for bringing the girdle to Calisto, she too starts to behave uncharacteristically" (p. 9). Herrero's illuminating observations provide excellent contextual material and philolOgical commentary, while Deyermond's show the sequence of an undeniable pattern of exchange, perhaps even a teleology. But the contextual material on witchcraft and the philolOgical clarification concerning the contemporary meanings of words cannot fully explain how these elements function once inside the text of Celestina. A literary work is not the sum of its sources, nor the total of its linguistic debt, but more often the balance of how those sources and debts perform once taken outside their original context. To my mind, the witchcraft hypotheSiS is weak because it withdraws autonomy from the characters and thus detracts from the meaningfulness of their actions. If Melibea, Calisto, and Celestina are under some sort of spell that overcomes their will and judgment, then the story is not one of human action, but a kind of fairy tale, no matter how tawdry. Besides, Calisto did not need the girdle to rage madly; he does that on his own even before Celestina appears on the scene. And there is no evidence to suppose that Melibea, before Celestina knocks at her door (not for the first time by the way), was a demure virgin whose resistance is weakened by a magic spell. Celestina herself does not have to be bedeviled by the gold chain to act imprudently. Her refusal to part with the chain is simply the culmination of a series of selfish acts

14

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that lead her accomplices to slay her. They had planned all along to take the goods from her by force if necessary: "que de grado 0 por fuerza nos dara de 10 que [Calistolle diere" (p. 143) ["Who by her will or by force will give us our part of her earnings"l.13 I understand that by my reluctance to accept the witchcraft theory I am leaving open the question of the meaning of Celestina's witchcraft, particularly in the scene in which she invokes the Devil's powers, as well as the instances in which she speaks to him sotto voce. It seems to me that the function of the Devil and of witchcraft in Celestina is similar to that of the encantadores and the romances of chivalry in Don Quijote. Don Quijote fails once and again to force the world around him to conform to his chivalric notions of how people and reality ought to behave. His code would remove the rough edges from the objective world and make everything conform to an ideal and abstract conception based on positive values such as valor, selflessness, and restraint. Celestina's belief in the powers of the Devil is like Calisto's mad adherence to the rules of courtly love: it is a false doctrine and system of behavior that purports to channel, organize, and give meaning to action. Now, this system does not pretend to be based on positive values, as in the case of Don Quijote or the courtly sources of Calisto's behavior; love's labor does not lead here to human perfection. On the contrary, Celestina's witchcraft is an antisystem of values and practices that would claim to induce the real world, particularly people, to act according to how they really are, not as they pretend to be. Witchcraft would regulate human exchange according to a truer chart of valences, one in which selfishness, lust, and aggressiveness prevail. Everything else is the false appearance of things as transformed by the accumulation offear and sanctimoniousness, a genealogy of morals. Witchcraft provides the recipe as well as the ingredients for the brew. And it is this brew that ultimately rules the traffic of symbols and values in Celestina.

3

It is clear in the scene of Calisto's ravings with the girdle that he has taken the symbol for what it symbolizes. His madness is such that Sempronio warns him: "Senor, por holgar con el cord6n,

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no querras gozar de Melibea" (p. 115) ["Sir, you take so much pleasure on the girdle that you won't want to enjoy Melibea"] (p. 73). And Celestina, more speCifically tells him to treat the girdle as such: "debes, senor, cesar tu razon, dar fin a tus luengas querellas, tratar al cordon como cordon, porque sepas hacer diferencia de habla, cuando con Melibea te veas: no haga tu lengua iguales la persona y el vestido" (p. 116) ["you should, Sir, put an end to your long laments, and treat the girdle as a girdle, so that you will be able to tell the difference when you meet with Melibea. Don't let your tongue make person and garment into one"] (p. 74). Celestina, as Dunn and others have seen, has a similar fetishistic relationship with the gold chain. In both cases the person (Melibea) or the thing (gold, value, power) desired is taken for that for which it stands. Symbolic language in Celestina is undone by both the appearance of an obstinate and excessive referentiality as well as by an appeal to the literal. To Calisto the girdle is Melibea's body; to Celestina the girdle is a girdle. The work invites either to allow desire to read through language to the object coveted or to read literally, putting aside the figurative meanings that a term may have acquired. What if we follow Celestina's advise and take the girdle for a girdle? In Celestina the symbolic or allegOrical is still a shield, a resistance to face the human, which is lodged in the literal. Sempronio warns Calis to in act 8 to abandon circumlocutions and poetry because very few understand them: "Deja, senor, esos rodeos, deja esas poesias, que no es habla conveniente la que a todos no es comlin" (p. 141) ["Leave off these high-flown phrases, sir, this poetizing. Speech that's not common to all, or shared by all, or understood by all, is not good speech"] (p. 101). Language in Celestina has a perverse, almost dumb literality that wipes away the accretions of meaning left by delusions, such as courtly love or even religion. But the literal, needless to say, is also a trope, a system of figures that invokes the accuracy of the letter, a lack of embellishment, and a freedom of expression, as Sempronio would claim. The literal pretends to be the opposite of figurative language. A literal reading takes words in their supposed natural or customary meaning and adheres to the ordinary rules of grammar. To interpret literally is, presumably, to follow the words in the strict sense or in an unimaginative way. To be literal is to be matter-of-fact, prosaic, and focus on the primary meaning of the word or words. Literal may also

16

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mean giving the original or earlier meaning of a word. The literal can be the etymological. Figuratively, then, the literal appeals to the real; it is a call for not going beyond the actual or material facts. It purports to represent reality accurately and in an unvarnished way. Hence the literal is taken to be truer. But, of course, only figuratively, for the literal is also a figure. In Celestina words mean too much what they say because the metaphors in the foundation of each are exploded to reach a deeper core of the object itself The most egregious examples of this process involve, as it often does in Rojas, a rather repulsive literalization of the body. A literalization that reacquires an allegOrical dimension when the body is shattered and fragmented, like the metaphors that hold it together and cover it. In Celestina the body, stripped of any meaning, is reduced to its most elemental feature: its gravity. Gravity is the most basic and common quality of things. Objects have weight, whatever their shape, be they beautiful or ugly, useless or functional, beneficial or harmful. There are throughout Celestina repeated allusions to falling used in a metaphoric sense: for instance, to loose one's status or to be duped by some ruse. Parmeno says that "quien mas torpemente sube a 10 alto, mas aina cae que subia" (p. 69) I"he who most awkwardly climbs on high, falls faster than he climbed"]. Later Sepronio echoes this by saying that "quien con modo torpe sube en alto, mas presto cae que sube" (p. 104) ["he who in an awkward way climbs on high, falls quicker than he climbed"]. Remembering her formerly "high" position, Celestina laments "No se como puedo vivir, cayendo de tal estado" (p. 152) 1"1 don't know how I can endure life, having fallen from such a state"]. Sosia reminds Calisto that ifhe does not look after his own, that is Sempronio and Parmeno, "de caida vamos" (p. 186) I"we are on our way down"]. And Calisto, upon hearing of the death of his servants, exclaims: "Proverbio es antiguo, que de muy alto grandes caidas se dan" (p. 188) l"It's an old saying, that the higher one climbs the greater will be his fall"] (p. 147). As we know, at the end of Celestina nearly all the major characters fall to their deaths.14 Calis to slips and falls off a wall, Melibea hurls herselffrom a tower, and before they are executed, Sempronio and Parmeno jump off a window and nearly kill themselves. There is, of course, an element of tragic irony in the fact that the words the characters use foretell their end, meaning literally more than they understood when they

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Calisto climbs the wall ofMelibea's garden with Tristan and Sosia watching; the servants pick up Calisto's body after his fall. (From Celestina, 1514 Valencia edition)

used them. But it is also Significant that they mean more by dropping (as it were) their metaphorical clothing and coming too close to referentiality, in the sense that they seem to literally conjure the action itself: the effect of gravity on bodies. Here the unexpected referentiality oflanguage is closer to comedy than to tragedy. Calisto's case is the most grotesque and revealing in this regard. In the scene where he raves while caressing Melibea's girdle, Sempronio warns him that "perderas la vida 0 el seso" (p. 115) ["you will lose your life or your mind"] (p. 73). In the Spanish original, how-

18

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ever, "mind" is rendered by the literal seso, which means "brain." This is, of course, an idiomatic expression, where the speaker would not be aware of the literality of his expression. "Perder el seso" means to lose one's mind, though literally it means to lose one's brains. When he falls at the end, however, Calista literally scatters his brains on the street. His servants have to scoop them up off the ground. Tristan asks his cohort: "Cage, Sosia, esos sesos de esos cantos, juntalos can la cabeza del desdichado amo nuestro" (p. 224) [uSosia, gather up our luckless master's brains from the stones and put them back into his skull"] (p. 152).15 Melibea, in her final lament, mournfully recalls the scene, adding a further touch: "Puso el pie en el vacio y cayo. De la triste caida sus mas econdidos sesos quedaron repartidos par las piedras y paredes" (p. 230) [Uhe put his foot on the void and fell. That sad fall scattered his innermost brains all over the pavestones and walls"] (p. 157). It is repulsive, yet revealing, that Melibea should refer to the hidden part of Calista'S mind as being scattered on the street: it is as if she were referring to his very soul, rendered visible, and divisible, by this accident. Calista'S darkest and deepest being-perhaps the seat of his soul-is a mess offlesh splashed on the street and walls. Rojas's shocking materialism seems to know no bounds. Calista is first reduced to his body, rendered as matter falling through the void, later to the pieces of that body as it crashes against stones, and finally his most recondite being, to something that can be broken and its contents emptied. The core where language dwells, where desire is turned into sounds and figures, is cracked open like a dried fruit or a shell. It is a thing turned into a no-thing. Sempronio and Parmeno also "lose their minds" in like fashion, after having uttered the same kind of premonitory words. When they demand from Celestina their part of the gold chain Calista gave her, they feign just having engaged in a fierce fracas to defend their master from some thugs while he lay with Melibea in the garden. The ploy is to play up how much they have done to appear deserving of compensation. To dramatize how excited they still are from the recent fight, Sempronio exclaims: uPor Dios, sin seso vengo, desesperado" (p. 179) rUBy God, I'm half out of my wits with rage!"] (p. 139). And a bit later, in the discussion that ensues, Celestina asks Sempronio: u;.Estas en tu seso, Sempronio?" (p. 180) ["Are you out of your mind, Sempronio?"] (p. 140). Sempronio and

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Parmeno, like their master, are severely injured in their fall from a window in Celestina's house. According to Sosia: "El uno llevaba todos los sesos de la cabeza de fuera, sin ninglin sentido; el otro quebrados entrambos brazos y la cara magullada. Todos llenos de sangre. Que saharon de una ventanas muy altas por huir del alguacil. Y asi casi muertos les cortaron las cabezas, que creo que ya no sintieron nada" (p. 187) ["one had all his brains hanging out of his head, feeling nothing. The other had both arms broken, his face mashed. Both all covered with blood. They jumped off very high windows to escape from the constable. In that state, almost already dead, they cut their heads off. I don't think that they felt anything"] (p. 147). Before they are executed according to human law, the servants are punished by physical law. Their bodies, like that of their master, are subject to gravity's pull. Here not only are brains again literally revealed, but heads are cut off. In lOSing their minds, Sempronio and Parmeno also lose their heads. This excessive referentiality and peeling away of the metaphOriC layers of everyday speech constitutes not only a corrosive critique oflanguage and of human exchange in general, but also a way of questioning the very notion of representation. If metaphor, the foundation of naming things and exchanging information, value, power, and desire falls so short from its goal, what can be said of the other codes based on it? The same is true of the skein, the girdle, and the chain, if seen in the context of the previous discussion about language. Here too the literal reveals a substratum of violence and bodily injury. The girdle may very well be just a girdle, but what is after all a girdle, and what does it do? English translation confuses the issue somewhat because one thinks of girdles as rather bulky garments that (mostly) women wear (or wore) to make themselves slimmer or to give a certain desired and desirable shape to their bodies. This is fine for our purposes here, as we shall see, but in fact what we are dealing with in Celestina is a cordon, a cordlike belt that wraps around the body, such as the one worn by certain religiOUS orders on their habits. In act 6 Calis to, and Lucrecia in act 9, also refer to the girdle as a ceiiidero (pp. 115 and 152), a term that brings out an essential characteristic of the garment: to gird, to make tighter, to surround or encircle the body. It is, of course, the function of a girdle to shape by tightening, by compressing the flesh. Ceiiir, in its broad semantic

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range, includes a sense oflimiting, of reducing. To gird the body is to reduce it by compressing the flesh, only that in the case of the cordlike belt, being narrow, it is more like cutting the flesh. This is so not only metaphorically, but also literally, if one thinks of it in visual terms. A belt cuts the body into halves, or parts; it not only compacts it, but divides it. Calisto is enthralled by this characteristic of the cordon: "cord6n, que tales miembros fue digno de ceflir" (p. 114) ["oh girdle, worthy of binding such limbs"] (p. 72); "jOh bienaventurado cord6n, que tanto poder y merecimiento tuviste de ceflir aquel cuerpo, que yo no soy digno de servir!" (p. 114) ["oh, happy girdle, so powerful and worthy to have bound such a body, of which I am not even worthy of being a servant"] (p. 72); "jOh mezquino de mil Que asaz bien me fuera del cielo otorgado, que de mis brazos fueras hecho y tejido, y no de seda como eres, porque ellos gozaran cada dia de rodear y ceflir con debida reverencia aquellos miembros que ill, sin sentir ni gozar de la gloria, siempre tienes abrazados" (p. 115) ["Alas, poor wretch that I am. Oh my girdle, would that heaven had made you, not of silk, but woven of my very arms, so I might hold each day, with all reverence, those limbs which you unwittingly embrace!"] (p. 73). The belt binds, cuts the body, detaches its limbs. Melibea's body is never seen whole by Calisto, but dismembered by the girdle. This is the circumvented, yet most literal meaning of the garment Calis to desires, the symbol he obtains from Melibea through Celestina's ministrations. The matchmaker's activities do not transmit or translate desire in a neutral fashion as a simple mediator. The language of desire, as rendered by Celestina, is one of aggreSSion, leading not to pleasure but to torn bodies and to death. It is hardly a mediation. Once one reflects on these connotations of cordon, the connection between that garment and the body ofMelibea after she jumps off the tower, described by Pleberio as "hecha pedazos" (p. 232) ["crushed and broken"] (p. 158), is inescapable. In the same way that to fall turns out to have a perversely literal implication that renders several metaphors comical as well as tragic, the girdle masks the dark side of desire, which is not only possession of the beloved, but a violent consumption of her body through dismemberment and quartering. Stripped ofits symbolic meanings (relic, cure), its metaphOriC origins unveiled (to bind, to cut), the cordon shows that what is exchanged in Celestina is not a set of neutral signs that convey

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information or desire, but objects by means of which the characters wound, disfigure, and ultimately kill each other. This disfigurement, whose emblem is perhaps the ugly scar on Celestina's face, is part of a general move toward the material by which values are razed in Celestina and signs brought down to marks on the body. Celestina's scar is a "cuchillada" (p. 187) in one instance (a wound made by a knife), and in another it is a "seiialeja" (p. 92), an ugly sign. Inscription is bodily, painful, and the product of violence. The perverse referentiality of discourse in Celestina is a reduction of language, and all that it carries with it, to a level where its lies are exposed, and its capacity to wound revealed. In the case of the chain this process is much easier to document, but it involves some complications relating to Celestina's conception of exchange, as well as to the dismemberment of bodies. While convincing Areusa to take on Parmeno as a lover (she already has another), Celestina launches into a praise of multiples and a diatribe against the number one: Que uno en la cama y otto en la puerta y otto, que sospira por ella en su casa, se precia [ElisaJ de tener. Y con todos cumple y a todos muestta buena cara y todos piensan que son muy queridos y cada uno piensa que no hay otto y que el solo es el privado y el solo es el que Ie da 10 que ha menester.,y ttl temes que con dos que tengas, en las tablas de la cama 10 han de descubrir? ,De una sola gotera te mantienes? jNo te sobraran muchos manjares! No quiero arrendar tus escamochos; nunca uno me agrado, nunca en uno puse toda mi aficion. Mis pueden dos y mis cuatto y mas dan y mas tienen y mis hay en que escoger. No hay cosa mas perdida, hija, que el mur, que no sabe sino un horado. Si aquelle tapan, no habra donde se esconda del gato. Quien no tiene sino un ojo, mira a cuanto peligro anda. Un alma sola ni canta ni llora; un solo acto no hace habito; un fraile solo pocas veces 10 enconttaras en la calle; una perdiz sola por maravilla vuela, mayorrnente en verano; un manjar solo continuo presto pone hastio; una golondrina no hace verano; un testigo solo no es entera fe; quien sola una ropa tiene, presto la envejece. ,Que quieres, hija, de este nillnero de uno? Mas inconvenientes te dire de el, que anos tengo a cuestas. Ten siquiera dos, que es compania loable y tal cual este. (pp. 129-30) She [ElisaJ keeps one in her bed, one at the door, and a third sighing for her, all at the same time. And she does right by all of them and

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smiles upon them, and they all think she loves them, and each believes he's the only one and her favorite, and gives her whatever she wants. If you had two lovers do you imagine that the slats of your bed would give you away? How can you support yourself by a single small dribble? You'll never have anything to spare. I'll not want your leftovers! I never cared for one man alone. Two can do more for you, and four still more. They've got more to give and you've got more to choose among. The most miserable creature in the world is the mouse who knows only one hole, for if it's sealed up he's got no place to hide in from the cat. The one-eyed man, how dangerously does he travel! A soul alone neither sings nor weeps. A Single action doesn't make a habit. You'll rarely see a partridge flying by itself, especially in summer. You'll hardly see a friar alone in the street. What's so fine about this number one? I could tell you more things wrong with it than I've got years to my back. It's much better to have at least two for the sake of good company. (pp. 88-89)

This tirade about the benefits of the plural is in consonance with Celestina's proposition that there is no value ifit is not shared: "que los bienes, si no son comunicados, no son bienes. Ganemos todos, partamos todos, holguemos todos" (p. 64) I"goods that are not shared are not goods. We'll all make money; we'll all share it; we'll all be happy together"J (p. 21). She repeats this to Parmeno: "que de ninguna cosa es alegre posesion sin compania" (p. 71) ["No good thing can be enjoyed without company"J (p. 28), and it is the general principle of exchange, of sharing, with which she tries to convince Melibea to give herself to Calisto. In fact, one could say that Celestina is the very embodiment of proliferation. Everything relating to her is multiple. According to Sempronio she has helped undo and redo five thousand virgins in the city, and she has been known to sell the same woman three times as a virgin: "que cuando vino par aqui el embajador frances, tres veces vendio por virgen una criada que tenia" (p. 62) I"When the French ambassador was here, why, she sold him one of her girls for a virgin three times running!"J (p. 19). Being a go-between, Celestina's point of departure, her reason for being, is the existence of two, with which she makes an unholy trinity. Her assault on virginity, particularly her ability to fabricate false ones, is preCisely the act of passing seconds for firsts, of denying the importance or even existence of firsts, for they can be faked. But is Celestina really a purveyor of multiples? As

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seen in the discussion about language, this is really a more problematic proposition than previously suspected. We can now go back to the chain, where we will find another perverse tum to the literal leading back to the body. Here the key word is partir, that is to say, to share, but also to break apart, to rend, to split, to cut. Celestina goes against her own precepts when she refuses to share (to partir) with her accomplices, Sempronio and Parmeno, the gold chain that Calis to gave her in payment: "no quiso partir con ellos una cadena de oro que ill Ie diste" (p. 188) ["Because she wouldn't share with them the gold chain you gave her"] (p. 147). It is, in a sense, as if Celestina were guarding her virginity. In fact she wants to part with nothing of what Calisto has paid her and has connived to make the gifts, after the hundred gold coins, indivisible units, such as a skirt. She is slain for transgressing her own economy of exchange by turning the value of the gold chain into something univocal, indivisible, and hence not apt to be shared. Her body is then tom apart, stabbed over thirty times, as if she had to pay with the shreds of her own physical being for not having divided and shared the chain: "De mas de treinta estocadas la vi llagada, tendida en su casa" (p. 186) ["I saw her body lying in her house, stabbed more than thirty times"] (p. 146). Celestina refuses to share and is sheared, not to partir (share) leads to a partir (break up) of her body. Her fetishistic possession of the chain is parallel to that of the girdle by Calisto; both objects are turned into indivisible and tangible repositories of the value they are supposed to represent. Yet both carry within them the very germ of divisibility, of dismemberment. In the case of the girdle because it "cuts" Melibea's body into parts (10 cine), while the chain, made of links, could have been split into parts (in fact links from gold chains could be used as coins). Celestina's mediation from one to many is carried out against her will and at the cost of her life. And multipliCity implies a multiplication of the parts of her body. We are seeing the chain, of course, only as an abstract unity that can or cannot be divided up and shared. But, as with the girdle, a chain is a chain. In a more literal and material sense the chain has an even more sinister connotation than the girdle. Chains are used for binding and for torture, hence the semantic field of cadena involves pain and the restraint of freedom, a restraint in the most physical and material sense. When Calisto speaks of his being bound by his

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love to Melibea he refers to a "dura cadena" (p. 118) ["a strong chain"] (p. 78) to which Celestina replies: "Calla y no te fatigues. Que mas aguda es la lima que yo tengo que fuerte es esa cadena que te atormenta. Yo la cortan~ con ella, porque tu quedes suelto" (p. 118) ["Don't worry yourself about it. My file is sharp enough to cut your chain and then you'll be free"] (p. 76). Sharp instruments, binding, cutting, restraining, the chain, like language, like the girdle, are hardly a neutral transmitter of value. Gold turns to blood. The skein is the most Significant of the three objects because it is related to the thread with which Celestina remakes virginities. Celestina's legitimate occupation is as seller of cosmetics, threads, skeins, and other paraphernalia used in knitting or sewing. But what this activity covers is her clandestine surgical ventures. These procedures, like those involving the girdle and the chain, provoke pain and constitute an assault on the integrity of the body. Celestina sutures the hymens of her victims, mending them sometimes with pieces of other tissues. In his long tirade of the first act about Celestina's activities, which includes a very detailed itemization of her laboratory, Parmeno offers the following details about how the old bawd repaired maidenheads: "Esto de los virgos, unos hacia de vejiga y otros curaba de punto. Tenia en un tabladillo, en una cajuela pintada, unas agujas delgadas de pellejeros e hilos de seda encerados, y colgadas alIi rakes de hojaplasma y fuste sanguino, cebolla albarrana y cepacaballo; hacia con esto maravillas" (p. 62) ["For the repair of maidenheads she used bladders, or she stitched them up. In a small painted box on a platform she kept a supply of furrier's needles and waxed silk, and hanging under it she had roots ofhojaplasma and fuste sanguino, squill and horsetail. She did wonders with all this apparatus"] (p. 18). Simpson's translation softens the shocking quality of Celestina's surgical kit. Pellejeros is not really "furriers," but "tanners." Celestina's needles, therefore, are like the ones used for sewing leather. But pellejeros has a ghastlier connotation because pellejo is the vulgar, disparaging word for human skin in Spanish, as when one says "hide" in English. Much of what is frightening here-as is always the case with leather-is that we are dealing with dead skin. Celestina repairs maidenheads transplanting dead skin into the woman's vagina. Where did Celestina get her materials? This dead skin comes from pig's bladders, to judge from what Sebastian de Covarrubias writes under "bexiga" a hun-

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dred years later in his Tesoro de Ia Iengua castellana 0 espanola (1611). He relates how children inflate pig's bladders and then jump on them to make them explode with a loud bang. 16 So Celestina grafts bits of pig skin onto the former virgins to restore their maidenheads. One need not dwell on the painful nature of this operation, which is underscored in the text itself. Among the medicinal plants Celestina keeps, the "cepacaballo," translated by Simpson as "squill," is said by Cejador y Frauca to be used, according to contemporary sources, to stop the bleeding of open wounds, when the crushed leaves are applied locally, and then drunk as an infusion cures internal wounds in the abdomen and bladderY It is a well-known fact that Covarrubias boasts in his Tesoro of an emblem of his for virgo whose legend reads: "Nulla reparabilis arte" (p. 1010). One wonders, without wanting really to know further details, if Celestina's craft was not part of popular lore, instead of medical fact. Be that as it may, the literal operation of restoring maidenheads is indeed a painful cure, even in the very thread used to suture, for in Spanish "hilo" derives from the Latin "filum," the sharp edge ofa cutting instrument. ls The wax on the thread used by Celestina was intended, one assumes, to make penetration easier and cleaner. As with the girdle and the chain, there is not only bodily harm involved in Celestina's activities-a rending of the body-but disfigurement. The metaphorical use, to repair, conceals a literal wounding. Celestina subjects her charges to bodily disfigurement in the process of refiguring them so that they can reacquire value in society. Virginity not only values purity, but it is a pure value, concocted out of nothing by male fantasies, probably tied to images of the mother. Celestina's restitutions unveil the arbitrariness and fantasy of this value by reducing it to its tawdry physical fact: virginity is a piece of skin that can be replaced, even by a dead one. Celestina's literal addition underscores the arbitrariness or socially contrived value of what the added piece of dead skin stands for, which is obviously the phallus. Celestina's added pig skin is a phallus, which by its very fraudulence (Freudulence) underscores the fraudulence of the other, "real" phallus it imitates and mocks and that is SOCially produced. Mary S. Gossy has perceptively seen the subversiveness of hymen-mending in Celestina because it exposes the patriarchal fic-

16

Celestina's Brood

tions that buttress society. The mended hymen is, then, a text woven by Celestina as a counterfiction. Therefore, The subversive confusion of meaning ceases when Celestina is killed and can no longer create fictional virgins, weave her fictive hymen text. The inevitable result of this fact is that Melibea's hymen is irrevocably decided. She has sex with Calisto and there is no one to help them slip through the rigidities of meaning that the dominant textual order imposes on that act. With Celestina's death, difference in the text and meaning outside or beyond the dominant discourse become inaccessible. Calisto and Melibea die, post errorem, because their error cannot be written over. The threads that held them up to move are cut, and both of them fall to their deaths. Their ability to move, to be in the process of fiction, depend on a seamstress to make text for them. When her catalyzing action ceases to be, so do they. 19

The metaphoric association between patched up hymen and literary text is a powerful insight, particularly if we add to it what has been shown above about the sadistic element involved in each "refiguration." But Calixto and Melibea do not die because there is no one to mend the latter's hymen, but because in Celestina's world (and text) fiction is based on the destruction of others and the reduction of all values to their sheer material representation. There is no room to mourn Celestina in such a world, for she is the purveyor of pain as well as offiction, of death as well as of pleasure. There is no untold story in Celestina that is not prey to this destructive dialectic, unless one is willing to concoct a flimsy fiction about Celestina's beneficence. Once told, every untold story will be based on another untold story, ifby that one means a story of subjection. The mended hymen is a text, even an emblem ofthe text ofCelestina, but as such it is made up by puncturing, rending, bleeding, and a general disfigurement. This tum to the material, to the bodily, as the last resort, the true mediator, leads back to Celestina herself If she stands for logos and at the same time debunks logos, it is inevitable that she will suffer the same fate as the characters whom she destroys and the language through which she destroys them. She will be phYSically rent apart, penetrated, split, like the metaphors through which language has stripped away its figurative layers and impeded the process by which desire and language would lead to a general sharing. As

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27

~tcbai~.

Stifa.

Melibea leaps from the tower. (From Celestina, 1514 Valencia edition)

subject and object of this literalization, Celestina is reduced to her material cipher, which is an old, sterile, and consumed body, finally ripped apart by her own charges. Celestina, as language, is not a mediator but an interrupter, not a go-between but a get-in-between. She facilitates the process of exchange, but only for the sake of the process, which turns out to be a violent activity whereby destruction is brought about. Her commerce is not ofgoods, value, values, or even language, but of brutality and destructiveness. This ultimate devastation and denial even of the material is dramatized in one of the most important scenes in Celestina, the banquet organized by Pcirmeno at the whorehouse to celebrate his "seduction" ofAreusa. It is one of the scenes where Rojas allows most visibly the mediation of tradition. The importance of this scene is made clear in several ways. First, from a purely formal point of view, the banquet takes place at the very center ofthe original sixteen-act comedia, that is to say, in acts 8 and 9. While this symmetry is upset by the addition of the five acts that make up the tragicomedia, the banquet remains central to the plot: it is a converging point as well as a climax ofsorts. The banquet marks the moment at which Parmeno's acceptance of Celestina's and Sempronio's way oflife and his willingness to be an accomplice in their scheme against Calisto is celebrated. In fact, the banquet celebrates the bond between Parmeno, Sempronio, and Celestina, uniting all the servants against their masters. This is evident also

28

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when Lucrecia appears to betray the trust of Plebe rio and Alisa by acting as a messenger between Melibea and Celestina. The banquet also marks Melibea's capitulation, which is the coded message that Lucrecia brings to the brothel. The banquet is the culminating scene in the plot because, from now on, the order that Celestina has wrought begins to unravel, and those who rejoice in pledging their allegiance wind up killing her. It is in this respect and probably with all due disrespect, truly a last supper. In terms of the plot, however, it is the pledge of mutual allegiance that is sealed at the banquet. But the Significance of the banquet in terms of the unfolding of the plot is merely a first indication of its multiple resonances in the work. The banquet scene in Celestina is drawn from a long tradition whose history and Significance has been studied by Mikhail Bakhtin in his remarkable Rabelais and His World.20 Bakhtin has emphasized that the origin of the banquet as the "mighty aspiration to abundance and to a universal spirit ... evident in each of these images. It determines their forms, their positive hyperbolism, their gay and triumphant tone" (p. 278). In the banquet, the body transgresses ... its own limits: it swallows, devours, rends the world apart, is enriched and grows at the world's expense. The encounter of man with the world, which takes place inside the open, biting rending, chewing mouth, is one of the most ancient, and most important objects of human thought and imagery. Here man tastes the world, introduces it into his body, makes it part of himself ... Man's encounter with the world in the act of eating is joyful, triumphant .... The limits between man and the world are erased, to man's advantage. (p. 281)

The banquet is a debunking of the ideal, lodged in the values and practices of the upper classes, and a glOrification of the base and material, which is the domain of the common people. The banquet celebrates the end of work and the defeat of the world, which becomes the food to sustain the body. A crucial feature of the banquet is, of course, speech. There is a link between eating and talking, between the gaiety of food and drink and the unadorned expression of truths. It is what Spanish appropriately expresses as "llamarle al pan pan y al vino vino" [calling bread bread and wine wine]. The banquet is "the occasion for wise discourse, for gay truth. There is an ancient tie between the feast and the spoken

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word. The antique symposium presents this relation in its clearest and most classic form. But medieval grotesque realism had its own Original symposium, that is, the tradition offestive speech" (p. 283). In Rabelais, according to Bakhtin, "seriousness was either the tone of the receding truth and doomed authOrity, or the tone offeeble men intimidated and filled with terror" (p. 285). "The themes of table talk are always 'sublime,' filled with 'profound wisdom,' but these themes are uncrowned and renewed on the material bodily level" (p. 285). "Wine liberates from fear and sanctimoniousness. In vino veritas" (p. 286). One could add to Bakhtin's long list of banquets in Western literature quite a few from the Spanish tradition, the culminating one being Sancho's at the Insula de Barataria, where the poor squire gets to eat nothing. The banquet scene in Celestina reflects most of the traits mentioned by Bakhtin. It is a hyperbolic celebration of eating, to judge by the enormous amount of food that Parmeno and Sempronio plan to steal from Calisto for the feast (which includes twelve chickens and a ham), Celestina pronounces the traditional praise of wine, and there is plenty of table talk about that most sublime of subjects, love, but brought down to its must vulgar and base manifestations. The verbal feast oflove soon becomes a carnal feast, as the characters romp and almost upset the table. There is, in addition, a raucous critique of the aristocrats, including a most unflattering deSCription of Melibea's body, as well as general mockery of Calisto's love madness. The banquet also celebrates the end of work, for Melibea's surrender marks the completion of Celestina's task, as well as that of her minions. All of this is part of the covenant of the lower stratum of society, of the triumph of matter over the abstractions of aristocratic love. Eating things is like an inversion of speech. In the one air is expelled through the mouth, while in the other matter enters the body through the mouth. The banquet is, in fact, a de bunking of all values and a substitution of countervalues in whose valence and truth the characters rejoice. The obvious parody of the classical symposium, with its serious talk and philosophizing is augmented when one remembers that one of the main topiCS of the Celestinesque banquet is preCisely love. It is not too difficult to see in this scene traces of Plato's Symposium, with its feasting, its wine, but also its exaltation oflove in terms that cannot be but inimical to the old whore and her diSCiples. Here she oc-

30

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cupies Socrates' position as teacher and mistress of a group of disciples who wish to learn from her the essence of love. Like Socrates, she is the go-between. Celestina is, in short, a parodied version ofSocrates as Logos, for she incarnates, in this banquet and throughout the work, the ways of the word and the world, but in the most negative of terms. Her dialogue leads her charges not to the nether regions of Platonic love, but to the material exchange of caresses, to groping hands under the table, and to a generalized rush to the bedrooms. This transformation of the word into its referent, prefigured in the scenes involving the girdle, reaches a paroxysmal culmination here, where love is no longer fiction but friction. Minds lost to wine and lust, language struggles to shed its abstractness and join the dumb awkwardness of the material and literal world, where gravity awaits the bodies oflovers and tricksters. The banquet would be the anointment of the material, its elevation at the expense of the ideal, and of the vapid values expressed by metaphor, by rhetoric. Bodies, food, and hands would substitute language, as Celestina would embody words in her role as go-between. The banquet would be a consecration of the crass and the real. But Celestina's fanatical pursuit of a zero ground of values and her effort to create a society of antivalues leads to the very same kind of abstraction and negativity that the banquet generally exposes. Here too Celestina shows her tragic flaw, and Celestina exhibits its unrelenting modernity. Bakhtin emphasizes the positive energy of the banquet, which is always a celebration of renewal, of the rebirth of the defeated world as it is transformed into the body of the revelers: "This element of victory and triumph is inherent in all banquet images. No meal can be sad. Sadness and food are incompatible (while death and food are perfectly compatible). The banquet always celebrates a victory and this is part of its very nature" (p. 283). This is the reason why the banquet, again according to Bakhtin, always anticipates the future: "the festive voice of time speaks first of all about the future. The festive occasion inevitably suggests looking into better days to come" (p. 286). In Celestina, however, the old whore soon launches into a depressing tirade about the glOries of her past and about the fleetness of pleasure, the carpe diem topiC which saddens everyone and causes the termination of the banquet. Celestina throws a wet blanket on the feast with her evocation of the past and breaks with the tradition in which the

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31

scene was conceived. Her past has no value in the present except as a negative value: that which she no longer is. Sempronio expresses this clearly, as he declares the meal over: "Madre, ninglin provecho trae la memoria del buen tiempo, si cobrar no se puede; antes tristeza. Como a ti agora, que nos has sacado el placer de entre las manos. Alcese la mesa" (p. 152) ["There is no use mourning over the good old days if you can't get them back. It just makes you sad and you spoil our fun crying over them. Clear the table"] (p. 111). The banquet is a culmination, but not a conclusion. The absorption of the world and of the words ends not in joyful affirmation, but leads to tragedy and negation. Exchange is again denied, mediation canceled. Dorothy S. Severin writes, in her recent book on Celestina, that in Rojas "All the literary models fail at the end of the work: courtly love, classical antiquity, neo-stoicism, scholastic lore, aphorisms, even estates satire."21 This is baSically correct, but there is more. Celestina suggests, in the most powerful way, that received knowledge, even in the form of religion, is but an elaborate cover-up that literature must constantly expose. This is the only literary model available and the one at the modem core of Celestina; it is what makes it literary in a way that the previous models did not. literature's foundation consists in undermining its own foundation. Nothing is sacred: not language as abstract system of signs nor language as dialogue and exchange. In this, of course, Celestina transcends genres and styles. It is a vision, the creation of a modem literary myth, or the modem myth of literature. Severin has also written that the cases of Calis to and Don QUijote "are substantially the same, that of the solid citizen whose brains have been scrambled by literary models. Both Rojas and Cervantes destroy the world of the medieval romance by shOwing it is impossible to live like an idealized knight-errant or a courtly lover in a picaresque milieu" (pp. 23-24). It seems to me, however, that Cervantes and Rojas have done no such thing. To enter into dialogue with sources is not to destroy them, or even to supersede them. What is modem and disturbing about Celestina is that while it may be difficult-not impossible-to live like a knight-errant or courtly lover in the present world (read the fallen modem world), it is equally difficult, perhaps in this case really impossible, not to. Severin's proposition takes us back to a moralistic reading of the kind she so ably crit-

32

Celestina's Brood

icizes, only that now the warning contained in Celestina is against literature, not against lust or loco arnar. The point is that no such warning would be useful, for without the delusions oflanguage and literature, fleeting and dangerous as they may be, there is nothing, as is made explicit in the work itself when the old whore says that talking about love is of the essence, for otherwise donkeys do it better in the fields (Umejor 10 hacen los asnos en el prado," p. 71). From this comes the resilience of Celestina, both the character and the work.

4

Modem Latin American literary tradition has been reluctant to consider itself a continuation of Spanish letters since the eighteenth century. This is due to several factors. First and foremost, the wars of independence , and the period leading to them, constituted a rejection of Spain, a metropolis that was out of step with the modem world the new nations wished to join. Desirous to establish an autochthonous literary tradition, spurred on by the romantic spirit of the early nineteenth century, when most Latin American republics became independent, Latin Americans looked elsewhere for literary models. In addition, particularly since the 1920s, a radical search for origins, which in other Western literatures could easily be traced to Romanticism, led to the Baroque, as the only common origin with Spain worth recuperating. Gongora and his diSCiples in the New World were conceived then as the very problematiC yet productive origin of Latin American poetry, as is discussed in greater detail in various essays in this book. In the narrative such a search soon led to Cervantes, whose figure looms large in all modem Latin American literature, from Borges to Carpentier and later to Garcia Marquez and Fuentes. A whole study could be devoted to show how Cervantes, by pre-emptying all narrative experiments of the avant-garde, became the chosen source of modem Latin American writers. The appearance of Celestina as ancestor is a recent phenomenon, dating to Fuentes's Aura (1962), but it is part of the same phenomenon. In reaching back to Rojas, Latin American novelists are bypassing the Spain that denied Celestina, the "Espana sagrada" scorned by her most daring recent writer,

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33

Juan Goytisolo, whose ties to Latin American literary tradition are well-known. 22 That Celestina should have been rediscovered by writers of the so-called Boom of the Latin American novel, and beyond, is no accident, for these writers subjected modem Latin American narrative to a radical rewriting that swept away traditional themes and sources of authority. The most important of these erased sources was the telluric, the appeal to Latin American nature as the ground on which narrative was based. This cultural and literary conceit had produced the rich novelistic tradition known as the novel a de la tierra.23 The new novel was iconoclastic, irreverent, urban as opposed to rural, and bent on reexamining all of its received literary and cultural myths. 24 In a way it was inevitable that in surveying its past, such a Latin American narrative would finally home in on Celestina, for, as we have seen, Rojas had pushed irreverence and the razing of values to unsurpassed limits. It was also perversely subversive and even amUSing to tout a work so sexually explicit and depraved as qUintessentially Spanish, when Franco was still in power and a retrograde, antimodern Spain boasted of its fidelity to a very orthodox tradition. Celestina's was the forgotten or repressed literary myth, brandished by the new writers to go along with those of Don Quijote and Don Juan. Another factor that plays a role in the discovery of Celestina by modem Latin American narrative was the publication of "La pharmacie de Platon," an influential essay by Jacques Derrida that seemed to have unwittingly found the true mythic sources of the Celestina type. 25 Aura, Cien an os de soledad, and the Erendira story antedate, or are at best contemporaneous with, Derrida's essay, but Terra Nostra and Cobra were written afterward, and certainly show it. But in each case, because it is concerned with the vital relationship between oral and written language, hence with the origins of literature, "La pharrnacie de Platon" helps in reading the Celestina element in each work. Derrida shows that the Western prejudice against the written word reaches back to platonic myths, themselves based on Eastern figures and stories. By studying the use of the terms pharmakon [both remedy and poison], pharmakeus [magician, sorcerer]' and pharmakos [scapegoat] in the Phaedrus, Derrida shows a subtext whereby is played out the story of writing's banishment from the city. This story emerges as a literary, supplementary

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element to philosophical discourse, a founding tale. In Plato the term pharmakeus is often applied to Socrates, who is the magician of language, hence an equation can be made between his logos and Celestina's brew, which would then be the pharmakon, the poison as well as the cure, the wound and the patched-up job done to heal it. This term is ambivalent because it is the place where contraries meet and absorb each other-meaning that one passes into the other, or that each is shown to have traces of the other. Celestina's brew, as we saw, would be that which renders language incapable of inscribing values. Her brew is capable of masking one thing as its opposite. She can make a virgin out of a whore. Celestina's pharmacy is made of remedies that are also poisons, cures that wound, like the tanner's needles she uses to sew up maidenheads. Finally, as we also saw, there is a pharmakos element in Celestina. She is slain to pUrify the city, a city in which she figures, nonetheless, as an essential element. By reaching back to the mythic sources of these stories, Derrida is able to add quite a few other elements that are relevant to Celestina as figure: her being so concerned with counting, for instance, which is linked to the mythic god Theuth, who tallies the souls of the dead. But the point is that, potentially, the mythic substratum of Celestina is composed of these figures who seem to inhabit the origin of writing and of literature. The pharmakeus-pharmakon Celestina incarnates a supplementarity by which language, lOgiC, reason, and logos are made to rehearse their demonic, condemned being, one that brings out all that is not logical, reasonable, lawful and for which it is denied or persecuted. The addition of this Derridean perspective to our reading of Celestina highlights, it seems to me, the founding quality of the work, but it would constitute a betrayal ofthat perspective to make Rojas's work itself simply the strict heir of a given lineage. As with the Latin American texts I am about to discuss, "La pharmacie de Platon" sheds light backward, as a reading of Celestina, and, in Derrida's case, also laterally to those Latin American texts. Celestina also "reads" into Derrida's mythology a sexual element that was not evident before. The most obvious and immediate source of Fuentes' Aura is Henry James's "The Aspern Papers," as has already been pointed OUt. 26 But in Fuentes the role of the matchmaking old lady has been expanded considerably by the addition of what I consider to be Celestinesque elements. The protagonist, Consuelo, is an old

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35

woman and witch who brings together a young couple, Aura and Felipe, who are her victims. Like Celestina, Consuela has a sort of laboratory (her medicines): "Ella te sorprenderi observando la mesa de noche, los frascos de distinto color, los vasos, las cucharas de aluminio, los cartuchos alineados de pildoras y comprimidos, los demis vasos manchados de liquidos blancuzcos que estin dispuestos en el suelo" ["She sees you glance at the night table, the different-colored bottles, the glasses, the aluminum spoons, the row of pillboxes, the other glasses-all stained with whitish liquids-on the floor"l (pp. 18-20).27 The old lady makes a diabolical pact (Consuela invokes the devil); there are devil-like figures in the images she worships, and there is a he-goat that Aura kills that is also a devil-figure. There is a dinner in Aura that could be a vestige of the banquet in Celestina. Like Celestina, Consuela has no brood, only a symbolic or a textual one. Finally, like Rojas's protagonist, Consuelo is sacrificed by the young, in the sense that she is consumed to generate Aura. The two old women are, in that sense, pharmakons. If Celestina, like the Derridean pharmakeus-pharmakon is a figure of the birth of writing, Consuelo, her heir, is concerned with the production or in this case reproduction of a literary text: her dead husband's memoirs. But Consuela inverts the Celestinesque situation. Instead of being the mediator, she uses the young woman as a mediator-bait to bring her the young man, a figure of her dead husband, who will complete the manuscript. Consuelo, in fact, yearns to abolish all mediation. This is her Faustic dream. This longing for youth constitutes the reading of an element that is present in Celestina: the bawd's frequent laments about the ravages of age, which clash with her still not extinguished sexual desire. It was this exaltation of her past glories, both as woman and go-between, that closed the banquet. In Rojas, Celestina has no future, only her past; in Fuentes, however, she wills a future through the agency of the young people she creates through her desire. One way to read the novel is to take Aura and Felipe as projections ofConsuelo's desire, figures conjured up by her imagination. In Fuentes, then, Celestina is her own brood, an autarchy forbidden by the radical play of differences in Rojas. This is the romantic element of Fuentes' novel. Literature, the text, can be an ex-pression, a pro-jection of a desire that issues from inside, from some dark, incommensurable self. This is the "aura" of the title and the

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young woman's name. In Celestina, however, that inside was revealed to be empty, a material form (seso, mind) that is hollow inside. And Celestina's body is irretrievably old and spent. Aura reads back into Celestina, however, a key element of its modernity: the pervasive, even oppressive presence of the city. Celestina rejected the spaces provided by late medieval and early renaissance literature: the garden, the road, the forest. Instead Rojas prefers interiors, like those ofMelibea's and Calisto's house, as well as Areusa's bedroom, and of course the whorehouse. Outside there are walls, streets, a tower from which Melibea leaps. It is not the ordered polis of the classical tradition, with plazas where the characters see each other and agree to meet for dialogues. Crowded and corrupt, Celestina's city preserves traces of other spaces. Melibea's garden is but a vestige of the locus amoenus, bound by buildings and walls. In Celestina the characters are hemmed in by the encroaching architecture of the city, an arch-texture of pavestones and walls on which they smash their bodies. In Aura, Consuelo's house is being crushed by the growth of Mexico City: "Es que nos amurallaron, senor Montero. Han construido alrededor de nosotras, nos han qUitado la luz. Han querido obligarme a vender. Muerta, antes" ["They've walled us in, Senor Montero. They've built up around us and blocked off'the light. They've tried to force me to sell, but I'll die first"] (pp. 50-51). The city appears in Celestina as an image of the collective perverSion of the human; it is that which is unnatural, yet congenital to human cohabitation. In Aura it is the end result of a history of perversions, of human constructs piled upon each other to stifle nature, and with it perhaps the good. The first deSCription of the city emphaSizes the endurance of the layers of constructions and reconstructions as a kind of petrified archaeology ofmisleading numbers: "Siempre has creido que en el viejo centro de la ciudad no vive nadie. Caminas con lentitud, tratando de distinguir el numero 815 en este conglomerado de viejos palacios coloniales convertidos en talleres de reparaci6n, relojerias, tiendas de zapatos y expendios de aguas frescas. Las nomenclaturas han sido revisadas, superpuestas, confundidas. EI 13 junto al 200, el antiguo azulejo numerado-47-encima de la nueva advertencia pintada con tiza: ahora 924" ["You always thought that nobody lived in the old center of the city. You walk slowly, trying to pick out the number 815 in that conglomeration of old colonial mansions, all of them con-

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37

verted into repair shops, jewelry shops, shoe stores, drugstores. The numbers have been changed, painted over, confused. A 13 next to a 200. An old plaque reading 47 over a scrawl in blurred charcoal: Now 924"j (pp. 8-9). The project for Terra Nostra was set out in Aura, when the protagonist longs to save enough money to devote himself to his "obra de conjunto sobre los descubrimientos y conquistas espanolas en America. Una obra que resuma todas las cr6nicas dispersas, las haga inteligibles, encuentre las correspondencias entre todas las empres as y aventuras del siglo de oro, entre los prototipos humanos y el hecho mayor del Renacimiento" ["Your great inclusive work on the Spanish discoveries and conquests in the New World. A work that sums up all the scattered chronicles, makes them intelligible, and discovers the resemblances among all the undertakings and adventures of Spain's Golden Age, and all the human prototypes and the major accomplishment of the Renaissance"j (pp. 64-65). Terra Nostra is that vast work, whose point of departure is the literary myths of the Spanish Golden Age, most prominently among them Celestina (in this sense, the book is like a dramatization ofMaeztu's Don Quijote, Don Juan y 10 Celestina).28 In Terra Nostra, the only Latin American narrative under discussion where the character appears under her own name, the whole story issues from Celestina, a young woman who appears and reappears as a symbol of continuity. It is clear that these reappearances have their origin in the Consuelo-Aura pair in the earlier novel and constitute an expansion of the romantic conception of the Celestina character on Fuentes' part. It is also true, of course, as William L. Siemens has perceptively noted, that this is a betrayal of the Original Celestina type, who could hardly play the role of the Earth Mother, or as I would call her, the Breeder of the Brood: One of the more striking features of the opening pages of Terra Nostra is the unexplained appearance, in the role of the archetypal Woman associated with an influx of new life, of a character named Celestina. For the reader who is at all familiar with Spanish literature this constitutes an anomaly of the first magnitude, simply because the Celestina created by Fernando de Rojas in 1499 is generally thought of as a promoter, not of life, but of sterility, for she not only engages in the merchandising of sexual pleasure and the attendant avoidance of procreation, but practices witchcraft and deals with the dead. 29

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While this is no doubt true, on an allegorical level, the figure of Celestina is a source not oflife but of texts. What Terra Nostra sets out, no doubt contradictorily, is the figure's fertility as literary myth. But Siemens is quite right in pointing out the contradiction inherent in turning Celestina into an archetypal figure of Woman. It is no less incongruous to have her appear as a beautiful young woman, paired with Don Juan as generators of a vast and recurrent progeny. Their combination into an androgynous figure at the end rekindles a utopian myth that Rojas would have never accepted and that is a restatement of the one told by Aristophanes in plato's Symposium to explain the origin of desire. This longed-for monism of Fuentes, an abolition of difference, hence of desire for and of the other, with the attendant eros and violence, is really a longing for a seamless society, an autarchy that ultimately denies the existence of the other and that abolishes writing altogether by denying difference. It is true, as Fernando Garcia Nunez writes, in the best study of Fuentes to date, that the androgynous figure at the end constitutes a rebellion that, unlike that of the Devil, is not to take the place of God, but to be more human: "If the androgynous world comes about, as the novel prophesies, there will be a major inversion in human life: the marvelous, the aberrant and surprising, personified by the androgynous figure, will become commonplace."3o But that marvelous world, when pitted against Celestina's, appears more like fable than history, particularly in view of the violent and turbulent history of conquest and domination narrated by the novel, the major instance of which is that of the New World by Europe. Fuentes has encrypted this contradiction in a feature rarely discussed of his version of Celestina, the tattoos around the young woman's mouth: "Se detuvo frente ala muchacha y penso que los labios eran mucho mas interesantes que el dibujo: un tatuaje violeta, amarillo y verde los cubria con sierpes caprichosas, libres para adaptarse a los movimientos de la boca, sometidos a ella y a la vez independientes de ella: el tatuaje era una boca aparte, una segunda boca y tambien solo la boca de la muchacha, pero perfeccionada, enriquecida por los contrastes de color que resaltaban y profundizaban cad a brillo de la saliva y cada arruga inscrita en la plenitud de los labios" ["He stopped before the girl and the thought passed his mind that her lips were much more interesting than her drawing: they were tattooed with violet and yellow and green snakes,

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capricious flowing serpents that moved as her lips moved, determined by that movement and at the same time independent of it. The tattoo formed a separate mouth, a second mouth, a unique mouth, perfected and enriched by the contrasting colors exaggerating and underlining every glimmer of saliva and every line inscribed on those fulllips"l.31 Writing on the body. like the scar on Celestina's face, is indicative not only of a certain bodily violence, but also of the quest for an ultimate Cipher: if meaning is not the airy, ideal thing one imagines. if signification is merely lodged in the materiality of signs, then the ultimate surface to inscribe those signs is the body itself More so when the writing appears around the mouth, as if to form another mouth, an alternate source of speech that is already writing. that is to say, that it is not speech melodiously and mellifluously emerging from the spirit but a system of distinctions. of negations marked by lines. Of course, what this Celestina has painted around her mouth are not mere lines, but snakes. which Signal not just evil, but hark back to the snakes frequently present in myths about the creation of the world. Phallus-like, or at least phallo-symbolic. these snakes wriggle around a mouth that represents the other pole of the androgynous figure. But here they do not coalesce or move at the same rhythm. The painted snakes seem independent of the mouth's movements. In this figure of Celestina, Fuentes has left an heir to Rojas's that is truer to her spirit, a snake in the grass, so to speak, in that earthly and literary utopia he wished to create. The story of young Erendira, exploited mercilessly by her ruthless grandmother, a clear Celestina type, first appeared in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Cien aDOS de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude] (1967). In that novel it is but a brief episode. Erendira and her grandmother are, one of several groups of performers and vendors who pass through Macondo. In the short story, however, published independently five years later. in 1972, the Celestina element is broadened and deepened. "La increible y triste historia de la candida Erendira y de su abuela desalmada" has much in common with Aura. It is the story of a young, beautiful woman who lives with her grandmother, an imperious, somewhat demented old widow who dreams of her past splendor, when she was married to a smuggler of diamonds. In the elaborate household, filled with trinkets from other eras, including the tombs of the old woman's

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husband and son in the backyard, Erendira toils with a mechanical, taciturn obedience reminiscent of Aura's. It is as if she were a projection of her evil grandmother. When a wind storm blows through the house, pushing the curtains against some candles, the house bums. The grandmother blames Erendira and decrees that she will have to repay the debt she has incurred by working as a prostitute. The grandmother sells her first to a local pharmacist, who pays dearly for the virgin. Afterward, the two women travel around a desertlike region, setting up first a small tent, outside of which the men line up and a carnival atmosphere develops, and later a larger tent that the grandmother buys from a circus. As hundreds of men pass through, the grandmother keeps a strict accounting of Erendira's earnings, deducting her overhead and traveling expenses. Abducted by clergymen, who want to save her from her fate, she is "rescued" by her grandmother with the subterfuge of having her married to one of the poor young Indian men being wed in mass ceremonies by the priests. Once free to go, Erendira elects to go back to her grandmother, who continues to exploit her. Finally, a young man called Ulises, of Dutch and Indian ancestry, appears, and he and Erendira fall in love. They plot to kill the grandmother, first with rat poison, which she ingests in pastries the young man gives her at a Celestina-like banquet, but which has no effect on her. Ulises then stabs her to death, but Erendira runs away from him and is never heard from again. The grandmother's Celestinesque features are clearer even than those of Consuela's in Aura. She is a madam, who sets up a brothel to exploit the young woman, through whom she controls other people, particularly men. The family tie between the two women is also Significant: the old one is not the young one's mother, but her grandmother. Though the Celestina figure here has had a brood, her son is dead, and her relationship to Erendira is one generation removed. Uke Fuentes, Garcia Marquez has made the young woman an expression of the old one's desires, particularly her desire to recapture her youth and sexual allure. The grandmother is also a chemist of sorts; she is an expert at making up the young woman: "Le pinto la cara con un estilo de belleza sepulcral que habia estado de moda en su juventud, y la remato con unas pestaiias postizas y un lazo de organza que pare cia una mariposa en la cabeza" (p. 109) ["She made up her face in the style of sepulchral

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41

beauty that had been the vogue in her youth and touched her up with artificial fingernails and an organdy bow that looked like a butterfly on her head"] (p. 272).32 The grandmother, as oracular in her pronouncements as Rojas's protagonist, also dies a Celestinalike death, stabbed by a young man. It is a death that also marks her as a pharmakos. But two features stand out in the story by Garcia Marquez: the grandmother'S obsession with counting, which links her to the Derridean mythology of the pharmakeus, counter of the souls of the dead, and Erendira's unquestioned guilt, which gives the entire story an aura of unreality, almost of Biblical damnation, emphaSized by the desertlike region through which they travel. The grandmother'S relentless bookkeeping, and her commerce with death, even in the makeup she chooses for Erendira, harks back to Celestina's penchant for counting money and maidenheads and to her diatribe about Singles and multiples. But it is the unreal atmosphere of damnation that pervades the story that reaches back to the most disturbing core of Rojas's work. The world preSided over by the grandmother is ruled by evil, an evil made routine by repetition: the endless lines of men outside Erendira's tent. In Celestina's world the old whore is known by all. She controls the city by managing illicit sexual activity. Hers is the true law. The grandmother's world, like her predecessor's, is a fallen one, controlled by base desires whose expression and rituals are the whorehouses and carnivals where the commerce of flesh takes place. Within this world, Erendira's being takes the form of a debt: she owes an incredible amount to her grandmother for a crime she did not commit, as if cursed by an Original sin. The unnatural character of this world is Signaled by the color of the grandmother'S blood at the end, which also shows her cosmic barrenness: "Ulises asesto un tercer golpe, sin piedad, y un chorro de sangre expulsada a alta presion Ie salpico la cara: era una sangre oleos a, brillante y verde, igual que la miel de menta" (p. 161) ["Ulises gave her a third stab, without pity. and a spurt of blood, released by high pressure, sprinkled his face: it was Oily blood, shiny and green, just like mint honey"] (p. 310). It is an ironic inversion that green, traditionally the color of fertility and hope, should Signal the evil unreality of this world, but against the expectation of red nothing could be more grotesque and fantastic. The all-encompassing fantasy of the grand-

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Celestina's Brood

mother's world reaches down to her demonic blood, which truly seems to be either the product or the raw material of her brew. There is no escaping this world, except, perhaps through Erendira's mechanical aloofuess. It is this disconnection that makes her sudden escape at the end not incongruous. In a sense she has never been there. Like Celestina with her remade virgins, the grandmother can sell Erendira's purity over and over again, for though the young woman surrenders her body, she remains pure in spirit. As opposed to her grandmother's green, she is white, "candida." Garcia Marquez, like Fuentes in Aura, rewrites, from within a romantic conception, Rojas's story: the old woman's unremitting corruption cannot touch Erendira, whose escape Signals her salvation, a possibility not available in Celestina. Cobra is the most unremitting and uncompromising rewriting of Celestina, though Rojas's protagonist is only mentioned once, through the generalized Spanish use of the word "celestina" as procuress. 33 It is also true, of course, that, Sarduy being the Latin American writer closest to the Tel Que! group, the mediation of Derrida's "La pharmacie de Platon" is greater here than in Fuentes and Garcia Marquez. 34 Cobra is one of the most daring experiments in fiction of the century, hence the questioning of the bases of literary expression is much more radical than in any of the works previously discussed. A more comprehensive reading of Cobra is offered in the last essay of this book, therefore I will conclude the present one by concentrating on the most Celestinesque aspects of Sarduy's text. In Cobra the obvious heritage of Celestina is the whorehouse as space, the Senora as head madam, the array of potions and cosmetics, Cobra's passion and sacrifice, the insistence on bodily painting and tattoos, the false genealogy, and the frequency of a dialogue format. All of these are elements present in some form or another in Fuentes and Garcia Marquez. But in Cobra there is a major difference. There is no effort whatsoever at mimesis; no illusion of creating a fictional world that is a reflection of everyday reality. In Cobra the text itself partakes of the spectacular quality of the brothel, which in this case is also a transvestite theater. In Sarduy, and this is crucial for our discussion, sexual roles are "constructed" by means of cosmetic and even more radical procedures, and the characters are representations of representations, made up of cliches drawn

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43

from language, painting, music, science, and popular culture in general, a whole junkyard of the given. And just as the process by which the protagonists are made up is presented in detail, the process of generating the text is also exposed. Not in the selfreflexive fashion to which one is accustomed in experimental fiction, but through discussions concerning the rules of writing and rhetoric, which are correlated with the procedures by which the characters are costumed. Text and body are made (up) by the brew. Cobra, the protagonist of the show, is subjected to painful cures to reduce the size of her feet, her only defect, she claims. Writing then is declared the art of ellipsis, of reduction. As in Celestina, and tangentially in Terra Nostra, writing and bodily inscription are the ultimate forms oftextuality. But this is merely an introduction compared to the major form of bodily inscription to which the protagonist is subjected: a sex-change operation, in one word, castration. In Cobra several characters suffer bodily transformations. Pup is changed into a Velazquez-type dwarf by taking an overdose of the medicine to bring about reduction. But Cobra goes to Tanger to undergo the unkindest cut of all at the hands of Dr. Ktazob, a parodic version of Jacques Lacan, who will perform the operation utilizing no anesthetic. La Cadillac, Cobra's rival, by the way, has undergone the opposite sex-change operation by having a phallus affixed by the busy doctor, who like Celestina with her bladder skins, can make additions to bodies. Cobra's passion constitutes her pharmakos phase. She suffers the ritual castration to acquire a more authentic and at the same time more artificial form of representation. Her being, her identity, her Signature, is the cut, paradoxically marking an absence, the mark like the scar on Celestina's face. Meaning, the self, are reduced to this bodily trace or traced to this bodily absence. It is only through raucous humor-Dr. Ktazob is a ridiculous figure of authority-that the whole ensemble does not collapse into a somber allegory. Everything, including the Telquelian ideology that seems to support it, appears in Sarduy as a cumbersome and always slightly askew system of writing whose theatricality leaves nothing hidden. There is no dark source of authentication or verification: everything is part of the show. Just like Celestina had a limited brood, because it had taken to the limits the critique ofvalues and representation, Cobra has had no sequel in modem Latin American fiction, though it is not difficult to

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detect Sarduy's presence in the most experimental fiction, even in that of his detractors, like Mario Vargas Uosa. Rojas and Sarduy are the nee plus ultra of Hispanic fiction: the alpha and omega. Could one also engage in fiction-making by claiming their kinship to be a founding form of alienation in the modern world: exile? Are the (supposedly) internal exile Rojas and the external exile Sarduy willing to risk all because they feel that they own nothing? Would my own exiled state not be then the inevitable (Celestinesque) mediator? Is self-wounding as the mark of individuality, as the trace of self, the last desperate gesture of those who have no distinguishing trait, no face, no identity? Is self-willed monstrosity the only form of being envisioned by the marginalized? But would all this not be a flimsy fiction based on our own postromantic feelings linking ethnicity and the origins of representation? Why must we construct, discover, or invent differences as historical forms of marginality, be they of class, ethnicity, or sexuality? Such crude essentialism collapses when faced with such major figures as Shakespeare, Cervantes, Mallarme, and Lezama, who were not exiles. The severe lesson to be learned from such radical works as Celestina and Cobra is that everything, including marginality, can be faked.

2. The Life and Adventures of Cipi6n Cervantes and the Picaresque

The question ofthe origins of the novel offered a peculiarly ironic double narrative to a student ofSpanish. Comparative Uterature. and what begun to be called in the late sixties Uterary Theory. Within the field of Hispanic Studies. it was a matter of common knowledge-the sort of thing asked in qualifying exams-that the novel had its origin in the Spanish picaresque. specifically in the anonymous Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes. published in 1554. The whole of the modem novelistic tradition issued from that text. having undergone. to be sure. a major transformation in the works of Cervantes. The more realistic the novel the more faithful it was to its picaresque beginnings. Hence. in Spanish it was easy to trace a tradition from Lazarillo to Benito Perez Gald6s and finally to Camilo Jose Cela and the novels of the Civil War and after. But beyond Hispanic Studies these truisms not only did not hold. but were ignored with nearly complete unanimity. It was not only a question of literary nationalisms. though the French held that the novel began with La princesse de Cleves and the English with the work of Fielding. The most bewildering situation was the absence of the picaresque from all of this century's best-known theoretical statements on the novel: Lukacs. Auerbach. Bakhtine. Frye. and closer in time Watt and Kristeva left it out altogether. On the Spanish side hardly anyone seemed to notice this. The theoreticians mentioned were "used" to study the Hispanic tradition. to be sure. but their failure to consider the picaresque was not denounced as a major oversight. Meanwhile. still on the Spanish side. studies and debates about the picaresque continued. generally oblivious to those about the novel in general being produced outside of their area of specialization. These studies and debates centered on three main topiCS. First. the notion that Spanish letters had an inherent penchant for realism that immunized them against flights of fancy or undue formal experimentation. The picaresque element at the origin was somehow responsible for this characteristic. though some traced it back to the

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Cervantes and the Picaresque

Poema de Mia Cid, and venerated Spanish philologist Ramon Menendez Pidal had a theory about the Spanish epic's realism. This critical tendency was clearly allied to national mythmaking in Spain and also reflected a certain distaste in the field of Spanish studies for the avant-garde. The second topic was existentialism. The picaresque seemed to satisfy the most important requirements of existentialist fiction, particularly in its projection of a feeling of estrangement in a hostile world. Through Ortega y Gasset and his diSciples, among them Americo Castro and his own many disciples, an existentialist inflection was given to the study of Spanish culture. It was a general feeling of gloom and bitterness exacerbated by the bleak years of the Franco regime and the fact that most prominent Spanish scholars and writers were in exile. Finally, the picaresque appeared to invite a moralistic, even doctrinaire reading, owing to its development in the Spain of the Counter Reformation. This feature was seen mostly in the Guzman de Alfarache (1599), considered by some to be the quintessential picaresque, in which narration and outright moralization alternate. A formalist preoccupation with genre was combined with this moralistic reading, a tendency that culminated in a very polemically received book on the picaresque by prominent English Hispanist Alexander A. Parker. Also in the Englishspeaking world, diSciples of Frye continued to press the question of genre, made anxious perhaps by the fact that picaresque novels are among the various literary manifestations that demonstrate the questionable usefulness of The Anatomy of Criticism beyond certain literary traditions. Such was the state of affairs in the criticism of the picaresque and the theory of the novel when Harry Sieber published his brief book on Lazarillo. Though I disagreed with a number of Sieber's proposals and thought that he was still too much under the influence of his (our) English mentors, his book seemed like an appropriate point of departure for a consideration of the picaresque that could lead into current discussions about criticism and out of the stifling arguments within the field of Spanish . The most suffocating of these became the obsession with genre, which mired critics in binary oppositions pitting predictable genres against no less predictable countergenres. I was also repelled by the pathetic aura of gloom that beset existentialist-oriented criticism of novels that, after all, contained a good deal of mirth and were supposed to be the forebears of many funny novels.

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Besides, it seemed clear that, precisely because the picaresque did not depend on the strictures of a genre bequeathed by the classical tradition, it sought to exist outside of what was considered literary in the Renaissance in order to reach a truth not available through literature. The picaresque, particularly Lazarillo, took the form of a legal document, since it was, after all the confession of a criminal. This tangible connection of the picaresque with the law was full of implications for the origins and history of the novel, it seemed to me, and led to my Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (1990). The thrust away from literature explains the picaresque's appeal to legal rhetoric and to a discourse devoid of literary form. There is, to be sure, a swerve back to the literary in the picaresque but in a different guise altogether. The relationship of the picaresque text to the notarial arts and to paraliterary forms such as autobiography soon acquires the intertextual nature of literary discourse, contaminating the very discourse of the law with the elusiveness and ambiguity that we associate with such a process. This was Cervantes' inSight into the issue, a crucial and historic one, for here was the first time that a modem form ofliterary discourse was shown to contain a move away from and back to literature that would be characteristic not only of the novel, but of other forms of literary and nonliterary discourse. One could say, evoking Celestina, who is the ultimate source of all this, that the process is a kind of prostitution of discourse, or better, a display of the generalized prostitution of all discourses that come into contact with modem literature, particularly those of authOrity. The modernity of this process is also found in the fact that it is inscribed as part of the very constitution of the literary work (the new literary work devoid of classical antecedents), making authOrity itself part and parcel of the work's fictionality. The picaresque makes all of this visible, as it were, in its own fables of transmission, the most basic of which involves a criminal writing about his life to someone with institutionallegal authOrity to gain exculpation. It is as if the anonymous author of Lazarillo had come to the conclusion that the lives of Sempronio, Parmeno, and Celestina herself, could only acquire literary legitimacy through a mock submission to the language of the law; the law outside of which they live. For someone who was reading not only the picaresque and the scholarship about it, but also the new Latin American novel. it was obvious that an approach to the picaresque that privileged its role

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Cervantes and the Picaresque

in the origins of realistic fiction was too limiting. I saw living traces

of picaresque fiction in Garcia Marquez, Fuentes, Cabrera Infante, Cortazar, and Sarduy; more importantly, I could see in their experiments with novelistic discourse the realization of possibilities opened by Celestina, Lazarillo, and (needless to say) Cervantes. These preoccupations led to the follOwing essay, which took the form of a review-article of Sieber's book in the style made popular by Diacritics, in which it first appeared and with whose early development and heyday I was closely associated.

The Life and Adventures of Cipi6n Cervantes and the Picaresque Few fields have been more thoroughly scrutinized oflate than the picaresque. Clearly because of their interest in the novel as a theoretical issue, critics have returned repeatedly to Lazarillo, Guzman and Busc6n, searching for the origins of a novelistic genealogy. Studies by such authorized critics as Carlos Blanco Aguinaga. Stephen Gilman, Claudio Guillen, Javier Herrero, Fernando Lazaro Carreter, Alexander Parker, Francisco Rico, Gonzalo Sobejano, and Bruce Wardropper provide a plethora of interpretations of the individual texts, as well as inSights into the origins and development of the picaresque. 1 All of this work has not been without controversy, and at times the field has been left like the one in the Gongora ballad, in which the horses "buscaban entre la sangre 10 verde. "2 The richness of this critical tradition could very well have discouraged a young critic like Harry Sieber, but fortunately it did not. 3 Sieber has managed to cull from these studies much ofwhat is valid and also make quite a strong reading of his own ofLa vida de Lazarillo de Tormes [The Ufe ofLazarillo de Tormes]. This is a substantial accomplishment, given that no picaresque novel has been more minutely read than the first. Sieber has raised the level of criticism ofLazarillo and by extension of the picaresque, and though he has done it partly because the level was already high, he has taken his leave from previous work on this specific novel and on the topic in general. It is clear, however, that Language and Society in Lazarillo de Tormes is heir to the long and distinguished Anglo-American tradition of Hispanic studies, a tradition whose main virtue has been to practice

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close readings of texts. The tradition goes back to Edward M. Wilson, Parker, Wardropper, Gilman, and more recently Elias Rivers and many other distinguished Hispanists whose contributions to Golden Age studies are simply immeasurable. The guiding principle of the reading method practiced by these critics has been belief in organic form, or structure conceived as the product of an artistic intention that a sedulous critic can recover. Work on the comedia or on poetry has focused on the interconnectedness of metaphors within a given play and on the relation of metaphoric systems to other levels of signification, mainly the plot in the case of the theater. 4 Similar efforts have been made with the picaresque, though here the readings have often led to moral allegOries. But because the question of form presents such peculiar problems in the picaresque, the awareness of more complex theoretical issues than organic or artistic form has been keener among its critics. Albert A. SicrofI's detailed study of the language of Lazarillo-a worthy predecessor to Sieber's work-and Rico's point of view analysis of the same novel are good examples ofthis.s Guillen and Lizaro Carreter made important contributions by underlining the relationship between the picaresque and various forms of autobiographical writing. Parker's book, on the other hand, was the first sustained effort to link the picaresque to society, though Americo Castro, Gilman, and Sicroffhad already provided tangential but important insights of their own in this area. 6 At the heart of Parker's controversial book there is an anachronism. His notion of delinquency appears to be tinged with a SOCiolOgical view of crime that is more akin to the nineteenth-century novel than to the picaresque, which promotes a notion of Criminality rooted in theology. Lizaro Carreter's and Guillen's arguments are more convincing, though it seems to me that to apply the notion of genre to the picaresque is futile. The picaresque is not one of the norms that tradition bequeaths as a genre in the Renaissance, and though one of its characteristics is that it assumes an autobiographical form, one would be hard put to define autobiography as a genre. 7 Autobiography usually needs the cloak of a speCific rhetorical vehicle (confession, for instance) and only becomes an independent form of narrative after the eighteenth century, as is well known. Sieber decided from the start to scuttle questions of genre. He

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thereby avoided having to deal either with the thematic issues raised by Parker or the formalistic arguments advanced by Guillen. Working from within more recent critical thought, Sieber saw that the key to both the problems ofform and the relation of the picaresque to society was language. Though he offers enough methodolOgical and historical justifications for his choice, a few more can be added. The sixteenth century was obsessed with questions of language, and especially so in Spain and its recently conquered American Empire. This obsession took the form not only of learned disquisitions by the like of Luis Vives or Fray Luis de Leon, but was a constant practical problem that surfaces in many guises in the works of Bartolome de las Casas and others involved in the conversion ofIndians to Christianity.8 The sixteenth century also witnessed an explosion of writing, not only in literature, philosophy, and theology, but in the massive output of the bureaucracy organized to govern the wide and unwieldy Spanish Empire. It was also in the sixteenth century that Spanish underwent its most radical linguistic transformation. Lazarillo was written at a time when the sociolinguistic changes taking place in the empire were qUick and profound. There can be little doubt that the novel reflects the nearly convulsive nature of those changes in the social and linguiStic realms. The chief virtue of Language and Society is that it reads Lazarillo as a linguistic performance whose aim is constituting the presence of the fictional author: "It [Lazarillo] is the story of this process, of these successive acts of mobiliZing language, that constitutes both the subject of my essay and the hidden discourse ofUzaro's Vida. The nature of this 'life' is not a reflection or a representation of an individualized sixteenth-century experience. Rather it is the 'life' of the individualizing acts oflanguage through which such an experience takes form. I will argue that Lazaro's 'trabajos y fatigas' refers to an experience that involves a struggle with language too difficult not be shared" (p. x). This inSight into the elaboration of the text and its fiction leads Sieber to conclusions, the importance of which he exploits with varying degrees of success: Lazaro "converts" to a writer, and his relations with his various masters, including the Vuestra Merced to whom the discourse is addressed, are chiefly linguistic, though they are Simultaneously a part of his psychosexual development. Lazaro's sexual autobiography is the story of his

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initiation into the complexities of the linguistic code, and with it, the language of society at all levels. The combined analyses of these various levels of performance will be the endUring value of Sieber's book. If Lazaro's awakening to the intricacies of language is the true story of Lazarillo, the relations with the various masters are the individual lessons. Sieber reads these instances with admirable subtlety and exemplary attention to detail, to the point that sometimes the readings stand out quite apart from the main narrative of Language and SOciety. The readings are carried out mainly at two levels. One could be called contextual and is above all a commentary of the text aimed at elucidation through scholarly spadework. Sieber's minute reading of the very short and suggestive fifth tratado unveils repressed homosexual connotations in such a convincing manner that his commentary should become the standard one. The same is true of his dazzling reading of the dress code in the fourth tratado. The second level could be called symbolic, in that it assigns a stable, though initially hidden meaning to parts of the text. Thus: "The bull's horns function as a visible sign of Lazaro's cuckoldry at the end of the novel and they point also to the gran ruido, the rumors of the malas lenguas of his neighbors, which threaten his comfortable life as Toledo's public voice" (p. 1). In these interpretations Sieber betrays his debt to Anglo-American Hispanism, and though his readings here are also convincing, they hark back to notions of organiC form, artistic unity, and symbolic meaning that are not as innovative as the critical ideology underlying other parts of his book. At this level Sieber reenacts vis-a.-vis his critical fathers an operation that he reads very well in the episode in Lazarillo where the protagonist's half-brother flees from his black father, blind to his own color. The symbolic is produced in that scene out offear. The reflective fear in Language and Society might be to transgress the laws of the criticism that precedes it. This sort of process occurs only because of the intensity of the critical operation being performed and the risks that Sieber is taking and should not be seen as a negative aspect of the book. On the contrary, I believe that Sieber's book gains considerable value by the very troublesome way in which it performs what it discovers in the picaresque. For instance, the very same process of blindness resulting from an obsessive attachment to the verbum visibile that

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afflicts Lazarillo also afflicts Sieber. This is apparent in the repetition of LazariIlo's structure in Language and Society. Language and Society contains seven chapters and a prologue, each a commentary of the same portions ofLazariIlo, a rather transparent strategy whose sense the reader must ponder upon. Is it too farfetched to think that it places Sieber's text in relation to Lazarillo's in the same position as Lazarillo's in relation to the Your Lordship to whom the text is addressed? But Lazarillo's relation to Vuestra Merced is not as submissive as it seems, as Sieber himself points out, and in repeating Lazarillo's text Sieber is submitting perhaps too readily to its own forms of blindness. For instance, though La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes beginS with a prologue that casts everything that follows as a performance from a given point in time, Sieber sometimes "forgets" the rhetorical diachrony of the tratados and sees a real teleology leading up to the insights ofthe prologue. But clearly all is written in Lazarillo as a way of persuading Vuestra Merced of something from the point of view (and time) ofLizaro's adult mastery of the codes oflanguage and society. To forget the fictionality of this teleology is to fall prey to the blindness of the verbum visible, the temporal unfolding of the text as we read. Sieber is not always deluded in this fashion; most of the time he is quite aware of the rhetoricization of the vida. The very intensity of Sieber's reading endows his text with a theoretical power that it may lack at a conceptual level (where, for instance, it is difficult to find a continuity to the Lacanian reading of the first tratado). Sieber struggles to maintain a balance between his exegetical work and overall formulation on LazariIlo, haunted both by scholarship and by the need to interpret. His close readings are so admirably detailed, so well supported with contextual reference, that they become independent of the whole argument of the book. Instead ofconverging, close reading and overall interpretation go in separate directions, the more the former intensified. It is as if the visible details manage to repress the overall interpretation, as if scholarship shielded Sieber from the ideolOgical grasp ofhis critical fathers. In this sense Language and Society acquires a more compelling picaresque character than through its repetition of the tratados. The visible detail delays and makes increaSingly difficult interpretation (the ultimate task of historico-thematic Anglo-American criticism), just as Lizaro find it difficult to find coherence in society's various codes: the linguistic, the sexual, the religiOUS. Only through his

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willed blindness to his wife's morals can Lazaro make his life coalesce with society, just as a certain blindness to detail can lead to interpretation of the text, in the sense of making it subservient to a given overall theme. So ultimately the greatest value in Sieber's book is the way in which it plays out the major preoccupation in the picaresque: the emergence of writing and its relation to authority. Sieber's analyses are mostly theoretical, in that they seek to uncover that relation through the hypostases of the paternal figure (the master), who embodies the law and the emerging picaro-writer. The emergence of the picaresque is thus a sort of psychodrama staged in the text itself, through which authOrity is subverted and preserved at the same time. Lazaro learns enough from the blind man to blind him, but his own authOrity at the end is based on his own willed blindness to his wife's infidelity. The very complex inscription of these issues in the text ofLazarillo has never been read with more subtlety than in Language and Society, a book that will remain a landmark in criticism of the picaresque as solid as the stone bull in the novel and as revealing to critics who, like the young rogue, were not wise to the ways of the word. The problematics that Sieber mobilizes in his book had been dealt with by Cervantes at the tum of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth in a way that tells a good deal about the origins of the novel. I believe that to read that problematic in Cervantes' work is a more concrete (even institutional) way of understanding the relation between literature and society than Sieber's attempt, but that is not at odds with his readings at all. Cervantes was forced by circumstances to deal with the picaresque. It is known that, though published later, Quevedo's Buscon was written in the very first years of the new century, in the wake of the Guzman (1599). An apocryphal second part to Aleman's novel came out three years after the Original-in 1602-and Aleman had to hurry to press with his own second part. In 1605 Lopez de Ubeda published his PicaraJustina, a feminine picaresque, while just a few years later, in Paris, H. de Luna published a Segunda parte de la vida de Lazarillo de Tormes (1620). The years around the tum of the century mark a peak in the production of picaresque novels. Though Cervantes never wrote a picaresque follOwing Aleman's model, he did leave a complex critique of how this new literature was changing the rules of the

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game. This speculation is contained in "El casamiento enganoso" ["The Deceitful Marriage"] and "EI coloquio de los perros" ["The Dogs' Colloquy"], intertwined tales that constitute, in my view, a sort of "metapicaresque." It was no formalist whim nor thematic compulsion that made a unity of"EI casamiento enganoso" and "EI coloquio de los perros" and much less an afterthought ofCervantes. 9 The relationship between the two tales is determined by their "reading" of the picaresque. Even the framing story alludes to a basic picaresque conceit: a roguish adventurer tells his story to someone in authOrity. Lazarillo tells the story of his life to a Vuestra Merced, a Your Lordship, who may very well be a judge. This implicit device of the picaresque is blown up in Cervantes' two linked stories, where we are told in detail how this narrative scene is set. Rather than begin his tales with the conventional formula of the picaresque, mentioning the protagonist's birth and parents, Cervantes indicates what, within the implicit fiction must literally be the first incident: the meeting of the teller and his listener and their agreement to have the story told. Here Ensign Campuzano, who is being released from the Hospital de la Resurrecci6n in Valladolid, meets by chance with Licentiate Peralta, a lawyer friend of his, and they both repair to the latter's quarters for lunch and conversation. Claudio Guillen, in his influential piece on the picaresque, uses as his point of departure Don Quijote's adventure with the galley slaves in which Cervantes pokes fun at the convention of autobiography that supports the picaresque novel.lO Gines de Pasamonte, one of the prisoners, says that he has not finished writing his life because he is not through living it, having only written his own picaresque novel up to the point where he was last arrested. The allusion to the Guzman de Alfarache, a novel in which the picaro undergoes the conversion that leads him to write his story when a galley slave, could not be clearer, as is the suggestion that autobiography can have no clear resolution and therefore no plot. But it hardly seems to be casual that Gines de Pasamonte is a prisoner, as is Guzman, or that Lazarillo appears to be telling his life to a judge. The picaro is often in trouble with the law. In his autobiography he speaks not to God, as did Augustine, but to a temporal authOrity. Cervantes has reenacted this scene in the framing story, and though the situation is much more relaxed, Ensign Campuzano is also

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telling his life to a representative of the law. The picaro, as Parker emphasized, is a delinquent, therefore the story of his life takes the form of a legal deposition. The picaresque, as I have shown elsewhere, developed the form oflife as a unit of narrative by mimicking one of the formulas offorensic rhetoric much in use at the time: the relaci6n.11 Lazarillo's life is told not simply in a letter, as Lazaro Carreter has argued in a brilliant article, but in the kind of letter which functions as a legal deposition or makes a petition to a higher authority based on services rendered. 12 Harry Sieber's penetrating analysis ofLazarillo's relationship with Your Lordship corroborates this. The fact that Lazaro refers constantly to the situation in which he finds himself with the Archpriest as a caso underscores, it seems to me, that the text of the novel passes for a relaci6n. Although caso was a fairly common word in the Golden Age, as it is even now in the same context, it may be well to remember here what Covarrubias says about it: "Caso, that is to sayan event that has taken place, hence jurists call a case the occasion or proposition upon which the determination of a law or decree is founded: and in litigation, the first thing they agree upon is on one case, or the facts, which are one and the same" (my translation).13 Further historical evidence can be adduced. The vastness of the Spanish empire in the sixteenth century and the myriad adventures in which so many of its citizens were involved made of the relaci6n a very common sort of document. A story by Alejo Carpentier evokes in these terms the world of pettifoggery and bureaucratic strife typical of the Spanish colonies in the sixteenth century: "Each time the New Spanish Fleet set sail for home, the ships' masters were entrusted with commissions, letters, lies, and slanders to be taken back to Spain and delivered to anyone who could best use them to harm someone else .... While the Governor was trying to discredit the King's officers in an eight page letter, the Bishop would be denounCing the Governor for living in concubinage .... And so a chain was formed, always ready to break at the weakest or most unexpected point. One man was denounced for having bought aphrodiSiac herbs from a Negro witch doctor who was whipped at Cartagena de Indias; the Town Crier was accused of the abominable sin.14 All of these adventures and misadventures, by people who were marginal to society, found their way to legal or quaSi-legal

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documents in which lives large and small were told in search of acquittal or social advancement. The relacion became the vehicle for such narratives. In it the protagonist identified himselfby telling his life and then told the relevant incidents in which he had been involved. Conventional literary history veils the fact that many of the chronicles of the discovery and conquest were relaciones. There is hardly a text more like Lazarillo or Guzman than Bernal Diaz del Castillo's Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva Espana [True History of the Conquest of New Spain], Heman Cortes' Cartas de relacion [Letters of Report], or Ramon Pane's Relacion acerca de las antiguedades de los Indios [Report on the Ancient Beliefs of the Indians]. The recourse to the relacion was so pervasive and popular that by 1636, in the viceroyalty of Nueva Granada, the lascivious and witty Juan Rodriguez Freyle wrote his well-known El Camero [The Trash Bin] using the device wholesale. The Camero was a history of the viceroyalty drawn from the trash bin in the archives of the Real Audiencia, or so claims its compiler, covering the tenure of several viceroys, plus "some cases [casos] that occurred in this Kingdom, that appear in the history to be exemplary, and not to be imitated owing to the harm they would do to conscience." These casos, as all readers of Rodriguez Freyle know, had to do very often with cuckoldry in a manner not too dissimilar from that ofLazarillo's. The lives ofinsignificant soldiers, the domestic foibles of petty bureaucrats, the adventures of obscure friars were told as relaciones, not in the classical rhetorical molds known only to the humanists. Reams of legal paper sailed the Atlantic in both directions in the sixteenth century, and streams of documents crossed Spain's arid plainS toward Europe. Not a few of those documents were relaciones, much like the one Lazaro writes for Your Lordship. What better form to express the life of a picaro than a legal formula, when he was forever on the verge of being entangled in the law? Cervantes, who had himself been a soldier and felt on his shoulders the weight of the law, picked up, it seems to me, this element of the picaresque and shows its importance in the story framing "El casamiento enganoso" and "El coloquio de los perros." It is indeed Significant that one of the characters is a picaresque soldier who has recently returned from Flanders and the other a lawyer who "hears" his case. When Lazarillo says that his case has not been heard before, he is also using a legalism. Covarrubias,

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again: "Oyr: to accept the validity of petitions, arguments or proofs brought by both parties before adjudicating." In assuming the form of a relacion, the picaresque is implicitly claiming that by doing so it is truer to life, that it is a document showing a real life enmeshed in the society of the times. The question of truth, as the correspondence between what is written and what actually happens, is not one to have troubled literature much before the Renaissance. In the picaresque, and so Cervantes recognizes, the question is violently introduced, and the appeal to a form oflegal rhetoric is evidence of it. Now literature must deal not only with abstractions such as moral truth or verisimilitude, but also answer to the pressures of social reality. In the framing story Cervantes posits this dilemma clearly. In addition, the picaresque text then appears as the result of guilt, exoneration, or achievement before a paternal figure who embodies power and authority. Not only by its ambience, but more Significantly by the relationship among its characters, the framing story sets the whole text encompassing "EI casamiento engaiioso" and "EI coloquio de los perros" in a critical posture before the picaresque. It is already Significant that the relationship has been altered: the tale is told to a curious reader, not to the slightly inquisitorial one of Lazarillo. The Licentiate is not performing his function as lawyer. Like the reader of Don Quijote, he is an "idle reader." The change in the picaresque formula is Significant. In "EI casamiento enganoso" and "EI coloquio de los perros," Cervantes reveals how the picaresque has an inner connectedness prOvided by the way in which the turning points of a typical picaresque vida allude, through appeal to a metaphOric field drawn for sexuality, to the origin and disposition of writing. By uncovering this metaphOriC stratum in the picaresque text, Cervantes lays bare a contradiction at the core of this new form ofwriting: its pretense to truth and authOrity sustained by taking the form of a legal document and at the same time the elusiveness of its dense system of inner connections, which seems to link it not to the outside world, but to a literary form of discourse. By pointing to the relationship between sexuality and writing, Cervantes is suggesting too that the turning points in a picaro's life are also tropes that tell the story of the writer and his text's coming into being. A picaro writes of his birth and family, of his masters, his

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marriage, and the conversion that leads him to write his autobiography. In all cases the early events lack distinctiveness. They do not constitute a clear beginning either for a life or for a story. Lazaro is born ofa Gonzalez and a Perez, the two most common surnames in Spanish. 15 Guzman has, according to his mother's rather explicit feminine computations, two fathers. 16 Given the flexible morals of Pablos's mother, his legitimacy could also be doubted. The masters, who become surrogate fathers, come and go. Picaresque life is made of maddening repetitions that the picaro-writer seeks to control by writing the text of his life, by giving it fictive substantiality in a relaci6n: a substantiality that would domesticate the repetitions, turning them into meaningful, unique instances, organized as a teleology that leads up to the moment he writes. By means of marriage and conversion, the picaro seeks to legitimize his beginnings and the starting point of his story. But of course, both turning points become as difficult to control as the wild dissemination they attempt to cover. Lazaro's marriage to the Archpriest's mistress only augurs that the next picaro will be born of a union that can hardly guarantee the identity of his father. Pablos repeats his father's error when he joins up at the end with La Grajales, a prostitute whose progeny could not be untarnished. Marriage, for a picaro, turns out to be the repetition of an initial moment in picaresque life, when the protagonist is born out of a confusing sexual situation: the proliferating Gonzalez's and Perez's, the multiplicity offathers, the public mothers. If marriage is going to be the picaro's social contract, that contract winds up being as unreliable a text as the picaro himself and the life that he later writes. The brood of the picaresque marriage is a picaresque novel. The same elusiveness is present in conversion, which is the other crucial turning point in a picaresque life. In Lazarillo the prologue is the best example of the notorious ambiguities of autobiographical writing. The account of a conversion can only breed a new account and the typical infinite regression is set in motion. Lopez de Ubeda has taken to its ultimate consequences the relationship between beginning to write a picaresque life, sexuality, and conversion in the interminable chapters in which Justina struggles with a hair that has stuck to the tip of her pen, and in the process tells a great deal about the difficulties of beginning to write a picaresque life-particularly when hers leads to marriage with none

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other than Guzman de Alfarache. the protagonist of the quintessential picaresque novel. Writing leads to a textual marriage. within the disseminatory power ofliterature. not to an outside union by means of which authority will be restored. L6pez de Ubeda too writes a metapicaresque. By focusing on the moment of marriage. Cervantes is calling attention to a crucial turning point in the picaresque: the end that "determines" its beginning. Besides. as is well known. marriage is an important convention in the literature of the times. particularly in the comedia. Marriage in the theater always Signals a happy ending. a restoration of order in society. insurance that reproduction will follow rules that contain it. In Cervantes' works marriage often appears as a dubious endeavor. which rarely ensures order and tranquillity. though there are cases such as "La Gitanilla" and "La fuerza de la sangre" ["The Power of Blood"] where it provides a happy closure. But in "EI casamiento enganoso" Cervantes is focusing on marriage as the end/beginning of a picaresque life. blOwing it up. as it were. to study both the picaro and the origin of his new vocation of writing. When Estefania disappears with his counterfeit gems. Campuzano thinks that he has had the last laugh. But he soon lands in the hospital with syphilis and discovers that it was Estefania who laughed last. The tale has a very tightly structured plot that leads from deceit to counterdeceit to delayed action deceit: it is a kind of inverted romance. There is no small measure of irony in that a marriage that began beyond all the mystifications of love should turn out to be a crescendo of falsehoods. The pure chance of their first encounter engenders an interlocking sequence of events that winds up with the dissolution of the marriage. a counterending in terms of the comedia. but also a step beyond the ending within the realm of the picaresque. And what is beyond the ending of the picaresque? The issue of the picaresque marriage is the elusive. ambiguous, and inconclusive picaresque text. The picaro "fathers" a picaresque novel. Campuzano's true progeny is the story that he has just told and also the text that the Licentiate Peralta is about to read. Just as the picaro is born of this uncontrollable kind of sexual dissemination. so the picaresque text is born of this textual multiplication. The relaci6n. no matter how many notary publics sign it. can only be a pretext, never a binding document.

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Gines de Pasamonte's quip about not having finished his picaresque novel because he had not finished living it is Cervantes's way of pointing to a convention of all autobiographical writing: the memorialist must undergo a conversion, must become another to be able to have enough distance from his former self In Lazarillo this occurs when he decides to take sides with the good people (a cogerme a los buenos), submit to the "laws" of society by marrying. In Guzman the protagonist undergoes a religiOUS conversion at the end, as we have already seen. In "El casamiento enganoso" conversion is spoofed by its taking the form of a social disease. The fact that the hospital is the Hospital de la Resurrecci6n should not be lost. Conversion as death and resurrection is a common enough metaphor. There is a mild, Cervantine irony running through the Ensign's illness and his becoming a writer, an irony that turns into more raucous humor in the next tale, in which the picaros have become dogs. If "El casamiento engmoso" and "El coloquio de los perros" were framed by the story of the two friends meeting outside of the Hospital de la Resurrecci6n, the story of Berganza's life is framed by at least two stories. The first has to do with the night in which the dogs speak; the second, somewhat nebulous, tells why they can speak and whether they will continue to have the ability to speak. Just as there are multiple stories, so there are various justifications for the dogs' ability to speak: first, they are really humans, changed to dogs by virtue of their mothers' commerce with the devil; second, it is the Ensign's feverish imagination that produced their speech as in a dream; third, as the Licentiate suggests, the Ensign has written a sort offable or apologue in the manner of the classics in which animals speak. To this already vast array, it could be added that the Ensign may be giving a veiled, transformed version of his own picaresque life. As Ruth EI Saffar argues, it is clear that the Ensign is a writer.!? But these possibilities, like the multiple stories, are not mutually exclusive. Multiplication and amplification abound in Berganza's tale. Berganza tells his life according to the picaresque formula: he begins by mentioning his parents, tells of his childhood, his early masters, and winds up, of course, at the moment when he had Cipi6n acquire speech suddenly. The most Significant aspects of the picaresque formula in Berganza's life are both his origin and conver-

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sion, which are multiplied and expanded. Right in the center of his story, Berganza speaks of his meeting with La Caiiizares, a witch who tells him how he and Cipion were really the product of La Montiela's (another witch) relations with the devil. Who were Berganza's parents? The slaughterhouse dogs or La Montiela and the devil? The undifferentiated and wild multiplication of Perez's and Gonzalez's in Lazarillo, the two fathers in Guzman, appears here in the figure of Montiela and her bizarre sexuality. There is an uncontrolled side to reproduction here that is akin to that of writing, a demonic origin that conspires against the possibility of finding a true, unpolluted beginning, a nonduplicitous source of reproduction. This appeal to Montiela is also a way of indicating the true genealogy of the picaresque, which winds back to the garrulous Celestina. (The dialogue form of the second novella is an homage to Celestina's own dialOgiC form.) Celestina, whose main occupation was restoring virginities, was a true figure of the writer; one who passes patchwork for the original. If the picaro's origins were confused because of the lack of chastity of his mother, Cervantes is going back here to their true mother-Celestina, that pharmakos in which both alchemy and writing are blended for the first time in Spanish literature. This is the sense of the very uncharacteristically salacious nature of these Cervantes stories. Montiela not only explodes the picaro's tale of origin, she also ruins the determining power of conversion within the picaresque fiction. She decreed enigmatically when the puppies were born that: Volveran en su forma verdadera cuando vieren con presta diligencia derribar los soberbios levantados, Y alzar a los humildes abatidos por poderosa mana para hac ella. (p. 338) 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. (pp. 238-39).

In other words, the dogs will be able to undergo a radical transformation at judgment day, not before. Conversion, so the text suggests, is yet another ruse of the picaresque author. The fact that the

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dogs have gained the ability to speak suggests that their change has been rather partial. Cervantes has foreclosed any chiliastic reading of the picaresque by making the temporal mechanism of conversion hinge on a literal figuration. (I am using figuration here in the sense Auerbach gave the term figura, that is to say, the relation between a past and a present event that renders the latter meaningful-the most common figures being those linking the Old and New Testaments.)18 The future of the picaresque is not the demystified hero, nor the author of romances; the future of the picaresque text is yet another text. By postponing the perfect text to a nether future, Cervantes makes all fictions of concord, all dreams of order and intelligibility as much a part of fiction as conversion, marriage, and the other conventions of picaresque life. 19 The future text is the life and adventures of Cipion, which my modest commentary anticipates. The unwritten text is Cervantes' move beyond the picaresque. At the end of"EI coloquio de los perros," Berganza tells offour madmen whose conversation he overheard at the hospital. The four are, a poet who has written an unfinished epic poem, a mathematician who claims to be close to locating the fixed pOint, an alchemist who is near the discovery of the philosopher's stone, and an arbitrista (a schemer) who has the answer to Spain's economic problems. It is clear that all four are searching for a kind of absolute knowledge and perfection that would only be possible ifMontiela's fiction of concord became a reality. In the meantime they are confined in the hospital as madmen: all four live in an absolute future at odds with the present. The most suggestive of the four is the poet, who gives the follOwing reasons for his lamentations: "lComo y no sera razon que me queje-prosiguio-, que habiendo yo guardado 10 que Horacio manda en su Pottiea, que no salga a luz la obra que despues de compuesta no hayan pasado diez alios por ella, y que tenga yo una de veinte alios de ocupacion y doce de pasante, grande en el sujeto, admirable y nueva en la invencion, grave en el verso, entretenida en los episodios, maravillosa en la division, porque el principio responde al medio y al fin, de manera que constituyen el poema alto, sonoro, heroico, deleitable y sustancioso, y que, con todo esto, no hallo un principe a quien dirigirle? Principe, digo, que sea inteligente, liberal y magnanimo. jMisera edad y depravado siglo nuestro!" "lDe que trata ellibro?",

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pregunt6 el alquimista. Respondi6 el poeta: "Trata de 10 que dej6 de escribir el Arzobispo Turpin del Rey Artus de Inglaterra. con otro suplemento de la Historia de 10 demanda del Santo Brial, y todo en verso heroico, parte en octavas y parte en verso suelto; pero todo esdrlijulamente, digo, en esdrlijulos de nombres sustantivos, sin admitir verbo alguno." (p. 335) "And haven't I good reason to complain?" he went on. "Having kept to the rules that Horace lays down in his Ars of Poetry that one shouldn't publish a work until ten years after it is finished, I have one which took me twenty years to write, not to mention twelve more I had it by me, a work with a vast subject, an admirable and novel plot, dignified lines and entertaining episodes, marvelously balanced, with the beginning matching the middle and the end: so that poem is lofty, tuneful, heroic, pleasing and substantial; yet I can't find a noble patron to whom I can address it. I mean a nobleman who is intelligent, liberal and magnanimous. What a wretched age and depraved century we live in." "What is the work about?" asked the alchemist. The poet replied, "It's about what Archbishop Turpin didn't get 'round to writing about King Arthur of England, with a further supplement to the 'Story of the Quest of the Holy Grail.' It's all in heroic verse, partly in octaves and partly in free verse; but all in dactyls and nouns at that, without a single verb." (p. 248)

Who is this poet if not a Cervantine figure, a modem author worried about the fate of his work within the market of the day, yet hoping to revive a heroic age? What is the book that he has written if not a sort of pre-Quixotic adventure, retelling the adventures of knights? And isn't Cervantes giving a figure of himself as author of the Quijote when the poet assumes the position of Archbishop Turpin, the apocryphal editor of chivalric tales (rather than the author)? The mixture of epic with humor, parody, questions about authorship and representation define Don Quijote, and these are the elements that prevail in the work-in-progress of this Borgesian poet who is also planning to omit all verbs from his discourse. Isn't this the same mixture that one would expect to find in the life of Cipian? After all, though merely a dog, Cipian bears a heroic, epic name, one that in the context of the Spanish peninsula had historical resonances as well and that, as Numancia shows, was important in Cervantes' conception of heroism. In short, his life may very well

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be much like that of Don QUijote himself The future work that Cervantes' intertwined tales announce is not the Persiles, but the QUijote. The life and adventures of Cipion become the life and adventures of Don QUijote. The picaresque is made up of the past life of the picaro and his present activity as writer. The picaresque is the novel of the writer: the portrait of the artist as a young man. The Quijote, on the other hand, is not burdened by the past like the picaro. The hero of that novel begins his adventures precisely and Significantly when he is beyond the reach of family and the more immediate constraints of making a living. Don QUijote's adventures begin as a result not of life but ofliterature, not of writing, but of reading. Don QUijote is the novel of the reader. If"El casamiento enganoso" was recounted, reenacted by Campuzano to his friend, "El coloquio de los perros" is read by Campuzano as the reader reads the text.20 Naturally, the past still weighs on Don Quijote, as does the present. He aims to bring about that moment when the humble overpower the lofty, but settles for less, constantly forced by the contingencies of the present. It is this, I believe, that would have prevailed in the life of Cipion, so much a tale of the reader that it is left up to us to imagine (as I do here). Cervantes' analysis of the picaresque focuses on two features of the new literature: the emergence of the modem writer and the relationship between the literary text and the other codes through which authOrity is transmitted in society. The first of these was of paramount importance to Cervantes and his contemporaries (Aleman, Lope) who were among the first profeSSional writers in Spain. Cervantes' social status and aspirations were not wholly different from those of the picaro. Like Pablos, Cervantes pined for the opportunity to cross the Atlantic in search of social advancement in the New World. Like the picaro Cervantes accepted the values of society and pretended as best he could to live by them. The new novel, as it emerged then, was appropriately a marginal form of writing without substantial antecedents in the classical tradition. It was a combination of rhetorical molds, a simulacrum of other texts with social acceptance. The picaresque lacked an official model, therefore it mimicked real, official documents to render effective its "performance" of the functions of society'S texts. Because it has no preSCribed form, the novel must often pretend to be a nonliterary

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document. It can appear as a relacion, the report of a scientific expedition, as history, a correspondence, a police report, a chronicle, a memoir, and so on. One fruitful way to study the history of the novel and its relation to society would be to take notice of what it pretends to be throughout the centuries. Is not Cervantes suggesting that the novel mimicks whatever kind of text a given society invests with power at a certain point in history? Sieber argued convincingly that Lazarillo is a sexual autobiography in which the emergence of the symbolic issues from the relationship between the language of authOrity and that of the callow picaro, the modem writer. This is an inSight that, supported as it is by so much valuable documentation, can truly begin to show how subversive the new literature really was in Golden Age Spain. 21 But Cervantes had already also shown that to remain within the dialectic of authority is not the fate of the new writing begun in Celestina. Otis Green rightly pointed out that "The ideology of Cervantes is not rigorous, except for his firmly held belief in an ultimate overarching harmony wherein the positives and the negatives agree."22 More than agreeing, however, in a text whose "origin" is ultimately a Celestinesque pharmacological mixture, they commingle; feminine picaresques like Picara Justina, obviously heirs to the old bawd, performed an equally corrosive function on the genealogy of voices that constitute the picaresque. The deconstruction of picaresque formulas is Cervantes' most radical view of the new narrative and its presence in Don Quijote is a crucial element in that text. Cervantes' inSight into the nature of the emerging novel contains an important lesson for literary critics and historians. We speak of the birth and growth of the modem novel, of the French and English novels being heirs to the picaresque, of Cervantes having fathered the modem novel. We say all this, allOwing ourselves to be carried away by the force of our own metaphors. Cervantes, by mocking this very metaphOrical system, has shown that the novel itself has no such genealOgical purity, that it is enmeshed in a vast textual field that is renewed in history. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Finnegan's Wake, and Tres tristes tigres [Three Trapped Tigers] are also part of the field offorce created in the explOSion of Celestina's lab.

3. Poetry and Painting in Lope's El castigo sin venganza

No play of Lope's has puzzled critics more than El castigo sin venganza [Punishment without Revenge] (1631). Peribrinez, Fuenteovejuna, and to some degree El caballero de Olmedo [The Knight from Olmedo] have elicited the kind of criticism that can be considered cumulative; generations of scholars have added their knowledge and inSights to our understanding of these plays. But our assumptions about Lope's work remain largely untouched. This is not the case with El castigo, a play that has provoked polemics as no other work by Lope and that, in spite of the amount of criticism it has received, always makes us feel that we are at ground zero in our effort to understand it. 1 Those of us who have been inspired by R. E. Kaske's work and emulate to the best of our abilities his vast learning and exegetical perseverance are inevitably led to such problematic texts. I have rarely been more impressed by an act of reading than by Kaske's prodigiOUS feats of interpretation of obscure passages in Dante. I remember one in particular that he performed at a symposium on "difficult literature," a gathering where El castigo would have surely been at home. 2 The position ofEI castigo in Lope's oeuvre seems to have destined it for such a polemical reception. One of the last plays of Lope's voluminous production, it was performed at a court feast at a delicate political moment, had a theme that could be interpreted as an allusion to an embarraSSing event in the history of the Spanish monarchy, and appeared at a time when Lope's successors, most notably Tirso and Calderon, had already produced masterpieces of their own. 3 Around that banner year of 1631, Calderon would produce La vida es sueno [Life is a Dream] and Tirso his EI burlador de Sevilla [The Trickster from Seville]. In poetry the great Gongora, who had died a few years earlier in 1627, had provoked bitter controversies, but his manner prevailed over Lope's, his enemy and detractor. In El castigo Lope had the unparalleled and disturbing privilege of reviSing his own revisionists. These circumstances, I believe, weighed heavily upon Lope as he wrote this beautiful and enigmatic product of his

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old age, one in which el fenix de los ingenios attempted to be born anew from the ashes of the literary wars that had beset Madrid in the first decades of the seventeenth century. It seems to me that Lope, at the end of his life, sensed that his successful formula for the theater was being radically revamped by his followers, and he wanted to regain his preeminent position. He wanted, in a manner of speaking, to be his own successor, his own literary son. What the upstarts had done, chiefly Calderon, but also Tirso, was to dramatize the incompatibility of the two forces that shape Lope's theatrical universe: love, in the guise of the postPetrarchan poetic mode, and honor, as the system ofsocial conventions that held love in check and thus shaped Spanish society. In Lope's theater they were, of course, also in conflict, but love and honor provided solutions as well as clashes, and their validity as mainsprings for action is rarely questioned. In Tirso the inherent evils oflove are displayed to their fullest by Don Juan, a character who eschews all amatory courtesy and makes a mockery of honor and valor. In Calderon honor appears as a destructive force that was at odds with the most elementary Christian tenets. 4 Together, these two annihilating passions would produce some of Calderon's most chilling tragedies: El medico de su homa [The Doctor of His Honor], El pintor de su deshoma [The Painter of His Dishonor], and A secreto agravio, secreta venganza [Secret Vengeance for Secret Insult]. In Peribrifiez love and honor triumph. In El caballero de Olmedo they produce a tragic hero. In E1 medico de su homa and EI pintor de su deshoma love and honor yield psychotic killers.s In EI castigo sin venganza Lope sets out to go further than Tirso and Calderon, to delve into the deepest source of the tragic contradiction that his successors have found in his dramatic formula. The theme of incest, I will argue, pitting a son and his father as rivals for the same woman, is a result of this quest to revise himself, both as a way of recasting the love-honor dyad and as a reflection of the problematic transition from Lope to Calderon. This turning point in literary history, which conventional criticism has up to now explained away in terms of continuity and stylization, was more polemical than has been suspected. 6 Critical efforts to translate EI castigo sin venganza into lOgical formulations, that is to say, attempts to interpret the play, have failed because the play is about the impossibility of such an attempt, as Currie K. Thompson has seen in one of the most perceptive pieces

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on it? The "meaning" of El castigo cannot be rendered discursively because the play's "meaning" is essentially about a breakdown in language, a breakdown that is brought about by contradictions that language cannot simultaneously contain. These warring contraries affect the possibility ofrepresentation; they are distorted reflections of each other that produce not meaning as something that can be exchanged, but error and violence. Their thematic projection in the play are the sexual relationships between the protagonists. So conceived, as it were, language always distorts its object, in the same way that the Duque kills the Conde by lOving him too much. The Phaedra myth lurking underneath the surface of the play is also concerned with a breakdown in reproduction, as are the various other Biblical stories to which the play alludes. 8 Incest is a contradictory redoubling in which the original is distorted by repetition. The son returns to the mother's womb in the most literal sense. The father inflicts wounds on himself by killing his son, whose desire for his stepmother he has unwittingly provoked. The breakdown in language is Signaled by an appeal to images, image-making, and imagery-in short, to painting. It is not a question here ofso-called comparative aesthetics, or simply of the influence that the great painters of the period had on Lope, but one where speculation (valga la palabra) about perception and expression leads away from the verbal to the visual. Incest, narcissism, and the tragedy they bring about are intimately related in El castigo. The only way to "interpret" the play is to show how these themes are deployed and relate to one another. In doing so, I will argue, Lope will be suggesting an aesthetic theory that is already modem, one as daring as that of the great painters of the age, and as much an anticipation of modem theories of cognition as their canvasses. Most criticism ofEl castigo has been led astray by focusing on the relationship between Federico and Casandra, while overlooking that between the Duque and his son. The central issue of the play hovers on that relationship, and if one were to look for a tragic hero, the Duque would have to be the most likely candidate, for it is his actions that set in motion the action of the play.9 It is clear throughout El castigo that the Duque feels great love for his bastard son. The Duque's motives for action-or, as we shall see, inaction-are determined by that love, not by his penchant for easy women. When the play begins, we soon discover that the Duque

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has postponed marrying so as not to produce a legitimate child who will rob Federico of his chance to inherit his title and position. What appear to be the philanderings of the Duque tum out to be really delaying tactics to preserve the rights of Federico. Once he does marry, impelled by TOZan de estado, the Duque's lack of ardor for his wife can be attributed to the same motive: porque es Federico, Aurora, 10 que mas mi alma adora, y fue casarme traici6n que hago ami propio gusto. (vv. 665-68) Because, dearest Aurora, Federico is that which my soul most keenly adores, so marrying meant to betray my own desires.lO

Later in the play, Batin tells Federico that he is the light in his father's eyes, a very significant image, as we shall see later ("eres el sol de sus ojos," v. 2153). The more the Duque loves Federico the less he can love Casandra, for lOving her threatens Federico. Critics bent on a moralistic reading of the play see the Duque's gallivanting as his worst fault and attribute his downfall to it. But what is at issue is not what the Duque does with other women as much as what he does not do with his wife. Casandra is quite clear on this point. She is not inspired by the Victorian morals of most critics of the play. Casandra does not care about the Duque's mujercillas [cheap women]. She resents the little attention her husband devotes to her. Que venga un hombre a su casa, cuando viene al mundo el dia, que viva a su fantasia, par libertad de hombre pasa. (qui en puede ponerle tasa? Pero que con tal desprecio trate una mujer de precio, de que es casado olvidado, o qui ere ser desdichado o tiene mucho de necio. (vv. 1047-52) That a man should come back home with the dawn,

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that he should live by his fancy, that's his license. Who's to stop him? But that he should neglect a woman as worthy as I forgetting his marriage vows means that he is courting disaster or that he's just the biggest fool.

It is by this nonaction that the Duque brings about the tragedy. His reluctance to make love'to his wife and therefore reproduce in the manner preSCribed by society thrusts Casandra into the arms of Federico. It is true, as we shall soon see, that there are other strong forces leading both lovers in that direction, but what propitiates their actual reunion is the absence oflove on the part of the Duque. The Duque constantly refuses to act as a husband, and it is tragically ironic that at the end, when he has to punish Federico, he does so as a father, not as a husband, for as a husband he would have had to take revenge: "Sere padre y no marido / dando la justicia santa" (vv. 2846-47) ["I will be a father, not a husband, / in administering holy justice"]. The Duque is always a father, seldom a husband. He is a master of negativity and nonaction. Thus we can say that because of his excessive love for his son, the Duque sets in motion a series of actions that lead to the destruction of that very son, his own wife, and ultimately of his public and private life. At this level one can readily see the tragic element in El castigo sin venganza; the Duque brings onto himself and the object of his love preCisely that which he wishes to avoid. But one cannot be entirely satisfied with this interpretation. The question remains, why the excessive love for his son on the part of the Duque, and why must this kind of filial love bring about tragedy? If we left our interpretation here, we would have to accept that the meaning of the play is moralistic. The Duque has made an imprudent error in putting his son's love above his duty as a husband and as a man of state. But can we really be satisfied with such vapid moralism in reading a playas full of disturbing overtones as E1 castigo, a play in which Casandra is willing to risk her life for her paSSion, in which a laving son is capable of committing adultery with his own stepmother, and one in which a laving father has his son slaughtered? Tragedy in E1 castigo sin venganza is not the result of

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moral defects that could conceivably be amended on the part of the characters. Tragedy is the result of overpowering dark forces in human nature that are irrevocably at odds with the social contract. These dark forces are a kind of negative vision as powerful as Celestina's. The Duque loves the Conde so much because he is in the grips of a narcissistic passion. Being the light, or more literally the sun in his eyes, Federico both guides him and blinds him. It is evident throughout the play that for the Duque, Federico is a reflection of himself, his very picture, as he and Casandra refer to him ironically toward the end. "Un retrato vuestro ha sido" ("he has been your living portrait"), she says, to which he replies, now with the full knowledge of their misdeeds: Ya se que me ha retratado tan igual en todo estado, que par mi Ie habeis tenido (vv. 2656-59) I know he has been my very portrait, so much so, in fact, that you have treated him as ifhe were 1.

The Duque's love of selfin Federico, and thus his self-annihilation through the destruction of that image of self, is central in what turns out to be a whole series of specular reflections whose motive is love. Love in EI castigo will always be love of a reflection. A good deal of the imagery of the play revolves around the issue of imagemaking, of the imagination and ofpensamiento, as well as of the ability of both to be bound by moral restrictions. Tragedy in EI castigo stems from the penchant in humankind to love images of self, a penchant that leads to destruction and self-destruction. Tragedy in this play of Lope's, then, is-beyond the themes oflove and honor-the eternal struggle created by the contradictory presence of death within love. To love the tangible, colorful representation of self, to produce images, is the central mimetic activity, the activity that produces art, art like El castigo itselfl! One of the endUring values of this latter statement of Lope's is the suggestion that his art is born of desire, like much else in his life. In the play Lope bridges the gap Wardropper sees between the role of the imagination as a creative force in the Golden Age dramatists and a destructive one in the

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characters they create; if the imagination leads to error and deceit in the fiction, it does so also outside of it. 12 The boldest image-maker in El castigo sin venganza is Casandra, who hankers for Federico and ponders if to want him is in and of itself a sin. But she figures incorrectly· that the mistake she has committed is merely an "error pintado" (v. 1585) ["an image of error," or "a painted error"]. Soon this image will come to life when she puts into practice what her imagination proposes. Imagination, rendered both as "imaginacion" and "pensamiento" in the play, makes the impossible seem possible, oblivious to reason and ethics; hence it is removed from discursive activity and always cast in the language of the visible: que no hay tan grande imposible que no Ie juzguen visible los ojos del pensamiento. (vv. 1559-61) there is nothing so impossible that the mind's eye cannot make visible. \3

Federico had closed the first act with a similar meditation on the freedom of the imagination to conjure up impossible images. But the imagination is not free. This is so not only because of the theolOgical injunction of Batin's that in the freedom of the soul man should see an image of his immortality, and hence should always choose the good (Calderon's argument in La vida es suefio), but because the imagination inevitably conjures up the impossible. Through the imagination desire creates a vivid representation of the forbidden. Imagination is always allied both to creation and to selfdestruction in the play. The characters' fatal inclination to love reflections of themselves is brought forth very early in El castigo sin venganza, when Casandra and Federico meet for the first time. This meeting occurs by chance. Federico, who has gone to meet Casandra, wanders off to a forest to consider his predicament, and there he meets his stepmother, whose carriage has foundered on a river bank. She had also wandered off the road, as if drawn by a magic force to be a specular image of Federico. The overtones of the encounter are clear. The lovers are impelled by fate to meet in this locus amoenus, this Pe-

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trarchan site where the "dolce, chiare e fresche acque" ["sweet, clear, and cool waters"] run through a beautiful forest. The results of the encounter are predictable. The Petrarchan echoes of the scene are fairly distinct in the silvas Federico recites upon entering the wood. He has stopped to consider his present state, a reflective gesture that has even clearer Petrarchan and Garcilasian resonances ("Cuando me paro a contemplar mi estado" ["when I stop to consider my present state"]). 14 There, "fatigado / de varios pensamientos" (vv. 240-41) ["Wearied / by various imaginings"], he sits at the foot of trees that "atentos" ["Listening"]: a las dormidas ondas de este rio, en su puro cristal. sonoro y frio, mirando estin sus copas, despues que los visti6 de verdes ropas, de mi mismo quisiera retirarme, (vv. 242-47) to the sound of the slumbering waves of this river, which look at their own tops on the sheen of its pure and cold crystal, once dressed in their green finery, from myselfI would like to take leave.

The fatal coincidence of the encounter between Federico and Casandra heightens the tragic nature of the play. But one must take notice of where they meet. The literary allusions already mentioned make it abundandy clear that Federico and Casandra meet in a place saturated with the aura of the courtly love tradition. This poetic grove is full of dangers. The waters of the river create an inverted reflection of the trees; the lovers find each other at the juncture between reality and its mirror image. They meet on the sheen of the mirror. This game of mirrors is itself a reflection of the mirrorlike actions of the two lovers, who have wandered off the road at the same time to meet and reflect each other in what is very much like a house of mirrors. Federico and Casandra are caught from the beginning in this world ofimages, of the imagination, one that is far from free, and whose machinelike precision is rendered visible by its "fearful symmetry," as Margaret Van Antwerp has called it, echoing Blake, in one of the most powerful readings of the play to date. ls The wordplay "yerro-erro" that appears so frequendy in this scene to convey the ambiguity between to err and to wander

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off is the linguistic version of this gallery of reflections into which the lovers have entered: each word is a slightly distorted mirror image of the other. The barely audible y is the transparent wall that separates them. In the grove-become-gallery-of-mirrors there is no longer a distinction between reality and reflection, for every appearance is the product of desire. Hence, as we already saw, in the world of the imagination contraries can coexist side by side. The world of the lovers, once they have surrendered themselves to their paSSion, is a house of mirrors. This is conveyed in a masterful scene in which Aurora, who loves Federico and is spurned by him (and is, in a sense, a counterimage of Casandra, who is shunted by the Duque), reveals to the Marques the activities of the stepmother and her son. Everything is Significant in this secondhand deSCription of the lovers' embrace, not the least of which is the source. Aurora admits that she is led to spy on Casandra and Federico by her jealousy, that is to say, by her desire of him. This desire turns walls into translucent glass: Pues viendome despreciada y a Federico tan libre, di en inquirir la ocasion, y como son los celos !inces que las paredes penetran, a saber la causa vine. (vv. 2061-67) Seeing myself so scorned and Federico so carefree, it came upon me to inquiry why, and since jealousy is linxed-eye and can see through the very walls I finally found out the cause.

Aurora does not really see the lovers through glass, but reflected in a mirror. The arrangement ofCasandra's boudoir and how Aurora manages to lay eyes on the lovers is of the utmost Significance: En correspondencia tiene, sirviendole de tapices retratos, vidrios yespejos, dos iguales camarines el tocador de Casandra;

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y como sospechas pisen tan quedo, dos cuadras antes mire y vi jcaso terrible! en el cristal de un espejo que el conde las rosas mide de Casandra con los labios. (vv. 2067-77) There are in Cassandra's chamber two corresponding closets on whose walls there are no tapestries, but paintings, glass and mirrors. Because suspicion advised me to tread lightly, I stopped two anterooms away to look, and saw, oh, terrible misfortune! upon the sheen of a mirror the Duke measuring the roses of Cassandra's lips with his. 16

What Aurora reports seeing is a Genet-like play of reflections (I am thinking, of course, ofLe balcon). Not only does she tum to glass the walls of Cas andras's boudoir, but those walls are covered with mirrors and portraits. More importantly, these two "camarines" or closets are in "correspondencia," that is to say, they face and reflect each other creating an infinitely receding sequence. Like the inverted tree tops in the scene when the lovers first meet, their kiss takes place in a gallery of mirror images that casts them into infinity, endlessly multiplying their act as in a nightmare. Aurora, appropriately, does not see the lovers, but their reflection, or perhaps a reflection of their reflection. The lines are beautifully precise in this respect: the lovers are seen on "the glass of a mirror," not in its depths. Their image is all surface, visibility. In a sense the lovers are their reflection, the image each has of the other as a projection of desire. It is this image that acts upon the other characters. But let us return to the boudoir. Aurora has seen the lovers through a correspondence of mirrors, but she does not see them from a perspective that keeps her safely outside the play of reflections. In order to see, Aurora has to be seen. To look into the mirror she has to surrender her own image to it. Somewhere in that gallery of mirrors Aurora's own image is reflected. If the lovers were to tum to the mirror they would be able to see her reflection in the act of

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looking, like the character at the back of Velazquez's Las meninas. Perhaps another observer would be able to see the three characters at once, framed in one mirror, a monstrous assemblage that would nevertheless be allowed by the play of reflections and would indicate to what degree Aurora is implicated in the image that she reports having seen. Like the Duque, she sees herself in the image of her desire, and by revealing what she has seen, she seeks to destroy it. The mirror's ability to contain warring contraries, that is to say, the impossible, makes it a symbol of the imagination, which in the play is capable of forming images that are monstrous in their heterogeneity. There is an inexorable multiplication of images, owing to very precise physical and geometrical laws. These laws determine what is seen and how more than each character's individual vision determines what is reality. Reality is the sum total of the characters' errors of perception, a composite of the images they create, and the reflections of those images. Each character's body is snatched by these reflections and placed in this game of correspondences that make up reality. No character can see without at the same time being seen. To see is to be caught in a ruthless mechanism whose end result is an anticipation of death, a giving up of the body; one lives in the image projected by the desire of the other, a projection that kills, as with the three protagonists, who kill themselves through their passion for each other. It is, of course, quite revealing that the walls of Casandra's boudoir are covered not only by mirrors but also by portraits. She lives in a world ofreflections, of representations of representations. We have already seen the perverse meaning of"retrato" in the play, as applied to Federico's supplanting of his father. Paintings and mirrors are equivalent in their function as walls here. They are walls that do not divide and thus arrest one's gaze, but return one's image and reflect vast nonexisting spaces, abolishing in fact the distinction between real and fictional space. The space where love and reflection take place, where painting exists, is the imagination, in the sense already noted: a pictorial image that is the projection of desire. It is for this reason, it seems to me, that Aurora's deSCription of the kiss has the configuration of a painting. The lovers are seen as if caught in the web of lines that a painter would draw to put them in the proper perspective. They occupy a center, around which reflections of their action appear. Even the metaphor used to de-

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scribe the kiss is of a spatial and chromatic nature: Federico measures Casandra's roses with his lips. The action is framed not only by the real stage, but by the camarines, the antechambers that center the lovers. It is not difficult, in short, to imagine a painting depicting this scene, one that would include the prying Aurora, who would, in tum, be reflecting our own role in the scene as spectatorsY By looking and being caught in the act by the mirror, Aurora is showing that the audience in EI castigo sin venganza is also caught in the play's game of reflections. She is pointing out that we too are voyeurs whose own libidinal forces are spent in observing the reflection of this repetitive lovers' triangle, of the images of it that the theater offers. It is in this that Lope's aesthetics tum modem in a manner not too dissimilar from that ofVeLizquez and other great painters of the period. This is where Lope's appeal to painting is most profound, as a reflection on the act of re-presenting reality. Painting as a hypostasis of desire was a commonplace in Golden Age literature, and Lope had often used it as such. In Peribdiiez the Comendador commissions a painter to make a portrait of Casilda. Casilda's image is a reflection of the Comendador's desire for her, and the portrait a way of possessing that reflection of hers.18 In Cervantes's Persiles the characters carry on their voyages painted images of their beloveds and of that which they desire. Lope has gone further in EI castigo by demonstrating that depiction issues from the inside as much as from a perception of reality and that such depiction not only affects the object of representation but thrusts its own subject into the fictional realm that he or she has created, much like Velazquez's own self-portrait in Las meninas. The most searing meditation on this is offered by the ending of the play. Here, like the protagonist of EI pintor de su deshonra, the Duque deSigns a picture in which he destroys the objects of his desire. 19 In the unforgettable last scenes of EI castigo the Duque creates a fiction. He tells Federico that the person bound, gagged, and covered is conspiring against his rule and orders him to kill the traitor. The person is, of course, Casandra, who by her actions has indeed threatened the stability of the realm. Then the Duque has his minions slay Federico, claiming that his bastard son has killed his stepmother because she was pregnant with a rightful heir. The Duque's fiction is as complex as the game of mirrors in Casandra's boudoir and the reflections of the waters in the locus amoenus where

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the lovers met. Like the gallery of mirrors, the Duque's fiction contains truth and lies enmeshed in a play of corresponding images. Casandra is at once a traitor and the duquesa, Federico's mother and his lover. That is, she has produced him (even if only metaphOrically) and is capable of re-producing him. In fact, according to the Duque's fiction Federico kills her because she is pregnant with an heir. But if she were pregnant it would have to be by Federico, not the Duque. Therefore, like his father, Federico is killing his own son in the realm of reflections and images in which they dwell. Federico has unwittingly become, again, his father's retrato. Like him he is killing his own son and in murdering Casandra destroying the person he loves most. Casandra too has brought about Federico's death. So that she gives him both life and death as a mother and as a lover. The Duque, in killing his wife through Federico, makes his son also reflect his actions. Casandra's body, like her boudoir, is the locus of refractions and reflections; she is loved and killed by Federico, making lOving and killing activities that are mirror images of each other. Life and death face each other in EI castigo sin venganza, creating an infinite series of images of each other. The descubrimiento scene at the very end of the play is the Duque's last creation. It is clear from all the evidence we have concerning the scenography of Golden Age drama that this kind of scene had a picturelike arrangement: it was like a tableau vivant. 20 This is reinforced by the fact that the characters themselves become spectators and talk oflooking one last time at the dead lovers, whose bodies are uncovered for that purpose. The Duque exclaims that En tanta desdicha aun quieren los ojos verle muerto con Casandra. (vv. 3009-11) Amid so much misfortune my eyes still long to see him dead beside Cassandra.

And after the bodies are displayed, the Marques reports, as the Conde looks at the lovers: "Vuelve a mirar el castigo/sin venganza" (vv. 3012-13) ["He looks once more / upon justice without revenge"]. The Marques reports not the bodies, but the Duque looking at the bodies. Like Aurora before him, he depicts an image, a

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reflection, and rightly so, one that is a repetition ("once more"). In both scenes Casandra and Federico are frozen in a gesture. They are motionless, yet their image is repeated in love as well as in death. The Duque's last deed is to cast Federico and Casandra onto a picture, the escena de descubrimiento, where he and the spectators become one as onlookers. Our playing a role like the Duque's is of the utmost significance here. We too are spectators/killers, viewing with relish a monstrous image that is a projection of our own desire. Like the scene of the kiss, this one contains the impossible made possible in the realm of the visible: a mother and his son joined by love and death, killed by the husband-father. Like the Duque's creation, Lope's play moves from the verbal to the visual, from the language of poetry to that of painting; in the last scene, taking advantage of the tradition of the discovery scene, the stage becomes a picture, and the players themselves, except those who play the roles of the dead lovers, become spectators. The development of Golden Age theater toward more ornate scenery and better-equipped houses did not stem solely from technical and social reasons. There was an inner development toward the painterly in the poetry ofthe comedia. El castigo sin venganza marks the transition and lays out the reasons for it. EI castigo, like the gallery of mirrors where Casandra meets Federico, is made up of reflections and repetitions. These are as Significant as Federico's being an image of his father and as trivial as Batin mimicking Federico's actions at the scene of the first meeting, where the gracioso proposes to Lucrecia. Scenes are repeated with slight variations, situations are reversed, characters meet their doubles. Even Casandra's unborn son appears as a reflection of Federico and of the Duque's worst fears. Like painting, the comedia has an inner construction made up of images of images, of divisions as troublesome as the walls of Casandra's room, of appearances (aparienda was, of course, the name for stage props). Beyond morality, and perhaps even beyond Christianity, Lope's tragedy offers a picture of humankind as prey to an insoluble dilemma, in which love, even filial love, is at once the creator and the destroyer of life. The blindness provoked by desire is what allows us to create images, and we live in the images of others. Parker and Manuel Duran have insisted, and rightly so, on the fact that the Spanish Golden Age theater is one of action, not of characters. 21 I

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would add to this that action means here the interaction between the various images that the characters have of each other. In short, that a character is not only his or her actions, but his or her reflections on others, be they doubles, counterimages, or creations of others. It is for this reason that characters often bewail being "fuera de si" ["beside oneself"], or, more memorably, in the beautiful gloss included in the play, "sin mi, sin vos y sin Dios" ["without myself, without you, and without God"]. Being without oneself, the other, or God is endemic in El castigo sin venganza, as we have seen. This living in one's image, in one's reflection, and the persistent errors of perception in which the characters fall compelled by the brightness of those images (like the sun in the Duque's eyes), constitutes one of the enduring messages of baroque theater in Spain, as Wardropper has persuasively argued in discussing a late play of Calderon's. 22 But Lope had already seen, as it were, where things were going, and gave a fairly full anticipation of it in El castigo. Would it be too much to read into the struggle between the Duque and the Conde a reflection of the competition between Lope and Calderon? There is no question, as others have noted before me, that El castigo sin venganza is a very Calderonian play, from the themes to the imagery, but, in my view, above all in its penchant for geometry.23 The worldview of the cosmos as a mechanistic play of geometrical reflections is Calderon's, not Lope's.24 Lope's adoption of this, plus the other elements mentioned, clearly indicates that he has consciously or unconsciously imitated that which Calderon had added to his theatrical formula. Calderon has become the precursor, to use Harold Bloom's terminology, and Lope the ephebe. 25 Only that here we have an inversion of Bloom's formula. In playing the ephebe Lope is turning the tables on his diSciple, making himself into a puer senex who will claim the new again as his own. Lope usurps both roles in the Oedipal confrontation. He is both precursor and successor, original and copy. Driven, like the Duque, by his narcissistic passion, Lope claims both sides of the mirror. His disproportionate claim, his anxiety to be original, has the romantic ring that his modem aesthetics already anticipate.

4. Calderon's La vida es suefio

Mixed-(Up) Monsters

There is probably no word that is more characteristic of Calderon de la Barca's art than monstruo, "monster." Rare is the play in which the word does not appear several times, and very few indeed are those in which the characters do not utter it at least once. la vida es sueno [life is a Dream] opens with an allusion to the hippogriff, the mythological monster that is halfhorse, half griffen, and Segismundo describes himself as a monster on several occasions. But, in addition to being used in numerous metaphors and appearing in countless mytholOgical allusions, the mere fact that monstruo is part of the title of three Calderon plays is enough of an indication of how Significant the figure is in his theater. The three plays are El monstruo de las fortunas [The Monster of Fortune] (1633), which Calderon wrote in collaboration with Juan Perez de Montalban and Francisco de Rojas Zorilla, El monstruo de los jardines [The Monster of Gardens] (1667?), and El mayor monstruo los celos [Jealousy, the Greatest Monster] (1637). I am not the first to be struck by this profusion of monsters in Calderon's theater. Octavio Paz, Edward M. Wilson, and Margaret S. Maurin have already noticed the relevance of the monster in baroque aesthetics, Calderon's imagery, and la vida es sueno, respectively. Octavio Paz maintains that the purpose of baroque art was "to astonish and astound; that is why it sought out and collected all extremes, especially hybrids and monsters. Conceits and cleverness are the sirens and hippogriffs oflanguage, the verbal equivalents of nature's fantasies."! In his influential essay on the four elements in the imagery of Calderon, Edward M. Wilson in turn refers to the playwright's "fondness for words describing monsters and semi-mythical creatures, which express in their names the confusion of two or more opposing characteristics. So he calls rivers: centauro indiano, centauro de hielo, hipogrifo de cristal."2 Studying the importance of the monster in the imagery ofla vida es sueno from a moral perspective, Maurin calls attention to the negative connotations of the term, above all to Segismundo's animal-like behavior: "a man who has delivered himself over to the violence of his passions

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is not only a monster, but he has denied himself that most vital part of himself. his reason."3 The value of what Paz, Wilson, and Maurin have seen in Calderon's figure of the monster cannot be underestimated. My own study owes much to theirs, particularly to Wilson's. There is an aspect of what we might call Calderon's aesthetics that depends on surprise, on the marvelous, and on wonder. Much more than any other Golden Age playwright, and especially more so than Lope, Calderon aimed at producing an effect on the public by means of the hyperbolic, the monumental, as well as the shocking and the surprising: prodigies, chimeras, and marvels. The monster fits very well within that tendency; it is, in a way, its emblem. Noting the propensity in Calderon's imagination for the systematic mixing of contradictory elements to signify chaos and confusion, Wilson has provided a fundamental insight into the figure of the monster. And Maurin is correct in stating that the animalistic element in Segismundo is what impels him to assault Rosaura as well as to insult and threaten Clotaldo and Basilio. Yet, the ubiqUity of the monster in Calderon's theater and the very complexity of that figure suggest that it is even more Significant than Paz, Wilson, and Maurin have indicated. The monster appears so frequently in Calderon's dramatic poetry and is so important a figure that it cannot simply be associated with the ugly and the grotesque. If in La vida es sueiio Segismundo is described as a "monstruo en forma de hombre" (1:672) ["a monster in human form"] (p. 24)-and we can imagine the character in the tower as a somewhat grotesque being-in other plays by Calderon, ugliness is totally absent from the figure 4 For instance, Semiramis, the protagonist ofLa hija del aire [Daughter of the Air] is very beautiful. Yet, from the start of the play, other characters refer to her as a monster: "Horrible monstruo / que aqui encerrado has vivido" ["Horrible monster / who has lived locked up here"].5 Semiramis's great beauty, however, precludes our thinking of her monstrosity as something associated with animal-like features or with her being grotesque in any sense. Semiramis is, as King Nino calls her, "un prodigioso monstruo bello" [u a prodigiously beautiful monster"] (p. 733 b). Chato, one of the graciosos, exclaims upon seeing the one to whom they have referred as a monster: Si todos los monstruos son como aqueste monstruocico

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yo pienso llevarme uno, dos 0 tres, 0 cuatro, 0 cinco. (p. 723 b) If every monster is like this little monster here. I'll take with me one or two, three, four or even five.

Minerva in La estatua de Prometeo [Prometheus' Statue] is also a Umonstruo bello" (p. 2086 b) [ua beautiful monster"]. The same occurs, though in much more complex fashion, in EI monstruo de los jardines, where Achiles appears dressed alternately as a beautiful lady and a handsome young man. Achiles complains to Deidamia, the woman he desires, about his ambiguous appearance: Monstruo, pues de dos especies tu dama de dia, y de noche tu galan, no te merece ni mi arnor de galan ni dama, ni favores ni desdenes, pues ni dam a me despides ni gaIan me favoreces. (p. 2086 b) A monster. then in two images am I: your lady by day and by night your suitor. But neither my cares as a lady, nor my desires as a suitor merit either your favor or your scorn, for as lady you don't discharge me, nor as a man return my love.

Transferrable from Segismundo's dark cave to Achiles's beautiful garden, applicable as much to the bestial Segismundo as to the beautiful Semiramis, the term monster appears to be a concept that is much more central and key to understanding Calderon's theater than has been assumed so far. An obsessive presence throughout Calderon's texts, the monster combines the most characteristic with the most problematic aspects of his aesthetics: It is the deepest substratum in which the contradictions that connect Calderonian aesthetics with the ideology of his times are revealed. My analysis of the figure of the

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monster will show a Calder6n who is not the docile vehicle of the ideas of counterreformist Spain, but an artist who in his best moments is as complex and modem as Cervantes. It is of course well known that Calderon wrote a piece based on the Quijote, which unfortunately has been lost, and certain critics have detected affinities between the great novelist and the author ofLa vida es sueiio. However, there have been but a few for whom Calderon has merited the same kind of critical appreciation that modernity has bestowed on Cervantes. This has been due, in great measure, to the fact that for many years Calder6n's honor plays were read as affirmations of the worst of a retrograde Spain, completely out of step with a modem senSibility. Cervantes represented a Spain that was progressive and modem, while Calder6n came to be the epitome of a Spain that was fanatically religiOUS and backward. Critics like Wilson, Parker, Dunn, Wardropper, and Honig have argued persuaSively, however, that far from upholding the honor code as an ideal form of conduct, Calder6n tried to demonstrate how it oppressed his characters and how it was incompatible with the most elemental Christian doctrines. 6 I hope to give further evidence here that Calder6n's theater questions the ideolOgical commonplaces of his period, even when it seems that his writing supports them. The central tenet of the criticism that aligns Calder6n with the doctrines of counterreformist Spain holds that there is a perfect fit between ideology and art, between beliefand expression. In other words, to uphold the absolute orthodoxy ofCalder6n's art one must assume that there is an implicit harmony among all the various codes that make up his theater, an internal unity ofform and meaning. There is no such thing in Calderon, but instead, as in Cervantes, a systematic and often jarring analysis of the constant friction between reality and doctrine, intention and expression. The study of the monster makes it possible to observe that aspect of Calderon's work, as well as some elements of what we might call the Calderonian baroque. For it should be clear that the monster is at odds with renaissance aesthetics and its ideal of harmony and decorum and, furthermore, that the figure questions the very concept of mimesis underlying much of renaissance literature. Segismundo is not the only monster in La vida es sueiio. Toward the middle of the third act, Rosaura challenges the prince to restore her lost honor. In that speech, Rosaura, who has herself taken up

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arms in the battle that engulfs them, summarizes her encounters with Segismundo and describes herself as a monster in what is without doubt the most poignant appearance of the term in the play: Tres veces son las que ya me admiras, tres las que ignoras quien soy, pues las tres me has visto en diverso traje y forma. La primera me creiste varon, en la rigurosa prision, donde fue tu vida de mis desdichas lisonja. La segunda me admiraste mujer, cuando fue la pompa de tu majestad un sueiio, una fantasma, una sombra. La tercera es hoy, que siendo monstruo de una especie y otra, entre galas de mujer armas de varon me adoman. (vv.2716-27) Three times now I've surprised you and three times you've failed to recognize me, because each time you saw me I was someone else and dressed differently. The first time you took me for a man. That's when you were heavily confined in prison, where your life was so wretched that it made my own sorrows seem trivial. The next time you admired me as a woman, when all the pomp ofmajesty was to you a dream, a fantasy, a fleeting shadow. The third time is today, when I appear before you as a monstrous hybrid: armed for combat as a man, but in woman's clothing. (pp. 97-98)

Honig translates "monstruo de una especie y otra" as "monstrous hybrid," but since I am not bound by the rhythmic constraints of

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Calder6n's La vida es sueiio

poetic translation, I can render that phrase as "monster made up of two images or appearances," "image" having the current meaning of outward, public character. If we go back to the seventeenth century to seek the meaning of espede, we find the follOwing in Covarrubias's Tesoro de Ia Iengua castellana 0 espanola (1611): "According to logicians, spedes is that which goes below gender and is the predicate of a great number of beings in reference to that in which they are the same; thus we commonly use the term to say: there is a certain species of animal. In its species. To change species."7 Rosaura is an entity possessing simultaneously contradictory predicates. She alters her visible appearances by changing her costume and confounds them by mixing female with male apparel, or, as she states later on in the same speech, mezclando entre las galas costosas de Diana los arneses de Palas, vistiendo agora ya la tela y ya el acero, que entrambos juntos me adornan. (vv.2886-91) You see me wearing both the precious robes of Diana and the armor of Minerva, for I'm equally adorned in cloth and steel. (p. 102)

It is evident that Rosaura, dressed Simultaneously as a man and a woman, is a portent, a marvel, a monster. I wish to emphaSize the visual aspect of the monster by adding that "species" is derived, of course, from the Latin spedes, and that word, in tum, from the verb spicere, to look or to see. Spedes thus had also the sense of outward beauty, of visible shapeliness. Species, moreover, has a very preCise meaning in what one might call scholastic epistemology, above all in Thornist epistemology, where it refers to the image that the mind (soul) conjures of an object, giving the name especie inteligible to a general idea that the active consciousness forges on the basis of sensory stimuli. Still more revealing is the fact that according to St. Thomas, language develops on the basis of that intelligible species: it is the visible species of the intelligible species which, in its tum, creates words. As Rabeau explains, "Traced back to its origin, intellectual activity consists [according to St. Thomas] of that which

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the possible intellect, engaged by the form of the acting intellect, expresses in a verbum or intellectio intellecta."8 That intellectio intellecta, or possibility to lend verbal coherence to what is perceived, is what affects Calderon's characters. "Monstruo de una especie y otra," then, must be two things: on the one hand, a logical and discursive impossibility, as it is a matter of contradictory attributes; on the other hand, an impossible, ambiguous vision, which is difficult to interpret because it consists of warring appearances. We are confronted here with an epistemological and expressive impasse, a kind of aporia, analogous to those Cervantes is known for. The essence of the "monstruo de una especie y otra" is its changing nature, something which cannot be adequately conveyed by language. St. Thomas himself, of course, does not postulate a perfect compatibility of things and linguistic expression: "St. Thomas sometimes speaks of an intuitus that cannot be achieved in language: there are instances when profound thought does not succeed in expressing itself adequately or perhaps renounces itselfin the process. Besides ... never does intellectual expression succeed in grasping the plenitude of intelligible forms: verbum ... non tatum in se recipit est in eo a quo oritur. Finally, intellectual expression, conditioned as it is by sensory elements, that is, by images that embody them or simply by the words through which they orient themselves, always limits intellectual emanation. In the process of expressing our thoughts to ourselves, we impoverish them" (p. 211). In Calderon, however, there is no impoverishment, but, on the contrary, a linguistic enrichment that arises from incompatibility. The monster is also the emblem of that enrichment. Carmen Bravo-Villasante and others have shown that the figure of the woman dressed as a man in Golden Age theater comes from a long literary tradition (above all, the Orlando furioso and the long list of its imitators).9 But the most important thing here appears to be something else: The type seems to be determined in Calderon by an inner structure of contrasting qualities, a structure that lies at the very core of his aesthetics. Rosaura's transmutations and the clash of opposing qualities are what determine her monstrosity, which, as in the case of Semiramis or Minerva, is not necessarily associated with ugliness. It is Significant that Krenkel, as Leo Spitzer reports, arrived at a similar conclusion about the meaning of the monster in Calderon, based on the same speech by Rosaura that I have cited

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above: "According to Krenkel (on Calderon, La vida es sueno, III, 494), monstruo does not always mean 'hideous beast' or 'deformed person' (synonymous with fiera, 11,498) [the German reads: Ungeheuer, Missgestalt], but more frequently only 'misshapen' [Missgestalt]. See 538 [Monstruo de una espede y otra, Entre galas de mujer Armas de varon me adornan]."10 Rosaura is not merely the virago ofliterary tradition, nor is she Simply deformed. She is, as Krenkel maintains, ofmixed shape, with all the attributes ofspecies that we have mentioned above. The transformations in Rosaura's appearance structure the plot of the play. The same is true ofSegismundo's make-up and his transformations. Clorilene, his mother, dreams that she will give birth to "a monster in human form," and Segismundo, while in the tower, describes himself as a monster: porque mas te asombres y monstruo humano me nombres, entre sombras y quimeras, soy un hombre de las fieras, y una fiera de los hombres. (vv. 208-12) but even more amazing (and this will make you say I am a human monster, hYing in his fears and fantasies): though I'm a beast among men, a man among beasts. (p. 19)

Honig mistranslates here "entre monstruos y quimeras," which means literally "among monsters and chimeras," by giving quimera our current meaning of "fantasy." In Calderon's text, however, it refers to the mytholOgical fire-breathing monster commonly represented with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail. Calderon's use of quimera certainly corresponds to what we have been able to observe about his conception ofthe monster. Segismundo is not just an animal. His deSCriptions ofhimselfalways include binary oppositions that are almost oxymorons: monstruo en forma de hombre, hombre vestido de pieles, monstruo humano, hombre de las fieras, fiera de los hombres ["monster in human form," "a man dressed in pelts," "human monster," "man of beasts," "beast-man"]. Throughout the play he wavers between one or the other side of this binary pair, be-

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tween his animal and his human qualities. He is an animal when he does, or threatens to do, violence to others; he exhibits human kindness in defending Clarin and Rosaura when they are discovered in the tower and prudence when the soldiers ask him to lead a revolt against his father. Segismundo's monstrosity does not consist of his being a fierce or beastly man, but of his having been born both beast and man: He is a double and contradictory being in which the two opposites coexist. Segismundo tells himself that he is "un compuesto de hombre y fiera" (2:1547) I"partly beast and partly man"] (p.52). Man and beast are species, predicates that oppose each other in Segismundo, as male and female oppose each other in Rosaura. The monster in Calder6n, then, is a mixed figure combining conflicting characteristics rendered visible by the outward appearance of the characters, by the costumes they wear. The best example of the monster in Calder6n, because it combines all of the characteristics mentioned, is not the deSCription ofa character, but the deSCription that the Incan priestess Guacolda gives of a Spanish vessel in La aurora en Copacabana IDawn in Copacabana], where the surprise caused by the appearance of the figure is highlighted by its newness to the observer. ruando, volviendo los ojos al mar, vimos en su esfera

un raro asombro, de quien no sabre darte las seiias; porque si digo que es un escollo que navega, dire mal, pues para escollo Ie desmiente la violencia; si digo preiiada nube que a beber el mar sedienta se abate, dire peor, porque viene sin tormenta; si digo marino pez, preciso es que me desmientan las alas con que yolanda viene, y si digo velera ave que nadando viene, tambien desmentirse es fuerza: de suerte que a cuatro visos

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monstruo es de tal extrmeza, que es escollo en la estatura, que es nube en la ligereza, y aborto de mar y viento, pues con especies diversas, parece pez cuando nada y pajaro cuando vuela. (p. 1317 b) when we turned our eyes to the sea, we saw on the waters a strange shape, which I don't know how to describe to you: because if! say that it is a floating reef. I would be wrong, since violence contradicts its being such; if! say it is an enormous cloud lowering itself down to drink thirstily from the sea, I would do worse, because it comes without a storm; if I say it is a large fish, it is true that I would ignore the wings with which it flies, and if! say it is a Sailing bird that is swimming, I would also inevitably contradict myself so that offour aspects, it is a monster of such strangeness, as high as a reef. as swift as a cloud, the prodigal offspring of the wind and the sea, made up of different species, a swimming fish and a flying bird.

Guacolda has never seen a European ship before, and therefore her reaction is one of bewilderment, quite similar in kind to the way in which Rosaura reacts when she sees Segismundo in the cave. Confronted with such strangeness, Guacolda endeavors to describe the ship by attributing to it elements she knows, but these give it a contradictory appearance. The key word in her deSCription is "vis os.. [aspects], which refers to the visible surface of things, to that

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which is perceptible by the sense of vision. "Vis os" also means shimmer, sheen, as when a shiny material, such as silk, changes colors with the light. Given the meanings of "visos," the phrase "con especies diversas" now acquires a clearer Significance. The images that form in Guacolda's mind are incompatible; above all, she is unable to decide what she has actually seen and limits herself to talking about appearances: "parece pez cuando nada / y pajaro cuando vuela" ["it looks like a swimming fish / and a flying bird"]. The strangeness, the lack oflogic, the simultaneity of opposites, the emphasis on the visual, all those are characteristic traits of the Calderonian figure of the monster. But what is the origin of that figure in Calderon, and what is its significance in La vida es sueno? Let us first see what the various monsters in Calderon's theater have in common. The same characteristics found in Rosaura and Segismundo also appear in Semiramis and Ninias in La hija del aire. They are shared as well by Achiles in El monstruo de los jardines, Prometeo in La estatua de Prometeo, the twins in En esta vida todo es verdad y todo mentira [In This Life Everything Is True and Everything Is False], the characters in Yerros de naturaleza y aciertos de fortuna [Nature'S Failures and Fortune's Successes] and many others. Monsters are clearly not confined to La vida es sueno, and there are certainly more than the ten Segismundos that Blanca de los Rios counted many years ago.!! There are, in fact, quite a few Segismundos and also some in-betweens such as Ninias, who is of ambiguous gender, a latent feature, of course, in all other crossdreSSing monsters. A comparison of these monsters suggests a common denominator that reveals the function of the figure in Calderon's theater. All of these characters are monsters because, as we have seen in the case of two of them, they are made up of conflicting elements that render their appearance deceptive: they are women who look like men; men who look like women; humans who look like beasts. But their mixed appearance is not the only trait these monsters share. They are also all young (galanes or damas); all are the product of some problematic or supernatural birth; and they are kept away from society for a period of time and then return to save the world from violence and chaos. For instance, Segismundo's birth in La vida es sueiio is accompanied by ominous catastrophes: an earthquake, an eclipse, rivers running red with blood, and clouds raining stones. To make mat-

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ters even worse, his mother Clorilene dies in childbirth. Rosaura is born of the illicit union of Clotaldo and Violante, and although there is no direct mention of anything supernatural in connection with her birth, we must consider some circumstantial evidence as relevant. First, while Rosaura's birth does not result in the physical death of Violante, it does bring her dishonor, a sort of civil death. It is also significant that Rosaura, as she tells Segismundo about her past, alludes to mythological figures that cast her own birth in the context of a supernatural violence analogous to that which accompanied the prince's birth: pues siendo objeto de su idea [her father'sl, siento agora no haber nacido gentil, para persuadirme loca, a que fue alglin dios de aqueHos que en metamorfosis Horan. Huvia de oro, cisne y toro. Danae, Cilene y Europa. (3:2740-47) Sometimes when I think he fathered me. a perverse idea seizes me: I'm sorry I wasn't born a pagan so I could tell myself he was like one of those gods who changed himself into a shower of gold. a swan, a buH, on Danae. Leda, and Europa. (p. 98)

Rosaura obviously equates her birth here with the supernatural birth of mythological monsters such as, for instance. the Minotaur. Like Segismundo. Rosaura is kept away from society by her father. Basilio imprisons Segismundo in the tower, while Coltaldo first hides Rosaura by abandoning her in Moscovia and later conceals her in a place disguised as Astrea. Both Segismundo and Rosaura undergo trials before reentering society and both put a provisional end to violence and chaos: Segismundo is brought to the palace and made king; Rosaura dons the sword her father left and. like Theseus, searches for him to restore her honor. It is this monstrosity, issuing from the mythopoeic background of the play, that joins Segismundo and Rosaura; it is also that which makes her very

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existence understandable and justifies the existence of the secondary intrigue that has so preoccupied critics. Rosaura and Segismundo are dioscuric twins, like Matilde and Polidoro in Yenos de naturaleza y aciertos de fortuna, and Focas and Heraclito in En esta vida todo es verdad y todo mentira. The outward appearance of Calderon's monsters, then, clearly reflects that they are figures in transition, in flux, mixed beings in the process of assuming a definite shape. As they are all young, products of supernatural births, and exiled from society until they undergo certain trials, the monsters are figures in a rite of passage, of initiation. 12 The ritualistic nature of the plot of La vida es sueiio is obvious in the metatheatrical character of many of the scenes, particularly the one in which Segismundo is brought to the palace and made to play the part of the king after elaborate preparations that include his being dressed for the part on stage. But the ritualistic nature of the plot is even more evident if we consider the follOwing statement by Claude Levi-Strauss concerning initiation rites in primitive societies: No anthropolOgist can fail to be struck by the common manner of conceptualizing initiation rites employed by the most diverse societies throughout the world. Whether in Africa, America, Australia or Melanesia, the rites follow the same pattern: first, the novices, taken from their parents, are symbolically "killed" and kept hidden in the forest or bush, where they are put to the test by the Beyond; after this they are "reborn'" as members of the SOCiety. When they are returned to their natural parents, the latter therefore simulate all the phases of a new delivery, and begin reeducation even in the elementary actions offeeding and dressing. I I

In the tower Segismundo is symbolically dead. Rosaura refers to him as a "vivo cadaver" (1:94) ["a still living carcass"] (p. 6), and Segismundo calls himself "un esqueleto vivo" (1:201) and "un animado muerto" (1 :202) [Honig translates: "a living corpse," "a moving skeleton"] (p. 10). Rosaura describes the tower as a "sepultura" ["tomb"], and Segismundo calls it a "sepulcro" ["sepulcher"]. The test by the Beyond is, as we have seen, the one Segismundo undergoes at the command of his father, while his second sally out of the tower is clearly a rebirth, which reinforces the connections between the ritual pattern and the play's dramatic plot. The corre-

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spondence between the pattern of the initiation rite and the play becomes even more explicit when we consider the following words by Basilio, uttered after Segismundo has forgiven him: hijo, que tan noble acci6n otra vez en mis entranas te engendra, principe eres. (3:3248-50) My son-because your noble deed has re-engendered you in meyou are a prince indeed. (p. 113, my emphasis)

La vida es sueiio represents an initiation ritual, a rite of passage: the monster-protagonists enact, within the fictive time of the play, each of the steps through which time is conceptualized and given artistic substance by Calder6n. The changes in costume structure this representation and reveal much about the monsters themselves, particularly the relationship between Rosaura and Segismundo. The changes in appearance that Rosaura undergoes are homologous to and correlative with those ofSegismundo. As dioscuric twins, Rosaura and Segismundo are not only monsters each in his or her own way, but together constitute a monster made up of correlative opposites. Calder6n's characters are not separate entities; they do not represent Single individuals, but instead are parts of a set of related characteristics dynamically linked by a formula that surpasses the contours of each by itself. Graphically, the development of the play cannot be represented in a linear fashion, but much better as a shuttling from one opposite to another, a pendular movement that reflects the mixed form of the monsters. Rosaura's and Segismundo's changes-to which we can also add Basilio'scan be represented in the follOwing way: Segismundo Rosaura Basilio

Al beast man king

Bl prince woman deposed

A2 beast man king

B2 prince/beast man/woman king/ deposed

When Segismundo is in the tower dressed as a beast, Rosaura appears dressed as a man and Basilio is the king of Poland. When Segismundo is brought to the palace for the first time, he is dressed as a prince, while Rosaura is disguised as a gentlewoman and Basilio

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has temporarily abdicated the throne. Segismundo is subsequently returned to the tower in pelts; Rosaura once more has to take up a masculine role to obtain what she desires; and Basilio reigns again. In the end Basilio is dethroned, but he survives the crisis; Segismundo is crowned king while still being dressed in pelts; and Rosaura, although having consented to marry Astolfo, continues to be dressed as a woman but wearing man's weapons. La vida es sueiio represents an initiation rite-which is in itself a re-presentationbut in doing so, it does not resolve the contradictory composition of the characters. At the end of the play, both Rosaura and Segismundo continue to be monsters because of their costumes and the roles they play. The representation of the ritual re-presents time itself, underSCOring its repetitive nature, not its end. Herein lies the complexity of the figure of the monster in Calderon and the overall complexity of his work: it seeks to reflect the very dynamiCS of change, the transformations that it occasions, not an ideal representation of its outcome that would reduce reality to simple and complete forms. That is to say that Calderon, through the double fictional frame of ritual and theater displays the dynamic nature of time. Representation in Calderon consists of momentarily fixing change in order to display its inner mechanisms. Segismundo and Rosaura are monsters, then, because of a mythopoetic element that links La vida es sueiio with various myths relating what are essentially initiation rites: the story of Buddha, the Minotaur, Theseus, and of course, Oedipus. Peter Szondi and later Cesareo Bandera have studied the presence of the Oedipus myth in La vida es sueiio, and Felix de Olmedo and Arturo Farinelli have delved into many possibly mythic sources of Calderon's masterpiece. 14 There can be no doubt about the close relationship between the Oedipus myth and La vida es sueiio, especially if we take into account the tension between Segismundo and Basilio, as well as between Rosaura and Clotaldo. 15 In addition, Calderon's monsters are metaphorically deformed-"contrahecho" (v. 2265),16 as it is said of Segismundo-as if they were, like Oedipus, products of incomplete chthonic or telluric births. I? But the possible relationship between Calderon's play and the Oedipus myth is not one of reflection, but of distortion and thus in a sense of denial. In La vida es sueiio, as in most other Calderon plays mentioned here, neither the son nor the father are annihilated by violence. At the end ofLa vida es

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sumo there are two kings, although one of them has been overthrown. La vida es sueno delves into all the questions raised by the Oedipus myth-self-knowledge, knowledge of one's origins and of one's fate, the difference between nature and culture-but offers different resolutions. There is no sense of finality in La vida es sueno, no sense of an irrevocable fate, but instead the sense that man will fall again only to be redeemed once more: hence the repetitious nature of time and its ability to accommodate Simultaneously struggling opposites, such as the father and the son. In La hija del aire, Semiramis, who is a monster, gives birth to Ninias, another monster who comes to replace her, but the queen, taking advantage of their resemblance, manages to supplant her own child. Life is a dream, the play seems to suggest, because time is not final, but always transitory and able to contain warring contraries, reflections of reflections, mixed forms that appear to be one thing and are quite another. There are no absolute victors and no final transformations. Life is a fiction, because, like dreams, it is made up of everything that is possible and its opposite in the same instant. The figure ofthe monster is, then, an emblem of this tangible dream, this mixed, always evolving, reality oflife. The monster, ultimately, has more to do with problems of representation, of mimesis, than with the kinds of moral and philosophical dilemmas that give rise to the figure of Oedipus. As we have seen, the monster is itself at the center of Calderon's aesthetics. But how does Calderon arrive at the figure of the monster as a representation of this conception of the real, and what are the aesthetic consequences of such a world view? In order to understand how Calderon conceived of this figure, we have to review the seventeenth-century meaning of the word "monster." Covarrubias, in his Tesoro de la lengua castellana 0 espanola, defines monster in the following terms: MONSTER is any birth against the natural order and rule, for instance, when a man is born with two heads, four arms and four legs, as happened in the County ofUrgel, in a place called Cabrera in 1343. There a child was born with two heads and four legs. The parents and others present, thinking superstitiously that this birth was an omen of great catastrophes which could be avoided by the death of the child, buried him alive. His parents were punished as parricides [sic[, and the others as well. I have wanted to bring forth only

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this example because it is an authentic one that has been written down by our chroniclers. In Latin monster was monstrum a monstrado, quod aliquid significando demonstret. (p. 812)

Covarrubias's example is surprisingly pertinent to La vida es sueno, but let us concentrate on the more technical part of his definition: "any birth against the natural order and rule." But, what was the natural order, and how could one account for a birth against nature's laws? Covarrubias defines natures as "the divine order of all created things" (p. 824), which echoes the Thomistic definition "reason of all art, that is to say, divine order of all things, by which things themselves are moved to a determined place."18 But, ifnature is the reason of all art, a divine order by which things themselves are moved to a predetermined end, then how can one account for anomalies? In Spain and the Western Tradition Otis H. Green gives a useful summary ofideas about the concept of nature in Golden Age Spain. Although it does not differ much from Covarrubias's, mostly because it is based on the latter's Tesoro, it can help us understand how Calder6n conceived of deviations from the natural order. Green distinguishes three concepts of nature: natura naturans, the nature that creates and is therefore God's vicar; natura naturata, created nature, from whose observation man derives wisdom and knowledge; and finally an everyday nature, or what Green calls naturaleza de tejas abajo, which is nature in purely material terms. It is in the latter that alterations of the divine order take place, where errors such as monsters can occur. 19 One can say even more bluntly that Calderon's concept of nature, which was the one generally held in Spain at the time, was essentially Aristotelian, as Felipe Picatoste has demonstrated. Monstrosity is an accident, a mistake of nature explicable within Aristotle's system in several ways. Picatoste writes: Natural philosophy ... admitted nature's constant tendency toward perfection, a tireless labor within the world's immense laboratory, a law of the evolution of matter that not only made it pass through all stages and categories, but also explained the existence of imperfect beings as a moment in their transmutation, or as the result of insurmountable obstacles on the way to perfection .... From here it followed that the perfect contained the imperfect, and that therefore the perfect was capable of engendering everything beneath it, which

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explained monstrosities, no matter how difficult to accept they were by such a science. Man possessed formally and substantially all predicates: he was animal, living, mixed, corruptible, body and substance. So man naturally begot the species man, with all of these qualities, but when various causes impeded it, only the genus animal issued, in the form of a brute. or successively the living genus in the form of a plant, the stone's mixed genus. or the genus "deformed body." accounting for monsters. 20

Such accidents in transmutation or generation in the Aristotelian conception of nature are what allow Calderon to conceive of the monster: the monster is an accident or a deviation in nature's movement toward perfection. While the renaissance poet aspired to copy nature's successes, its manifestation of a perfect harmony, Calderon focused his artistic attention on the accidents, on the process toward an eventual perfection, not on perfection itself In Yerros de naturaleza y aciertos de la fortuna, the play he wrote in collaboration with Antonio de Coello, the prodigious fact that the twins Matilde and Polidoro are so alike in physical appearance, yet so different in character, is explained as follows [Matilde speaks in lines written by Coello]: mas por hacer en nosotros naturaleza algo nuevo; o porque estaua cansada de hazer los rostros diversos. en los nuestros. confundida. o por primor 0 por yerro nazimos tan parezidos en el semblante. en el cuerpo. en la estatura, en la voz y casi tan uno mesmo, que. ill mismo. aun mi padre. y los que mas me asistieron no sabian distinguimos ... pienso que naturaleza. varaxando los efectos. la semexanza, que estaua para las almas, por yerro. les dio a los cuerpos, sin duda, sino es ya que quiso hazemos. por primor de la ygualdad

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y por gala del estremo, dos que fuesen vno, y vno que fuesen dos tan dibersos. Crieme yo, aunque muger, con tan varonil esfuerzo, con fama tan ambiziosa, con natural tan sediento de reynos, de monarquias, de coronas y ymperios que, a pesar de los adornos mujeriles, al estruendo de Marte me alborotaua ... y, al contrario, Polidoro, tan vrnilde, tan modesto, de valor tan abrebiado, de coraz6n tan estrecho. 21 just to make something new with us, or because it was tired of making different faces, nature, to be precious or by mistake, made ours so much alike, as well as our bodies, our stature, our voices, that we look so much like each other that even you, my own father, cannot tell us apart. I think that nature, by mistake, shuffling appearances, destined, the likeness that should be our souls' for our physical shapes. No doubt, unless nature wanted, for the sake oflikeness' beauty, or to show off its fancy might, two that could be as one, and one made up of two so distinct. Although I am a woman, I was raised with so manly a spirit, with so ambitious a reputation, with so thirsty a nature for kingdoms, monarchies, crowns and empires that,

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despite the feminine apparel, I'd be aroused by the roar of battle ... and Polidoro, by contrast, is so humble, so modest, has so little courage and so weak a heart.

Matilde and Polidoro are monsters because, like Rosaura and Segismundo, they have contrasting and correlative qualities; together they make up a monster, very much like the characters in La vida es sueiio. But they are also monsters according to the explanation given in the play, by some qUirk of nature, a whim to be beautiful, or a temporary error. The birth ofMatilde and Polidoro is an accident of nature (as all multiple births were believed to be), which produced a mixed form that can be seen as an intermediary stage, presumably in nature's constant labor to reach ever-greater perfection. In aesthetic terms, Calderon's protagonists are conceived as exceptional, as imperfect entities, as products of accidents and errors in the passing of time and the visible manifestation of such anomalies in things and beings. There is, then, a strong link in Calderon between his concept of nature and the functioning of its laws on the one hand and artistic representation on the other. Situated between nature and art there exists a solid bridge that is made up of equivalences and analOgies concerning process and change. Calderon's figure of the monster also emerges from such a relationship. But this is not the only context out ofwhich the figure emerges; there are countless allusions to monsters in the literature of the time, as well as a very peculiar way of dealing with deformed humans. The concept of nature provides the ideolOgical constraints for the definition of the monster; actual linguistic and poetic usage and the way in which deformed individuals were dealt with furnished the practice within which the figure was conceived. Allusions to monsters abound in all of Spanish literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The best known of those is the phrase Cervantes uses in his prologue to Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses [Eight Comedies and Eight Interludesj where he refers to Lope de Vega as a "monstruo de naturaleza" ["nature's monster"j.22 There even arose a curious anachronism, the poetic bestiary, which has been studied in various articles by Rafael Osuna and Jose Lara

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Garrido.23 From the work of these critics, particularly from the latter, one can gather that the poetic tradition of the bestiary, transmitted through Gongora's "Fabula de Polifemo y Galatea" ["Fable of Poliphemus and Galatea"], could very well have had an impact on Calderon and his creation of the figure of the monster. 24 Lara Garrido writes: "Richness, exoticism and monstrosity are to Barahona [de Soto] but three variants that revolve around the same axis on which the whole of baroque aesthetics is founded, an aesthetics that prefers whatever is opposed to the archetypical beauty of Neoplatonic idealism" (p. 185). Both the "scientific" beliefs of the period as well as the poetic tradition of the bestiary were powerfully influenced by the discovery and conquest of America. If there can be no doubt that both forms of discourse were ultimately derived from the same ancient sources, from Pliny to classical literature, the New World lent a very speCial actuality to topics having to do with nature and natural phenomena. It was, above all, through the work of Peter Martyr d'Anghiera that the new American zoology was initially disseminated. Because many of the animals found in the New World were strange ifseen through the systems of classification known in those days, their deSCription inevitably led the chroniclers toward the figure of the monster. Peter Martyr himself writes the follOwing in an attempt to describe a manatee (I am quoting from Richard Eden's 1555 translation, which I have modernized somewhat): "Into his [Indian king Caramatexius] nets chanced a young fish of the kind of those huge monsters of the sea which the inhabitants call Manati, not found, I suppose, in our seas nor known to our men before this time. This fish is four-footed, and in shape liken to a tortoise, although she be not covered with a shell, but with scales. And those of such hardness, and couched in such order, that no arrow can hurt her. Her scales are defended with a thousand knobs. Her back is plain, and her head utterly like the head of an ox. She lives both in the water and on the land."25 I will refrain from listing further examples from Peter Martyr and other historians such as Father Jose de Acosta, in spite of how amusing it would be to do so. But to have more than only one instance, I quote the follOwing example from Garcilaso de la Vega's Comentarios reales de los Incas [Royal Commentaries of the Incas] because it dwells on disproportionate size, another feature of the monster: "In these provinces of the Andes the natives commonly

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worship tigers and large snakes called amam; they are much wider than a man's thigh and are twenty-five to thirty feet long. There are smaller ones. They are all worshipped because of their size and monstrosity."26 While Peter Martyr speaks not only of the bulk of the manatee, but also of its mixed composition, for Garcilaso, monstrosity is almost always synonymous with disproportionate size. It is remarkable, however, that for other chroniclers the word monster refers to small objects, jewels, or silverwork. As Lascault has pointed out, monsters appear frequently in the Western tradition in various crafts, including cabinet makingY In a letter dated July 10,1519, which included a list of Aztec objects sent to Emperor Charles V, Heman Cortes writes of "a large gold medal with a figure of monsters in it," and further on of "a miter with blue stones and a figure of monsters in the middle of it," and also, now referring to the Aztec temples, of "the masonry [being] all painted with monstrous things."28 The strangeness of American zoology led to a proliferation of real and imaginary monsters, and the conspiCUOUS presence of that zoology in New World art testifies to the pleasure in representing them. Lack of proportion, on which the concept of the monster is based in Garcilaso, is also present in art forms, where smallness or largeness-in jewelry and masonry, for example-creates the sensation of strangeness. It is not insignificant either that the so-called "Barroco de Indias," the Colonial Baroque, came about when native artisans began to incorporate, in the decoration of churches, representations of the American flora and fauna, as well as their own deities. 29 If the monster is the key figure in Calderonian aesthetics, it is because it was preCisely that, either expliCitly or impliCitly so in all of baroque aesthetics. But we should not be misled by the usages of the word "monster" in the above citations nor by the technical, scholastic aspects of the concept both in the chronicles and in Calder6n. As seen in the quotation from Covarrubias, monster also referred to deformed people. The social function of these individuals was, in a manner that is quite theatrical and close to Calder6n, to exhibit themselves, to display their defects, not in order to elicit pity, as was the case with beggars and Cripples, but to entertain with their strange appearance. To return for a moment to America and to Cortes, it is worth noting that the conqueror relates, in terms by no

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means foreign to Europeans, or to Spaniards in particular, how Montezuma hired freaks for his entertainment: "He had another house where there were many men and women monsters, in which there were dwarfs, hunchbacks and malformed individuals, some with other deformities, and each kind of monster in a speCial room."30 Later historians of the conquest of Mexico frequently mentioned Montezuma's monsters (until well into the seventeenth century). Motolinia writes that "among those malformed individuals was a young man dressed like a lion";31 Bernardino de SahagUn notes that "they also used dwarfs and hunchbacks, and other monstrous men";32 Cervantes de Salazar reports that there were "always dwarfs, Cripples and others of this kind at dinner, all for the amusement and to move to laughter" ;33 while Antonio de Solis affirms that there were "very capacious headquarters where buffoons live, with other palace creatures who served as entertainment for the king, among whom there were monsters, midgets, hunchbacks, and other mistakes of nature."34 Montezuma, of course, did not have a monopoly on this sort of entertainment; the custom to keep malformed individuals for that purpose has a long history in the West, and the Spanish Hapsburgs had a well-documented penchant for them. As we read deSCriptions like the ones by Cortes, SahagUn, and Solis, Velazquez's paintings of dwarves come to mind and with them the fairs of the period with their freak shows, which endure to our days.35 It is probable that, with respect to Spain, there is no better summary of this topiC than Covarrubias's definition of enano (dwarf) in his Tesoro. Tracing the Latin origin of the word, he writes: The dwarf is very much a monster, because nature wished to make a funny toy out ofit, as with other monsters, giving them a knot in the spine, making them bow-legged and bow-armed, and making of the entire body a contorted abbreviation with the sole exception of the mind, and the head which has normal proportions. This abbreviation, of whatever it may be, Pliny calls misfortune (Book 12, Chapter 2), referring to plants dwarfed by nature or art: Hoc quoque ergo in genere pumilionum infelicitas dicto erit. Celio Rodig., Lectionum antiguarium, Book 3, Chapter la, shows the natural cause for the generation of dwarfs. Justo Lipsio Saturn., Sermonun, Book 2, Chapter 4, mentions that he saw in Rome lively gladiatOrial games involving women and dwarfs, and cites a passage from Xiphilino's in Dominiciano, which translated

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into Latin reads: Pugnas etiam noctu saepe exhibuit et interdum nanos ac foeminas inter se commisit. ... Those dwarfs are usually in the service of the nobility. And those who write books of chivalry portray them as servants carrying messages for some officials. Finally, those monsters fare well with the kings, as with all those who keep them as curiosities and for their leisure; it is really a disgusting and abominable thing to do for any educated man .... Brutus owned a dwarf whom he held in great esteem, and that one is mentioned by Martial in his poetry, speaking of a seal on which was engraved: Gloria tam parvi non est obscura sigilli: / Iustus pueri Brutus amator erat. It could be that Martial's dwarf was of well -proportioned body and well-mannered, like Estanislao, a dwarf who belonged to Philip II, our Lord, may His glory be everlasting, or like the one His Majesty, Philip III, God save Him, has today, whose name is Bonami. (pp. 510-11)

The list of those unfortunate individuals immediately recalls Velazquez portraits of dwarves and, above all, his most famous painting, Las Meninas, where those "monsters" occupy the foreground. The monster is a figure of very speCial importance for Calderon, as we have seen, but the figure of the lame, the hunchback, the dwarf, the curio, the being of exceptional strangeness, was also of interest to his fellow artists, and in the society of that period such individuals occupied a theatrical place and had a very speCific function: to exhibit that which made them different in order to (above all) provoke laughter. In this sense, the monsters strictly obeyed the etymology of the word, which as we have seen in Covarrubias, is monstrum a monstrado, quod aliquid significando demonstret: "monster comes from monstrado, that which must be shown, exhibited, brought to light, be made manifest, that which must be brought to knowledge, demonstrated, deSignated, pointed out." There was a certain theatricality built into the figure of the monster, and a speCial space was assigned to it in the palace. Like Velazquez, Calderon drew heavily on this already codified role of the figure. Even if their monstrosity is not ugly or grotesque, one should not underestimate the strangeness of Calderon's crossdreSSing protagonists. Made up of contradictory characteristics, Calderon's monsters are as prodigiOUS as the freaks the kings kept for their amusement and delight. The major feature of Calderon's monster-protagonist is that strangeness which distances him or her from the audience. In La aurora en Copacabana we have seen how that

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Diego Velazquez, Diego de Alcedo, HEl Primo". (Prado Museum, Madrid)

strangeness is realized by having the spectator-the priestress Guacolda-see for the first time, without any point of reference, the ship she attempts to describe. If the monster is an accident of nature, a being who is kept in special places-Segismundo in the cave; the hunchbacks in their own enclosed quarters-it is so by being exceptional, precisely by not being a reflection of human qualities, ifby that we mean only the norm or the ideal of conduct

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Diego Velazquez, Francisco Lezcono. (Prado Museum, Madrid)

or appearance that defines an individual. The most exceptional aspect of the monster is not simply that its mixed form makes it a scandal of representation, but that it does not by itself constitute an entity; other strange beings surround the monster, as in the case of Rosaura and Segismundo, beings that reflect their monstro~ity and with which they share qualities as if according to a formula that combines correlative opposites. Like those Egyptian figures, whose

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various parts are painted from the best angle in relation to each part, not to the whole, the Calderonian monster is an admixture of elements that do not come together to form a fixed unity. Consequently, the monster does not represent an individual; it is more of a puppet, a dummy, or a manikin, not something that is characterized by defects, however, but part of a new aesthetics whose intention is precisely to highlight the rare. In the distance that this concept of the person creates between the monster and the audience emerges the sense of disproportion, which as we have seen, also determines monstrosity. In the case ofSegismundo, that quality manifests itselfin his identification with the mytholOgical giants: "fuera / contra vosotros gigante, / que, para quebrar al sol" (1 :33233) [''I'd be a giant / rising up against you ... to smash / the crystal windows of the sun!"] (p. 13). One could almost say that the monster is a mockery of mimesis, in the sense that this concept has for renaissance humanists. Like the freaks in the palaces, Calderon's monsters are kept in a special space and their appearance on stage tends to be doubly theatrical. The theatrical space in Calderon's drama has more in common with the "capacious headquarters" for Montezuma's monsters than with any of the spaces created by the Renaissance: locus amoenus (pastoral), road or inn (picaresque), street or courtyard (Lope's theater). The Calderonian monster is not a tragic figure in the Aristotelian sense because his strangeness distances him from the audience, thus failing to elicit the kind of identification that Aristotelian tragedy demands to produce catharsis. It is, after all, difficult to identify with a prodigy. Moreover, the monsters are exceptional and do not represent individuals, but a set of relations in which several individuals are involved, not just one. They are part of a larger formula. There is no tragedy either because there is no radical or final solution to the dilemma of succession and temporality. In spite of Segismundo's decision to do good and refrain from violence-he does not kill Basilio, who, while still alive, makes Segismundo his heir-there is still no synthesis of the various elements that make him up. There is no radical solution to the question of temporality at the end of the play; Segismundo and Rosaura continue their monstrous masquerade, which announces a repetition of the previous transmutations. That repetition culminates not in La vida es sueiio but in La hija del aire: the monster

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becomes a figure of authority who in tum hides her son and becomes the new monster. The importance of repetition cannot be overstated: at the end the scene that concludes the play is not a simple reestablishment of order, but a kind of fixed view, a frozen frame, in the series of transformations that makes up the plot of La vida es sueiio. There is no Single Oedipus who gains, at great cost, a full measure of self-knowledge, but instead several fragments ofa possible Oedipus, dispersed in the time and the space of the play. Basilio's "scientific" pride has been humbled, and he brings upon himself what he has been trying to avoid, but he is too old to be a protagonist. Basilio has been supplanted, not eliminated. Segismundo has defeated his father, but not killed him, and has certainly not, in any sense, committed incest with his mother. Rosaura, although another Oedipal figure in her struggle with Clotaldo, is a woman. The end of the play is neither tragic nor comic. There is, instead, a clash among the various theatrical codes: the marriages, as in comedy, may bespeak a certain order, as do Segismundo's concluding words, but visually the monsters continue to be monsters, and the most important feature of these monsters is their visible appearance, which reveals their "deformity." Nor is the ending tragic for reasons already mentioned. There has been change in that Segismundo has undergone a rite of passage, but the importance of that ritual is precisely its repetitive character, not its finality. In the end Segismundo attains the crown, but he continues to be dressed as a monster, while Basilio, who has been dethroned, remains in the palace. 36 Like the monster-protagonists themselves, Calderonian dramatic time is full of prodigies and sets itselfofffrom the normal temporal flow through its emphaSiS on the accidental. It is a time that is special, exceptional, and artificial in the same way that the monsters are exceptional with regard to the laws of nature. Historical time in Calderon is a movement that alternates between opposites, as we can see, for instance, in his auto sacramental, EI pintor de su deshonra [The Painter of His Own Dishonor]. In one of those tours de force that are typical of the genre, in which the history of humanity is condensed into a thousand verses because, as Human Nature explains, "10 aleg6rico puede / pasar los siglos por horas" (3:841 b) ["AllegOries can / make centuries pass like hours"]. A bit further down, Free Will remarks:

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De la Creaci6n al Diluvio buen saIto ha dado la Historia y pienso que ha de dar otro, si es que yo entiendo la trova, del Diluvio al Nacimiento. (3:842 a) From Creation Day to the Great Flood History had made a big leap, and I think that it must make another, ifI understand the poem right, from the Great Flood to Nativity.

There is no synthesis, but only a wavering between positive and negative events. History in Calderon does not have the epic density provided by a sequential chronology of events, but is made up, instead, of an alternating series of turns, of pure events entrapped in a symmetrical movement between opposites: History is the meeting point of surprises, of wonders. In the space of a few hours, Pedro Crespo is disgraced by the captain, elected mayor ofZalamea by the aldermen, and then appOinted permanent mayor by the king. The lines that the captain utters on the top of the hill articulate with special vehemence the lack ofduration ofCalderonian time, which contains in a Single instant the most drastic and contradictory changes: En un dia el sol alumbra y falta; en un dia se trueca un reino todo; en un dia es edificio una pena; en un dia una batalla perdida y vitoria ostenta; en un dia tiene el mar tranquilidad y tormenta; en un dia nace un hombre y muere: luego pudiera en un dia ver mi amor sombra y luz como planeta, pena y dicha como imperio, gente y brutos como selva, paz y quietud como mar, triunfo y ruina como guerra, vida y muerte como dueiio de sentidos y potencias. 37

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Within a day the sun sheds light and fades away; kingdoms fall and rise within a day. In one day, the proudest building lies in ruin; in a day a losing battle's won. An ocean storms and stills within a day; in a day a man is born and dies. And so within a day my love, like a planet, may come to know both dark and light, and like an empire, pain and joy; like a forest, men and beasts; like an ocean, peace and storm; as in battle, victory and defeat; and as master of all my faculties and senses, know life and death. 38

In La vida es sueiio this speCial time begins appropriately with an accident-the fall from the horse that throws Rosaura down the mountain-and ends with the final ceremony in which Segismundo is crowned king. The time between those two events is made up of prodigies and surprises, for a whole series of past incidents and accidents will meet in the present, a present that is like the day described by the Captain in the quote from EI alcalde de Zalamea. When Coltaldo, after carefully weighing the consequences, reveals to the King that Rosaura and Clarin have violated Segismundo's abode, the King answers, "si otro dia hubiera sido, / confieso que 10 sintiera" (vs. 875-76) ["If this had happened any other day I confess / I would have been annoyed"] (p. 29). But the violation has occurred on a speCial day, preCisely when Basilio is about to take the monster out of his secret confinement to display him at the palace. The first two scenes ofLa vida es sueiio, which contradict each other, should be viewed Simultaneously, functioning like the contrasting characteristics of the monsters. La vida es sueiio is played not only in a day of monsters , but in a day-monster. The play begins at sunset"cuando se parte el sol a otro horizonte" (v. 48) ["when the sun is setting"] (p. 5) "que ya la noche destierra" (v. 491) ["the day that the night already banishes"] (p. 19)-in the ambiguous twilight caused by the struggle oflight with darkness. (The second translation has been made literal. for Honig's poetic rendition made it say the

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opposite.) The play also begins with scenes representing simultaneous actions that cancel each other out. There is no possibility for Astolfo and Estrella's schemes to become reality at the same time that Rosaura and Clarin discover the existence of Segismundo. Clotaldo believes that the discovery made by the two strangers will have unfortunate consequences for both, but preCisely as they come across the tower, Basilio announces his intention to set Segismundo free. The remainder of the represented time is filled with similar kinds of opposing actions, with ludicrous substitutions (Segismundo, for instance, does not play Basilio's role very well, nor is Clarin a good substitute for Segismundo), of comings and gOings from one extreme to another, and of actions related by analogy or repetition. It is a dense time redolent with surprises and prodigies which have much in common with comedy: the shocking disorder and proliferation ofcharacters who are either repeated in others or play the roles of other characters within the play. Calderon's dramatic time is monstrous because it is a complex temporal construct; it is not linear or one-dimensional, but reversible and multidimensional. Segismundo makes two "exits" from the tower, Rosaura two entrances into the palace under different guises. The pair Astolfo-Estrella is confronted with the pair Segismundo-Rosaura, and in the end there is a crossing of AstolfoRosaura (a repetition of the Original grouping) and SegismundoEstrella (in whom Basilio's heritage is multiplied, since they are cousins). Exceptional events take place within the elastic confines of the day-monster. Octavio Paz was right in equating the monsters of the baroque aesthetic with conceits and wit, which are tropes that call attention to their own exceptional makeup. Lara Garrido is also justified in his observation that the monster is the opposite of the "archetypal naturalness ofNeoplatonic idealism."39 But there is more. With the figure of the monster Calderon reaches back to the very foundation of representation to test a new aesthetics: an aesthetics regarded as exceptional because it holds that change and temporality are always exceptional, that they are continually exceptional. Calderon's aesthetics sought to reflect simultaneity and contradiction. The Baroque is not an idealistic art, but an art that is attached to the coarse and brute materiality of the world with all its contrasts and contradictions. Calderon's art is not inherently regreSSive. It is instead an

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art in which the observation of reality struggles with the received codes meant to represent it. It absorbs the world, incorporates it, and makes it meaningful in its fashion, like the Colonial Baroque which managed to include images of New World theogonies. The concluding lines ofLa vida es suefio proclaim the reestablishment of order, but the apparel and appearance of the characters contradict that statement. La vida es suefio does not resolve that contradiction because Calder6n's art is an art-monster, a hybrid in which different dramatic codes are in constant disagreement. Rosaura, "monstruo de una especie y otra" in the same way that Cervantes' baciyelmo in the Quijote remains undefined in the end, always ends the play wearing arms like a man while being dressed as a woman. "Monstruo de una especie y otra" marks a lOgical impossibility and underscores, almost through a pleonasm, the typical vision of the monster: its irredUcibility as a pictorial being, as an admixture of contradictory appearances. Perhaps the ultimate meaning of the figure of the monster lies in the etymolOgical origin ofthe term, and with it in the Baroque in general: "that which must be shown, brought to light, exhibited." In this sense, the ending ofEI castigo sin venganza IPunishment without Revenge], studied in the previous chapter, is also monstrous. Ernst Robert Curtius, Everett W. Hesse, and Eunice Joiner Gates have noted, from different perspectives, the importance of painting for Calderonian theater.40 Gates, in her detailed and revealing essay, shows that that interest can be found not only in Calder6n's allusions to painting or in the portraits and other deSCriptions we encounter in his plays, where there are reflections of painterly techniques, but in the instructions he wrote for the construction of the scenery of his autos sacramentales. the memorias de apariencias, as these documents were enigmatically called. Our analysis of the monster in Calder6n allows us to affirm that his obsession with painting has to do with a deeply rooted feature ofhis aesthetics. The visual nature of the monster. made up of different species and perspectives. seems to represent Calder6n's zeal for rendering visible a concept of representation that eludes the precision and coherence oflogical as well as poetic discourse. The most profound element of the Calderonian Baroque can be found in this tendency to tum aporia into a vision that contains contradictory appearances without having them cancel each other out. appearances that are so contradictory and multiple that they reenact the clashes of the

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dynamic reality they represent. As Bernardo de Balbuena writes in chapter 4 of his Grandeza mexicana (1604) in his attempt to describe the wonders of the Mexican soil: "It is an accident, a rarity, a monster, / a splendid iridescence, / upon which our vision can scarcely fasten itself."41 La vida es sueno is a play about many things, including some of the moral and philosophical issues that criticism has traditionally discussed. But it is, above all, a play about the question of representation, in the same way that the Quijote is a book about literature. Calderon has probed into the origins of the relationship between art and nature, gone back to a moment of dispersion before law, of androgynous monsters and conflicting qualities, and retraced his steps to a present that is embodied in the play in order to put forth a disturbing proposition: that there is no natural difference between that chaotic origin and art, that the differences are always already art, that art, therefore is monstrous by nature. "Monstruo de una especie y otra" is cast in the language of lOgiC and embodies a paradox: multiple predicates that should be mutually exclusive. The play shows, however, that they coexist regardless of their logical incompatibility as elements of a series of changes taking place in time. Representation must include this irreducible quality. At the end ofeach performance ofLa vida es sueiio, Segismundo and Rosaura will always be dressed as monsters, in spite of their dream of reason.

5. Threats in Calderon

La vida es sueiio

"'rt.1i

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1:303-8

The history of modem poetry in Spanish can be told as a series of episodes concerning the acceptance or rejection of baroque poetry. The Neo-Classics rejected Gongora and Calderon, who they thought were embarrassing examples of Spain's backwardness, of her failure to be a part of Modernity. The Romantics accepted these poets partially, but only because they had been anointed by the Germans, who found them (especially Calderon) to be worthy preCisely because they seemed to be untouched by modem poetics. Critics of the late nineteenth century, particularly that most influential of Spanish critics, don Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo, again rejected the Baroques, both because he considered them barbarous and at the same time too unrealistic. In this period the realist novel dominated Spanish literature, and there was almost a total absence of Significant poets (save for that minor and belated Romantic, Gustavo Adolfo Becquer), not the best climate for the rare flowers of baroque poetry. Ramon Menendez Pidal, the great philologian, was too preoccupied with the origins of popular poetry and the epic to bother with poets as rabidly cultured as the Baroques. It was left to the Generation of'27, the avant-garde poets concerned with the foundations of poetry in a way similar to the European Romantics, to rediscover Gongora and Calderon, to be aware that they represented the most powerful poetic tradition in Spanish. Federico Garcia Lorca, Jorge Guillen, Pedro Salinas, and above all Damaso Alonso, launched a thorough reappraisal of these poets, which was accompanied, and sometimes preceded by, that of Latin American poets and essayists like Jose Marti, Ruben Dario and Alfonso Reyes, all of whom, searching for the roots of their own poetic language, also reached back to the great baroque poets of the Golden Age. This reappraisal was also carried out by a splendid group of English critics and scholars, the best among them being Edward M. Wilson, Bruce W. Wardropper, and Alexander A. Parker, the first having performed the herculean task of translating Gongora's Soledades [The Solitudes] into English.!

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Only after reading Octavio paz's Children of the Mire can we fully understand the historical reasons for the importance ofthe baroque poets in modem Spanish poetry. 2 paz underscores an unpleasant, yet unavoidable fact: that there are no first-rate romantic poets in Spanish. Scholars with an investment in Spanish or Latin American Romanticism may qUibble, but next to Goethe or Blake, Spanish and Spanish-American nineteenth-century poets pale. With minor exceptions, Spanish-language Romantics derived their inspiration from the French, who were themselves derivative of the English and German. With the exception of Leo pardi and some Hugo, Romanticism was essentially a Nordic phenomenon, including the United States and particularly Whitman. Without a recent tradition on which to base their search for a poetic language, Hispanic poets had to look back to the Baroque, when the most radical revamping of poetry had been carried out, and when a truly Original tradition had emerged from the ruins of Petrarchism. In Baltasar Gracian culteranismo had even had a theoretician who saw in the Baroque conceit the workings of a creative force, the likes of which would not be found until the German Romantics. Contradictory as it may appear-and this will be the main argument of this chapter-the most genuine and authentic poetry in Spanish is the one that is most contrived and artificial. Poetry shows this conSistently, regardless of what critics and even the poets themselves often say, due to the influence of a postromantic ideology that obscures the issue. While Gongora gained a high degree of acceptance as the result of this reevaluation, Calderon lagged somewhat behind. This was due in part to the religiOUS themes of a good deal of his theater, which did not find an echo in the modem senSibility. While Dante's Catholicism could be seen with a certain detachment as the unifYing cultural system of the Middle Ages, Calderon's Spanish Catholicism, with its more militant ring and its association to the relatively recent and highly polemical history of Spain (particularly the discovery and conquest of America), was more difficult to accept. In addition, Gongora's poetry was read and savored by poets and scholars in the quiet of their studies; it did not have to be performed. Gongora's more audacious syntactical and metaphOrical figures do not eaSily lend themselves to oral performance. In fact, this most persistent trope, the hyperbaton, makes his poetry hard to breathe; its syncopated periods are difficult to read aloud, let alone

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recite. Calderon, on the other hand, had to test his poetry on the stage and had to endure having generations of schoolchildren all over the Spanish-speaking world recite it. Everyone knows by heart some of the most bombastic lines from La vida es sueiio [Life is a Dream]. As a result, parodies abound, and with them the feeling that Calderon's poetry is excessively contrived and artifiCial, as far, in short, from modem poetry and drama as can be imagined. No other lines from Calderon's masterpiece have been more conSistently read according to these prejudices than those uttered by Clotaldo in the first act, when he finds that Rosaura and Clarin have discovered the secret place where the king has concealed his son Segismundo. Clotaldo says, in what the great Spanish poet Antonio Machado called a "stick 'em up in slow motion":3 rendid las annas y vidas, o aquesta pistola. aspid de metal. escupira el veneno penetrante de dos balas, cuyo fuego sera esc.indalo del aire. (Act 1, lines 303-8)4 It seems to me that we have much to learn from these lines in spite and perhaps because of their rejection by modem critics and translators. They contain in my view the essence of baroque poetry and playa very important role in La vida es sueiio. The lines have fared reasonably well in Edwin Honig's fine modem translation: put down your anns and lives, or else this pistol like a metal snake will tear the air apart with fire, and spit out two penetrating shots of venom. S Honig has managed nevertheless to tone down the lines by translating the very charged "aspid" merely as "snake", by rendering "esGindalo del aire" as to "tear the air apart," and by turning the metaphor pistol-metal asp into a simile. To tear apart the air relies on an English idiom so that the expression sounds familiar enough to the ear. To scandalize the air, in contrast, does not sound familiar to the Spanish ear at all. It is a catachresis that the listener immediately perceives as a breakdown in speech. In other translations

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and annotated editions, these lines suffer an even more bizarre fate, making up a striking list of beguiling and instructive misreadings. In some translations these lines are simply left out. This is the case in Alexandre Arnoux's prose adaptation, where Clotaldo merely says: "rendez vos armes et vos vies" ["Surrender your arms and lives"].6 In his 1871 prose version, Antoine de Latour translates the lines almost completely, and then some: "rendez vos armes, ou ce pistolet, serpent de metal, vous crachera au visage Ie venin penetrant de deux balles, dont Ie feu et Ie bruit vont etonner l'air" ["Surrender your arms, or this pistol, a metal snake, will spit at your faces the penetrating poison of two bullets, whose fire and noise will astonish the air"p Having, like Honig, turned the asp into a snake, de Latour feels the need to add that the pistol will spit at the faces ofRosaura and Clarin, remembering perhaps that the basilisk was reputed to strike at the eyes. He also has Clotaldo ask Rosaura and Clarin to surrender only their weapons, not as in the original, their lives, which is, as we shall see, a substantial omission. Frank Birch and]. B. Trend, in their 1925 translation to be "spoken not read," feel compelled to make explicit the tropes: "Surrender, or this iron snake, my pistol will spit the poison ofits bullet-sting, and rend the air with fire."s Like Latour, Birch and Trend leave out "scandal" and collapse the snake's two forms of attack, stinging and spitting, into one. As if this were not enough, Birch and Trend put the lines in brackets, a device they use to point out passages "too characteristic of the style and dramatic convention of the country and period to be sacrificed altogether, and yet, perhaps, too 'Gongoristic' for modem taste, or for other reasons likely to prove ineffective." In other words, in a stage presentation, the lines could be left out. F. D. Cries, in the translation included in the handsome Ausgewiihlte Werke, provides an elegant and fairly accurate version of Clotaldo's threat, though also with Significant additions and suppressions: 0bergebet Wehr und Leben; Oder dies Pistol hier, Natter Von Metall, wird sich alsbald Seines scharfen Gifts entladen In zwei Kugeln, deren Donner Wird die Luft in Aufruhr jagen.9

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(Surrender weapons and life, or this pistol. a metal asp, will soon discharge its burning poison in two bullets, whose thunder will disrupt the air.)

Cries explains away the trope "to scandalize the air," and turns fire into thunder, perhaps under the influence of nineteenth-century nature poetry. C. V. West's Das Leben ein Traum takes more liberties, changing the weapon from pistol to spear, and multiplying death by ten: iibergebet schnell Wehr' und Leben; oder Augenblicks Soli zehnfacher Tod von unsern Spiessen Auf ewig Aug und Uppen euch verschliessen. \0 (immediately surrender your weapons and lives, or within the flicker of an eye, death ten times over from our spears will forever seal your eyes and lips.)

Clotaldo's threat has not fared much better at the hands of commentators and annotators of La vida es sueiio. As sober a calderonista as Albert E. Sloman, in his splendid and widely used edition of the play, Singles out Clotaldo's speech as one of those lines that are "primarily decorative" and calls them "absurdly pompous."11 Everett W. Hesse writes, in a note to his also fine edition, that these verses are "an example ofa favorite conceit of Calderon's. The 18th century critics considered this type of extended metaphor 'mal gusto,' but modem critics take an entirely different view."12 Obviously, the "entirely different view" does not apply to these lines, which the great Cuban neobaroque poet, Jose Lezama Lima remembers as he compares Calderon unfavorably to Gongora, giving, in passing, the most likely source of one of the figures: "Hablabamos de ese escandalo de la luz, en recuerdo de una de las cetreras, el jerifalte, llamado por don Luis 'escandalo del aire,' y que mas tarde en Calderon, y 10 hacemos para diferenciar el barroco concentrado e incandescente de Gongora, del barroco curvo, suelto y languidamente sucesivo de Calderon, produce el disparo de la pistola tambien 'gran escandalo del aire' [sic). ["We were talking about a scandal of light, remembering one of the hawking birds, the jerifalte, called by don Luis, 'a great scandal of the air', which later in Calderon gives us the shot of the pistol, 'a great scandal

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of the air', to distinguish GOngora's concentrated and incandescent baroque, from Calderon's more sinuous, loose and languidly repetitive."13 It is Significant how often translators ofLa vida es sueiio have left out or altered these lines, either by suppressing elements (life, pistol, scandal) or by adding explanations or new tropes (thunder). I believe that this reaction obeys the logic of the tropes that make up Clotaldo's threat and indicate to what extent his lines constitute the most resilient part of his poetics, as well as that which unveils most effectively the ideology of modem poetics. Despite the combination of astonishment and revulsion that modem critics and translators of La vida es sueiio experience before these lines ofClotaldo's, threats of this nature are common among Calderon's most illustrious predecessors. In Lope de Vega's version ofEI medico de su homa [The Doctor of his Honor], for instance, Don Jacinto says: Pues, lhay quien pueda darme a mi eel os, 0 yo, si en mis pensamiento apenas sospeehas acreditara, mas pedazos no os hiciera que atomos el sol deslumbra, que peces el mar navegan?14 Could there be anyone who would dare make me jealous, or could I in my own mind give credence to any suspicion, before I smashed you into more bits than atoms are illuminated by the sun, than fishes sail the sea?

In Tirso's EI condenando por desconfiado [Condemned for Being Skeptic], Enrico thunders: que a poder, jah cielo airado! entre mis brazos soberbios te hiciera dos mil pedazos; y despedezado el cuerpo me 10 eomiera a boeados, y que no quedara, pienso, satisfecho de mi agravio. 15

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For if! could, oh vengeful heaven!, between my proud arms I would crush you into two thousand bits, and once your body was dismembered, I would feast upon it and even then I would not feel that the insult has been satisfied.

There are a number of similar threats in Shakespeare. In Romeo and Juliet, for instance, the desperate lover warns Balthasar not to meddle in what he is about to do in the crypt, But if thou, jealous, dost return to pry In what I further shall intend to do, By heaven, I will tear thee joint by joint And strew this hungry churchyard with thy limbs. (act 5, scene 3, lines 33-36)

The presence of such threats in Lope, Tirso, and Shakespeare (to mention only three predecessors) clearly indicates a common European source: the miles gloriosus of classical comedy and his various reincarnations in renaissance theater.16 The fanfarr6n [braggart] in Celestina and the Spanish theater and the boastful soldier in Moliere owe their existence to this tradition. Another source, common to both Shakespeare and the Spanish theater is, ofcourse, the commedia dell'arte, where, although the violence is not verbal, it is equally excessive and many scenes hinge on the threat of violence more than on violence itself One may add to this that in the commerua the boastful captain was traditionally a Spaniard-the capitano spagnuolo-with an exaggerated martial air and a penchant for empty threats, obviously a mockery of Spain's military exploits in the sixteenth century and her imperialistic adventures in Italy. Yet another source may very well be purely linguistic. It is a well-known fact that elaborate blessings, curses, harangues, and other such performative kinds oflanguage made their way into Spanish from the Arabic during the eight centuries of Islamic presence in the Peninsula. 17 Could the sort of threat discussed here not have the same origin? Even today, it seems to me, Spanish retains this quality. A friend of mine in Madrid last year, when told that someone had done something evil, roared that if it were done to him, he would seize the culprit and: "Ie pego una hostia que se Ie acaba el cielo

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para dar vueltas: ["I will give him such a blow that the heavens won't be large enough for him to spin around"]. All of these sources serve to show that Clotaldo's lines belong to a very theatrical tradition and that their being rooted in the language is further evidence of their appropriateness as part of the Spanish comedia. One can certainly imagine the delight of the mosqueteros, the rowdy low-class spectators at Spanish theaters, at hearing such elaborate threats, which no doubt competed in complexity and verbal bravado with their own. The language of germania, of thugs , is by nature highly figurative and baroque, as the literature of the Golden Age shows inSistently in the picaresque and Cervantes. It is as much a language for initiates as Gongora's.l8 Calderon must have understood this to be so, for the threat that Clotaldo uses to intimidate Rosaura and Clarin is commonplace in his theater. There are many others that compare favorably with Clotaldo's in ornateness and the promise of mayhem, though the one in La vida es sueiio contains all of the important elements of what is no doubt a common conceit, and almost a topic, in Calderon's theater. It is such a common one, in fact, that the public may very well have expected it and looked for it in every play, judging each by its contrivance, thereby making each compete with the other. For instance, in La hija del aire [Daughter of the Air], after listening to a long speech by Lidoro, an ambassador from her son and bitter enemy, Semiramis rages: no se como mi valor ha tenido sufrimiento hoy para haberte escuchado tan locos delirios necios, sin que su colera ardiente haya abortado el incendio que en derramadas cenizas te esparciese por el viento. I don't know how my rage has been able to suffer all your foolish and insane stories, before my burning ire erupted and sent you flying like cinders through the air.

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Dismissing the messenger, she thunders again: temo que la ley de embajador su inmunidad pierda, haciendo que vuelvas par ese muro tan breves pedazos hecho, que seas materia ociosa de los atomos del viento. 19 I fear that if you don't leave qUickly the law protecting ambassadors will be rendered null and void, and you will return over that wall in pieces so small that you will be like playful matter in the atoms that make up the air.

In La fiera, eI rayo y 1a piedra IBeast, Lightning and Rockj Irifile tells Anjarte that she will give her such a blow with her staff that de la tierra el centro tan gran sepulcro te abra, que muerta aqui, las exequias los antipodas te hagan de esa otra parte del mundo. the very center of the earth will open up like such an immense tomb that although you will die here, the antipodes will celebrate your wake in that other part of the world.

To which Anjarte replies, with lines that by now begin to have a familiar ring, that her rage is such that it will blast her into pieces so small that esparcidos par el viento, suban a esfera tan alta que en pavesas encendidas, o caigan tarde 0 no caigan. 2O scattered in the wind, they will raise to so high a sphere

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that, like glowing cinders, they may be slow in dropping, or may never drop at all.

We have so far shown that Clotaldo's lines belong to a longstanding theatrical tradition and that such threats appear with a certain degree of frequency in Calderon's theater. While demonstrating that these lines are not as unusual as the reaction of critics would make them out to be, we have yet to see them in the context of the play. What is their meaning and function, and are these in any way related to the fate of these lines in modem scholarship and poetry? I would venture to say that Clotaldo's threat has been the object of such scorn because it is an extreme example of a relationship between meaning and language in poetry that is the opposite of the one proclaimed by the modem tradition. Modem poetics would make the follOwing equation: the more intense the feeling, the less ornate the poetry. Or, put in positive terms, the more intense the feeling the more direct and natural the expression. In baroque poetry the equation can be reversed: the more intense the feeling, the more ornate and artificial the poetry. Rhetoric increases in direct proportion to feeling in baroque poetry. Feeling is completely external, contained in the language, which unlike that of modem literature, does not appear as an inadequate medium that reveals only partially the character's inner world. There is no inner world that cannot be externalized in language. All emotion is represented, without there being a residue in some inaccessible chamber of the soul. This is true when the feeling is love; it is also the case when it is anger or aggression, but then the relationship is more visible and the results are stranger to the modem ear. The swelling up oflanguage is such in these cases, that, more obviously than in the case oflove, rhetoric replaces action. Language itself becomes action. In all of the threats quoted here, the promise of physical violence is never fulfilled. No one is ever scattered in the winds. It is the act of vowing to do so that takes place on the stage. The character's feelings are not expressed so much as they are enacted in language; the violence takes place in the tropes themselves. This is evident if we take into account the fact that the action of scattering, of disseminating, threatened in the utterance, is the very same

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action taking place in the trope. To scandalize the air is to shock it, to send waves, to disseminate signs. Hesse is right in referring to this trope as an "extended metaphor." The "extended metaphor" is like the particles of the body rising to fall late (i.e., when least expected) or never again. The exploSion is an exploSion of language. The actors must be almost motionless as the laborious, slowmotion threat is recited and the echoes of the verbal blast resonate through the theater. By replacing action, however, Clotaldo's lines do not appear as something disconnected from the rest of the play. On the contrary, they not only SignifY through the very act of being uttered, but also Signify in relation to the rest of the play, and enact the way in which signification functions in Calderon's dramatic poetry. But let us return to the scene of the threat. Clotaldo's warning is directed against two characters he does not yet know, Rosaura and Clarin, but whose presence will bring more misfortune to him and the kingdom than he can imagine at the time. His lines prefigure their own threat to him and Basilio. Rosaura is Clotaldo's long abandoned daughter, whose existence he ignores. Clarin, as his name suggests, is about to publicly proclaim, at great risk, everything that should remain a secret in Poland. In El mayor encanto, amor [Love, the Greatest Enchantment], a trumpet is described in the same words used to describe Clotaldo's pistol, an "aspid de metal."21 Clarin, a trumpet, can also "scandalize the air." In En la vida todo es verdad y todo mentira [In Life Everything is True and Everything is False] discordant music is also an "esccindalo del aire."22 It is clear, then, that together, these two characters will cause a scandal in the same way that the report from Clotaldo's pistol will "scandalize the air." Clotaldo's elaborate threat, unbeknownst to him, will be realized not on Rosaura and Clarin, but on himself By airing all the secrets of the state, these two characters will bring about shocking changes: Basilio will be deposed, his hidden son will replace him on the throne, Clotaldo will have to recognize Rosaura as his daughter, Astolfo will have to marry Rosaura, and Estrella marry Segismundo. The blast will scatter the figures and reassemble them in pairs that are as surprising as the sound of the tropes. In short, Clotaldo's threat, with its promise of mayhem, dismemberment, and dispersal, prefigures the fragmentation of the social order, the revolution that will come about in Poland.

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This prefiguration, of course, is independent of the one who utters the threat. Clotaldo has no idea that his verbal violence will boomerang back to him, in the same way that his relationship with the aptly named Violante many years ago produced Rosaura as a tangible aftereffect. Like the noise of the pistol, the voice scatters into the wind sound whose Significance is not immediately apparent. The air is always an uncertain medium in Calderon, more a prism than a neutral filter. In EI medico de su homa, both light and sound are distorted in the air, and the wind blows out candles at critical moments, causing confusion and violence.23 This is also what happens with Clotaldo's verbal shots. Once the Significant particles of sound, of poetic language, are scattered, they have a way of gathering together in unusual, shocking formations. These formations are the tropes of poetic language itself Poetic language is like the shots that "scandalize the air," for through persistent catachresis it tears apart and fragments the space in which linguistic exchange takes place. Clotaldo's threatened shots stand for the very act of uttering sound, for the moment at which poetic language is created, and for the troubled reception of that sound: delayed, deformed, fragmented. Could the displacement of the source of language from mouth to hand Signal also the writerly nature of baroque poetry? Such proliferation of meaning becomes evident if we look more closely at the most astonishing trope in Clotaldo's threat, the one that seems to have troubled most modem translators and commentators ofLa vida es sueiio. I refer to the description of the pistol as a "metal asp." Like the shots that the pistol might discharge, this trope is full of implications. By describing the pistol as something that will "spit the penetrating venom of two bullets," Calderon invests it with the qualities of a mouth, which made it possible for us to equate its function with that of uttering poetic language. But, of course, the act of poetic utterance as spitting through a metal asp is itselffull of suggestions. We do not have to go too far to search for the traditional meaning of "metal asp"; Calderon wrote an auto sacramental entitled La serpiente de metal [The Metal Snake] (1676) that gives us many clues and also reveals how important this trope was for him. La serpiente de metal is based on the Old Testament story of Moses leading the Israelites through the desert, and its basic theme is that

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ofidolatry.24 In the auto, after Moses destroys the golden calf, Idolatry scatters snakes in revenge, and also as a reminder of the sin committed in the Garden. The Israelites beg Moses to save them from this plague. He complies by appearing with a metal snake wrapped on a magic wand. Those who have been stung by real snakes are cured by looking at Moses' metal one. When asked why he cures with a metal snake, and not with a real one (since it is known that poison is cured by another pOison), Moses answers allegOrically: the snake on the wand prefigures Christ on the cross, therefore He can only assume the shape of sin (the snake), but not its real, natural form, for He can have no sin. The source for these last scenes of the auto, whence the title is taken, is Book of Numbers, v. 21, where the metal snake is at one point described as being fiery and made of bronze. The sense of "metal asp" in Clotaldo's threat should now be clear. Clotaldo, who has given life to Rosaura, albeit unknOwingly, is now threatening her with death. The threat, however, is ambiguous, for its object is one that can both cure and harm. The first line of Clotaldo's threat suddenly acquires meaning. Whether it is an idiom or not, in asking Rosaura to surrender her life, Clotaldo is asking her to return to him what he has given her. Of course, Clotaldo gave Rosaura life through his sin with Violante, and Rosaura herselfhas sinned in her relationship with Astolfo. The "metal snake" in the threat is a reminder of these original sins. Clotaldo gave Rosaura life, but also took it away by leaving her mother. The phalliC nature of the metal snake adds a darker Significance to the threat. Clotaldo is threatening his own daughter with the same sort of act that he perpetrated on her mother. "Flickers of incest" occur often in Calderon, as Honig has already studied.25 Rosaura is a part of Clotaldo himself, though he does not know it. Perhaps this impliCit incest prefigures the rebounding quality of the threat, which as we have already seen, will strike Clotaldo more than Rosaura. More significant, of course, is the dual nature of the metal asp, which both kills and cures, an ambiguity that has been observed in relation to Clotaldo and Rosaura. 26 It is in this duality that baroque poetic language will forever be stalled. The disseminating shots of language scatter meaning in a performance of its own annihilating force; yet the rebound invests the tropes with an order and meaning that, while unexpected and certainly delayed, is still there. The

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aporia is suggested in one of the threats in La fiera, el rayo y la piedra, when, as we saw, the burning cinders created by the explosion may fall late or not at all. Clotaldo's threat is one of the most characteristic passages of Calderon's dramatic poetry. It is language as action, staging its own performance and performing its own meaning. It is also a language of spectacular indirection, which means much more than the characters or even the audience suspects at a given moment. Meaning in Calderon's theater is always subject to this dispersion, which must be brought together by the spectator as he remembers words and figures that suddenly become Significant when other words and figures are spoken. But most of all, it is a language whose elaborate performance stands in an inverse relation to that established by the modem tradition. The stronger the feeling, the more intense its artifiCiality. Baroque poetry performs both its own meaning and its production thereof. This simultaneity is its own peculiar form of authenticity, one that does not melt intention and form together, but instead sets into motion their violent ritual of approximation and separation. Modem poetry in Spanish, particularly that ofneobaroque poets in Latin America, has come to accept this kind of poetic language as its origin.

6. Reflections on the Espejo de paciencia

1

The history of the reception of the Espejo de paciencia [Mirror of Patience] is, for the most part, of an importance undeserved by the intrinsic value of that poem, which is a marginal and belated product of the renaissance epic, a distant offshoot of the Orlando furioso.! It is not that the Espejo has absolutely no literary merit at all or that it is completely devoid of charm. But had it appeared in a richer cultural environment, or better, had it not been discovered at the time and under the circumstances in which it was, the poem would today be no more than an obscure scholarly fact, hardly worthy even of being included in those tedious lists of minor works and authors that literary histories visit upon us. Let us then recall the circumstances of its composition and give a brief synopsis of the poem in order to bring forth its humble origin and composition. We will then draw a critical sketch of the major editions and interpretations of the poem to explain why it was so important to the development of Cuban literature. Finally, we will analyze an aspect of the Espejo that is quite remarkable and frequently commented on-the admixture of elements from classical mythology and the deSCription of the Cuban landscape-to give a more precise and complete idea of the distance between the readings of the poem and what it represents in the context of its historical period and environment. The space between those two images of Balboa's poem will afford us, I hope, a clearer notion of the origins of the island's literature. Despite its humble origin, something that the Espejo de paciencia has not lacked from the start are resonances in the names of its author: Silvestre de Balboa y Troya de Quesada. In the highsounding name of this Canarian writer there are echoes of the pastoral novel (Silvestre), of the name of the discoverer of the Pacific Ocean (Balboa), of the classical epic (Troya), and of the lineage of illustrious viceroys (Quesada). As we know very little about Balboa's historical personality, and given the laXity prevailing in his

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day with respect to the acquisition of names, we might think that this embarrassing accumulation of bombastic appellatives was an invention on the writer's part, designed to lift himself to the same level ofliterary pretense we find in his poem. But such was not the case, since there are documents that in fact testify to the legitimacy ofBalboa's names, which makes us reverse our fiction and suppose, on the contrary, that Balboa wrote his poem to match the hyperbolic flair of his name. Great indeed was the desire in colonial society to attain an exalted social level. The distance from the Spanish metropolis gave wings to the aspirations of the disenfranchised and fortune hunters. The "good" marriages of Balboa's descendants show that the family of the Canarian was not above such delusions ofgrandeur. It could not have been but as a reaction to the squalid surroundings in which it was created that the Espejo displays such a penchant for hyperbole and for the epic mode, an inclination already implicit in the names of its author. A native of Gran Canaria, Silvestre de Balboa y Troya de Quesada lived in Puerto Principe (today Camagiiey) and also, it seems, in Bayamo from the last decades of the sixteenth century until his death in the middle of the seventeenth century. The Espejo was written neither in Santiago, which had initially been the most important city in Cuba, nor in Havana, which, as the central port where the fleets were reassembled twice a year, had, by 1608, when Balboa finished his poem, acqUired a cosmopolitan atmosphere that it never lost. Apart from those cities, the rest of Cuba suffered from the decline in population that devastated the Antilles after the colonization of Mexico and Peru, regions that were much richer both in the material and in the cultural sense and toward which the conquistadors gravitated. By 1608 Cuba's interior consisted of a number of hamlets and small cattle farms, which were often dependent on illegal trade with pirates and corsairs from countries that were Spain's enemies. In spite of this isolation-which, in the case of Balboa, might almost be called both literal and endemic-the Espejo was written in the midst of an enthusiastic, if rather humble, pleiade oflocal rhymesters. Six of those, as is known, wrote laudatory sonnets that were included in the poem's front matter. Those sonneteers in the remote and insignificant Puerto Principe constituted a kind ofliterary academy like the ones that existed in Madrid, Seville, and other Spanish cities of that period. This academy was

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also a forerunner of the much more substantial and illustrious Academia Antartica, organized later in the imperial City of Kings, the great Lima. By 1608 the martial spirit and missionary zeal characteristic of the early years of the conquest had already disappeared from the modest settlements of Puerto Principe, Bayamo, and Manzanillo. Furthermore, except in limited cases, the subjugation of the peaceful Arawak (toino) Indians had been more of a systematic genOCide, punctuated by paroxystic massacres of extreme cruelty, than the pitched battles against the Araucanos in Chile, which Alonso de Ercilla y Zuiiiga immortalized in his famous poem. In purely military terms, Balboa's topiC had to be necessarily less promising than Ercilla's. But this does not make it dismissable. Even if the Espejo is about a simple skirmish that took place on an unknown Cuban beach, that incident did have certain antireformist and pious hues that were in keeping with peninsular Spanish poetry during the second half of the sixteenth century. In little more than 1,200 hendecasyllables (not all ofthem metrically perfect), that were naturally organized in octavas reales, Balboa describes the abduction of the bishop of Cuba, Friar Juan de las Cabezas Altamirano, by Gilberto Giron, a French pirate, the liberation of the bishop through the payment of ransom, and the revenge of the inhabitants of Bayamo, who ambushed, captured, and beheaded the buccaneer. The poem emphaSizes the bishop'S virtues, above all his patience, over the wickedness of the "Lutherans," and the courage of the inhabitants ofBayamo, among them the black Salvador, the one who killed the pirate. In addition to this plot, Balboa describes the reception of the bishop after his rescue, a celebration during which mytholOgical beings appear in the Cuban countryside and the inhabitants ofBayamo offer the prelate baskets filled with tropical fruits, which are enumerated with obvious relish: "Mameyes, piiias, anones y aguacates / platanos, y papayas y tomates" ["Mameys, pineapples, prickly pears and avocados, / plantains and papayas and tomatoes"]. And then, already in a state of euphoniC euphOria, Balboa writes in the poem's most frequently discussed stanza: Bajaron de los arboles en naguas Las bellas hamadriades hermosas Con frutas de siguapas y macaguas Y muchas pitajayas olorosas;

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De bijiri cargadas y de jaguas Salieron de los bosques cuatro diosas, Driadas de valor y fundamento Que dieron al pastor grande contento. 2 From the trees descended in flOwing skirts The most beautiful and lovely nymphs With the fruits of siquapas and macaquas And an abundance offragrant leaves; With fruits of pungent bijiri and jaguas Four goddesses emerged from the forest Nymphs of valor and substance Which pleased the churchman greatly.

Aside from this rather overwhelming presence of the local flora (to which I shall have to return later), the poem offers a wide range of themes that belong to the epic, such as the enumeration of the adversaries and the deSCription of their weapons and attire, as well as to the realm of hagiographic literature, such as the detailed account of the trials and tribulations of the bishop and his infinite goodness in the face of evil. The historico-literary context of the poem is obvious, though frequently suppressed. The Espejo de pacienda is a poem written in the tradition of the Spanish renaissance epic, whose origin can be found in the Orlando furioso. More specifically, it seems to be derived from Las lcigrimas de Angelica [Angelica's Tears] by Luis Barahona de Soto. The poem has a strong religiOUS component, which reflects the inclination toward "10 divino" in Spanish poetry of the second half of the sixteenth century. Given its tendency toward chromaticism, a certain penchant for neolOgisms and for mUSicality, as well as for the theme of war, one might also see in it a reflection of the poetry of the great Fernando de Herrera, above all his "Por la perdida del Rey don Sebastian." But what the Espejo has taken from all those tendencies and influences is generally that which is most commonplace. There is no doubt that the most remarkable thing in Balboa's poem is the curious mixture of figures from classical mythology and exotic tropical plants. And yet the Espejo has inspired a host of commentaries, which include Alejo Carpentier's novel Condeno barroco (1974) and Antonio Benitez Rojo's El enigma de los esterlines (1980), in addition to studies by outstanding Cuban scholars such as

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Jose Maria Chac6n y Calvo, Felipe Pichardo y Moya, as well as essays by writers like Cintio Vitier and Jose Lezama Lima By glossing the most important of those commentaries, we will be able to see how the idea of Cuban literature evolved and how Balboa's modest poem gradually assumes a foundational role in the elaboration of that literature.

2 As is known, the Espejo de padencia was "discovered" in 1838 by Jose Antonio Echeverria Echeverria published fragments of the poem, as well as a deSCription and evaluation of it in EI Plante!, a journal edited by Ram6n Palma. 3 The latter had written a summary, in the form ofa story, of the poem's plot for another journal, the 1837 issue of the AgUinaldo Habanero, which he and Echeverria published together. 4 We do not know ifit was Echeverria who provided his friend with the necessary information, or ifhe actually let him see the poem he had discovered in the history written by Morell de Santa Cruz. In any case, this twin resurrection ofthe Espejo at the very moment when it was discovered by Cuban literature is Significant: it is discovered both as an historical fact and as a fiction, a harbinger of things to come. I say fiction because Palma took certain liberties with the poem's subject matter as well as with some of the details, such as giving a name to the pirates' ship. In the follOwing we will see why I claim that the Espejo was "discovered" by Cuban literature and what this means. Associated with Domingo del Monte, with whom he collaborated in the Sociedad Patri6tica's Committee on History, Echeverria was a very important promoter of culture in his time. It is with del Monte and his famous group that one can, in a strict sense, speak of a Cuban literature that was conscious of being just that. Out of this group, or as a result of its influence, came the works whose preferred theme was Cuban history, the deSCription of the island's landscape as well as an analysis of its SOciety-above all, the question of slavery. Examples are the abolitionist novel Francisco by Anselmo Suarez y Romero; the costumbrista novel Cecilia Valdes by Cirilo Villaverde; as well as the poems and the autobiography of the slave Juan Francisco Manzano. 5 Echeverria did not have the impact on

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the development of Cuban literature of his fellow countryman del Monte (both, by the way, had been born in Venezuela). But Echeverria's promotional activities were not insignificant either, and his work, from which the historical novella Antonelli stands out, is of considerable value. El Plantel, for instance, published substantial articles about education in Cuba, as well as exquisite essays by Felipe Poey about Cuban animals, with priceless drawings of insects, accompanied by quaint plans for constructing traps to catch them undamaged. But most remarkable in El Plante! are the works on Cuban history, among which is found the one that contains the Espejo. There are essays on Diego Velazquez, the colonizer of the island, who founded the first Cuban cities, on Francisco de Arango y Parreiio, the brilliant and controversial promoter of the island's sugar industry and first defender of Cuban autonomy (who had just died), as well as on other foundational figures. Echeverria himself wrote some of those articles. His interest in Cuban history was programmatic. In an essay entitled "Historiadores de Cuba," which was published in the issue of El Plante! directly preceding the one that included the news of the Espejo, Echeverria wrote the follOwing: More than three centuries have already passed since the first Europeans settled in Cuba, and still there has not been an intelligent writer who has sketched the vigorous and complete scene of our island's history, who has investigated the sources, the progress and foundations of its wealth, determined the obstacles that keep it from thriving more rapidly, and shed light on the path it can take in finding a just and efficient form of government. Cubans must certainly regret that lack, when their country already occupies a very distinguished place among [Spain's] American possessions: for it is true that a people without history is like a young man without parents, who does not know who he is, where he comes from, why he has not been educated, nor what his future might hold. 6

More than history, what Echeverria desires is a myth about the national origin, that is, a founding fable with which to assign Cuba its place in the overall scheme of world history. The remarks just quoted are followed by a tight summary of Cuban history up to the moment when he wrote the article. In this way he laid the first stone of that foundation, part of which was, of course, Antonelli, a fictionalized autobiography of the builder of Havana's fortresses, some of which date back to the sixteenth century. To Echeverria

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these fortresses were what the gothic cathedrals were to the European Romantics. Both history and fiction are intermixed in the mortar of the foundations that Echeverria intends to give to the edifice of Cuban literature. The "discovery" of the Espejo is the principal ingredient in that mortar. Echeverria's next article is devoted to introducing Pedro Agustin Morell de Santa Cruz's Historia de 10 isla y catedral de Cuba. It is in that book that the Espejo de paciencia appears, used as a document revealing the island's early history. Morell's work was of interest to Echeverria for all the reasons we have already mentioned, but above all because it was the first history of Cuba. Furthermore, it did not escape his romantic sensibility that Morell had no qualms about using the poem as an historical document, that is, literature as a source of history. In introducing the poem, Echeverria remarks with characteristic critical reticence (he was a neurasthenic about style): "I have said that one of the sources on which Morell relies was historical poetry. You judge for yourselves if an entire poem, which he transcribed and which, by virtue of its antiquity and of the elegance that sparkles in it from time to time, should not be brought before the public eye."? Echeverria quotes and comments on more than fifty stanzas of the Espejo, among those the one we have already cited, where the "nymphs" "descend from the trees in flOwing skirts," about which he remarks: "What the demands of rhyme can force someone to do! How can such a good troubadour like Silvestre de Balboa y Troya de Quesada dress the nymphs of the forest in such bothersome garments that one wonders how they could possibly disentangle themselves from their folds when leaping from branch to branch, which is their natural way of life!"8 This is a revealing criticism from within the fiction of the poem itself. since Echeverria seems to accept the presence of the nymphs in the Cuban jungle and only criticizes their faulty fashion. It is obvious that Echeverria allows himself to be drawn into the poetic world that he encounters in this fabulous source of the first history of Cuba. Despite his misgivings, there is no doubt about the Significance that the Espejo held for Echeverria and his group. Like del Monte and his cotery, Echeverria was, as we have seen, eager to found a nationalliterature, conceived in accordance with the romantic ideology that inspired the group, and, as part of a larger project, to

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establish the foundations for a concept of nationality. Language, literature, history, and nature were the raw materials to be used in this foundation: a people has a language and fables onts own, and is the product of a specific natural environment, of an evolutionary process. A static concept oflanguage and culture came to an end by the eighteenth century. The new ideas that were generated by the Enlightenment began to arrive in Cuba and to clear the intellectual cobwebs of the colonial world. 9 Echeverria wanted to devise a genealogy for this "young man without parents" to whom he refers in his essay on Cuban history. By the time he was writing, the national literatures of Europe had already "discovered" their origins, and philology had elaborated the history of different languages, naming as origins literary monuments that stood presumably at the beginning: the Poema de Mio Cid, the Nibelungenlied, Beowulf, La Chanson de Roland. To be sur~, the Venezuelan Andres Bello had been one of the first to study the Poema de Mio Cid and to be preoccupied, in modem terms, with the origins and the grammar of the Spanish language. To write a history of Cuba, to give Cuba a literary history by way of creating an evolutionary profile of its native, vernacular literatures, reqUired the building ofa literary monument of the origin, an epic. Balboa's poem, used as its own poetic source by Cuba's first history, was at hand and contained elements that made it suitable for such a role: it was based on an incident that really occurred on the island; it included an abundance of allusions to the local plant and animal life; and blacks were present in it. According to Echeverria, Balboa was not a simple poet; he was, if we remember his phrase, a "troubadour," a term with which he links the Canarian bard with the romantic concept of the popular poet, the poet of the people. The presence of blacks, espeCially of Salvador who plays a heroic role, is of particular importance to Echeverria and his group, because, as we know, the question of slavery was what made these writers aware of Cuban issues and problems. Echeverria did not create a mirror, but a convenient mirage that glittered at the bottom of Cuban history like a gold coin in a shallow pond. Ever since its "discovery" by Echeverria, the Espejo would be turned into "the first Cuban poem," as can be read in what should have been (were it not inspired by pettiness) the culmination of the efforts of Echeverria and del Monte: the Diccionario de la Iiteratura

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cubana, published in 1980 by the Institute of literature and linguistics of the Cuban Academy of Sciences. lO To be "the first Cuban poem" was the fate of the Espejo, which had ironically remained unknown for two centuries; as such it would become the cornerstone of every project that formulated the existence of a Cuban literature. Each one of the major studies of the Espejo coincided either with a moment of national crisis or with a radical revision of the Cuban literary canon. Each of those studies or rewritings confronted obstacles in considering the poem's originality, that is to say, its belonging to the origin, its fundamental Cubanness. To begin with, its author is a native of the Canary Islands, not Cuba; the Espejo is the product of renaissance poetics, not a popular poem; its characters display a militant Spanish loyalism (they shout, "Santiago y cierra Espana" during the battle, which was the war cry of Spaniards fighting the Arabs during the war of Reconquest); and, above all, the literary value ofthe poem is highly questionable. Faced with those obstacles, commentators either wavered or displayed remarkable heuristic powers. But the doubts persisted, to the point that one scholar-Carolina Poncet-began to suspect that the Espejo was a fraud, written by Echeverria himself or some other poet of the del Monte group, overanxious to provide Cuba with an epic at the origin. 1J Carolina Poncet's suspicion remains unconfirmed, but the author ofE! romance en Cuba is not that far off the mark: there is a strong element ofinvention in the rewritings of the Espejo by its various commentators. It is no doubt significant that the first commentary on the Espejo after Echeverria's was a lecture by Nestor Ponce de Leon delivered before the Hispanic-American Society of New York. Like the Cuban patriots who were heir to the ideas of the del Monte group, Balboa's poem went into exile. More specifically, what happened was that Echeverria himselfwas forced into exile because of his abolitionist ideas, and he took with him a copy in his own handwriting of Morell de Santa Cruz' history. Upon his death in New York, Echeverria left that copy to his friend Ponce de Leon, who, in tum, used it for his lecture. All this has been detailed by Vitier in his valuable 1962 edition of the poem. 12 But the first serious study of the Espejo was undertaken by Jose Maria Chacon y Calvo in an article entitled, fatefully, "EI primer poema escrito en Cuba" ["The First Poem Written in Cuba"].13 Chacon y Calvo, who was one of the

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pioneers in the study of Cuban literature after the advent of the Republic, had already made reference to Balboa's poem in 1913 in a famous lecture about "Los origenes de la poesia cubana" ["The Origins of Cuban Poetry"]. But he admits to not having seen the whole poem at that time, but only the version published by Echeverria. In this new work, Chacon y Calvo limits himself to describing the Espejo, to citing some of its stanzas, and to insisting that it was really just a rhymed chronicle. The distinguished scholar concludes his study as follows: "Balboa, what can save him? Only, perhaps, the undeniable peculiarity of his poem. It was written in 1608; it would take many years for Cuban poetry to be able to offer its own version of the national landscape."14 Chacon y Calvo wrote from Spain, where he held a diplomatic post in the Cuban delegation and made the acquaintance of Ramon Menendez Pidal and his group, who provided an intellectual context for his studies. In Spain he carried out research on Cuba in various archives. As skeptical as he may sound in his meditations on the Espejo, one nevertheless has to note that Chacon y Calvo refers to the poem as "an ancient manifestation of Cuban letters" and that by calling it a "rhymed chronicle" he echoes Menendez Pidal's research on the historical origins of the Spanish Epic, and at the same time of the poetic origins of medieval Spanish histOriography. In Chacon y Calvo's imagination there existed a Cuban Middle Ages: the Middle Ages essential to all philolOgical research and its resulting constructs. The strong ties to Spain in Chacon y Calvo's commentary are significant. Many intellectuals in those early years of the Republic were looking toward the motherland as they faced the imminent threat to Cuban nationality posed by the United States. Spain was an antidote to Yankee interference, as well as a reaffirmation of Cuba's Spanish heritage. I am not only thinking of Chacon y Calvo, but also of Fernando Ortiz, whose career began in Spain. The fascinating correspondence between these two has recently been edited by Zenaida Garcia Vega. IS By 1921, when Chacon y Calvo had published his work on the Espejo in the Revista de Filologia Espanola, the United States had already occupied Cuba twice since they had declared the island independent in 1902, and the Platt Amendment, which granted the Americans the right to carry out those interventions, was in effect. In 1929, during the heyday of the Machado regime, Jose Manuel Carbonell published his edition of the Espejo,

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the second stop of our critical itinerary. In the prologue to that book he writes: "Cuba has risen as a Republic, after crossing, like a salamander, the fires of the wars ofindependence, under conditions of such watchful vigilance on the part of her allies in the SpanishAmerican War that the right to make mistakes became for her the perennial threat of a death in fixed installments." That edition of the Espejo appeared in the collection entitled La poesia lirica en Cuba [Lyric Poetry in Cuba]' a work which Carbonell dedicated "To the REPUBLIC OF CUBA, under the dignified presidency of General Gerardo Machado y Morales, and to the VIth INTERNATIONAL AMERICAN CONFERENCE, held in his city, in January 1928."16 Those were moments ofintense and polemical nationalism, which were to lead to a full-scale revolution against Machado, who, being a veteran of the Wars of Independence, felt that he was anointed to lead the Republic. Those were also the years ofthe avant-garde and the AfroCuban movement. It was inevitable for the Espejo to be included in Carbonell's anthology as "the first and oldest monument of our literature" without even being a lyric poem and despite Carbonell's references to the plot of the poem as an "insipid story." Balboa's poem was already in the process of becoming an official part of Cuban literature, sanctioned by government organizations. Precisely that was finally accomplished with the 1941 edition by Felipe Pichardo y Moya, which was preceded by a detailed study on which all later criticism of the Espejo would be basedY The edition appeared in a series of "Cuadernos de Cultura" published by the Department of Education, the same series in which were also published works by Jose Marti, Felix Varela, Jose Antonio Saco, Enrique Jose Varona, Francisco de Arango y Parreiio, Maximo Gomez; in short, the whole pantheon of the Republic's tutelary figures. The edition was printed, with more than a few mistakes, by the Imprenta Escuela del Centro Superior Tecnologico del Instituto Civico Militar. Obviously deSigned for public education, the work "was distributed for free, as a medium for cultural divulgation, by the Department of Education." Balboa had become a part of national education; the place of his poem at the beginning of Cuban literature had received the official seal of approval and had thus become institutionalized. Nineteen forty-one: First Batista administration, a moment of national reconciliation (pact of the communists with the government), and a boom in the Cuban economy due to World

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War II. Printed in a military school, the Espejo reflected that spirit of reconciliation and affirmation of nationalism. Despite inevitable reservations, Pichardo's study is much more explicit with respect to the role Balboa's poem played in the context ofthe origins ofCuban nationality and of a national literature. Among the commentators of the Espejo, Pichardo y Moya is the one who is most deliberate in elaborating a philolOgical fiction: "It strikes our fancy to view those two tranquil centuries [the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries] of colonial rule as a Cuban Middle Ages."18 In Pichardo's biographical sketch of Balboa, the poet's lineage is interwoven with that of Vasco Porcayo de Figueroa (it was almost impossible for this not to happen, since Vasco was a "genitorial" figure, only that, in this case, Lezama's term can be taken quite literally given that this patriarch fathered a prodigious number of children with native women as well as Spanish). Pichardo y Moya wanted to situate the poem's conception in the context of the founding families with epic patriarchs, in the manner ofRuy Diaz and the Infantes de Lara. His analysis of the poem shows an equally tendentious view. Pichardo was not satisfied with the obvious: that the poem makes reference to Cuban plant life and animals, as well as includes blacks, Indians, and Spaniards, whose cultures in their various stages of intermixing formed the origins of Cuban nationality. In spite of his emphatic affirmation of the sophisticated character of the Espejo, Pichardo insisted on its simplicity and claimed that it contained something like the beginnings of Cuban speech. Pichardo writes like someone who goes out of a house walking backward to make it seem as ifhe were going in. The poem has "literary aspirations"; 19 it is also "a poem far from all that babble and wavering [which] is cultured in body and soul."20 Nevertheless, "Let us leave it up to a competent scholar to study the language of Balboa's poem, comparing it to other poems of that time; ifindeed it sometimes gives the impression of being much closer to us than other Spanish works from the same period appear to be, it may well be because of the less literary language Balboa employs, or perhaps-and it would be interesting to test this-because the Espejo was written right here in Cuba."21 In this context, "literary," as applied to language, means cultured or sophisticated-culto, as opposed to popular or tradicional. Finally, Pichardo affirms, contrary to all rules oflogic but true to the ideolOgical project of his edition, that

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"Balboa Troya [sic] has the constant desire, and puts it into practice more or less effectively-but in any case, in a way that is essential to his poem-of speaking in Creole and of describing our natural landscape and environment. The language of the Espejo does not cease to appear to us, at certain moments, closer to our reality than that of some other Spanish poems of that period. Vulgarity on the part of Balboa? Less literariness in him? Perhaps Cuban-ness?"22 Pichardo's contradictions did not hamper the powerful influence of his ideas about Balboa's Cuban-ness on the more recent and daring readings of the Espejo. The poem's lack of literariness, according to Pichardo, makes it more authentic in its claim to Originality. The ball of thread that began to spool up in the fictions of Palma and Echeverria would grow with each of the dizzying spins it received from Vitier, Lezama, Carpentier, and Benitez Rojo, thus acquiring an undeniable facticity. Cintio Vitier's reading of Balboa is essentially an extension of that of Pichardo y Moya's.23 But we have to keep in mind the new context in which it arises. It consists of a series oflectures that Vitier gave in the Lyceum de La Habana at the end of 1957, which were published a year later under the title Lo cubano en la poesfa [The Cuban Element in Poetry]. Vitier, in addition, was the prinCipal ideologue of the Orfgenes group, whose main concern was the interpretation of Cuba's national culture. But by 1957 that group had already dissolved, and Vitier developed his concept of "10 cubano" in the midst of the crisis which would lead directly to the revolution. The period 1957-1958 witnessed Batista's dictatorship, increased fighting in the Sierra Maestra, an attack on the presidential palace, and an avalanche of North-American popular culture on Cuba by way of the mass media. Vitier affirms in the final chapter that his desire has been to recover Cuba's endangered nationality through the study of Cuban poetry. He writes: "It is certain that we are victims of the most subtly corrupting influence that has ever infected the Western world, and I do not say this because I attribute to it any specific kind of malice, but because the essence of the Simple-minded 'american way oflife' [as in original] is to tear the values and essences out of everything it touches."24 The main thread of Vi tier's analysis is a kind of Hegelianism, in which the Cuban spirit would discover itself through the internalization of an external reality, the landscape. Vitier uses the same arguments as Pichardo about the simplicity of

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the poem and, above all, the supposed Cuban-ness of the language, but he adds something that grew out of the first romantic readings of the Espejo: the presence of Cuban nature. Moreover, he cites another element that had been mentioned without receiving any major attention: the mirthful tone, which Vitier ascribes to the island's indigenous cultures. It is obvious that Vitier already wants to see in this founding poem the origins of that choteo of which Mafiach spoke in his famous study on Cuban culture. Vitier writes: "The island's open landscapes, with their true native sounds, invade the poem's plot and immediately break up two kinds of seriousness: classical mythology and the heroic epic. By being faithful to the island's flora and fauna, by daring to dress the Nymphs of the Forest in flowing skirts and combine those with the alboques, tamboriles and adufes, the marugas and tipinaguas into a wild feast, by giving an example unusual in his times, Balboa, albeit clumsily, already opens a space for the first approach to our national reality above and beyond all the Classical. Spanish and Italian influences he accumulated in the process of creating that reality."25 I do not quite understand why classical mythology has to be serious and much less the tradition of the epic from which Balboa derived his inspiration. The Orlando is a very funny poem. But Vitier needs the mirthful tone-one might almost say, the parodic slant-to explain the poem's clumsiness and to bring it into the fold of Mafiach's theories. We have already seen in the work of the commentators that the ideolOgical imperative does not relent before any textual or historical obstacle. In Vitier's metaphOrical system, the "island's outdoors," that is to say, the lands without boundaries, invade the poem through native sounds that are true (we do not know to what), allOwing animals and plants to inscribe themselves into the language without lOSing their authenticity in the process. That is to say, what Vitier suggests is that the Espejo is already an unmediated expression of Cuban reality and that therefore it is Original, as much in the sense of being new as in the sense of belonging to the origin. The edition that Vitier published after the revolution with the sponsorship of UNESCO came to be the institutional consecration of the readings of the Espejo that we have discussed so far. The consecration of the Espejo in the form of Vitier's edition would reach an even more official level with the Antologia de la poesia cuban a [Anthology of Cuban Poetry], edited in 1965 by no lesser writer

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than Jose Lezama Lima. In that anthology, Balboa and the Camagtieyan sonneteers appear in a place of honor at the beginning of Cuban literature, and Lezama affirms unequivocally in his beautiful introduction that "Ie]ver since that poem was written, one could already speak of/a cubano, more than just in an external sense, as a complex poetic presence."26 It is, however, necessary to see that contention of Lezama's in the context of his evolving theory of 10 cubano, a theory much more powerful than that of Vitier, which is at best a derivation of it. For Lezama, 10 cubano is not something that manifests itself in poetry with increasing clarity, a clarity whose culminating point, for Vitier, is the poetry of Lezama himself For Lezama, 10 cubano is always already poetry, from the very beginning: from the metaphor Columbus used to describe the silky hair of the natives he found on the island. Consequently, Balboa is notalthough he appears, of course, at the beginning of the official Antologia-the clumsy origin of something that would become clarified or improved over time, but part of an "imaginary era." The Espejo would instead be an integral part of a Cuban poetic imagination with original characteristics that go back to that moment when the language of the island was first articulated. It is, however, surprising that Lezama does not incorporate Balboa's poem in his theories about the Baroque, since, as we have already seen, it can be reconciled with those theories much better than with Lezama's pronouncements about Cuban literature. In any event, Lezama's and Vitier's respective readings of the Espejo did prepare the ground for those by Carpentier and Benitez Rojo. It is impossible here to devote to EI enigma de los esterlines IThe Sterling Enigma] and Concierto barroco IBaroque Concert] the space they deserve. 27 Suffice it to say that with those two novels Silvestre de Balboa and his characters become part of the fiction of Cuban literature and not of its development. Benitez Rojo's novel is the text that most sedulously follows the orientation that the poem's readings have taken in this century, with the special twist that in it Silvestre de Balboa plays the role of a protagonist in a story inserted in the novel. Benitez Rojo's is a continuation of the previous readings because his novel is an adventure story for adolescents, which fulfills in that way the task of making Balboa and his poem an essential part of Cuban education and thus of the formation of Cuban culture in the strict sense. The stories about the corsairs and

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pirates of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have become part of this fictional world in the same way that the Marchen or the brothers Grimm or medieval legends have become part of children's imagination. With Benitez Rojo the project of providing Cuba with fables of its origins reached its fulfillment and became institutionalized. In Concierto barroco Carpentier makes Filomeno, a character in that novel, a descendant of Salvador, the black man who beheads Giron in Balboa's poem. There is, therefore, a literary genealogy that links Carpentier's novel with "the first poem written in Cuba." The major scene is Concieno barroco, the enormous jam session in the Ospedale della Pieta, echoes the celebration at the end of the Espejo de paciencia, when the inhabitants ofBayamo celebrate the bishop's rescue. There is, nonetheless, an element in Carpentier's novel that finds no precedent in previous readings and interpretations of the Espejo; namely, that it is inserted in a purely baroque context. In Concierto barroco, Carpentier creates with his main character a "senor barroco" who appears to have stepped out ofLezama's La expresi6n americana [American Expression]. That gentleman in Carpentier's novel is a wealthy criollo from Mexico, who lives surrounded by the works of art and the crafts of the New World. Like those objects, which are derived from the various cultures that were gathered in New Spain, Carpentier's text is an intricate fabric of stories of many different origins: operas, Shakespearian plots, elements drawn from the picaresque novel, the Quijote, the conquest of Mexico. The plot of the Espejo, narrated by the black character Filomeno in his own way, is one of many stories; that is to say, neither more nor less, just one more story. In this way, Carpentier emphasizes not the exoticism of Balboa's poem, but the plethora of stories that make up universal culture: from anyone of the multiple comers of the world, any other culture, is exotic. What Carpentier stresses in the Espejo, then, is not its originality, but its inherent exoticism. That exoticism is what figures in those scenes in which unusual words referring to Cuban plants and animals mix with a vocabulary no less strange describing those beings drawn from classical mythology. The origin that Carpentier postulates is not Singular and simple, but multiple and contradictory; in short, it is baroque. In returning now to the controversial stanzas of the poem, I will be guided by the way in which Concieno barroco reads the Espejo.

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3

In his deservedly famous A Cultural History of Spanish America: From Conquest to Independence, Mariano Picon Salas has written eloquent pages about the origins of the "Barroco de Indias," the Colonial Baroque. Picon recalls how Mexico, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, had become a center where one could find products from the different cultures that inhabited the Spanish empire. This was due, in great measure, to the nao de Filipinas, the Manila galleon, carrying to Mexico merchandise from the Far East, to be shipped to Europe by the fleet ofVeracruz, which on its return voyage brought European products to the New World and the Orient. Picon evokes that aspect of the viceroyalty of Mexico by quoting some stanzas from the Grandeza mexicana [The Greatness of Mexico City] by Bernardo de Balbuena, a poem almost exactly contemporaneous with the Espejo de pacienda, which celebrates the notion of the ancient Aztec capital as crossroads and cornucopia. Balbuena writes: La plata del Pini, de Chile el oro viene a parar aqui y de Terrenate clavo fino y canela de Tidoro.

De Cambray telas, de Quinsay rescate, de Sicilia coral, de Siria nardo, de Arabia incienso, y de Onnuz granate; diamantes de la India, y del gallardo Scita balajes y esmeraldas finas, de Goa marfil, de Siam ebano pardo; de Espana 10 mejor, de Filipinas la nata, de Macon 10 mas precioso, de ambas Javas riquezas peregrinas. 28 Silver from Peru, gold from Chile, all end up here, as well as fine cloves from Terrenate and cinnamon from Tidoro. Cloths from Cambral, money from Quinsay, from Sicily corals, perfume from Syria, from Arabia incense, granate from Ormuz;

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diamonds from India, and from the graceful Scita fine rubies and emeralds, ivory from Goa, dark ebony from Siam; from Spain the best, the cream of the Philippines, the most precious things from Macon, exquisite riches from both Javas.

The admixture of diverse elements which Balbuena's great poem celebrates is reflected already in the architecture and the crafts of that country. The great cathedrals, built to compete with the magnificent Aztec temples, incorporate into their ornaments elements of the plants, animals, and mythology of the New World. Even more elements could be found in painting: there soon appeared, in American as well as European painting, fruits and animals in striking colors, which characterized the natural environment of the New World. There was a proliferation of small parrots and macaws, as well as pineapples and other tropical fruits. It is against this background that one has to see the mixture of taina words and mythological deities in Balboa's poem. American fruits were of great interest to the Europeans. Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo delighted in describing them in his history, and Father Jose de Acosta puzzled on how to integrate all those exotic fruits into his scholastic schema. Those unusual products of nature are also reproduced on the friezes and capitals of public bUildings. Life in the great cities of colonial America was eminently spectacular and public, with American nature and mythology serving as ornaments. Inca demons with bulging eyes glare down from the arches of cathedrals, and fruits of many different kinds crowd in the ornamentation of domestic and liturgical objects in the governors' palaces and the churches. Everything was spectacular, pompous, a display of power, primarily to impress the native population, but also to maintain a rigid social stratification. The chaotic accumulation offragments from different cultures is an essential part of the festive public pompousness of the Colonial Baroque. Balboa's poem echoes that tendency. The nymphs and satyrs appear in the forest at the very moment when the people of Bayamo celebrate the rescue of Bishop Altamirano; their costume, those cumbersome skirts, are part of this carnival in which everything is a mask, because nothing belongs to anyone, nothing is

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anybody's own. The Colonial Baroque is surface, festival, mask. Similarly, the depiction of soldiers and their attire is more masquerade than military parade. The culmination of this tendency can perhaps be found, like an emblem, in Carlos de Sigiienza y Gongora's Teateo de virtudes politicas que constituyen a un principe: advertidas en los monarcas antiguos del mexicano imperio [Theater of Political Virtues That Should Make Up a Prince: As Noted in Ancient Monarchs of the Mexican Empire], a text written to celebrate the triumphal arch, adorned with effigies of Aztec gods, which "the noblest, most loyal, imperial city of Mexico built for the purpose of giving a dignified reception to his Excellency the Viceroy Conde de Paredes, Marquis de la Laguna, etc."29 Sigiienza's text is n web of quotations from European authorities in the manner of scholastic discourse, but interlaced with examples from the Mexican emperors, whose biographies are narrated in a style modeled after that of the Loores de los Claros varones de Castilla [Praise of the Virtuous Gentlemen of Castille]. We can now better confront the issue of Nature in the Espejo. Once we rid ourselves of the Romanticism with which Echeverria and his followers approached that poem, we qUickly realize that in it there is no identification with the island's natural environment. The words of taino origin have the same function in the poem that the cultismos and neolOgisms have in the poetry of Gongora. Contrary to what the founders of Cuban literature believed, they are words whose strangeness creates an aesthetic distance rather than promoting identification. For that reason, they appear in conjunction with the mytholOgical deities and, above all, in the midst of the festivities that celebrate the victory over Giron. The guanabanas, gegiras, and caimitos in their strangeness are artificial representations of the American cornucopia; they are ephemeral manifestations, superficial in the literal sense, of a carnivalesque explosion, of a baroque feast. It is also important that nature in Balboa's poem is represented by its fruits, its final products, the end of a process that is not itselfbeing represented, and also that those fruits are listed in the poem without syntagmatic connectives, that is, like a chaotic accumulation. In the same way that they appear in the elaborate friezes of the monuments, where there is hardly a crack between individual figures, the tropical fruits fill the space of the poem without temporal intervals, without syntax, and without hierarchy. American nature, which so preoccupied scholastic thinkers, did

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not place those new kinds offruits in categories that would threaten the closed system of Aristotelian botanies, but accumulated them like additions, or like monstruous transformations which offered themselves to the onlooker in their compelling strangeness. We have to bear in mind how unfamiliar the words Balboa employed sounded to ears conditioned by the mellifluence of renaissance poetry. The fiction created by Echeverria hides a radical difference between the way in which he and his followers perceived nature and the posture that a baroque poet would assume before nature. Octavio paz has explained this difference with great clarity in a brilliant passage from his book on Sor Juana: Although the baroque and romanticism are mannerist, the similarities between them cloak very profound differences. Each, reacting against classicism, proclaimed an aesthetics of the abnormal and the unique; each presented itself as a transgression of norms. But while the romantic transgression centers on the subject, the baroque transgression focuses on the object. Romanticism liberates the subject; the baroque is the art of the metamorphosis of the object. Romanticism is passionate and passive; the baroque is intellectual and active. Romantic transgression culminates in the apotheosis of the subject in its fall; baroque transgressions lead to the appearance of the unheard of object. Romantic poetics is the negation of the object through passion or irony; the subject disappears in the baroque object. Romanticism is explOSion; the baroque is implOSion. The romantic poem is spilled time; the baroque is congealed time. 3D

It is revealing that Placido 00se de la Concepcion Valdes), the Romantic Cuban poet, sings to flowers-of the tobacco plant and the pineapple, for instance-while Balboa exalts fruit. The flower embodies time, metamorphosis, transience. The Cuban fruits appear in the Espejo as the embodiment of a nature that is dead (a naturaleza muerta), fixed, completed, exotic; unusual, but not distinct, in a time that is not that of the "becoming" of the Romantics who discovered the poem and turned it into "the first Cuban poem." This exoticism points to another, even more radical one that distances Balboa from his critics, from his inventors-the criollo exoticism to which Paz also refers. (This exoticism is evident in the recovery of the display of American fruits made by a neo-Baroque painter such as Ramon Diaz Alejandro.)

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The motley multiplicity offruits in the Espejo has its counterpart in the different origins of the characters. In Balboa's poem there are Spaniards from various regions, Africans, Italians, Frenchmen, and Indians. "In the seventeenth century," paz writes, "the aesthetics of the strange expressed with rapture the strangeness of the criollo."31 I suspect that this is precisely the kind of strangeness that the Espejo de paciencia expresses, and not the Cuban-ness attributed to it by Cuban letters, which made this poem the origin ofits origin. The adjectives Balboa uses to describe various nationalities illustrate this quite well: "Ethiopians," "Lutherans," "Islanders" (insulanos, a strange, high-sounding way of referring to Cubans). The fusion of those adjectives will always be a "concierto barroco," a baroque concert, that is, an accumulation ofstrange things, not an ontolOgical synthesis; something strange and unfamiliar, not a delightful fusion of nature, language, and the imagination. The generic filiation of the Espejo points in the same direction: the Ariostesque epic is comical and distant; Medoro is a hero because he is an oddity, much like Salvador. The fact that the inhabitants of Bayamo appear disguised as soldiers straight out of a Renaissance epic recalls that tragicomic masquerade which is the Orlando furioso, Balboa's model. The mirror ("espejo") reflects, but by distorting reality and by inserting its flat and shimmering surface between reality and its representation. One could then, perhaps, correct Paz's proposal concerning the disappearance of the baroque subject into the strange object or monster by saying that the mirror reflects back to the subject the strangeness of the object, which then the subject assumes as its own, an arrogation, it is true, that is always by definition reflexive and eminently superfiCial. The subject then makes, as in Lunarejo or Sor Juana's "Primero sueiio" a spectacle of its rarity, a display of its oddity. This constitutes, against what Paz claims, a movement outward, an ex-pression that turns the Baroque into a proto-Romanticism, perhaps the most genuine one in Spanish American letters. The mirror is the emblem of the Baroque, and the Espejo de paciencia is part of the Colonial Baroque; it does not belong to a New World Middle Ages, if only because there was no such thing. We cannot deny the historical facticity of the work ofEcheverria and his successors up to Lezama, Carpentier, and Benitez Rojo. But neither can we lose Sight of the fact that that facticity is the product of a labOriously created historical fiction.

7.

Poetics and Modernity

in Juan de Espinosa Medrano, Known as Lunarejo

And who was this clever, though disoriented preceptist? -Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo

I feel uncomfortable opening with the commonplace that the author that I intend to study has been ignored or poorly read by earlier critics. However, in the case oOuan de Espinosa Medrano, known as Lunarejo because ofa birthmark on his face, the facts-or the absence thereof-justify the platitude.! The reassessment of the Baroque, which has been going on for over fifty years, has barely affected Lunarejo. What is more disgraceful is that Lunarejo is rarely read, even in the most literal sense of the word, in spite of the routine praise that he receives in literary histories and antholOgies and of having been proclaimed the first Latin American critic. 2 Worse yet, he is not read because there are no reliable editions of his works, and even the faulty ones that exist are not eaSily available. For example, in the case of the Apologetico en favor de don Luis de Gongora [Apology in Defense of Don Luis de Gongora], students of viceregal literature, including Jose Toribio Medina, have been content with alluding to the 1662 first edition, though sometimes doubting its existence, and to reproducing the 1925 edition by Ventura Garcia Calderon, which is based on a 1694 edition. 3 Luis Alberto Sanchez quotes from the Apologetico what appeared cited by Manuel de Mendiburu in his Diccionario historico-biogrcifico, and other critics continue to use equally secondhand sources as text. Details about Espinosa Medrano's life are also imprecise and beclouded by fiction. Clorinda Matto de Turner wove an Indigenist legend around Lunarejo, which was repeated not long ago by Mario Vargas Llosa. 4 It turns out, however, that archival research, carried out mostly by Luis Jaime Cisneros and Pedro Guibovich Perez, shows that there is no evidence that Espinosa Medrano was a pitifully poor Indian, but on the contrary, that he was a man offairly substantial means, in no way the pathetic figure painted by the novelists. 5 The recent discoveries made by scholars bring Lunarejo

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closer to the figure of the "baroque gentleman" elaborated by Jose Lezama Lima, which he proposes typifies the period: "That American baroque gentleman is the first man to feel authentically at home in what is already our own. He dwells in his estate, canonry or pleasure house with a modesty that augments the amusement of the intellect. His type appears when the tumult of the Conquest and the distribution of the colonized landscape are finished. He is the man who walks to the window balcony to observe, who sorts out with deliberation the sand in front of the deVOUring mirror, who places himself next to the cascade oflunar light erected in a dream about his own sense of belonging. On taking his pleasure with language, language braids itself and multiplies; the pleasure ofliving swells up in him and becomes fervent. Living has turned him into a large, subtle ear, which, from the far comer of his living room, untangles the imbroglios and gathers together the simple leaves."6 This is a far cry from the poor mestizo preacher literary lore had invented. Like other colonial writers, such as Silvestre de Balboa, Lunarejo has been the object of fabrications that result from the process offounding Latin American literary history. This is a project that was initiated by the Romantics during the nineteenth century, but that situated the origins of Latin American literature in colonial times.? Espinosa Medrano's importance cannot be put in doubt, in spite of the disorienting history of his reception. The Apologetico and the Nouena Marauilla [The Ninth Wonder]' his collection of sermons, deserve to appear in the same canon as Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz's Respuesta a Sor Filotea [A Reply to Sor Filotea], and Carlos de Sigiienza y Gongora's Infortunios de Alonso Ramirez [Misfortunes of Alonso Ramirezj.B Everyone knows Menendez y Pelayo'S lapidary phrases about the Apologetico (which were no doubt stony): "it is one of the juiciest fruits of primitive Creole literature"; and "it is a pearl cast into the dungheap ofGongorist poetics."9 But Damaso Alonso, who had no reason to be profligate with either praise or scorn, and who knew better than anyone the history of Gongora's commentators, asserts that Espinosa Medrano, "although a latecomer, is one of the best of those who engaged in those literary wars . . . in his defense of Gongora one can perceive a critical sensibility that is generally lacking in other commentators."l0 The bitter and protracted disputes over the author of the Soledades [The Solitudes] are Significant

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because they represent, in Spanish-language literature, the quereille des anciens et des modernes, in which a new poetics was at stake, one which in Gracian's formulations anticipated very modem critical ideas in Western literature. In this struggle Espinosa Medrano sides most resolutely with the modems. Of course, I am not the first to remark on Lunarejo's modernity. Susana Howell finds in the Apologetico "some ideas that, without their being developed by Espinosa Medrano, have obvious links with critical and theoretical notions of our times."!! Eduardo Hopkins has made a similar observation, comparing one of Espinosa Medrano's ideas with theoretical propositions made by the Russian Formalist Yuri Tinianov.!2 And Alfredo Roggiano has written: "This conception of form as a creative activity of language, which subsumes referents and meanings in an ethos of writing, as Roland Barthes has taught, is what has been revalued since the romantic visionaries, the French Symbolists, Croce's aestheticism, and even structuralism and semiotics today."!3 But, what does this modernity consist of specifically, and what does it share with other writers of the Colonial Baroque?14 I shall follow three approaches in studying the Apologetico. The first will lead me to consider Espinosa y Medrano's self-location or self-identification, vis-a.-vis the origins of his discourse, which extends, naturally, to that of other viceregal writers. The second will consist of an analysis of Lunarejo's ideas about poetry, particularly with regard to Petrachism and the doctrine ofimitatio. The third will take me to the foundations of the text of the Apologetico, to its enabling pretexts, by comparison with other writers of the Colonial Baroque. We shall see if these avenues lead to a discrete square in that ideal baroque city, where there shine, among others, the statues of Balbuena, Sigiienza, and Sor Juana, and in which we may begin to erect the monument owed the Sublime Doctor, as Espinosa Medrano was also known in his time. I guess that one could adapt Montesquieu's character's famous question, "Comment peut-on etre persan?" and ask "How could one be a Peruvian writer in the seventeenth century?" What is remarkable in the Apologetico is the insistence with which Espinosa Medrano, as well as the writers of the front matter identify themselves, geographically and culturally, with a group that defines and

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delimits their discursive activity. They name who they are by reference to where they are. For example, in the "Censura" or "Appraisal," one of the routine assessments that had to be included in books at that time, Doctor D. Fray Fulgencio Maldonado uses what already appears to be a rhetorical commonplace among his associates, when he compares the rich mineral resources of Peru with its wealth of "ingenios," of "wits": "que donde crio Dios mas qUilatados, y copiosos los tesoros de la tierra deposito tambien los ingenios del cielo" ["For, where God created the most valuable and copious treasures of the soil, he also deposited celestial wits"]. It seems to be a topic because the comparison also appears in Doctor Alonso Bravo de Paredes y QUinones's "Aprobacion" or "Approval," another formality that appeared in books then: "siendo su ingenio, no el ensaye del oro y la plata, que prodigas dan sus brutas penas; de los grandes talentos si, que produce el mineraje racional de sus hijos" ["being his wit not merely the gold and silver setting that generously supply its brute rocks, but one of the great talents that the rational mines of its sons provide"]. Paredes y Quinones himself uses a suggestive epithet when he refers to Peru as "esta escondida America" ["this hidden America"]. Miguel de QUinones, Professor of Theology, Guardian and Regent of Studies at the Convent of Our Father Saint Francis at the city ofCuzco, another of the contributors to the preliminaries, makes a geographico-meteorolOgical identification that is much more precise and dramatic, when he says that Espinosa Medrano had "muchas si [costumbres] de grande ingenio y letras, de tantas que con toda perfeccion profesa con credito grande de nuestros desesperados climas para ultramarinos pechos" ["many of the qualities of someone who with great wit and talent for letters, among the many that he exercises with great credit to our desperate climes and for the benefit of hearts beyond the sea"]. This hidden America, which is desperate, that produces not only precious metals but wits, addresses hearts beyond the sea that are different and that are found outside the perimeter of these vehement and anxious circumscriptions. Once the borders of this discourse are drawn, the territory can become a launching pad for more hostile messages against that Other that is powerful and faraway. Thus in the first line of his laudatory sonnet, licentiate Don Bernabe Gascon challenges Faria, Lunarejo's opponent, to "Sienta la herida del harpon Indiano" ["suffer the wound

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from the American harpoon"]. This tense exchange allows one to define more clearly the self-designations, as if in drawing a map with various countries, one were later to trace a name over each empty space. Indiano is the adjective used most by these American writers to refer to themselves, which suggests that it is the resentful appropriation of a name that Originally was anything but laudatory. In 1611, Covarrubias writes in his Tesoro de la lan8ua castellana 0 espaflOla, with barely contained rancor: "indiano, he who has gone to live in the Indies, who ordinarily returns rich."IS Criollo is also used quite often, whereas austral and antartico-with a clear Latin backgroundappear to be used most often to refer to the area. 16 The cardinal point that deSignates the strange territory from which these authors write is a word that is almost still Latin, as ifit were part ofan inscription chiseled on the facade of some imposing bUilding. Naming causes estrangement at the same time it baptizes and appropriates. This somewhat belligerent deSCription of the native territory in the front matter of the Apolo8etico culminates in the preliminary texts written by Espinosa Medrano himself In his dedication to Luis Mendez de Haro, Duke Count of Olivares, he proclaims, with a mixture of humility and pride: "A los Principes grandes suelen presentarse la Aues peregnnas, los paxaros que crio Region remota: vna pluma del Orbe Indiano se abate a los pies de V. Exc. no de buelo tan humilde, que por 10 menos no ha saluado el Antartico mar, y el Gaditano" ["Strange birds appear before great princes, fowl from remote areas. A qUill from the Indian Orb surrenders at Your Excellency'S feet, whose flight is not so modest that it has not crossed the Antartic Sea and the Sea of Cadiz"].!7 He adds (in the Baroque it is always a question of adding): "Ie desseamos eternizados los que en tan remoto Hemisferio viuimos distantes del cora