Millennial Cervantes: New Currents in Cervantes Studies 1496217624, 9781496217622

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction xiiiBruce R. Burningham
Part 1. Cervantes in His Original Contexts
1. From Literary Painting to Marian Iconography: The Cult of Auristela in Cervantes’s Persiles y Sigismunda • Mercedes Alcalá Galán
2. “Dios Me Entiende y No Digo Más”: Nominalism, Humanism, and Modernity in Don Quixote • Rosilie Hernández
3. Obscene Onomastics and the Sheep-Army Episode of Don Quixote • Sherry Velasco
Part 2. Cervantes in Comparative Contexts
4. Befriending and Being Friends in Cervantes’s La Galatea (1585) and Sidney’s Arcadia (1593) • Marsha S. Collins
5. Cervantine Curiosity and the English Stage • Marina S. Brownlee
6. QuixoNation: Unfinished Adaptations of Don Quixote in Cold War U.S. Cinema • William P. Childers
Part 3. Cervantes in Wider Cultural Contexts
7. Don Quixote and the American Culinary Arts • Carolyn A. Nadeau
8. Cervantes, Reality Literacy, and Fundamentalism • David Castillo and William Egginton
9. Don Quixote and the Rise of Cyberorality • Bruce R. Burningham
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

M i l l e n n i a l C e rva n t e s

N e w H i s pa n i s m s Anne J. Cruz, series editor

MILLENNIAL C ER VA N T E S New Currents in Cervantes Studies

Edited by Bruce R . Burningham

U n i v e r s i t y o f N e b r a s ka P r e s s   Lincoln

© 2020 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska Portions of chapter 4 first appeared in Imagining Arcadia in Renaissance Romance by Marsha S. Collins (New York: Routledge, 2016). Portions of chapter 5 first appeared as “Experimental Architecture: Cervantes’ Lothario on the English Stage,” Republics of Letters 4, no. 2 (2015): 1–­12. Portions of chapter 8 first appeared in Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media by David Castillo and William Egginton (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Burningham, Bruce R., 1964–­editor. Title: Millennial Cervantes: new currents in Cervantes studies / edited by Bruce R. Burningham. Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [2020] | Series: New Hispanisms | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2019041553 isbn 9781496217622 (hardback) isbn 9781496219701 (epub) isbn 9781496219718 (mobi) isbn 9781496219725 (pdf) Subjects: lcsh: Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 1547–­1616—­Criticism and interpretation. | Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 1547–­1616. Don Quixote. | Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 1547–­1616—­Influence. Classification: lcc pq6348.a3 m55 2020 | ddc 863/.3—­dc23 lc record available at https://​lccn​.loc​.gov​/2019041553 Set in Arno by Mikala R. Kolander. Designed by N. Putens.

For Anne Cruz

Contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction xiii Bruce R. Burningham Part 1. Cervantes in His Original Contexts

1. From Literary Painting to Marian Iconography: The Cult of Auristela in Cervantes’s Persiles y Sigismunda  3 Mercedes Alcalá Galán 2. “Dios Me Entiende y No Digo Más”: Nominalism, Humanism, and Modernity in Don Quixote  25 Rosilie Hernández 3. Obscene Onomastics and the Sheep-­Army Episode of Don Quixote  51 Sherry Velasco Part 2. Cervantes in Comparative Contexts

4. Befriending and Being Friends in Cervantes’s La Galatea (1585) and Sidney’s Arcadia (1593) 81 Marsha S. Collins

5. Cervantine Curiosity and the English Stage 107 Marina S. Brownlee 6. QuixoNation: Unfinished Adaptations of Don Quixote in Cold War U.S. Cinema 123 William P. Childers Part 3. Cervantes in Wider Cultural Contexts

7. Don Quixote and the American Culinary Arts 167 Carolyn A. Nadeau 8. Cervantes, Reality Literacy, and Fundamentalism 203 David Castillo and William Egginton 9. Don Quixote and the Rise of Cyberorality 225 Bruce R. Burningham Contributors 247 Index 249

Illustrations

1. Alegoría de la Virgen Inmaculada by Juan de Roelas 12 2. Compañón del Perro from Pedacio Dioscórides Anazarbeo  68 3. Orchid from Phytognomonica 69 4. The Housekeeper Serves Alonso Quijano His Meal by Daniel-­Nicolas Chodowiecki 168 5. Eating abadejo at the Inn by Antoine Clouzier 171 6. Sancho Enjoying the Feast at the Wedding of Camacho by Albert 172 7. The “Don Quixote” dining room at Columbia restaurant 176 8. Don Quixote in front of Diego’s Mexican Cantina 179 9. Mural of Don Quixote and Sancho in the Don Quixote restaurant 180 10. Don Quixote Tilting at Windmills at Café Ibérico 181 11. Grilled sardines from the Taberna de Haro 183 12. Graph showing U.S. visitors to Spain 184

13. Graph showing Americans studying abroad in Spain 185 14. Aceitunas “Ferran Adrià” from Jaleo restaurant 188 15. Croquetas from Jaleo restaurant 189 16. Modern salpicón at é restaurant 190 17. Modern quince and wafers at é restaurant 191

Acknowledgments

Many people have had a hand in the publication of this volume, and I owe a profound debt of gratitude to them all. First and foremost, Millennial Cervantes would not have been possible without Rosilie Hernández, whose brilliant organization of the 2014 National Cervantes Symposium, titled “New Currents in Cervantes Studies,” provided the core group of essays for this volume. Second, I would like to thank all the contributors for their hard work, generosity, and patience in seeing this endeavor through to fruition. And third (but certainly not least), an enormous thanks goes to everyone involved with the New Hispanisms series at the University of Nebraska Press, particularly to Anne Cruz (for her immense generosity and support), and to Alisa Plant, Courtney Ochsner, and Heather Stauffer for shepherding this project through the process.

xi

Introduction Bruce R. Burningham

The academic world has experienced rapid and fundamental change during the past fifty years. The first wave of cultural change came in the wake of the social movements of the 1960s that not only led to an increasing diversity among the people working and studying on college campuses but also gave rise to a rich multiplicity of theoretical approaches within the humanities and the social sciences. What had once been seen as a rather linear, positivist progression of knowledge gave way to a rich montage of overlapping, intersecting, complementary, and occasionally competing approaches that include deconstruction, psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory, new historicism, Marxian approaches, cultural studies, queer theory, and critical race theory (to name just a few of the most prominent). What Terry Eagleton says of the “rise of English” (1983, 17–­53) as an ideologically driven academic discipline in the late-­nineteenth and early-­twentieth centuries is equally true of “Spanish,” although within the U.S. context what was once a decidedly Eurocentric discipline (one that privileged Spanish Peninsular—­and, in particular, “golden age”—­studies) has also transformed itself since the 1960s into a field where Latin American literature and culture have achieved a position of clear institutional prominence. This development has prompted a recent trend among academic departments across the United States that have abandoned older, more traditional names like “the Department of Spanish and Portuguese” in favor of names such as “the Department of Latin American and Iberian xiii

Cultures” (to use Columbia University as just one example). In this way the “New Hispanisms” of the twenty-­first century involve a great deal more than just notions of Spain and its former, “peripheral” colonies and now engage a lush mosaic of interrelated cultures both within and across Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. The second wave, no less important than the first, came in the wake of the “information revolution” that occurred with the rise of widespread microcomputing in the 1980s and the coming online of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, which radically transformed the way scholars perform the tasks necessary for the production and distribution of cultural analysis. Where once humanities research entailed laborious initial processes only tangentially related to actual analysis, the labor-­saving aspects of the information age have made it possible for scholars to devote much more time to the essential work of reading, thinking, and writing. Not long ago researching a topic for a critical essay required long hours in an academic library’s reference section perusing the various volumes of the Modern Language Association’s annual bibliography in order to handwrite a preliminary list of potential sources. This step was followed by an equally labor-­intensive search of the library’s card catalog to determine that the institution actually owned a critical mass of these potential sources. Next came another lengthy search among the library stacks for the pertinent books and journal volumes. All this research eventually culminated in handwriting what was literally a “manuscript” before handing it off to someone else who would prepare the final typescript for submission.1 Today most of this initial legwork has been replaced by electronic databases (like the online mla International Bibliography) from which scholars are able not only to email themselves preformatted lists of potential sources but also often can immediately download pdfs of many of the articles themselves, thus bypassing the need to photocopy these publications for future reference. Both of these revolutions have had a profound impact—­conceptually as well as practically—­on the world of Cervantes scholarship. As I recently noted elsewhere (Burningham 2017b), a basic keyword search of “Miguel de xiv Burningham

Cervantes” in the mla’s online bibliography for the eighty years between 1888 and 1968 yields a list of roughly 800 sources. A similar search for the next thirty years (1968–­98) brings up a list of more than 3,300—­a fourfold increase undoubtedly related to both the expansion of the U.S. system of higher education during the 1960s and 1970s and the proliferation of the new approaches mentioned above. More importantly using the same search terms for the most recent twenty years (1998–­2018) yields a list of over 4,100 publications, which means that more than half the total number of books and articles on Cervantes currently cataloged in the mla online bibliography were published in the last two decades—­another remarkable doubling of the total body of knowledge undoubtedly related to the availability of the World Wide Web in the 1990s.2 In this regard the mla’s unusual decision to publish a new “second edition,” coedited by James A. Parr and Lisa Vollendorf, of its original 1984 first edition of Approaches to Teaching Cervantes’s “Don Quixote” (edited by Richard Bjornson) is a recognition that we have entered a new phase of Cervantes scholarship. As Parr and Vollendorf note in their preface to the second edition, “the dramatic changes in literary theory, methodology, and pedagogy in the [years since the publication of the first edition] have changed the ways many students and scholars approach Cervantes’s text” (2015, ix). These two important waves of change—­one methodological, one technological—­have also overlapped with an unusually large number of academic conferences held during the past quarter century (many organized to mark the four hundredth anniversary of one or another Cervantine commemoration between 2005 and 2016). Three of these numerous conferences are particularly germane to the scope of this volume. The first—­which more or less coincided with the inauguration of the World Wide Web—­was held at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1996 and responded directly to the wave of methodological change. Co-­organized by Anne J. Cruz and Carroll B. Johnson, “Colloquies in Conflict: Cervantes and His Postmodern Constituencies” sought to resituate Cervantes studies in the age of what Paul Ricoeur had earlier characterized as “the school of suspicion” (1970, 32), thus opening up the Introduction  xv

traditional, canonical Cervantes to readings that brought new and important perspectives to the debates. (Recall, too, that the decade preceding this important ucla conference had seen the rise of the so-­called Yale School of criticism—­itself announced in the 1979 book Deconstruction and Criticism, cowritten by Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller—­which was extremely influential across the U.S. academy and beyond, even if the Yale School itself had more or less run its course by 1990.) As Johnson rightly remarks in his introduction to an edited volume (Cruz and Johnson 1999) published in the wake of this 1996 ucla conference: Interpretative differences have always characterized Cervantine scholarship, but the present situation appears to be qualitatively distinct from what we are used to. It is not so much a question of different vocabularies, although every -­ism has its own idiom, which inhibits mutual comprehension. And it is not so much the standard kind of displaced oedipal conflict that used to be called the generation gap, although that conflict is still alive and well, and plays a not insignificant part in the current debates. The crucial question raised by the postmodern situation, or moment, has to do with the nature of truth and the goals of our intellectual enterprise. (xi)

Indeed, as Cruz notes in her own contribution to this post-­conference volume: “Those essays in this collection that champion postmodern theories as legitimate approaches to Cervantes seek to demonstrate that, in de-­essentializing literary texts, these theories advance our dialectical understanding of the texts and their authors as primarily cultural products” (Cruz and Johnson 1999, 135). In this regard Cruz’s own chapter, pointedly titled “Cervantes and His Feminist Alliances,” provides an overview of what she rightly laments as “Hispanism’s belated feminism” (141). It also issues a call to arms to the very generation of feminist scholars that over the past two decades has made good on Cruz’s appeal to dismantle the “bipolarities imposed on Cervantes’s narratives by masculinist modes of reading” (146)—­the success of which is clearly demonstrated by the recent publication of Perspectives on Early Modern Women in Iberia and xvi Burningham

the Americas: Studies in Law, Society, Art and Literature in Honor of Anne J. Cruz (Martín and Quintero 2015), which runs some 642 pages and contains chapters by thirty-­four scholars. The second of these three conferences—­which responded directly to the wave of technological change since 1996—­occurred some five years later, in April 2001 at the University of Southern California. Organized by me and titled “Idle Readers in a Frenetic Age” (in a deliberate reference to the opening line of Cervantes’s prologue to part 1 of Don Quixote [1978, 1:50]), this first California Cervantes symposium of the new millennium asked participants to “explore the issue of ‘reading’ Cervantes (broadly defined) in the self-­congratulatory age of ‘globalization,’ ‘hypertexts,’ and high-­speed internet access” (Burningham 2001). Fundamental questions posed by the call-­for-­papers included “What does it mean to be an ‘idle reader’ at a time when ‘reading’ is being displaced more and more by ‘web surfing’ and when newly published ‘books’ can be downloaded into a Palm Pilot or other such high-­tech, ‘e-­book’ devices? How will changes in our reading praxes influence our interpretation of Cervantes’s work? How will his texts resonate in an increasingly ‘interconnected’ world?” (Burningham 2001). Among the various papers delivered at this conference (see Fraser 2001; Hernández Araico 2001; and Stroud 2001), Eduardo Urbina’s report (2001) on the database of Cervantes imagery that he was then in the early process of building at Texas a&m University stands out, given that this database has proved to be such an important digital resource for Cervantes scholars worldwide. And while some of the technology described in the cited call for papers may appear somewhat quaint in a world now dominated by social media, the issues explored at this 2001 conference remain pertinent, as a series of recent articles published in Harper’s magazine demonstrate (see Caplan-­Bricker 2018; Self 2018; Solnit 2018; and Turner 2019). The third of these three conferences—­which, to a large extent, responded synergistically to both waves of change—­was held at the University of Illinois at Chicago in April 2014. Organized by Rosilie Hernández, this first-­ever National Cervantes Symposium took the place Introduction  xvii

of the separate regional Cervantes symposia that are normally held each year in California, Chicago, Florida, Texas, and the Northeast region. Titled “New Currents in Cervantes Studies” (from which the present volume borrows its subtitle), this 2014 symposium featured some thirty-­ five speakers from all over the United States and Canada (and from as far away as Dublin and Paris) and focused on a range of recent scholarly trends, from cognitive literary studies to ekphrasis, from the senses and affect to animal studies, from the poetics of space to the performative turn (Hernández 2013). As Hernández noted at the time in her closing remarks on the “present and future” of the field, the future of Cervantes studies is not a new concern to any of us who actively work in the field. . . . The question, seemingly uncomplicated—­we all work in the present looking towards the future of the field in general and our own research in particular—­is nonetheless often fraught with tension. This is especially the case when it is articulated within the larger context of the humanities, as humanists of all sorts struggle to defend their autonomy and claims of service to the public under the increasingly menacing external pressures of the market economy, right-­wing politics, depleted state funds, and shifting cultural values. (2014)

Within the landscape of these “shifting cultural values,” Hernández’s response to this newly fraught terrain included a call to “reflect upon our intellectual and disciplinary practices, our collaborations with other scholars within and outside Cervantes and Spanish early modern studies” in order to “effectively renew and even transform the boundaries of the discipline while maintaining the highest standards for scholarly rigor and upholding the integrity of the field” (2014). It is within this context that we offer Millennial Cervantes: New Currents in Cervantes Studies. Drawing principally on a select group of scholars who presented papers at the 2014 symposium in Chicago but amplified by other scholars whose work complements that of the symposium participants, Millennial Cervantes explores some of the most important recent trends in Cervantes scholarship in the twenty-­first century. As such this volume xviii Burningham

seeks to serve as a platform for showcasing the research of some of the leading Cervantes scholars working in the United States today. Thus this volume not only articulates the state of Cervantes studies during the first two decades of the new millennium (from adaptation to ekphrasis, from gender theory to political satire, from the culinary arts to the digital humanities) but also functions as a performance of this very millennial scholarship as we move further into a century that promises both unimagined technological advances and the concomitant cultural changes that will naturally adhere to this new technology (whatever it may be). The chapters in Millennial Cervantes are divided into three parts conceptually organized along thematic and methodological lines that move outward in a series of concentric circles. The first part, “Cervantes in His Original Contexts,” features chapters that bring new insights to these texts within the primary context of early modern Iberian culture. Part 2, “Cervantes in Comparative Contexts,” is composed of chapters that examine Cervantes’s works in conjunction with those of the English-­ speaking world, in both the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Part 3, “Cervantes in Wider Cultural Contexts,” considers Cervantes’s relationship to other cultural issues. Whereas part 2 primarily focuses on “adaptations” of Cervantes’s works across space and time, part 3 examines Cervantes’s works—­principally Don Quixote—­as points of departure for other cultural products and wider intellectual debates. Cervantes in His Original Contexts

The first chapter of part 1, Mercedes Alcalá Galán’s “From Literary Painting to Marian Iconography: The Cult of Auristela in Cervantes’s Persiles y Sigismunda,” is part of a recent trend in Cervantes studies that focuses on the concept of ekphrasis—­an approach notably made prominent by Frederick de Armas, whose publications in this area include his monograph Quixotic Frescoes (2006) and two edited volumes, Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age (2004) and Ekphrasis in the Age of Cervantes (2005), and who has mentored a generation of important scholars since leading a 2003 National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar Introduction  xix

on Cervantes and Italian Renaissance art at the University of Chicago. Alcalá Galán’s contribution to the present volume—­like her “Retórica visual: Ékfrasis y teoría de la ilustración gráfica en el Quijote” (2015) and “¿Qué ve Cide Hamete? Omnisciencia y visualidad en Don Quijote II” (2016)—­examines the role of the visual arts in Cervantes’s works. But where Alcalá Galán’s earlier publications focus on Don Quixote, this chapter looks at Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda in order to explore the way in which Cervantes’s posthumously published last novel problematizes the “genealogy [of Auristela’s portrait] in the narrative as a work of art through copies of copies.” In this way Alcalá Galán argues that “the iconographic appearances of [this portrait] not only are related to each other by the narrative but also play an essential role both in the novel’s meaning and in its literary conception.” The second chapter of this part, Rosilie Hernández’s “‘Dios Me Entiende y No Digo Más’: Nominalism, Humanism, and Modernity in Don Quixote,” flows from her long-­standing engagement with the work of various philosophers (particularly humanists) and their role in shaping early modern society (see Hernández-­Pecoraro 2003, 2004, 2005, 2010; and Hernández 2012). Moreover, Hernández’s interest here in the intersection of humanism and the pastoral is also related to the recent work of several other Hispanists who examine the role of the pastoral in the rise of modernity (Boruchoff 2004, 2006, 2011; Irigoyen-­García 2008, 2010, 2011; and Stoopen Galán 2007; see also Hernández-­Pecoraro 1998). Like Alcalá Galán, Hernández focuses on the question of subjectivity. In her particular case, however, she challenges “the assumption . . . that the theological and philosophical foundation of the Supreme Being in Don Quixote is per force a stalwart divine essence of unchanging universals” and argues instead that we can “better understand the relationship between the universal and the particular (bound to the quandaries of perspectivism) in Cervantes’s novel by turning to theological nominalism, a system of thought first formalized by William of Ockham.” In this way readers of Don Quixote, she says, particularly in part 2 of that work, “encounter a world where character after character wills his or her world xx Burningham

and wills himself or herself into the world of others, affirming his or her individual existence with little regard for externally determined reason or predictable design.” For Hernández such agency forges a “multiplicity of linguistic perspectivism” that defines “the cusp of the emergence of modern subjectivity.” The third chapter of part 1, Sherry Velasco’s “Obscene Onomastics and the Sheep-­Army Episode of Don Quixote,” shares with a number of her recent publications a keen focus on sexuality and the body (2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2010). As part of a larger trend in early modern Iberian and Latin American studies that examine gender, sexuality, and desire (see Bergmann 2011; Martín 1999, 2008; Sears 2000; Ter Horst 1996; Weimer 2000), Velasco’s chapter is reminiscent of Louise O. Vasvari’s earlier “Vegetal-­Genital Onomastics in the Libro de buen amor” (1988) in that Velasco examines a number of “alternative” (and deliberately bawdy) literary influences that inform Don Quixote, thus demonstrating that Cervantes “was keen to interrogate sexuality’s persistent presence in many of the disciplines and issues of his day” in order to recognize “the importance of semantics and onomastics for understanding the interdependent history of sexual knowledge and political agendas.” Cervantes in Comparative Contexts

The first chapter of this second part, Marsha S. Collins’s “Befriending and Being Friends in Cervantes’s La Galatea (1585) and Sidney’s Arcadia (1593),” adds another voice to the increasing number of scholars interested in models of early modern friendship—­particularly female friendship—­as well as to the aforementioned academic interest in pastoral literature. In terms of the latter, Collins’s chapter is part of her long engagement with the representation of “Arcadia” (2004), the performance of the pastoral in the eclogues of Lope de Vega’s Rimas (2007), the construction of identity in Jorge de Montemayor’s Siete libros de la Diana and Lope’s Arcadia (2013), and the Renaissance “imagining” of Arcadia in a pan-­European context (2016). Regarding the former Collins’s chapter complements the work of Lisa Vollendorf (2005), Ellen Anderson (2010), and Sherry Introduction  xxi

Velasco (2011) on female friendships in early modern Spain, and of both Juan Pablo Gil-­Oslé (2013) and Mehl Allan Penrose (2014) on “imperfect” friendships and queer desire, respectively. Here Collins explores the theme of friendship in the pastoral romances of Cervantes’s La Galatea and Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. She not only argues that “Cervantes’s rich, experimental exploration of friendship in La Galatea likely proved to be one of the catalytic forces that moved his creative process in the direction of Don Quixote” and other later works, but she also asks whether Sidney’s “equally complex and innovative deployment of amity in Arcadia would have moved or changed his literary work in fundamental ways” as well. While still remaining focused on the early modern period, the second chapter of this part, Marina S. Brownlee’s “Cervantine Curiosity and the English Stage,” examines the issue of cultural and generic translation of Don Quixote’s intercalated tale “El curioso impertinente” in relation to adaptations by Aphra Behn (The Amorous Prince, or The Curious Husband) and John Crowne (The Married Beau, or The Curious Impertinent). Brownlee’s contribution to the present volume parallels a much broader discussion that has followed in the wake of the “rediscovery” of a lost play by William Shakespeare, titled Cardenio and based on another episode from Don Quixote (see Bourus and Taylor 2013; Chartier 2013; and Taylor and Wagschal 2013). But it also flows from Brownlee’s established interest in adaptation and literary transformation (see Brownlee and Brownlee 1985; Brownlee 2000, 2015a, 2015b). Complementing such recent work as that of Gregory Baum (2014) and Jorge Figueroa Dorrego (2018), Brownlee’s chapter argues that The Amorous Prince and The Married Beau “illustrate the dynamic nature of [Walter] Benjamin’s ‘material content’ (the work and its initial historical context) and the ensuing dialogue of the author, text, reader, and successive works) in the textual ‘afterlife.’” The final chapter of part 2, William P. Childers’s “QuixoNation: Unfinished Adaptations of Don Quixote in Cold War U.S. Cinema,” moves us from the context of Cervantes in early modern England to that of Cervantes in the United States of the second half of the twentieth century. Like many other recent publications (see Burningham 2008; Giorgini xxii Burningham

2015; Latorre, Martínez Illán, and Pronkevych 2015; McMorran 2006; and Romero-­Díaz 2007), Childers’s chapter explores Cervantes’s impact on world literature and culture and is related to his long-­standing interest in adaptations of Don Quixote (see Childers 2002, 2010, 2015a, 2015b, 2016, 2017). But where others have examined the ongoing influence of the so-­called Romantic Don Quixote (Close 1977), particularly as mediated through Miguel de Unamuno’s La vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1987) and Dale Wasserman’s romanticized Man of La Mancha (1966), Childers is interested in a completely different Don Quixote, one not quite so idealistic. In this chapter Childers thus explores three never-­completed film projects by Orson Welles, Harold L. Humes, and Waldo Salt, respectively, and argues that such adaptations represent a strain of counterculture “quixotism” different from what emerged following the success of Man of La Mancha. For Childers this alternative quixotism “rejects received ideas” and “conventional notions of self and identity,” thus allowing artists like Welles, Humes, and Salt “to create their own form of discretion in a social and political environment that is intolerant of deviance.” Cervantes in Wider Cultural Contexts

The first chapter of part 3, Carolyn A. Nadeau’s “Don Quixote and the American Culinary Arts,” is part of an emerging trend in literary and cultural studies that grew out of wider concerns regarding material culture. Among recent “culinary” work by cultural historians are publications by Diane M. Spivey (1999) and Igor Cusack (2000) on African cuisines (both in the diaspora and as an element of national identity); by Juliana Duque Mahecha (2016) and Ramona L. Peréz (2016) on the cultural contexts of the cuisines of Colombia and Mexico (the latter work particularly focuses on issues related to migration, both physical and cultural); and by Manuela Marín (1997), F. Xavier Medina (2005), Rafael Chabrán (2002), Lara Anderson (2013), and Joseph-­Maria Garcia-­Funentes, Manuel Guàrdia Bassols, and José Luis Oyón Bañales (2014) on the culinary culture of the Iberian Peninsula from the time of al-­Andalus through contemporary Cataluña. This growing corpus of research—­which involves both Introduction  xxiii

visual culture and literary texts—­also includes specific work by Leonardo Mauricio Bacarreza (2013) on the relationship between food, eating, and identity in early modern Spain, and by Manuel Fernández Nieto (2006) and Pina Palma (2009) on food in Don Quixote. Of course Nadeau’s own work on culinary issues also includes publications related to Francisco de Quevedo’s poetry (2009), Cervantes’s “Rinconete y Cortadillo” (2018), and Don Quixote (2005, 2006)—­all of which culminated with her recent monograph Food Matters: Alonso Quijano’s Diet and the Discourse of Food in Early Modern Spain (2016). In this chapter Nadeau looks at the “connection between Cervantes’s most famous novel and the American culinary arts by first bringing to light the presence of food in Don Quixote and then considering the effect of both the novel and Spanish cuisine on American dining and culinary sensibility.” The second chapter in part 3 is David Castillo and William Egginton’s “Cervantes, Reality Literacy, and Fundamentalism.” Publishing both individually and in tandem, Castillo and Egginton have been major voices among scholars exploring the rise of modern subjectivity, the baroque, and the relation of the neo-­baroque to contemporary popular culture. While such scholarly interest in the neo-­baroque initially emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s (see Overesch 1982 and Pasero 1979), this research really took off in the 1990s (see Brownlee 1995; Cro 1995; Degli-­ Esposti 1996a, 1996b; González Echevarría 1993; Reijen 1992; Reinert 2001; Rolando Pérez 1992; and Wollen 1993), often in connection with film studies. In this latter regard, Angela Ndalianis (1997, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2011, 2012a, 2012b) has published a number of important studies on diverse issues, including spectatorship and aesthetics in various media forms ranging from graphic novels and video games to television shows and movies. Castillo’s individual contribution to this growing corpus of neo-­baroque publications includes (among several others) his examination of horror vacui (2005), his study of exemplarity gone awry in baroque fantasy (2008), his exploration of the connection between Don Quixote and “road movies” (2013), his tracing of a distinctly Cervantine form of satire in the media work of Sacha Baron Cohen and Steven Colbert xxiv Burningham

(2015), and, most recently, his work on zombies (2016). Egginton’s own prolific work, of course, has been highly influential, from studies of early modern subjectivity as “theatricality” (2003, 2010) to early modern spatial holes and folds (2001, 2005), from the baroque as a problem of thought (2009) to Cervantes as the man who invented fiction (2016). Working together Castillo and Egginton have also published an impressive body of work on early modern ideology that began in the early 1990s (Castillo and Egginton 1994; Egginton and Castillo 1994) and culminated with their recent monograph Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (2017). Their chapter in this volume, which is closely related to Medialogies, confronts what has been called “the crisis of the humanities” in order to argue that what is needed is “an engaged and engaging humanities to rescue our universities and . . . our communities, from the neoliberal orthodoxy that defines our reality through media framing.” The third chapter of part 3 (and the final chapter of the volume) is my own contribution, “Don Quixote and the Rise of Cyberorality,” which flows out of the same trends exhibited by Castillo and Egginton’s work described above, and which is also the product of my ongoing interest in connecting Cervantes’s early modern concerns to those of our own postmodern era (see Burningham 2008, 2010, 2015, 2016, 2017b). However, where my own earlier work (like that of Ndalianis) seeks to excavate subterranean strands that connect the early modern baroque to the postmodern neo-­ baroque, my chapter here largely bypasses the baroque in order to explore the way in which the kind of “inflationary media” studied by Castillo and Egginton in Mediaologies also harks back to medieval models that predate the advent of modernity. In this regard “Don Quixote and the Rise of Cyberorality” explores three pivotal moments in Cervantes’s novel that not only mark the shift from premodern culture into what Marshal McLuhan termed the “Gutenberg galaxy” but also raise questions that prefigure the rise of what I call “cyberorality” as a return to an “older” set of values and concerns that have been displaced by the five-­hundred-­year arc of traditional print culture. Introduction  xxv

In conclusion a brief caveat is in order. Given the many thousands of Cervantes-­related publications that have appeared around the world since 1996, Millennial Cervantes cannot possibly “cover” every approach and topic that has developed in the field during the past two decades, much less showcase the work of every important Cervantes scholar currently working somewhere around the globe. Thus the scope of this volume has, by necessity, been limited to just one possible sampling of some of the most cutting-­edge work currently being done by one group of Cervantes scholars in the United States. In this regard Millennial Cervantes exists as a “snapshot” of the field at one particular place and time. The selection of these specific chapters has been my decision alone, and I certainly recognize that other editors might have chosen any number of other equally compelling chapters written by other, equally brilliant scholars and organized around other geographies, other methodologies, and other topics. Notes

1. The cost (in both time and money) of retyping an essay prompted a physicist in 1975 to add his house cat as a “coauthor” (credited as F. D. C. Willard) rather than go to the trouble and expense of removing all the first-­person-­plural pronouns as required by the particular journal for a single-­authored paper. 2. The online mla International Bibliography lists slightly more than 8,100 sources for “Miguel de Cervantes” between 1888 and 2018. Of these, roughly 3,800 were published between 1888 and 1996, while roughly 4,400 were published between 1996 and 2018. Works Cited

Alcalá Galán, Mercedes. 2015. “Retórica visual: Ékfrasis y teoría de la ilustración gráfica en el Quijote.” In Autour de “Don Quichotte” de Miguel de Cervantès, edited by Philippe Rabaté and Hélène Tropé, 175–­202. Paris: Sorbonne Nouvelle. —. 2016. “¿Qué ve Cide Hamete? Omnisciencia y visualidad en Don Quijote II.” In El Quijote desde América (segunda parte), edited by Ignacio Arellano, Duilio Ayalamacedo, and James Iffland, Colección Batihoja 24, 27–­40. New York: idea. xxvi Burningham

Anderson, Ellen M. 2010. “Mothers of Invention: Toward a Reevaluation of Cervantine Dramatic Heroines.” Bulletin of the Comediantes 62, no. 2:1–­44. Anderson, Lara. 2013. “The Unity and Diversity of La olla podrida: An Autochthonous Model of Spanish Culinary Nationalism.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 14, no. 4:400–­414. Bacarreza, Leonardo Mauricio. 2013. “Food, Eating, and the Anxiety of Belonging in Seventeenth-­Century Spanish Literature and Art.” ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global 73, no. 8. Baum, Gregory. 2014. “Performing Adaptation in Guillén de Castro’s El curioso impertinente.” Bulletin of the Comediantes 66, no. 2:123–­39. Bergmann, Emilie L. 2011. “Martyrs and Minors: Allegories of Childhood in Cervantes.” In Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood, edited by Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World, 193–­207. Farnham UK: Ashgate. Boruchoff, David A. 2004. “Free Will, Beauty and the Pursuit of Happiness: Don Quijote and the Moral Intent of Pastoral Literature.” Anuario de estudios cervantinos 1:121–­35. —. 2006. “La revisión moral de la literatura pastoril en el Quijote.” In El Quijote desde América, edited by Gustavo Illades and James Iffland, 23–­41. Puebla, México: Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. —. 2011. “Why Bad Things Happen to Good Shepherds: Providence and the Pastoral.” Cervantes 31, no. 1:135–­45. Bourus, Terri, and Gary Taylor, eds. 2013. The Creation and Re-­Creation of Cardenio: Performing Shakespeare, Transforming Cervantes. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Brownlee, Kevin, and Marina Scordilis Brownlee, eds. 1985. Romance: Generic Transformation from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes. Hanover nh: University Press of New England for Dartmouth College. Brownlee, Marina S. 1995. “Postmodernism and the Baroque in María de Zayas.” In Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain, edited by Marina S. Brownlee and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Parallax: Re-­Visions of Culture and Society, 107–­27. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. —. 2000. “Romance at the Crossroads: Medieval Spanish Paradigms and Cervantine Revisions.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, edited by Roberta L. Krueger, Cambridge Companions to Literature, 253–­66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Introduction  xxvii

—. 2015a. “Experimental Architecture: Cervantes’s Curioso impertinente on the English Stage.” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 4, no. 2:n.p. https://​arcade​.stanford.​ edu/​ rofl/​ experimental​ -architecture​-cervantes​%e2​%80​%99s​-curioso​-impertinente​-english​-stage. —. 2015b. “La Cava: Romance and History in Corral and Cervantes.” In Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period, edited by Jon Whitman, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 92, 228–­42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burningham, Bruce R. 2001. Call for papers. “Idle Readers in a Frenetic Age,” 2001 Annual Southern California Cervantes Symposium, University of Southern California, April 7. —. 2008. Tilting Cervantes: Baroque Reflections on Postmodern Culture. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. —. 2010. “David Lynch and the Dulcineated World.” Cervantes 30, no. 2:33–­56. —. 2015. “Don Quixote in the American Imaginary.” In Parr and Vollendorf, Teaching Cervantes’s Don Quixote, 153–­58. —. 2016. “Screening Quixote: Cervantes and Media Culture.” In Baroque Projections: Images and Texts in Dialogue with the Early Modern Hispanic World, edited by Frédéric Conrod and Michael J. Horswell, 167–­90. Newark de: Juan de la Cuesta. —. 2017a. “Crouching Squire, Hidden Madman: Ah Gan’s Don Quixote and Postmodern China.” In Don Quixote: The Re-­Accentuation of the World’s Greatest Literary Hero, edited by Slav N. Gratchev and Howard Mancing, 181–­92. Lewisburg pa: Bucknell University Press. —. 2017b. “The Golden Age of Cervantes.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Chicago, Illinois, March 30–­April 1. Caplan-­Bricker, Nora. 2018. “Preservation Acts: Toward an Ethical Archive of the Web.” Harper’s, December, 59–­63. Castillo, David R. 2005. “Horror (Vacui): The Baroque Condition.” In Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context, edited by Nicholas Spadaccini and Luis Martín-­Estudillo, Hispanic Issues 31, 87–­104. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. —. 2008. “Exemplarity Gone Awry in Baroque Fantasy: The Case of Cervantes.” Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos 33, no. 1:105–­20. xxviii Burningham

—. 2013. “The Literary Classics in Today’s Classroom: Don Quixote and Road Movies.” In Cervantes in Perspective, edited by Julia Domínguez, 29–­44. Madrid: Vervuert. —. 2015. “Don Quixote and Political Satire: Cervantine Lessons from Sacha Baron Cohen and Stephen Colbert.” In Parr and Vollendorf, Teaching Cervantes’s Don Quixote, 171–­77. —. 2016. “Zombie Masses: Monsters for the Age of Global Capitalism.” In Zombie Talk: Culture, History, Politics, edited by David R. Castillo, John Edgar Browning, and William Egginton, 39–­62. Basingstoke UK: Palgrave Pivot. Castillo, David R., and William Egginton. 1994. “All the King’s Subjects: Honor in Early Modernity.” rla: Romance Languages Annual 6:422–­27. —. 2017. Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media. New York: Bloomsbury. Cervantes, Miguel de. 1978. El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. Edited by Luis Andrés Murillo. 2 vols. Madrid: Castalia. Chabrán, Rafael. 2002. “Medieval Spain.” In Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe: A Book of Essays, edited by Melitta Weiss Adamson, Routledge Medieval Casebooks, 125–­52. New York: Routledge. Chartier, Roger. 2013. Cardenio between Cervantes and Shakespeare: The Story of a Lost Play. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Cambridge: Polity. Childers, William. 2002. “Chicanoizing Don Quixote: For Luis Andrés Murillo.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 27, no. 2:87–­117. —. 2006. Transnational Cervantes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. —. 2010. “Baroque Quixote: New World Writing and the Collapse of the Heroic Ideal.” In Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, 415–­49. Durham nc: Duke University Press. —. 2015a. “Quixote Gumbo.” Cervantes 35, no. 1:17–­47. —. 2015b. “Reading Don Quixote in the Americas.” In Parr and Vollendorf, Teaching Cervantes’s Don Quixote, 104–­11. —. 2016. “‘En ambas posaderas’: Sancho Panza y la parodia de Stirner en la ideología alemana.” In Filosofía y culturas hispánicas: Nuevas perspectivas, edited by Nuria Morgado and Rolando Pérez, 21–­50. Newark de: Juan de la Cuesta. —. 2017. “Surviving the Hollywood Blacklist: Waldo Salt’s Adaptation of Don Quixote.” In Don Quixote: The Re-­Accentuation of the World’s Greatest Literary Introduction  xxix

Hero, edited by Slav N. Gratchev and Howard Mancing, 153–­80. Lewisburg pa: Bucknell University Press. Close, Anthony. 1977. The Romantic Approach to “Don Quixote”: A Critical History of the Romantic Tradition in “Quixote” Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Collins, Marsha S. 2004. “Lope’s Arcadia: A Self-­Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Renaissance Quarterly 57, no. 3:882–­907. —. 2007. “Staging Lost Love in the Eclogues of Lope’s Rimas (1609).” Neophilologus 91, no. 4:625–­39. —. 2013. “Artful Edifices and the Construction of Identity in Montemayor’s Diana and Lope’s Arcadia.” In Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain, edited by Mary E. Barnard and Frederick A. de Armas, 31–­53. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. —. 2016. Imagining Arcadia in Renaissance Romance. Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 30. New York: Routledge. Cro, Stelio. 1995. “Fellini’s Freudian Psyche between Neo-­Realism and Neo-­ Baroque.” Canadian Journal of Italian Studies 18, no. 51:162–­83. Cruz, Anne J., and Carroll B. Johnson, eds. 1999. Cervantes and His Postmodern Constituencies. New York: Garland. Cusack, Igor. 2000. “African Cuisines: Recipes for Nation-­Building?” Journal of African Cultural Studies 13, no. 2:207–­25. de Armas, Frederick A., ed. 2004. Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age. Lewisburg pa: Bucknell University Press. —, ed. 2005. Ekphrasis in the Age of Cervantes. Lewisburg pa: Bucknell University Press. —. 2006. Quixotic Frescoes: Cervantes and Italian Renaissance Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Degli-­Esposti, Cristina. 1996a. “The Neo-­Baroque Scopic Regime of Peter Green­ away’s Encyclopedic Cinema.” Cinefocus 4:34–­45. —. 1996b. “Sally Potter’s Orlando and the Neo-­Baroque Scopic Regime.” Cinema Journal 36, no. 1:75–­93. Eagleton, Terry. 1983. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Egginton, William. 2001. “Reality Is Bleeding: A Brief History of Film from the Sixteenth Century.” Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology 9, no. 2:207–­29. xxx Burningham

—. 2003. How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity. Albany: State University of New York Press. —. 2005. “Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds.” In Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context, edited by Nicholas Spadaccini and Luis Martín-­ Estudillo, Hispanic Issues 31, 55–­71. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. —. 2009. “The Baroque as a Problem of Thought.” pmla: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 124, no. 1:143–­49. —. 2010. The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics. Stanford ca: Stanford University Press. —. 2016. The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World. New York: Bloomsbury. Egginton, William, and David R. Castillo. 1994. “The Rules of Chanfalla’s Game.” rla: Romance Languages Annual 6:444–­49. Fernández Nieto, Manuel. 2006. “La comida del Quijote.” Edad de Oro 25:157–­79. Figueroa Dorrego, Jorge. 2018. “Genre Shifting in Restoration Adaptations of Cervantes’s ‘El Curioso Impertinente.’” Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-­Norteamericanos 40, no. 1:59–­75. Fraser, Benjamin. 2001. “El Quijote que tocó la música punk: Cervantes, Dead Kennedys y un análisis de la mecanización nacionalista capitalista vista a través de ‘Rambozo the Clown.’” Paper presented at “Idle Readers in a Frenetic Age,” 2001 Annual Southern California Cervantes Symposium, University of Southern California, April 7. Garcia-­Funentes, Joseph-­Maria, Manuel Guàrdia Bassols, and José Luis Oyón Bañales. 2014. “Reinventing Edible Identities: Catalan Cuisine and Barcelona’s Market Halls.” In Edible Identities: Food as Cultural Heritage, edited by Ronda L. Brulotte and Michael A. Di Giovine, Heritage, Culture and Identity, 159–­ 74. Farnham UK: Ashgate. Gil-­Oslé, Juan Pablo. 2013. Amistades imperfectas: Del Humanismo a la Ilustración con Cervantes. Madrid: Vervuert. Giorgini, Massimiliano Adelmo. 2015. “Don Quixote in American Song: Underground Hero and Champion of the Counterculture.” Cervantes 35, no. 1:49–­76. González Echevarría, Roberto. 1993. Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literatures. Durham nc: Duke University Press. Hernández Araico, Susana. 2001. “Re-­escritura y recepción de Don Quijote en Los Angeles 2000: Ballet ruso y teatro ‘bilingüe.’” Paper presented at “Idle Readers Introduction  xxxi

in a Frenetic Age,” 2001 Annual Southern California Cervantes Symposium, University of Southern California, April 7. Hernández, Rosilie. 2012. “Furiò Ceriol, Sancho Panza, and Althusser: Machiavelli’s Prince Reconsidered.” Cervantes 32, no. 2:11–­36. —. 2013. Call for papers. “National Cervantes Symposium 2014: New Currents in Cervantes Studies.” Email to Cervantes Society of America listserv, May 10. —. 2014. Round table comments. “National Cervantes Symposium 2014: New Currents in Cervantes Studies.” April 26. Hernández-­Pecoraro, Rosilie. 1998. “The Absence of the Absence of Women: Cervantes’ Don Quixote and the Explosion of the Pastoral Condition.” Cervantes 18, no. 1:24–­45. —. 2003. “Isabel Correa’s Transformative Translation of Guarini’s Il pastor fido.” In Disciplines on the Line: Feminist Research on Spanish, Latin American, and U.S. Latina Women, edited by Anne J. Cruz, Rosilie Hernández-­Pecoraro, and Joyce Tolliver, 125–­44. Newark de: Juan de la Cuesta. —. 2004. “Isabel Correa: Traducción transformativa de Il pastor fido de Guarini.” In Actas del XIV Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas, II: Literatura española, siglos XVI y XVII, edited by Isaías Lerner, Robert Nival, and Alejandro Alonso, 291–­97. Newark de: Juan de la Cuesta. —. 2005. “Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa and Isabel Correa: Competing Translators of Battista Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido.” Romance Notes 46, no. 1:97–­105. —. 2010. “Cervantes’s Quixote and the Arbitrista Reform Project.” Romance Quarterly 57, no. 3:169–­82. Irigoyen-­García, Javier. 2008. “¡Qué si destas diferencias de música resuena la de los albogues! Lo pastoril y lo morisco en Cervantes.” Cervantes 28, no. 2:119–­46. —. 2010. “‘La música ha sido hereje’: Pastoral Performance, Moorishness, and Cultural Hybridity in Los baños de Argel.” Bulletin of the Comediantes 62, no. 2:45–­62. —. 2011. “Diana and Wild Boar Hunting: Refiguring Gender and Ethno-­ Religious Conflict in the Pastoral Imaginary.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 88, no. 3:273–­87. Latorre, Jorge, Antonio Martínez Illán, and O. V. Pronkevych, eds. 2015. El telón rasgado: El “Quijote” como puente cultural con el mundo soviético y postsoviético. Pamplona, Spain: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra. Mahecha, Juliana Duque. 2016. “Forms of Colombian Cuisine: Interpretation of Traditional Culinary Knowledge in Three Cultural Settings.” In Cooking xxxii Burningham

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—. 2008. “From Neo-­Baroque to Neo-­Baroques?” Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos 33, no. 1:265–­80. —. 2011. “Why Comic Studies?” Cinema Journal 50, no. 3:113–­17. —. 2012a. The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses. Jefferson nc: McFarland. —. 2012b. “Lost, Fan Culture and the Neo-­Baroque.” Anuario calderoniano: Acal 5:35–­50. Overesch, Lynne Elizabeth. 1982. “The Neo-­Baroque: Trends in the Style and Structure of the Contemporary Spanish Novel.” Dissertation Abstracts International 42, no. 7. Palma, Pina. 2009. “Not Only Who They Were but What They Ate: Food and Courtly Ideals in Don Quixote.” In Don Quixote: The First 400 Years, edited by Zenia Sacks Da Silva, Serie Coediciones, 59–­70. Lima, Peru: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos; Hempstead ny: Hofstra University. Parr, James A., and Lisa Vollendorf, eds. 2015. Approaches to Teaching Cervantes’s “Don Quixote.” 2nd ed. New York: Modern Language Association of America. Pasero, Anne Marian. 1979. “Neo-­Baroque Tendencies in Contemporary Hispanic Poetry.” Dissertation Abstracts: Section A. Humanities and Social Science 40. Penrose, Mehl Allan. 2014. Masculinity and Queer Desire in Spanish. New Hispanisms: Cultural and Literary Studies. Farnham UK: Ashgate. Peréz, Ramona L. 2016. “If You Don’t Use Chilies from Oaxaca, Is It Still Mole Negro? Shifts in Traditional Practices, Techniques, and Ingredients among Oaxacan Migrants’ Cuisine.” In Cooking Technology: Transformations in Culinary Practice in Mexico and Latin America, edited by Steffan Igor Ayora-­Diaz, 99–­110. London: Bloomsbury. Pérez, Rolando. 2012. Severo Sarduy and the Neo-­Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts. Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures 53. West Lafayette in: Purdue University Press. Reijen, Willem van. 1992. “Labyrinth and Ruin: The Return of the Baroque in Postmodernity.” Theory, Culture and Society 9, no. 4:1–­26. Reinert, Cristina Degli-­Esposti. 2001. “Neo-­Baroque Imaging in Peter Greenaway’s Cinema.” In Peter Greenaway’s Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema, edited by Paula Willoquet-­Maricondi and Mary Alemany-­Galway, 51–­78. Lanham md: Scarecrow. Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage. New Haven ct: Yale University Press. xxxiv Burningham

Romero-­Díaz, Nieves. 2007. “Translating Cervantes and Don Quixote for the US Screens: A Quixotic Enterprise.” In Cervantes and/on/in the New World, edited by Julio Vélez-­Sainz and Nieves Romero-­Díaz, 213–­30. Newark de: Juan de la Cuesta. Sears, Theresa Ann. 2000. “Sacrificial Lambs and Domestic Goddesses; or, Did Cervantes Write Chick Lit? (Being a Meditation on Women and Free Will).” Cervantes 20, no. 1:47–­68. Self, Will. 2018. “The Printed Word in Peril: The Age of Homo virtualis Is upon Us.” Harper’s, October, 23–­31. Solnit, Rebecca. 2018. “Driven to Distraction.” Easy Chair, Harper’s, May, 7–­9. Spivey, Diane M. 1999. The Peppers, Cracklings, and Knots of Wool Cookbook: The Global Migration of African Cuisine. Albany: State University of New York Press. Stoopen Galán, María. 2007. “La arcadia profanada en la obra pastoril de Miguel de Cervantes.” In “Injerto peregrino de bienes y grandezas admirables”: Estudios de literatura y cultura española e hispanoamericana (siglos XVI al XVIII), edited by Lillian von der Walde, María José Rodilla, Alma Mejía, Gustavo Illades, Alejandro Higashi, and Serafín González, 347–­62. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Iztapalapa. Stroud, Matthew. 2001. “Don Quijote in the Age of Digital Reproduction.” Paper presented at “Idle Readers in a Frenetic Age,” 2001 Annual Southern California Cervantes Symposium, University of Southern California, April 7. Taylor, Gary, and Steven Wagschal. 2013. “Reading Cervantes, or Sheldon, or Phillips? The Source(s) of Cardenio and Double Falsehood.” In Bourus and Taylor, Creation and Re-­Creation of Cardenio, 15–­29. Ter Horst, Robert. 1996. “The Sexual Economy of Miguel de Cervantes.” In Bodies and Biases: Sexualities in Hispanic Cultures and Literatures, edited by David William Foster, Roberto Reis, Dário Borim Jr., and Naomi Lindstrom, Hispanic Issues 13, 1–­23. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Turner, Fred. 2019. “Machine Politics: The Rise of the Internet and a New Age of Authoritarianism.” Harper’s, January, 7–­9. Unamuno, Miguel de. 1987. Vida de don Quijote y Sancho. Madrid: Alianza. Urbina, Eduardo. 2001. “Edición electrónica virtual del Quijote (eevv-­d q).” Paper presented at “Idle Readers in a Frenetic Age,” 2001 Annual Southern California Cervantes Symposium, University of Southern California, April 7. Vasvari, Louise O. 1988. “Vegetal-­Genital Onomastics in the Libro de buen amor.” Romance Philology 42, no. 1:1–­29. Introduction  xxxv

Velasco, Sherry M. 2000a. The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and Catalina de Erauso. Austin: University of Texas Press. —. 2000b. “María de Zayas and Lesbian Desire in Early Modern Spain.” In Reading and Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American, and Spanish Culture, edited by Susana Chávez-­Silverman, Librada Hernández, and Robert Richmond Ellis, 21–­42. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. —. 2000c. “Marimachos, Hombrunas, Barbudas: The Masculine Woman in Cervantes.” Cervantes 20, no. 1:69–­78. —. 2002. “La primera dama, el público y Catalina de Erauso: Colaboración teatral en la monja Alférez de Pérez de Montalbán.” Bulletin of the Comediantes 54, no. 1:115–­32. —. 2003. “Interracial Lesbian Erotics in Early Modern Spain: Catalina de Erauso and Elena/o de Céspedes.” In Tortilleras: Hispanic and U.S. Latina Lesbian Expression, edited by Lourdes Torres and Inmaculada Pertusa, 213–­ 27. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. —. 2004. “Performing Male Pregnancy in Lanini y Sagredo’s El parto de Juan Rana.” Comedia Performance 1, no. 1:192–­218. —. 2006. Male Delivery: Reproduction, Effeminacy, and Pregnant Men in Early Modern Spain. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. —. 2007. “Hairy Women on Display in Textual and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain.” South Atlantic Review 72, no. 1:62–­75. —. 2009. “The Dueña Dolorida: Policing Gender, Desire, and Entertainment.” Hispanic Review 77, no. 2:221–­44. —. 2010. “‘If These Beds Could Talk’: Narrating Lesbian Sex Acts in Early Modern Spain.” Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos 35, no. 1:229–­42. —. 2011. Lesbians in Early Modern Spain. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Vollendorf, Lisa. 2005. “The Value of Female Friendship in Seventeenth-­Century Spain.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 47, no. 4:425–­45. Wasserman, Dale. 1966. Man of La Mancha: A Musical Play. Lyrics by Joe Darion. Music by Mitch Leigh. New York: Random House. Weimer, Christopher B. 2000. “Going to Extremes: Barthes, Lacan, and Cervantes’ La gran sultana.” In Gender, Identity, and Representation in Spain’s Golden Age, edited by Dawn L. Smith and Anita K. Stoll, 47–­60. Lewisburg pa: Bucknell University Press. Wollen, Peter. 1993. “Baroque and the Neo-­Baroque in the Age of the Spectacle.” Point of Contact 3, no. 3:9–­21. xxxvi Burningham

M i l l e n n i a l C e rva n t e s

P ART 1 Cervantes in His Original Contexts

chapter 1

From Literary Painting to Marian Iconography The Cult of Auristela in Cervantes’s Persiles y Sigismunda

Mercedes Alcalá Galán

In Cervantes’s last novel, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, the relations between literature and painting, as well as the notion of representation through a varied practice of ekphrasis, are repeatedly explored in surprising ways. This work, which serves as a kind of portico to the baroque, contains many complex references to the art of painting. Works of art appear in the text and assume a conceptual role in relation to the poetics of the novel. Cervantes, in fact, seeks a relationship between text and image that questions the Renaissance concept of mimesis and above all the equivalence Ut pictura poesis, which, as is well known, emerged in the sixteenth century from a literal and decontextualized interpretation of Horace’s famous phrase. In Persiles y Sigismunda there are a plethora of pictorial examples: the canvas painted in Lisbon that draws together the adventures lived by the protagonists in the first two books; the canvas of the false captives; the six portraits of Auristela—­in addition to their almost infinite copies—­which appear in the book and serve as active agents that trigger their own events; the portrait of a lady found on the chest of the murdered Don Diego de Parreces; and in book 4 the two museums or galleries in Rome, namely, Imperia’s gallery of portraits and the monseigneur de la Cámara’s museum of blank portraits.1 By way of an analysis of the portrait of Auristela that appears in Rome in the calle Bancos, and its genealogy in the narrative as a work of art through copies of copies, my aim in this chapter is to establish how the 3

iconographic appearances of the work not only are related to each other by the narrative but also play an essential role both in the novel’s meaning and in its literary conception. Despite the many examples of pictorial works in Persiles y Sigismunda, the genre of the portrait takes on a special importance. In this work the portrait thus becomes a fundamental theme that profoundly explores the notion of representation and its poetic, as well as socioreligious, implications. In this sense the portrait of Auristela in which she appears full-­length with the world at her feet and a split crown on her head is a clear version a lo humano of the representations of the Immaculate Conception that are so important in the political iconography of the Counter-­Reformation. Thus in Persiles y Sigismunda we find reflection on the materiality of the work of art and its enormous symbolic potential through the exploration of the power of images to create a “truth” beyond what they represent. Hence, certain images can establish themselves as entities capable of generating a spiritual reality, and this in turn illuminates an important and polemical aspect of Catholic devotion. Before delving into the portrait of Auristela from the calle Bancos in the fourth book, I would like to briefly consider the canvas painted in Lisbon as an example that shows the complexity of the representational logic inherent in this work. In particular the text demonstrates how the equivalence between painting and writing is questioned from different angles at the same time that an interesting praxis of ekphrasis is set in motion, showing the limits of the correspondence between verbal and visual representation. Thus in the canvas painted in Lisbon, which will itself give rise to different permutations (copies of portraits of Auristela will originate from it, as will the fantasies of a playwright), we see represented almost all the adventures lived by the protagonists in the first two books with the aim of facilitating and abbreviating the narration by relying on its plastic representation: Desde allí se fueron en casa de un famoso pintor, donde ordenó Periandro que, en un lienzo grande, le pintase todos los más principales casos de su historia. A un lado pintó la isla bárbara ardiendo en llamas, y allí junto la isla de la 4 Alcalá Galán

prisión y, un poco más desviado, la balsa o enmaderamiento donde le halló Arnaldo cuando le llevó a su navío; en otra parte estaba la isla nevada . . . ; allí se mostraba el desafío de los amantes de Taurisa y su muerte; acá estaban serrando por la quilla la nave que había servido de sepultura a Auristela y a los que con ella venían; acullá estaba la agradable isla donde vio en sueños Periandro los dos escuadrones de virtudes y vicios y, allí junto, la nave donde los peces náufragos pescaron a los dos marineros y les dieron en su vientre sepultura. No se olvidó de que pintase verse empedrados en el mar helado, el asalto y combate del navío, ni el entregarse a Cratilo; pintó asimismo la temeraria carrera del poderoso caballo . . . ; pintó, como en resguño y en estrecho espacio, las fiestas de Policarpo, coronándose a sí mismo por vencedor en ellas. Resolutamente, no quedó paso principal en que no hiciese labor en su historia, que allí no pintase, hasta poner la ciudad de Lisboa y su desembarcación en el mismo traje en que habían venido. También se vio en el mismo lienzo arder la isla de Policarpo, a Clodio traspasado con la saeta de Antonio y a Cenotia colgada de una entena; pintóse también la isla de las Ermitas, y a Rutilio con apariencias de santo. Este lienzo se hacía de una recopilación que les escusaba de contar su historia por menudo, porque Antonio el mozo declaraba las pinturas y los sucesos cuando le apretaban a que los dijese. Pero, en lo que más se aventajó el pintor famoso fue en el retrato de Auristela, en quien decían se había mostrado a saber pintar una hermosa figura, puesto que la dejaba agraviada, pues a la belleza de Auristela, si no era llevado de pensamiento divino, no había pincel humano que alcanzase. (437–­39; my emphasis)2

Several observations must be made about this canvas, presented and summarized here, and also the practice of ekphrasis that it exemplifies in novelized form, if only briefly. First, it is here that the initial portrait of Auristela is painted when she arrives in Lisbon. Pages later we learn that innumerable portraits of the beautiful lady would be made in Lisbon, and that the portrait on the calle Bancos in Rome would be a copy of a copy made in France. Also, as I have noted elsewhere, Persiles y Sigismunda is above all a germinating ground of stories (“semillero de historias”): the From Painting to Iconography  5

adventures serve as a foundation for infinite narrations of the characters who are met along the way, and in addition to the stories that are told, many others are interrupted, announced, and never enunciated (Alcalá Galán 2009, 218).3 Thus in this vortex of stories—­in which the travelers tell and retell their adventures, exchanging narratives with other characters—­the canvas serves as a formidable literary resource of great narrative economy. Throughout the text, therefore, the mere act of conjuring up the painting under the repeated formula of “recounting the canvas” (“relatar el lienzo”) creates the effect that all the adventures have been retold to new characters: “Mostróle asimismo el lienzo de la pintura de su suceso, que la relató y declaró muy bien Antonio el mozo”; “Volvió Antonio el mozo a relatar el lienzo” (467, 469). Second, another very interesting aspect signaled by this canvas is how, indirectly but clearly, there is a flagrant lack of equivalence between, on the one hand, the synchronic two-­dimensionality of the painting and, on the other, the temporal character of the narration whose elements follow one another in a linear order. As we have seen in the passage quoted above, the description is exhaustive, and all the adventures represented in the first two books are enumerated, which in turn gives us the sensation of a necessary lack of space. We are even told how a detail of the Policarpo festivities has had to be represented through foreshortening and in a small space. The extent to which other episodes and adventures are supposed to be added to the canvas as if it were a written and narrated story continues to surprise us, since we find ourselves before a finished painting and not before a book to which chapters can be added: A todo esto, nunca había mostrado a su abuelo el lienzo donde venía pintada su historia. Enseñósele un día Antonio, y dijo que faltaba allí de pintar los pasos por donde Auristela había venido a la isla bárbara, cuando se vieron ella y Periandro en los trocados trajes: ella, en el de varón, y él, en el de hembra, metamorfosis bien estraño. . . . Bien quisiera el anciano Villaseñor que todo esto se añadiera al lienzo, pero todos fueron de parecer que, no solamente no se añadiese, sino que aun lo pintado se 6 Alcalá Galán

borrase, porque tan grandes y tan no vistas cosas no eran para andar en lienzos débiles, sino en láminas de bronce escritas, y en las memorias de las gentes grabadas. (524–­25)

Unsurprisingly, this “enlargement” of the painting is not carried out; indeed, a suggestion is made to erase it because painting is not as durable as bronze or, according to the narrator, “las memorias de las gentes.” We thus have a transition from the orality of narrative to the physical paint of a canvas, and from this to a hypothetical engraving in a more durable artistic medium (bronze), all of which is brought together in the text that we read and that consummates the fictional transference of the pictorial to the realm of words. In Persiles y Sigismunda the contrast between the pictorial and the verbal is so vivid that we forget that what is painted exists only in the narrative itself as brief verbal descriptions. Sometimes it suffices to say the word portrait or canvas for us to see a painting about which we are reading. Mutatis mutandis this Cervantine trompe l’oeil is, in a certain way, reminiscent of Cortázar’s story “Continuidad de los parques” in which a reader, sitting on a green velvet armchair, is unwittingly reading his own murder, which will happen while he is reading about it. And third, as Cassidy Reis astutely observes, although we think that the canvas sums up the adventures lived by the protagonists, this is precisely not so, since the canvas portrays what has been narrated in the first two books (including Periandro’s dream, which was not an adventure as such but rather a dream that was told to us as a phantasmagorical allegory rather than an experience): “Acullá estaba la agradable isla donde vio en sueños Periandro los dos escuadrones de virtudes y vicios” (2016, 438).4 In reality the Lisbon canvas is by no means independent of most of the portraits of the protagonist that circulate in the last two books. In fact Auristela never again lets herself be portrayed after her sojourn in Lisbon, and even the painter who makes a portrait of her in France for the Duke of Nemours must do so from memory because Periandro refuses to have Auristela pose. “El criado del duque, viendo que Periandro quería partirse luego, se llegó a él y le dijo: ‘Bien quisiera, señor, rogaros que os From Painting to Iconography  7

detuviérades un poco en este lugar, siquiera hasta la noche, porque mi pintor, con comodidad y de espacio, pudiera sacar el retrato del rostro de vuestra hermana, pero bien os podéis ir a la paz de Dios, porque el pintor me ha dicho que, de sola una vez que la ha visto, la tiene tan aprehendida en la imaginación, que la pintará a sus solas tan bien como si siempre la estuviera mirando’” (570). By book 3, where Periandro orders a canvas painted of their adventures so far, metapainting has become a recurrent motif stemming from different sources. Perhaps the most important one is that the genealogy of copies of portraits of Auristela can be traced back to this canvas, which, at the very least, lets us know of the first portrait of Auristela that appears in the text—­or more likely the first portraits of her, since she is probably portrayed numerous times on that canvas. From that moment onward, the text becomes ambiguous, for it seems that all the portraits that appear—­except for the painting from memory ordered by the Duke of Nemours and one that Magsimino sees in Septentrional lands—­are copies of the portrait(s) on the Lisbon canvas or at least come from copies made there. In this way when the protagonists meet Prince Arnaldo again in the last book Arnaldo reflects on the enormous impact of the portraits: “Dijo que en Portugal, especialmente en Lisboa, eran en suma estimación tenidos sus retratos; . . . [contó] cómo dejaba en el camino a un mancebo, peregrino poeta, que no quiso adelantarse con él, por venirse despacio, componiendo una comedia de los sucesos de Periandro y Auristela, que los sabía de memoria por un lienzo que había visto en Portugal, donde se habían pintado, y que traía intención firmísima de casarse con Auristela, si ella quisiese” (680–­81). However, to complicate things further, when a painter tries to establish the origin of the portrait of Auristela on the calle Bancos, we are informed that during the short time that the pilgrims were in Lisbon a great many portraits were made of Auristela: “Acudió el pintor a buscar a Periandro, y a contarle todo el suceso de la venta y del temor que tenía no se quedase el gobernador con el retrato, el cual, de un pintor que le había retratado en Portugal de su original, le había él comprado en Francia, 8 Alcalá Galán

cosa que le pareció a Periandro posible, por haber sacado otros muchos en el tiempo que Auristela estuvo en Lisboa” (663).5 In addition to this proliferation of portraits of the protagonist, when we get to the last book, in which the pilgrims are in Rome, the novel’s reflections about art and the notion of artistic and literary representation are intensified and deepened, including even an exploration into the notion of a museum. We thus find a description of the museum-­house of the courtesan Hipólita, which exhibits portraits of the great masters of antiquity such as Parrahasius, Polygnotus, Apelles, Zeuxis, and Timanthes (let us not forget that their works were lost long before the Renaissance and that they were known only through literary descriptions), as well as works of the great masters of the Renaissance such as Michelangelo and Raphael. Also, with the specific portrait of Auristela explored here, we will see that Persiles y Sigismunda concludes this historical tour of painting with a view of the baroque that is by no means exempt from critique. This recurrent interest in painting is profoundly linked to the project of Persiles y Sigismunda, which offers a poetics of literary representation that reflects on pictorial art and the relationships between image, word, and the creative imagination. Although numerous critics have considered Persiles y Sigismunda as a Christian allegory that adopts Counter-­Reformation ideology, I personally dissent from this interpretation of the work and am instead inclined to understand it as a literary project of enormous scope whose keys are found in aesthetics and not in ideology. Joaquín Casalduero is perhaps the critic who most militantly defends the religious reading of the work: “In the Persiles the ideal of the Counter-­Reformation is realized. We again see the truth, and the Apostolic Roman Catholic Church, through the sacraments, washes the repentant man of all guilt, restoring to him the beauty with which he was created” (1975, 225–­26, my translation). I concur with Isabel Lozano when she affirms that “the allegorical reading has serious limitations, since it legitimates its interpretation in an ideological view of religion.” She later adds: “What I propose to do is to ascertain From Painting to Iconography  9

the role that Cervantes, as an artist and not as a believer . . . , assigns to religion in his novel” (2014, 188, my translation). In this sense the portrait on sale on the calle Bancos in the guise of the Immaculate Conception in which Auristela appears with the world at her feet and a split crown on her head is a marvelous example of the complexity with which religious themes are treated in the work. Through this portrait various aspects of the religiosity of the period are examined such as the Marian cult and the power of religious iconography to foment popular devotion. In effect at the time of the writing of Persiles y Sigismunda, there was a popular, political, and ecclesiastical furor in Spain in favor of the Inmaculada. The defense of a theological position according to which the Virgin Mary was conceived without original sin would become a religious cause embraced with extreme fervor in Counter-­Reformation Spain. Spaniards from the king to the most lowly of his subjects would feel committed to the cause of the Immaculate Conception, which would soon be identified with the defense of the Virgin’s honor. Marian devotion would be one of the pillars of the Counter-­Reformation in Spain, and the cult of the Inmaculada could not by any means be separated from an iconography of the Virgin that depicts her as a beautiful adolescent with the moon at her feet and a crown on her head. Indeed, the artistic representations of the Inmaculada would be omnipresent in any place of worship, and the workshops of painters and sculptors, from the most famous to the humblest, would produce countless versions of this advocation of the Virgin. According to Estrella Ruiz-­Gálvez, “immaculism reached its climax in seventeenth-­century Spain. Between 1613 and 1617 the country would burn in a fervor that affected all of the social estates” (2008, 217, my translation).6 Ruiz Gálvez refers to a friar from the Dominican convent Regina Angelorum in Seville, who in 1613 preached against the Marian privilege. When the parishioners, who were by and large immaculists, reacted, the preacher insisted that the Virgin had been conceived “like you or like me or like Martin Luther.” Following this incident a number of disorderly events ensued. The city was filled with signs saying, “Sine macula concepta,” 10 Alcalá Galán

immaculist songs were composed and sung in the schools, and innumerable public acts were organized to placate the Virgin over a period of four years through 1617. The king intervened, and in 1613 decided to create the Council of the Inmaculada. This amounted to a national campaign that did not obtain a declaration of dogma but which in 1617 extracted from the pope a ban on preaching against this “pious” belief (Ruiz-­Gálvez 2008, 202). December 8, the day on which Spain received news of this papal disposition, was declared the day of the Inmaculada. Later, in the reign of Charles III, she would be named patrona of Spain, and in 1854 Rome finally declared the dogma of the Inmaculada. The defense of the Inmaculada would be an enterprise championed by the monarchy and supported by popular fervor. It was a social, political, and religious phenomenon that put Spain at the head of a movement in defense of Marian purity and honor. Rarely has an issue with such delicate theological nuances turned into a matter of national honor. In this immaculist offensive, the iconography of the Inmaculada naturally played a formidable role. It is no wonder that many works represented her with a crown of stars and the moon at her feet, following the model of the apocalyptic woman in churches and chapels as well as on estampas easy to disseminate. In this regard it seems pertinent to consider here the Alegoría de la Virgen Inmaculada by Juan de Roelas, since it captures perfectly the magnitude of the immaculist cult (see figure 1). This painting clearly expresses something that we also see in Persiles y Sigismunda, the intrinsic interdependence between image and word. In fact as I’ve already mentioned, in the poetics of Persiles y Sigismunda there is an exploration of the inherent linking of the visual and the textual as one of the keys of its time with respect to artistic and literary representation. Roelas’s painting explains in a text on the left that it was painted to record the notable acts that took place to appease the Inmaculada in Seville in 1615. Below the text is a procession representing all groups, classes, nationalities, trades, estates, and ages. Thus it includes clerics and laypeople, child singers, Flemish, French, Portuguese, and Genoese, as well as mulattoes and blacks, all representing the different communities that lived in Seville. In the middle From Painting to Iconography  11

Fig. 1. Alegoría de la Virgen Inmaculada by Juan de Roelas. 1616. Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid, Spain. Google Art Project. Wikimedia Commons.

is a celestial defense of immaculism, composed of evangelists, church fathers, and diverse male and female saints holding signs with biblical inscriptions in favor of immaculism. In the upper part of the image, we find an allegorical depiction of angels carrying emblems with pictorial representations and surrounded by inscriptions with the attributes of the Virgin.7 Roelas’s painting impressively expresses the popular fervor invested in the cause of immaculism while at the same time showing us the power and function of the images as facilitators of religious devotion. In the Alegoría de la Virgen Inmaculada, the defense of absolute purity in the Virgin’s conception is represented through an overwhelming use of writing and meta-­painting. It is important to observe here that the textual portrait of Auristela as the Immaculate Conception in Persiles y Sigismunda corresponds exactly to those years of immaculist vehemence and that it is not by chance that in the Rome of Persiles y Sigismunda the iconographic appearance of the novel’s protagonist culminates with this image so highly charged with Counter-­Reformation content. Additionally, the portrait of the calle Bancos is the culmination of what I call “the cult of Auristela.” In effect one of the strangest and most fascinating aspects of Persiles y Sigismunda is the profusion of Auristela’s portraits, of which many copies are made, thus setting off a spiral of crazed devotion. Quite by surprise, in chapter 12 of book 4, we learn from Seráfido, Persiles’s tutor, that years before the pilgrims’ arrival in Lisbon, a portrait of Auristela had served as the spark that set off the protagonists’ journey. Magsimino, Persiles’s brother, in effect falls in love with Auristela from a portrait of her without ever having met her in person and demands her for his wife. As a result Persiles/Periandro flees with Sigismunda/Auristela under the pretext of a pilgrimage to Rome. Thus the plot of the entire Persiles y Sigismunda stems from a portrait that frames and gives sense to the entire work. Curiously, until the very end of the text we have no knowledge of this portrait that initiates the novel’s plot. It is a portrait of Auristela with which the adventures of the protagonists and the work itself begin and end. Michael Armstrong-­Roche rightly characterizes it as From Painting to Iconography  13

a fratricidal portrait (2009, 277). The representations of Auristela take on a life of their own and stir more intense passion than their model, given that in fact it is the portraits, rather than Auristela herself, that arouse the most extreme, radical, and violent reactions. We should recall that the Duke of Nemours and Prince Arnaldo gravely wound each other in a duel for possession of another of these portraits. The materiality of the work of art, on the one hand, and the inapprehensibility of what it represents, on the other, endow the pictorial representation with an ineffable power over the spectator, giving rise to a fantasy of possession and control over the subject represented. This general characteristic of the portrait as an artistic genre multiplies ad infinitum in the case of the power that religious images have to inspire fervor among the faithful, which was exploited as a fundamental strategy in the offensive of the Counter-­Reformation. I quote here a passage from the calle Bancos scene: Y sucedió que, pasando un día por una calle que se llama Bancos, vieron en una pared della un retrato entero de pies a cabeza de una mujer que tenía una corona en la cabeza, aunque partida por medio la corona, y, a los pies, un mundo, sobre el cual estaba puesta. Y, apenas la hubieron visto, cuando conocieron ser el rostro de Auristela, tan al vivo dibujado, que no les puso en duda de conocerla. . . . —­¿Qué significa—­respondió Auristela—­haberla pintado con corona en la cabeza y los pies sobre aquella esfera, y, más, estando la corona partida? —­Eso, señora—­dijo el dueño—­, son fantasías de pintores, o caprichos, como los llaman. Quizá quieren decir que esta doncella merece llevar la corona de hermosura, que ella va hollando en aquel mundo; pero yo quiero decir que dice que vos, señora, sois su original, y que merecéis corona entera, y no mundo pintado, sino real y verdadero. (659–­60)

As of the late sixteenth century, the orthodox representation of the Immaculate Conception depicts the Virgin wearing an imperial crown, or at least a crown of twelve stars in the form of a halo, with the moon at her feet (Stratton 1994, 58–­67). As many critics have observed, the 14 Alcalá Galán

identification between Auristela and the Virgin is clear, although there must be modifications to avoid a sacrilegious association. Persiles y Sigismunda has three direct allusions to the cult of Mary, and all three are bound by a context that in some way strikes a discordant note in the Marian fervor of the passages.8 In the first place we have the immaculist song that Feliciana de la Voz sings before the Virgin of Guadalupe and that Auristela asks her to transcribe, though she says she doesn’t understand a word of it but likes it all the same.9 It is hardly necessary to note that the implications of not understanding what one is praying are obvious in the context of the Counter-­Reformation. Besides we should recall that Feliciana is a woman who has just given birth as a result of forbidden love, and in her hurried flight she has deserted her child. The theme of immaculism here is juxtaposed with the carnal sensuality and vicissitudes of human love. In the second example, the pilgrims find themselves in the festivities of La Monda, and the text tells us that the Virgin had replaced the pagan Venus: “Hallaron que [Talavera] se preparaba para celebrar la gran fiesta de la Monda, que trae su origen de muchos años antes que Cristo naciese, reducida por los cristianos a tan buen punto y término que, si entonces se celebraba en honra de la diosa Venus por la gentilidad, ahora se celebra en honra y alabanza de la Virgen de las vírgenes” (483–­84). And last we have the portrait in the calle Bancos of the Virgin a lo humano (since we cannot really say that it is Auristela a lo divino). The calle Bancos was a commercial street where religious art was sold (Nerlich 2005, 566). After Auristela’s encounter with her portrait, a tumultuous crowd of curious people gathers around, and the Duke of Nemours and Prince Arnaldo, who have almost killed each other over another portrait, shift their rivalry to financial terrain and make bids, leaving jewels so costly as collateral that the governor of Rome has to intervene. Taking advantage of his power, the governor arranges for the portrait to be given to him. Before he does so, the text tells us that “half of Rome” follows Auristela and her entourage in a fervor, and when the pilgrims try to free themselves of the multitude, Periandro tells her to From Painting to Iconography  15

cover her face: “Auristela, hermana, cúbrase el rostro con algún velo, porque tanta luz ciega, y no nos deja ver por dónde caminamos” (660). The commentary of the painter is also disturbing: he compares the painting, a Marian image, with Auristela, and tells her that she is better than what she represents and deserves a real world and a full crown. Armstrong-­Roche observes that there is an almost sacrilegious inversion in the painter’s remarks (2009, 278). Also the people crowded around Auristela start saying that it is better to contemplate her than her image, thus evading the devotional nature of the painting. The scene of this Inmaculada a lo humano—­again, since it is not an Auristela a lo divino—­ seems very important in the reflections that Persiles y Sigismunda devotes to the power of art: “Cayó la gente que el retrato miraba en que parecía al de Auristela y poco a poco comenzó a salir una voz, que todos y cada uno de por sí afirmaba: ‘Este retrato que se vende es el mismo de esta peregrina que va en este coche; ¿para qué queremos ver al traslado, sino al original?’” (660). By taking the “cult of Auristela” to an extreme in this portrait, Persiles y Sigismunda is obviously making an important commentary on the political iconography of the Counter-­Reformation. The power that images exert has an impact on how devotion is created and fueled. The portraits of Auristela throughout Persiles y Sigismunda leave us with a disturbing sense of disappointment and deceit. The symbiosis between reality and representation is dangerously altered when the portraits acquire a life of their own and exert a power of attraction in their own terms. Ultimately we experience a sense of vertigo when we grasp that the representation has been substituted for what is represented. In a certain way, a kind of closed circuit is created in which representation goes beyond and is transformed into what is represented, becoming in itself an object of adoration whose referent it supplants. Moreover, the “cult of Auristela” relies on the almost “hagiographic” portrayal of the character that the narrator provides us, although, as Beatriz Mariscal maintains, Auristela is not as perfect as the narrator affirms since she experiences jealousy and is arrogant and vain (2004, 553).10 Auristela 16 Alcalá Galán

thus affirms about herself that “juntando a la belleza de mi cuerpo, tal cual ella es, a la de mi alma, hallarás un compuesto de hermosura que te satisfaga” (288). I would add that although she loves Periandro and her faith is sincere, she is dispassionate in both love and devotion and is not equal to the epic-­tinted pilgrimage of love that she protagonizes. On the other hand, the notion of a Catholic pilgrimage relies almost exclusively on Auristela because, as Armstrong-­Roche affirms, “Rome for Periandro is not primarily catechism, but marriage to Auristela” (2009, 275). Besides, it makes little sense, since there is only scant emphasis on catechesis and baptism that might provide a kind of argumental climax to the meaning of the work. Importantly, the character of Auristela is defined by two attributes: the most perfect chastity and an absolute beauty that distances her from the limits of the human, which in turn connects her to the unattainable ideal that the Inmaculada represents. It is nonetheless curious that with the rise of the cult of the Inmaculada in the Counter-­Reformation, other Marian representations such as the Virgins of Milk (Vírgenes de la leche) or pregnant Virgins (Vírgenes de la O), which were closer to the carnal humanity of the feminine, would gradually lose much of their relevance. Auristela’s beauty is never described but is ineffable; that is, it is so perfect that it cannot be described with words. In fact we know absolutely nothing specific about her physical aspect but only the value judgments that exalt her beauty above that of all other women. While she is never described for us, we are informed of the reactions that the contemplation of her stirs in other characters in the book. Also, her beauty as it is artistically represented loses none of its power over those who contemplate her portraits, which, in effect, compete with their model in their ability to provoke a burning devotion. Thus naming Auristela implies evoking her absolute beauty, a beauty that, although it escapes every attempt at explanation, can be transferred to a canvas. Hence there is a failure of the literary in the face of the pictorial in the attempt to represent her. Auristela wanders through the spaces of Persiles y Sigismunda like a character intangible in her idealized perfection. In book 3 there is a comic and futile attempt on the From Painting to Iconography  17

part of an author of comedias to convert her not only into an actress but also into a woman of flesh and blood. Through the failed fantasies of this comedy monger, we witness an almost sacrilegious humanization of the beautiful pilgrim who is dressed and undressed in different garb and roles: [El autor] fue el que más se admiró de la belleza de Auristela y, al momento, la marcó en su imaginación y la tuvo por más que buena para ser comedianta, sin reparar si sabía o no la lengua castellana. Contentóle el talle, diole gusto el brío y, en un instante, la vistió en su imaginación en hábito corto de varón; desnudóla luego y vistióla de ninfa, y casi al mismo punto la envistió de la majestad de reina, sin dejar traje de risa o de gravedad de que no la vistiese, y en todas se le representó grave, alegre, discreta, aguda y sobremanera honesta: estremos que se acomodan mal en una farsanta hermosa. (442–­43)

To conclude I would like to point out that the Rome of Persiles y Sigismunda functions as a memory of human life through art. In Rome one looks toward the pagan past and contemplates the splendor of the Renaissance with its hope in humankind. Nonetheless, with the arrival of the pilgrims, the gaze turns toward the baroque with the cult of the Inmaculada as its emblem. I do not believe that Persiles y Sigismunda takes a stand in this regard but rather think that the devotion to the Virgin serves as a device to explore the irreducible power of images through the portraits of Auristela. As Roland Anrup argues, Spanish religious painting of the baroque is unique both in its reliable realism and in its skepticism toward the visible, and he notes that Spanish masters painted everything apparent as though it were a superficial covering, and their mastery consisted in showing that the visible is useful only as a memory of the disturbing void of the invisible (2000, 968n81). In another study I refer to the Counter-­ Reformation religious theme of Persiles y Sigismunda as an empty shell that served a purpose of generic unity and literary coherence (Alcalá Galán 2009, 241). I believe that Persiles y Sigismunda is not a Christian epic but rather a poetic epic, a monumental reflection on the possibilities and limits of literary and artistic representation. This multifaceted reflection 18 Alcalá Galán

on art also takes into consideration the power of religious iconography to arouse intense devotion (Alcalá Galán 2015, 383–­87). As I have already observed, the Rome of Persiles y Sigismunda is the destination of a religious pilgrimage that reveals itself in its tepidness as a narrative pretext and also a characteristic of the Greek novel genre. Nonetheless, I think that Rome takes on meaning in that peregrine journey as the city in which the past, the present, and the future of humanity are inscribed through art. We thus have in Hipólita’s museum works of the masters of the classical period such as Apelles, Polygnotus, Zeuxis, Parrahasius, and Timanthes (imaginary works because they have been lost); Renaissance masters like Michelangelo and Raphael; and a museum of portraits of the future with blank canvases. The action of Cervantes’s novel is set in the sixteenth century, and Cervantes opens a horizon toward an incipient Counter-­Reformation baroque that coincides with the present that he inhabits. This historical present is characterized by a religious fervor closely linked with sacred art in general and the Marian cult, including the Immaculate Conception, in particular. The portrait of Auristela in the calle Bancos brings us to the most extreme reflection on the irreducible power of images. Notes

1. The theme of painting in Persiles y Sigismunda has been explored by Joaquín Casalduero (1975), Michael Nerlich (2003, 2005), Michael Armstrong-­Roche (2009), Isabel Lozano Renieblas (1998), Margarita Levisi (1972), Carlos Brito (1997), Helena Percas de Ponseti (1975), Mary Gaylord Randel (1986), Karl-­ Ludwig Selig (1973), Frederick de Armas (1993), Ignacio López-­Alemany (2005, 2008), Aurora Egido (1990a, 1990b), and Alcalá Galán (2009), among others. 2. All quotations from Persiles y Sigismunda are from Cervantes 2004. 3. “The Persiles is thus a ‘semillero de historias’ that the reader perceives as inexhaustible. The book we know is pure potential: within its pages is contained the perception that we have in our hands an infinite book that has materialized in an almost aleatory way and that it could have taken many other forms. . . . Cervantes wrote a work riddled with mute voices and experiences untold From Painting to Iconography  19

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

only because in the labyrinth of crossroads and intersections they haven’t been ignited by the fuse of the main narrative voice” (Alcalá Galán 2009, 218–­19). In her article “Painted Dreams and Cervantes’ Critique of Representation in the Persiles,” Cassidy Reis (2016) analyzes this narrated dream in depth from the viewpoint of narrative ekphrasis. Earlier the same painter corroborates that this painting is a copy made in France: “Sólo sabía que otro pintor, su amigo, se le había hecho copiar en Francia, el cual le había dicho ser de una doncella estranjera que en hábitos de peregrina pasaba a Roma” (659–­60). In this exhaustive study, Ruiz Gálvez (2008) explores the history of immaculism in Spain over the centuries. Patricia Andrés González (2013), María Jesús Sanz (1995), and Suzanne Stratton (1994) have approached Roelas’s Alegoría de la Inmaculada from within the historical context of immaculism. One must pay attention to this disconcerting way of presenting the Marian cult because by setting it forth as the result of the evolution of types of devotion prior to Christianity, the sense of the pilgrimages is seen as yet another manifestation of human devotional practices that have transformed the object of devotion—­for example, from Venus to the Virgin Mary—­but not the need to pray and plead that is satisfied in these pilgrimages to holy sites. On the immaculist theme in the song of Feliciana de la Voz, see Schmidt 2016. Beatriz Mariscal Hay observes that, in addition to Auristela’s jealousy and vanity, she also lies, and not only about her identity but every time it suits her purposes: “Let’s recall for example that, in order to resolve the matter of crossed love among the fishermen and fisherwomen, Auristela pretends to have the power to read the mind of the two women to know the truth of their amorous preferences” (2004, 556, my translation).

Works Cited

Alcalá Galán, Mercedes. 2009. Escritura desatada: Poética de la representación en Cervantes. Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos. —. 2015. “‘Así como lo pintan por acá’: Iconografía contrarreformista en las Vidas de monjas.” In Perspectives on Early Modern Women in Iberia and the Americas: Studies in Law, Society, Art and Literature in Honor of Anne J. Cruz, 20 Alcalá Galán

edited by María Cristina Quintero and Adrienne L. Martín, 377–­95. New York: Artepoética. Andrés González, Patricia. 2013. “Emblemática mariana en Juan de Roelas: La Alegoría de la Inmaculada del Museo Nacional de Escultura de Valladolid.” In Palabras, símbolos, emblemas: Las estructuras gráficas de la representación, edited by Ana Martínez Pereira, Inmaculada Osuna, and Víctor Infantes, 139–­50. Madrid: Turpín Editores. Anrup, Roland. 2000. “The Image of the Virgin Mary during the Baroque in Counter-­Reformation Spain and Post-­Reformation Sweden.” In Spain and Sweden in the Baroque Era (1600–­1660): International Congress Records, edited by Enrique Martínez Ruiz and Magdalena de Pazzi Pi Corrales, 949–­80. Madrid: Fundación Berndt Wistedt. Armstrong-­Roche, Michael. 2009. Cervantes’ Epic Novel: Empire, Religion, and the Dream Life of Heroes in “Persiles.” Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Brito Díaz, Carlos. 1997. “Porque lo pide así la pintura: La escritura peregrina en el lienzo del Persiles.” Cervantes 17, no. 1:145–­64. Casalduero, Joaquín. 1975. Sentido y forma de “Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda.” Madrid: Gredos. Cervantes, Miguel de. 1989. The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Northern Story. Translated by Celia Richmond Weller and Clark A. Colahan. Berkeley: University of California Press. —. 2004. Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. Edited by Carlos Romero Muñoz. 5th ed. Madrid: Cátedra. de Armas, Frederick A. 1993. “A Banquet of the Senses: The Mythological Structure of Persiles y Sigismunda, III.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 70, no. 4:403–­14. Egido, Aurora. 1990a. “La memoria y el arte narrativo del Persiles.” Nueva revista de filología hispánica 38, no. 2: 621–­41. —. 1990b. “La página y el lienzo: Sobre las relaciones entre poesía y pintura.” In Fronteras de la poesía en el Barroco, edited by Aurora Egido, 164–­97. Barcelona: Editorial Crítica. Forcione, Alban K. 1970. Cervantes, Aristotle, and the “Persiles.” Princeton nj: Princeton University Press. —. 1972. Cervantes’ Christian Romance: A Study of “Persiles y Sigismunda.” Princeton nj: Princeton University Press. Gaylord Randel, Mary. 1986. “Cervantes’ Portraits and Literary Theory in the Text of Fiction.” Cervantes 6, no. 1:57–­80. From Painting to Iconography  21

Levisi, Margarita. 1972. “La pintura en la narrativa de Cervantes.” Boletín de la Biblioteca de Menéndez Pelayo 48:293–­325. López Alemany, Ignacio. 2005. “A Portrait of a Lady: Representations of Sigismunda/ Auristela in Cervantes’s Persiles.” Ekphrasis in the Age of Cervantes, edited by Frederick A. de Armas, 202–­16. Lewisburg pa: Bucknell University Press. —. 2008. “Ut pictura non poesis: Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda and the Construction of Memory.” Cervantes 28, no. 1:103–­18. Lozano Renieblas, Isabel. 1998. Cervantes y el mundo del “Persiles.” Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos. —. 2014. Cervantes y los retos del “Persiles.” Salamanca: Seminario de Estudios Medievales y Renacentistas. Mariscal Hay, Beatriz. 2004. “Las verdades de Cervantes: Observaciones sobre el Persiles.” In Peregrinamente peregrinos: Actas del V Congreso Internacional de la Asociación de Cervantistas, edited by Alicia Villar Lecumberri, 1:549–­59. Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Nerlich, Michael. 2003. “Una corona partida por medio, ou sur le rôle de la peinture dans Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda.” In Lectures d’une oeuvre: “Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda” de Cervantes, edited by Jean-­Pierre Sánchez, 119–­56. Nantes: Éditions du Temps. —. 2005. El “Persiles” descodificado, o La “Divina Comedia” de Cervantes. Translated by Jesús Munárriz. Madrid: Hiperión. Percas de Ponseti, Helena. 1975. Cervantes y su concepto del arte: Estudio crítico de algunos aspectos y episodios del “Quijote.” Madrid: Gredos. Reis, Cassidy. 2016. “Painted Dreams and Cervantes’ Critique of Representation in the Persiles.” eHumanista/Cervantes 5:460–­77. http://​www​.ehumanista​ .ucsb​.edu​/sites ​/secure​.lsit​.ucsb​.edu​.span​.d7​_eh​/files​/sitefiles​/cervantes​ /volume5​/ehumancer5​.finalfinal​.option2​.pdf. Ruiz-­Gálvez, Estrella. 2008. “Sine labe: El inmaculismo en la España de los siglos XV a XVII; La proyección social de un imaginario religioso.” Revista de dialectología y tradiciones populares 63, no. 2:197–­241. Sanz, María Jesús. 1995. “El problema de la Inmaculada Concepción en la segunda década del siglo XVII: Festejos y máscaras; El papel de los plateros.” Laboratorio de Arte 8:73–­101. Selig, Karl-­Ludwig. 1973. “Persiles y Sigismunda: Notes of Pictures, Portraits, and Portraiture.” Hispanic Review 41:305–­12.

22 Alcalá Galán

Schmidt, Rachel. 2016. “The Stained and the Unstained: Feliciana de la Voz’s Hymn to Mary in the Context of the Immaculist Movement.” eHumanista/Cervantes 5:478–­95. http://w ​ ww.​ ehumanista.​ ucsb.​ edu/​ sites/​ secure.​ lsit.​ ucsb.​ edu.​ span​ .d7​_eh​/files​/sitefiles​/cervantes​/volume5​/ehumancer5.​ finalfinal.​ option2.​ pdf. Stratton, Suzanne L. 1994. The Immaculate Conception in Spanish Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

From Painting to Iconography  23

chapter 2

“Dios Me Entiende y No Digo Más” Nominalism, Humanism, and Modernity in Don Quixote

Rosilie Hernández

In his seminal essay “Linguistic Perspectivism in the Don Quijote,” Leo Spitzer considers Cervantes as an author who exemplifies polynomasia and a relativistic attitude, more specifically described as a “deliberate refusal on the part of the author [Cervantes] to make a final choice of one name (and one etymology)” (2005, 163). In search for “what may be Cervantes’s psychological motive” in Don Quixote, Spitzer proposes the following conceptual criteria for his own investigation of the novel: “It is as if language in general was seen by Cervantes from the angle of perspectivism. . . . It will not be difficult to see . . . that perspectivism informs the structure of the novel as a whole: we find it in Cervantes’ treatment of the plot, of ideological themes, as well as in his attitude of distantiation toward the reader. And yet, beyond this perspectivism, we may sense the presence of something which is not subject to fluctuation: the immovable, immutable principle of the divine” (164). Spitzer then proceeds to finely analyze prescient examples of perspectivism in the novel, reiterating what had already been proposed in the opening paragraphs: “The artist Cervantes never denies God, or His institutions, the King and the State. God, then, cannot be attracted into the artist’s linguistic perspectivism; rather is Cervantes’ God placed above the perspectives of language, He is said to be, as we have seen, the supreme Entendedor [Understander] of the language He has created—­just as Cervantes, from his lower vantage point, seeks to be. Perhaps we may assume with Cervantes the old Neoplatonic 25

belief in an artistic Maker who is enthroned above the manifold facets and perspectives of the world” (184–­85, interpolation in original). This analytical position reflects what from a philosophical perspective is the guarantee tendered by universal forms or ideas, illustrated in the early modern period through both Platonic and Aristotelian realism and their theological and scholastic reiterations. In the Platonic register universal forms exist outside human empirical perception and function as abstract ideal objects or paradigms independent from our mental processes. In Aristotelian formulations universals are equally real, but they are instead formed from and depend on the characteristics that can be generalized from our perception of—­the mental processes that allow us to discern—­ particulars. From a medieval theological perspective, whether external to or derived from perception, universal forms provide an ontological guarantee to human existence and confirm the syllogistic logic of the divine universe: particulars replicate universals, universals reflect (even if not always transparently) the perfection of God’s divine reason (Gillespie 2008, 20). Consequently, following Spitzer Don Quixote is seen as a text in which inevitably the play of perspectives—­linguistic, thematic, and ideological—­is always already “subservient to the divine” and textually represented in the novel by the all-­knowing author (2005, 185). Despite having been first published in 1948, Spitzer’s essay remains—­and with good reason—­a pivotal critical text, singled out by Roberto González Echevarría as, “the most insightful essay ever written on Cervantes’s masterpiece” (2005, 20). Interestingly, González Echevarría summarizes Spitzer’s contribution as follows: “Don Quixote is about the freedom of the individual to choose and to create according to what he perceives and feels as being the true and the real” (20). What González Echevarría overlooks, both in terms of Spitzer’s argument and of Don Quixote, is how this freedom may be conceptually related to the competing onto-­theological traditions that in the early modern period offered a religious and philosophical foundation for how to perceive what is true and what is real at the cusp of secular modernity.1 My intent is not to reject, by way of Spitzer, the notion that Don Quixote is epistemologically bound to the existence of the divine. In other 26 Hernández

words I am not interested in pursuing an analysis that marks the death of God—­as a precedent to Friedrich Nietzsche’s interpretation of this dictum—­in Cervantes’s masterpiece. To the contrary I would like to reassess the constitutive logic of the divine in the fictional world of Don Quixote. More precisely I want to challenge the assumption found in Spitzer that the theological and philosophical foundation of the Supreme Being in Don Quixote is per force a stalwart divine essence of unchanging universals; a Neoplatonic divine Other that is distinct from, stands above from, and referentially anchors the many, varied, and proliferating names and accompanying perspectives that arbitrarily signify the knight-­errant’s world. If we move away from categorizing Cervantes’s God as sharing a Neoplatonic, Aristotelian, or Thomistic provenance, then what onto-­ theological tradition can we reference?2 And, simultaneously, how can we address the malaise of the period signaled to by Georg Lukács’s assertion that Don Quixote was “the first great novel of world literature [to stand] at the beginning of the time when the Christian God began to forsake the world” (1971, 103)? I would propose that one might better understand the relationship between the universal and the particular (bound to the quandaries of perspectivism) in Cervantes’s novel by turning to theological nominalism, a system of thought first formalized by William of Ockham in the fourteenth century (ca. 1280–­ca. 1349).3 The advantage that nominalism offers as a point of reference when reading Don Quixote is that it, more than any other theological tradition, focuses on the unique and arbitrary relationship that humans hold with the universal and the divine. In his Theological Roots of Modernity, Michael Allen Gillespie—­whose work I will follow closely in this chapter—­identifies what he terms the “nominalist revolution” as the most notable ancestor of what we today have come to define as modernity: “The origins of modernity therefore lie not in human self-­assertion or in reason but in the great metaphysical and theological struggle that marked the end of the medieval world and that transformed Europe in the three hundred years that separate the medieval and the modern worlds” (2008, 12). Following Gillespie’s proposition “Dios Me Entiende y No Digo Más”  27

and in tandem with critical positions that bind Don Quixote with the emergence of (secular) modernity, I will explore some possible common coordinates between late medieval nominalist theology, its connection to Petrarch’s humanist project, and the shifting linguistic and ontological boundaries of Don Quixote’s world.4 What Does God Have to Do with Anything?

A school of thought that by the end of the Middle Ages competed—­ most prominently in France and Germany—­with other positions such as “Thomist” or “Scotist,” Ockhamism denies the existence of external absolute universal forms, rejecting both Platonic and Aristotelian realism (Courtenay 2008). Against metaphysical realism—­the belief in universal ideas or forms that serve as the foundation of all knowledge—­Ockham argues for a universe composed of ever-­proliferating singular and contingent iterations of particulars from which no universals can be securely drawn: “no particular substance is a universal; every substance is numerically one and a particular” (Ockham 1974b, 79). From his perspective universals are always already constructed even if convenient concepts—­ ficta or thought objects—­created in each individual mind in order to establish what is a tenuous and ever-­changing set of singular/unique/ individual concepts through which the person provisionally understands and configures similitudes in the world (Spade 1999, 101). This assertion is possible because, for Ockham, God—­not as a form himself but as a creator of singular forms—­is not bound to any fixed logic or even to the natural laws of his own creation: “God is free in the fullest sense, that is, free even from his previous decisions. He can thus overturn anything he has established, interrupt any chain of causes, or create the world again from the beginning if he wants to” (Gillespie 2008, 23). To be clear Ockham’s contribution is not that God transcends his creation—­an assessment that was central to Thomas Aquinas and scholastic thought in general and which conceptually secured God’s omnipotence. What Ockham argues is that nature is neither a reflection of nor analogous to God (Gillespie 2008, 20). Consequently, no universals, no similitudes, and 28 Hernández

no predictable design can be drawn—­syllogistically understood—­that would allow us to approximate an understanding of his transcendence. God—­in his absolute omnipotence—­is not constrained by any universal or singular name, concept, or final cause. As such, for Ockham God is by his nature exempt from any obligation to any logic, past or future, or even to his creation. The only thing human beings can hope for, and not without some uncertainty, is divine grace: God’s love and mercy given not as a result of merit or any traceable rational logic but simply because God so desires it.5 The theological motivation for medieval nominalists was to honor God’s limitless omnipotence; God cannot be constrained for our convenience by any form or essence—­neither preexisting nor derived. The ontological consequence, nevertheless, is an unhinging of any secured and predictable bond in the relationship between God and humanity. For us today in the aftermath of modernity, nominalism is associated with the death of God, insofar as we have come to link (from a metaphysical perspective) the disappearance of universals with the disappearance of divine transcendence. If there are no universals and everything (including each human being) is a particular, then nothing outside ourselves ties us to anything. However, in the late-­medieval and early modern theological nominalist context this formulation was not possible. To the contrary God loomed large, one could say even larger than in any other theological tradition, precisely because he was not only omnipotent and transcendent (that is, unknowable) but more importantly untethered from all logic except from the mystery of his grace. As a result in the nominalist onto-­theological scheme the logic of universals was replaced by the logic of radical individuality, resulting in a proliferation of singular perspectives through which each human being must per force construct his or her worldview. It is precisely at the conceptual juncture of radical individuality with linguistic perspectivism that Don Quixote can be read as congruent with a nominalist theological proposition. There is a related aspect of nominalist theology that equally can inform our reading of Don Quixote: the privileging by Ockham of divine will over “Dios Me Entiende y No Digo Más”  29

divine reason. In the absence of universal design, God’s will is guided only by a general avoidance of contradiction, an imperative that is deployed in nature and our continued human existence and made manifest to us through revelation; we are all, after all, here on earth, still alive, and benefiting from Christ’s redemptive power. As Ockham famously stated in the Centiloquium theologicum, God could have sent Christ to us in the form of a donkey or a rock (1974a, 44). It is only in the interest of avoiding contradiction that he sent the Redeemer in the image of a man whom we as humans could recognize and identify as our savior. As summarized by Gillespie, “Faith alone, Ockham argues, teaches us that God is omnipotent and that he can do everything that is possible, that is to say, everything that is not contradictory. Thus, every being exists only as a result of his willing it and it exists as it does and as long as it does only because he so wills it. Creation is thus an act of sheer grace and is comprehensible only through revelation. God creates the world and continues to act within it, bound neither by its laws nor by his previous determinations” (2008, 22).6 Mirroring their Creator, human beings—­in their singularity—­are prone to eschew an external controlling reason or design in favor of their will; they are driven by their capacity to impose on the world their own schema, to name things, and to form connections that give order to what is essentially a human existence characterized by contingency and the ever-­impending possibility of chaos. I will return to the issue of the will when I examine the connections between Petrarch and Don Quixote within a nominalist framework. For now it is important to reiterate that despite God’s absolute freedom and the resulting absence of final causes, human existence—­for Ockham—­is shepherded by divine grace and by our attachment to moral law: “The nominalist rejection of universals was thus a rejection not merely of formal but also of final causes. If there were no universals, there could be no universal ends to be actualized. Nature, thus, does not direct human beings to the good. Or to put the matter more positively, nominalism opens up the possibility of a radically new understanding of human freedom. The fact that human beings have no defined natural ends does not mean 30 Hernández

that they have no moral duties. The moral law continues to set limits on human action” (Gillespie 2008, 24). In other words God (in his tendency to avoid contradiction) is prone to protect his creation through grace; and humans, in their gratitude for having been created and for being the recipients of divine grace, are expected (even if not naturally determined) to act toward each other in ways that are moral and good.7 Consequently, one must trust that God will not capriciously deny his grace and that humans will act morally in the face of radical individuality, contingency, and the unpredictability that frames their existence.8 In Don Quixote the characters (and we as readers) are faced with an ethical injunction that is tenuous and contingent; characters in Don Quixote often grapple with the definitions and parameters of what it is to be moral or do good in any given context, a quandary that is often complicated by the disjuncture between Don Quixote’s fantasy and the world in which it is deployed.9 If our knight-­errant’s fantastic quest is made possible by nominalist singularity, it simultaneously cannot stave off the contingency, arbitrariness, and resulting ethical and moral dilemmas that afflict radical individuality at the verge of modernity. Perspectivism, the Will, and Moral Virtue

Returning to the topic of linguistic perspectivism (or, more precisely, to how we can better understand the textual and ideological function of perspectives within the ethical and moral paradigm of nominalist radical individualism), in chapter 1 of part 2, as Don Quixote once again obstinately holds on to his fantasy as a knight-­errant, he twice insists, “Dios me entiende, y no digo más” (552).10 Don Quixote wills his way back to Rocinante, devoid of any decipherable logic, only understood by God. Throughout part 2 readers encounter a world where character after character wills his or her world and wills himself or herself into the world of others, affirming his or her individual existence with little regard for externally determined reason or predictable design. For example, Don Quixote wills his way down the cueva de Montesinos; the Duke and the Duchess will out of thin air the fantasy of Trifaldi; and Sancho “Dios Me Entiende y No Digo Más”  31

unexpectedly wills himself as a just governor of Barataria. It is my view, therefore, that the problematics of affirmative, shifting, and conflicting voluntades are at the core of part 2 more so than those of dialogism—­to recall Mikhail Bakhtin—­or perspectivism in Spitzer’s terms. To be more precise, if part 1 assembles a vast conglomeration of differing and singular perspectives—­manifesting their respective experiences, values, and ideologies—­through which characters position themselves in the world, part 2 digs deep into the forces that drive those perspectives and the mechanisms that determine a human being’s ability to impose his or her will, his or her selfhood, on the world. Each of the characters, in his or her contingent individuality, attempts to construct a willful, singular, and self-­serving experience of the world; in turn the motivations and the effects of their individual wills organize the thematic and ethical content of the text. Part 2, more so than part 1, richly exemplifies the triumphs, failures, and moral and ethical quandaries that frame the singular and the provisional; the task then is to examine how the many and varied wills intersect and what the implications of this existential paradigm may mean in the transition to modern subjectivity. The humanist nominalist conception of the will proposes a vision for the individual who is heartened to create himself, not strictly tied to a predestined station and given identity, but rather as an artist or a free agent—­what Stephen Greenblatt has defined as self-­fashioning and of which much as been said in relation to Don Quixote.11 Yet the issue of the will, I would propose, should be examined apart from the motor of self-­creation. In the fictional world created by Cervantes, the issue is not simply how characters successfully or pathetically fashion their selfhoods but rather how they, as their nominalist God, privilege their will as the organizing force of their existence, placing the deployment of their individual desires and singular perspectives over any consideration for external design or forms. Both structurally and thematically, Don Quixote is a text in which the potential and problematic effects of the individual as an independent agent is given its full due. In the world of Don Quixote, and including its narrative voices, the force exerted by the individual will—­in 32 Hernández

terms of what characters think, how they act, and how they judge their thoughts and actions—­is fundamental to an understanding of the ethical (systematic) and moral (personal) fabric of the text. Don Quixote is, without a doubt, the best example. From the standpoint of the will, part 2 allows for an understanding of our knight-­errant not as an irrational madman but as a man of singular will. After his journey and many adventures in part 1, the one thing he is sure of is that God understands him, even if no one else does; his persistent attachment to the chivalric scheme continues to be driven by a singular engagement with the world that needs no external logic or universal sanction. He is not a mad Jupiter or Neptune, as the barber’s joking story insinuates. He is Don Quixote, a man who wills his sense of the world by attaching himself to the logic and ethical economy of knight-­errantry despite the ostensibly anachronistic and delusional nature of the project. The curate’s insistence on the chivalric as a “ficción, fábula y mentira, y sueños contados por hombres despiertos, o por mejor decir, medio dormidos” (558) is wholly accurate on a larger existential level because we all—­in our godlike radical individuality—­create fictions, fables, and lies, insofar as we give order to a contingent world where God’s design is undecipherable and his will is wholly unpredictable. Don Quixote just does this with more conviction and flair than most others. As mentioned earlier Ockham maintained that there was no absolute necessity except for God’s will, divine and unconstrained.12 The existential repercussions of this system of thought proved rather hefty, and the logic of noncontradiction in Ockham’s account of the incarnation seems tenuous at best. However, at the level of the human—and the individual’s potentiality for forging a singular, even if provisional, design for his or her own particular existence—Don Quixote’s willed knight-­errantry and his fluctuation between madness and sanity, between one perspective and another, can be seen as fully consistent with a nominalist position. In the world of Don Quixote, God—­omniscient and willful, and exempted from any logic or design—­recedes to the background, making it possible for each character to impose order or make sense of the world in her or his “Dios Me Entiende y No Digo Más”  33

own exceptional manner and responding to her or his own needs, values, idiosyncrasies, obscured traumas, and corresponding desires. This is most evident in part 2, where Don Quixote forges on despite the many ways in which others impose their own singular wills on his own, as well as on his narrative, ordering his world in unpredictable ways. The Duke and the Duchess are a prime example, introducing themselves into Don Quixote’s knight-­errantry, injecting it with their own perspectives, framing values, and desires, the performance an idle and corrupted noble selfhood that Cervantes seems not to hold dear but which, nonetheless, competes with and offers an alternative model for an analysis of the conjunction of radical individuality, will, perspectivism, and moral virtue. The issue of language within Ockham’s nominalist theology—of how an individual attempts coherency and graspable categories through words and signs—is certainly equally at play in Cervantes’s masterpiece. Gillespie explains the function of language for Ockham as follows: Ockham’s assertion of ontological individualism undermines not only ontological realism but also syllogistic logic and science, for in the absence of real universals, names become mere signs or signs of signs. Language thus does not reveal being but in practice often conceals the truth about being by fostering a belief in the reality of universals. In fact, all so-­called universals are merely second or higher order signs that we as finite beings use to aggregate individual beings into categories. These categories, however, do not denote real things. They are only useful fictions that help us make sense out of the radically individualized world. However, they also distort reality. (2008, 23)

Up to this point I have presented Don Quixote’s chivalric identity as a product of his will, of his singular position within a world made of competing singular identitary positions. Yet what also must be recognized is that this singular position can be articulated, again as the curate’s diatribe insinuates, only through fictions, through words, signs, and ideas that claim a universality they cannot unequivocally verify or de facto uphold. On the one hand, Ockham’s conception of language opens up the possibility 34 Hernández

for scientific inquiry since things cannot just be assumed to be—­for their truth to lie in some external universal form that we cannot understand—­ but rather are subject to being hypothesized and tested. This is one of nominalism’s most notable contributions to modernity. But also, and at the same time, language is ultimately a ruse that humans employ in order to make sense or to secure something where there is no-­thing. It is in this manner that we repress the real of sweeping contingency in a world created by a God whose power and will are necessarily without limits and whose grace is only tenuously ensured by the hope that he will sustain his creation and not contradict himself. When understood from within the bounds of theological nominalism, Don Quixote’s prolific use of the chivalric (and many other literary forms) as a mode of language and as a conceptual and ethical framework can be identified as a way for this singular individual to make sense of—­and adjudicate—­intelligible categories in a context where the assurances of universal realism and divine design have abandoned the scene; again, what is fundamental to a nominalist understanding of human and divine existence is not that God is dead but rather that God cannot be held by or tied to any limits (self-­imposed or consequential), predetermined design, or unchangeable form. In the face of this condition, and at the level of the individual character, we can all relate to the particular state of loss that Alonso Quijano experiences—­no idealizable past to provide meaning to his life, no present to boast about, no future to offer solace, the face of God hidden. All that is left for Alonso Quijano is the simultaneous creative potential and existential burden of his radical singularity—­what to do with himself, how to make sense of the world, how to exert his will in a vast sea of equally contingent and lost individuals; this is perhaps one way to describe the journey into and encounters in the cueva de Montesinos, where all souls are willfully and eternally reliving the stories that give meaning to their existence. From a humanist point of view, the stress falls on his creative potential, on his self-­fashioning as an agent of his particular will. From a purely nominalist theological perspective, and perhaps more at the level of the text than of the character, the emphasis is on the quandaries of the individual who “Dios Me Entiende y No Digo Más”  35

wills his self in and through signs and language, without the assurance of a fixed universal referent, subjected to the whim of an absent God. If part 1 of the novel offers a creative space where Alonso Quijano—­ despite the many failures and small victories he enjoys—­singularly fashions himself for himself through the language of chivalry as a hero, part 2 offers a much more complex set of conditions. Playing out more prominently the unsettling potential of theological nominalism, individual characters—­Sansón Carrasco, the Duke and the Duchess, Ginés de Pasamonte—­impose their singular will and perspectives on and enter into a contentious relationship with Don Quixote. Conceptually between Ockham’s principal of divine and human noncontradiction and the freedom from accident offered by Kantian reason, Cervantes creates a world where the individual is left to his own devices, at times deploying his will for positive, productive, or humorous effects, many other times in a fashion that proves conflictive and destructive, but always within the vagaries of proliferating singular perspectives that attempt to deflect the absence of God, the lack of a decipherable syllogistic universal logic, and the resultant isolation of the self. We can think of many examples in part 2, some of which I have already mentioned briefly, others that include Sancho’s enchantment of Dulcinea, Sansón Carrasco’s obsession with defeating Don Quixote, Teresa Panza’s letters to the Duchess and Sancho, and Ricote’s return to a homeland that has rejected him; all are instances where characters insist on establishing categories and drawing purpose and a cause where there is no sense or order to be discerned beyond the contingency of individual selves and their tenuous social relations. What all these individuals ultimately share, and what separates them even more prominently from God, is their lack of omnipotence and their mortality. On the path to the self-­sustaining reason that the Enlightenment will attempt to offer, no fictional characters better exemplify the condition of radical individuality tied to a God who offers no assurances than those in Don Quixote.

36 Hernández

The Vagaries of the Self: Between Petrarch and Don Quixote

Don Quixote is nothing if not an individual; whether one thinks of the knight-­errant as a hero, a fool, or something completely other, the reader cannot help but deeply engage with the unique existential and psychological coordinates of this most singular of characters. When the topic of individuality is broached from a philosophical perspective, Cervantes’s novel has been identified as a site for an emergent modern or even postmodern subjectivity and consciousness—­an account that deviates from the Enlightenment’s insistence on the individual’s capacity to independently exercise reason (unfettered by an external cosmological order) to the tattered psyche of a fragmented, decentered, and opaque (to himself as well as to others) self. As shown in the previous sections, I am interested in examining connections between theological nominalism, the will, and the construction of the self as found in Don Quixote (not subjectivity as it later came to be defined by the Enlightenment); as such, this analysis can well benefit from thinking about nominalism’s connections with St. Augustine’s Confessions and its synthesis in Petrarch’s humanist project. In spite of the threat of disarray that radical individuality appears to suggest, the concept, as generally understood by early modern theologians and philosophers—­and here we can include Jesuit theologians in Spain such as Francisco Suárez—­features the exercise of the will toward the good as a moral imperative. It is through the faculty of the will that human beings can guide their lives in favor of what they intimately and individually understand as virtuous and thus congruent with God’s will and grace. The troublesome question of how to simultaneously consider God’s omnipotent, absolute, will vis-­à-­vis the unbound exercise of human will is central to Christian theological debates in general, and nominalism does little to provide a resolution. Nevertheless, what is important is how nominalist theology—­and the relationship between the will and virtue—­makes possible the conception of the self in humanism, especially as first developed in Petrarch’s philosophical corpus. Petrarch’s legacy in Spain has largely been documented through the decisive influence that

“Dios Me Entiende y No Digo Más”  37

his Canzoniere exerted on the literary amatory imagination and its poetic forms (Cruz 1988 and Navarrete 1994). Instead I will refer to the connections between Petrarch’s philosophical propositions and Cervantes’s Don Quixote in terms of the concept of the individual, both as it concerns an affirmation of singularity in human beings and as the signifying instability that radical individuality assumes. Petrarch and Ockham were contemporaries, and it seems highly possible that the poet-­philosopher was well aware of the controversies that swirled around the Franciscan monk’s theological propositions and defense of the vow of poverty. Even if Petrarch was not a follower of nominalism, his notion of the self is informed by the concept of radical individuality as a positive space where the creative potential of the self can be made manifest and deployed. As Gillespie, once more, explains, While [Petrarch’s] thought remained generally Christian, he envisioned a new kind of man with new virtues, not a citizen of a city-­state or a republic but an autarchic individual being who was whole and complete in himself. . . . The ideal for the Greek artist and citizen was not the formation of individual character or personality but assimilation to an ideal model. Petrarch and his humanist followers did not put the human per se at the center of things but the individual human being, and in this respect they owed a deeper ontological debt to nominalism than to antiquity. (2008, 31)

In the context of Ockham’s thought, Petrarch’s singular self is created by—­and can only function properly through the imposition of—­the will. In the image of God—­and here the theological concept of imago Dei comes to bear—­human beings can through their will create a version of themselves that they believe is good and virtuous. Petrarch states, for example: “It is safer to strive for a good and pious will than for a capable and clear intellect. The object of the will . . . is to be good; that of the intellect is truth. It is better to will the good than to know the truth” (quoted in Gillespie 2008, 67). Virtue and goodness, not given reason and external truth, lead each individual in his own singular way to an articulation of 38 Hernández

selfhood that is congruent with what God has shown humanity through his divine grace. This approach to selfhood as motivated by a will to good was first modeled in the Confessions of St. Augustine, Petrarch’s spiritual and philosophical mentor. As noted by Eunyoung Hwang, for Augustine selfhood implies two competing parallel forms: individuality as singleness and individuality as uniqueness (2010, 82).13 On the one hand, singleness pertains to how the divinely created universal form, “humanity,” is made manifest in a particular human being; on the other, uniqueness “is regarded as the most private experience in the phenomenological structure, [and] implies that the individuality of a human person is considered a unique phenomenon denying any form of comparison and generalization” (82). Like Petrarch after him, Augustine anchors the potential for uniqueness in the cultivation of the will toward virtue; yet, as observed by Aaron Gurevic, “while St Augustine’s personality is revealed as he draws nearer to God and seeks spiritual union with Him, Petrarch’s attention, . . . is concentrated on his own significant self, as he carefully and prudently molds his biography and his personality” (1995, 250).14 Ockham, in turn, established similar parameters for the relationship between the individual will and virtue yet insisted on two distinct elements that may prove pivotal to a nominalist approximation to Don Quixote. Marilyn McCord Adams explains that for Ockham human beings are not naturally inclined to do good; virtue is instead a matter of an “informed right reason” guided by the following tenet: “God is the highest good; the highest good ought to be loved above all and for its own sake; therefore, God ought to be loved above all and for God’s own sake; therefore one ought to will whatever God wills and nill whatever God wills one to nill” (1999, 257). This may seem a worthy set of parameters for human existence, except that reason is often prone to defects and diversions and cognitive powers are fallible; as such, reason “can make false judgments about what is good, bad or evil and to what degree” as well as “fail to conform to its norms” (McCord Adams 1999, 258). If we briefly relate this quandary to Cervantes’s context, it is possible to say that perspectivism in Don Quixote is in equal measures “Dios Me Entiende y No Digo Más”  39

and variously related to the will and its wavering between “informed right reason,” “false judgment,” and “failure.” Taking this background into account, for Petrarch to know God is to know oneself not as a singular manifestation of a universal form but as a singular being whose moral duty is to will a distinctive—­sometimes more successful, sometimes less—­path to virtue. In My Secret (a fictional dialogue with Augustine) and The Life of Solitude, Petrarch makes clear that for him only solitude, introspection, and a proper use of leisure can quell his passions and open the space for the creation of a virtuous self. Despite the exemplary model of virtue that Petrarch embodies and which fills the pages of his texts, his formulation of humanism insists on nominalist exceptionality and affirms difference and idiosyncrasy. Most importantly, for Petrarch (and in the humanist project in general), we as individuals have “a right to the expression of our individuality, the right of the human personality to express and realize itself according to its individual qualities, the right of a particular individual to regulate his life according to the disposition and humor with which nature has endowed him and without any reference to the claims of his fellow men upon him” (Gillespie 2008, 62). God, in his infinite will, created each of us as a unique human being (as defined by Augustine), and each of us has the duty to attempt his or her own unique path to virtue and eternity. Yet we must not forget that for Petrarch selfhood is not exempt from external and internal threats, including the distractions caused by other individuals, the insistence of the passions, the failures of reason, and, most importantly, the residues of uncertainty motivated by a looming absence of universals. The creative capacity of the self is a source of freedom and self-­affirmation, but it is also a source of anxiety in a nominalist paradigm where universal external forms do not secure existence. This is the paradox of radical individuality for Petrarch: each person is free and, in fact, has a moral duty to, through his will, create the best possible version of himself; yet this same self, in the absence of the certainty of divine design and universal forms, cannot rid himself from contingency, arbitrariness, and selfishness. If God’s will lies outside the domain of design or predictability, 40 Hernández

more so and despite our best intentions, the human will does also. We can all hope that God, our fellow human beings, and we as individuals forge selfhood and exercise will for the common good; regretfully, no one can singularly define the common good and how our actions and choices may affect those around us. It is in this manner that Ockham’s nominalism and Petrarchan humanism plant the seeds for the malaise of modernity. There is no stable referent for signs—­neither in images nor in words—­not because the divine is ineffable or absent but because it is arbitrary; an unpredictability that beleaguers the individual even as she forges her singular version of virtuous selfhood. If on the one hand, God and human beings are unfettered from the yoke of classical realism and predestination, on the other hand we find ourselves diminished in a sea of contingency and lack of referentiality. As we look to Cervantes and Don Quixote, the question is, How does the knight-­errant’s quest correspond to the humanist nominalist ideal of radical individuality? Or, to be more precise, how can Alonso Quijano’s creation of himself as a knight-­errant be read through the paradigm fleshed out in Petrarch’s writings, both in terms of an articulation of the virtuous self—­uniquely conceived and self-­fashioned—­and in the uncertainty and potential failure that this creative willed process includes? Michel Foucault argues that Don Quixote’s adventures are motivated by the need to endow with reality signs without content: “His adventures will be a deciphering of the world: a diligent search over the entire surface of the earth for the forms that will prove that what books say is true” (2005, 52). The point of Foucault’s analysis is that Don Quixote is destined to fail; in an epistemological shift toward secular modernity, the knight-­errant’s quest takes place in a world where “resemblances and signs have dissolved their former alliance” (53). In other words things in the world no longer hold a strong correspondence to unchanging universal forms. Foucault does not occupy himself with Ockham, Petrarch, or humanism for that matter; nevertheless, it is not a stretch to establish a parallel between his thesis regarding the failure of the system of resemblances that anchored classical realism and the less-­certain aspects of the humanist nominalist “Dios Me Entiende y No Digo Más”  41

model for radical individuality. Gillespie notes that for nominalists, as for Petrarch, “there are no universals or species, and all supposed species are merely names or signs. Petrarch had similar doubts that humans could be understood as a species” (2008, 60).15 Following this logic and relating it back to Foucault, humanist singleness can then be said to function as an emptied sign, cut off from the assurance of divine design or fixed resemblance. In Petrarch the result is that the individual seeks to fill the void of the emptied self with some type of worthy content (and, of course, here the question of value and perspective cannot be escaped), creating a unique selfhood willfully saturated with meaning in an asymmetrical and unsure circumstance where unchanging external referents are no longer available. At this point in my argument, it should start to become clear that the conceptual connection between Petrarch and Cervantes might be best found in Alonso Quijano’s quest for self-­knowledge through the creation of Don Quixote as a radical individual. Quijano—­like Petrarch in his philosophical treatises—­searched for what was exclusively for him (in his so-­called locura) real, meaningful, and sustainable through the creation of his individual self as Don Quixote; he sought to fill the empty sign of Quijano with the “real” (willful, unique, meaning-­imparting) content of the hero knight-­errant. In Petrarch’s case the project of crafting a consequential selfhood—­as portrayed in the Triumphs, for example—­finds its ultimate success in the soul’s final ascent to the heavens and through the work of historical and literary memory.16 Quijano, as the reader of Don Quixote quickly realizes, is not as fortunate. In Cervantes’s novel the humanist quest for an exceptional virtuous selfhood—­made possible by self-­knowledge—­is to the contrary vexed (rather than facilitated) by the absence of universal forms and essential referents (past or present). If Petrarch textually translates radical individuality into creativity, fulfillment, and a life of scholarly and elevated virtue, Cervantes tips the scale in favor of uncertainty and the absence of signification. To be more precise, the humanist nominalist project remains palpable in Don Quixote but as an ultimately failed existential practice, not as the triumph of the creative 42 Hernández

capacity of the individual that Petrarch had conceived, promoted, and (at least textually) achieved. We all remember well the first chapter of part 1 of Don Quixote, where we meet an old, socially marginalized, haggard hidalgo who “[en] los ratos que estaba ocioso—­que eran los más del año—­, se daba a leer libros de caballerías” (28). The obsessive reading of chivalry books—­he had sold most of his arable land in order to buy more tomes—­takes him to what the narrative voice introduces as “perder el juicio” (30), an alleged abandonment of reason and judgment that drives Quijano to take up the identity of a knight and leave the bookish solitude of his reduced estate, “según eran los agravios que pensaba deshacer, tuertos que enderezar sinrazones que emendar y abusos que mejorar y deudas que satisfacer” (34). Read through the lens of Petrarch, Quijano is rejecting the model offered in books such as The Life of Solitude, going out into a world of strife and corruption, swarming in “tuertos” and “desagravios,” instead of staying in the quietude of his home, reading books, holding his friends close, and fashioning himself as a uniquely righteous man. Nonetheless, as Petrarch had made clear, “each man must seriously take into account the disposition with which nature has endowed him and the best which by habit or training he has developed” (Petrarch 1924, 131). It can be easily argued that Quijano’s life story and position in life, as well as the “training” he receives in his reading of chivalric novels and romances, make his self-­creation as a knight-­errant suitable and reasonable; it fits his disposition and promises to fill him with virtuous meaning, enabling him to carve a sense of self to the best of his ability in a world of partiality and singularity. When understood in this manner, Don Quixote’s sally is not much different from Petrarch’s retreat into solitude. Both are a quest for a consequential life, and when all that is had are empty selves and signs to imbue with sense, any quest is as good as any other. Quijano, as Petrarch before him, creates his selfhood through the force of his sheer will, consistent only with what he believes is a truly moral and worthy trajectory: “El primero que en nuestra edad y en estos tan calamitosos “Dios Me Entiende y No Digo Más”  43

tiempos se puso al trabajo y ejercicio de las andantes armas, y al de desfacer agravios, socorrer viudas, amparar doncellas” (85).17 As especially part 2 and its conclusion make clear, Don Quixote’s singular self fails to produce a lasting satisfactory existence. The fictional world created by Cervantes is nothing but partial, inhabited by so many other individuals and the plethora of perspectives and values that accompany them. What makes his singleness possible—­the creative and identitary liberty inherited from a nominalist humanism—­is also what ushers his failure. Ultimately, Quijano cannot fix for himself a stable referent or signifier that can sustain him and with which others can identify. For example when after so many failed adventures and noxious appropriations the viability of knight-­errantry is exhausted, the proposition of a pastoral sojourn arises only to be quickly discarded, too much of an effort to pursue at this late date, and threatened by the sexual desire of the “pastores más maliciosos que simples” who ascribe a different set of values to bucolic identity (1063).18 Therefore, despite his best effort, Quijano/Quixote remains alienated from any recognizable form or meaningful design and instead devolves into an empty sign that others can manipulate and fill with their own values, misplaced fantasies, and narcissistic desires; Sansón Carrasco, the Duke and the Duchess, even Sancho Panza can be easily read through this analytical lens. Rather than Bakhtin’s heteroglossic overabundance—­as presented in “Discourse in the Novel”—­or Spitzer’s divinely ordered multiplicity of linguistic perspectivism, what we find in Don Quixote, I would argue, is a land populated by radical individuals looking to fill themselves with meaning at a time when God remains a looming but arbitrary absence and the Petrarchan humanist affirmation has lost its luster. Not surprisingly Alonso Quijano el Bueno’s final pronouncement of sanity is rejected by his friends and family, as well as by the narrative voice, who insist on naming him “Don Quixote” despite his decisive refusal of this adopted name and identity. The demise of Don Quixote signals the demise of a Petrarchan project where it was still possible, through the will and the grace of God, to forge a unique virtuous existence. The conclusion we can reach, therefore, is not simply that Don Quixote is a failed 44 Hernández

humanist, but more so, that in Don Quixote Cervantes drives nominalist humanism to its limits. When there is only the will and no fixed meaning or absolute values, one has little chance to fashion a virtuous selfhood, to secure a meaningful life beyond contingency and locura. The modernity of Don Quixote as a new literary form—­pregnant with possibilities yet unstable, haunted by its impending alienation—­can be found in the novel’s taking radical individuality to its ultimate consequences and before the rise of the rational, self-­sufficient subject of the Enlightenment. In sum Quijano/Quixote embodies the degradation of humanist nominalist singularity: the self is an emptied sign, vexed by the lack of any sure referent or universal design to anchor a person, motivated by her or his moral and creative will, yet unable to fashion a new self that could overcome the contingency and arbitrariness left behind by an inscrutable God. Given these conditions Alonso Quijano can only return home to die: “Como las cosas humanas no sean eternas, yendo siempre en declinación de sus principios hasta llegar a su último fin, especialmente las vidas de los hombres, y como la de don Quijote no tuviese privilegio del cielo para detener el curso de la suya, llegó su fin y acabamiento cuando él menos lo pensaba; porque o ya fuese de la melancolía que le causaba el verse vencido o ya por la disposición del cielo, que así lo ordenaba, se le arraigo una calentura” (1099). Thinkers such as Montaigne, Locke, Descartes, and Hobbes will confront the same set of epistemic coordinates with a variety of philosophical and existential responses that increasingly make possible a passage to secular modernity. For Cervantes all that was possible, it seems, at least as he finished the second part of Don Quixote and neared his own death, is the confirmation that there is no true virtue to be found or value to secure one’s bearings in a world devoid of design with a God whose omnipotent will is radically unknown. Notes

1. The issue of secularization and modernity is taken up by Anthony J. Cascardi, where he proposes that “the process of secularization visible in a work like Don Quixote is not anything happening in culture external to literature, but “Dios Me Entiende y No Digo Más”  45

2.

3.

4. 5.

that literary history itself, as an effort to negotiate between the authorities of the present and those of the past, is the best example of the secularization process” (1995, 211). Cascardi also takes issue with Spitzer’s assessment of the status of the divine in Don Quixote and offers the following proposition: “It is simply impossible to judge whether an object is a barber’s basin or Mambrino’s helmet by appeal to some ground external to, or transcending, the very judgments and culture from which they stem. This is one way of saying that our judgments, as human judgments, are ‘contingent.’ Indeed, what is so remarkable about Don Quijote, and an index of its modernity, is the fact that Cervantes shows us a world in which one cannot have recourse to God, the King of Spain, or the Inquisitor General in order to make determinations about the ‘ultimate’ nature of reality” (1987, 167). Cascardi nevertheless follows a very different analytical route than my own, focusing on the relationship of values to perspectives and language, and reaches the conclusion that what Don Quixote shows is that “although values are relative to human culture, and therefore contingent, they are also the only values we have, and are also necessary” (176). In my own analysis, I touch on this same issue but from the perspective of ethical and moral acts in the context of theological nominalism. Ockham’s influence in Spain can be indirectly traced through humanist thought, Franciscan theology, and the writings of Francisco Suárez. The point is not to establish a direct connection between Ockham and Cervantes but rather to establish a dialogue between this theological system and Cervantes’s fictional world. On the rise of secular modernity as reflected in Don Quixote, see Cascardi 1987, 1992, 1995; Egginton 2003, 2016; Farrell 2006; and Graf 2007. As defined by Stephen Priest in the entry for “grace” in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, grace can be defined as “that which is granted by the will of God. Divine assistance, especially that conducive to sanctification and salvation. It is argued, for example by Augustine, Luther, and Calvin (following Romans 9: 11–­26), that the grace of God does not depend on merit. Augustine distinguishes grace necessary for action (adiutorium sine quo non fit) from grace sufficient for action (adiutorium quo fit). Aquinas calls the inspiring presence of God in the soul ‘habitual grace’ or ‘sanctifying grace,’ and divine intervention causing a good human act ‘actual’ grace. The ability to not act sinfully since the Fall, the salvation of the soul, and the possession

46 Hernández

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

of Christian faith itself are arguably by the grace of God. The sacraments are symbols or instruments for the reception of grace, but grace may be bestowed without them.” For further analysis on Ockham’s principle of contradiction, see Wood 1987. For a detailed analysis of Ockham’s moral theory, see McCord Adams 1986. For Ockham’s thinking on predestination, see Ockham 1983. The episode of the boy Andrés in part 1, chapter 4, is a case in point. This phrase is also repeated twice by Sancho Panza upon the demise of this government at the ínsula Barataria. All quotations from Don Quixote are taken from Cervantes Saavedra 2007. See also González Echevarría 2015; Presberg 2001; and Simerka and Weimer 2005. See the Centiloquium theologicum conc. 6, 7a. I am following Eunyoung Hwang’s reading of Augustine (2010), which in turn references Georg Simmel’s thought on individuality. Gillespie observes: “We today often assume that Augustine was the bedrock of medieval Christianity, but in fact his work was generally known only from the excerpts presented in Peter Lombard’s famous Sentences. Moreover, with the revival of Aristotle in the thirteenth century, Augustine suffered a marked decline, although the Franciscans and Augustinian Hermits remained loyal to him. It was thus only with the nominalist revolution and the rise of humanism that Augustine returned to the center of theological and philosophical speculation” (2008, 56–­57). “Scholasticism had understood man not in his particularity and uniqueness but as a species, as the rational animal. Human happiness for scholasticism consisted in actualizing one’s natural potentialities and fulfilling one’s supernatural duties. Ockham and the nominalist movement rejected this view, arguing that all beings are radically individual, created directly by God. Thus, there are no universals or species, and all supposed species are merely names or signs. Petrarch had similar doubts that humans could be understood as a species. In a letter to his brother Gherardo, he argued that ‘human inclinations conflict not only for man in general but also for the individual: this I confess and cannot deny, since I know others and myself as well, and since I contemplate the human species in groups and singly. What in truth can I say about all men, or who could enumerate the infinite differences which so mark mortals that they seem to belong neither to a single species nor to a single type?’” (Gillespie 2008, 60–­61). “Dios Me Entiende y No Digo Más”  47

16. As Finotti explains, “It is thanks to historical and literary memory that man constructs his destiny on earth, his individual and collective identity. It is through memory that man rescues from time and death the values of his worldly experience. It is through memory that man consecrates life and in it quests for signs of eternity” (2012, 83). 17. Bryant L. Creel has noted, “In implying the existence of an antithetical relationship between the moral will and empirical fact, Don Quijote’s incongruous attitudes hint at the author’s suggestion that, in general, the enthusiasm and integrity of subjective motivation can depend, to some extent, on an artificial and even self-­conscious denial of outward reality. Except towards the end of the novel, Don Quijote is invulnerable to depression because he refuses to take seriously those threats that a less heroic cast of mind might find intimidating. He is grandiose in his projections but modest in what he actually requires to satisfy his demands of life. The reason is that his truth is conative, based on the strivings of the will, and hence independent of the actual realization of values” (1992, 28). 18. See Hernández 2006, especially chapter 4, on Don Quixote. Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited and translated by M. M. Holquist, 259–­422. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Cascardi, Anthony J. 1987. “Perspectivism and the Conflict of Values in Don Quixote.” Romance Quarterly 34:165–­78. —. 1992. The Subject of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1995. “History and Modernity in the Spanish Golden Age: Secularization and Literary Self-­Assertion in Don Quixote.” In Cultural Authority in Early Modern Spain: Continuation and Its Alternatives, edited by Marina S. Brownlee and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, 209–­33. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. 2007. Don Quijote de la Mancha. Edited by Francisco Rico. Madrid: Punto de Lectura. Courtenay, W. J. 2008. Ockham and Ockhamism: Studies in the Dissemination and Impact of His Thought. Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 99. Boston: Brill. 48 Hernández

Creel, Bryant L. 1992. “Theoretical Implications in Don Quijote’s Idea of Enchantment.” Cervantes 12, no. 1:19–­44. Cruz, Anne J. 1988. Imitación y transformación: El petrarquismo en la poesía de Boscán y Garcilaso de la Vega. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins. Egginton, William. 2003. How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity. Albany: State University of New York Press. —. 2016. The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World. New York: Bloomsbury. Farrell, John. 2006. Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau. Ithaca ny: Cornell University Press. Finotti, Fabio. 2012. “The Poem of Memory: Triumphi.” In Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, edited by Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi, 63–­84. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 2005. The Order of Things. London: Routledge. Gillespie, Michael Allen. 2008. Theological Origins of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. González Echevarría, Roberto. 2005. Introduction to Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”: A Casebook, edited by Roberto González Echevarría, 3–­22. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2015. Cervantes’s “Don Quixote.” New Haven ct: Yale University Press. Graf, E. C. 2007. Cervantes and Modernity: Four Essays on Don Quijote. Lewisburg pa: Bucknell University Press. Gurevich, Aaron. 1995. The Origins of European Individualism. Translated by Katharine Judelson. Oxford: Blackwell. Hernández, Rosilie. 2006. Bucolic Metaphors: History, Subjectivity, and Gender in the Early Modern Spanish Pastoral. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Department of Romance Languages. Hwang, Eunyoung. 2010. “Augustine’s Idea of the Will and Individuality.” Glossolalia 2, no. 1:82–­98. Lukács, Georg. 1971. The Theory of the Novel. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge ma: mit Press. McCord Adams, Marilyn. 1986. “The Structure of Ockham’s Moral Theory.” Franciscan Studies 46: 1–­35. —. 1999. “Ockham on Will, Nature, and Morality.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, edited by Paul Vincent Spade, 245–­72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. “Dios Me Entiende y No Digo Más”  49

Navarrete, Ignacio Enrique. 1994. Orphans of Petrarch: Poetry and Theory in the Spanish Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ockham, William of. 1974a. Centiloquium theologicum. Edited by Philotheus Boehner. In Guillaume d’Ockham, Guillelmi de Ockham Opera Philosophica et Theologica, part 7. Saint Bonaventure ny: Saint Bonaventure University Press. —. 1974b. Ockham’s Theory of Terms. Part 1 of the Summa Logicae. Translated and introduced by Michael J. Loux. Notre Dame in: University of Notre Dame Press. —. 1983. Predestination, God’s Foreknowledge, and Future Contingents. Translated and edited by Marilyn McCord Adams and Norman Kretzmann. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett. Petrarch, Francis. 1924. The Life of Solitude. Translated and edited by Jacob Zeitlin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Presberg, Charles D. 2001. Adventures in Paradox: “Don Quixote” and the Western Tradition. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Priest, Stephen. 2005. “Grace.” In The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simerka, Barbara, and Christopher Weimer. 2005. “Ever Want to Be Someone Else? Self-­Fashioning in Don Quixote and Being John Malkovich.” Anuario de estudios cervantinos 2:45–­54. Spade, Paul Vincent. 1999. “Ockham’s Nominalist Metaphysics: Some Main Themes.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, edited by Paul Vincent Spade, 100–­117. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spitzer, Leo. 2005. “Linguistic Perspectivism in the Don Quijote.” In Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”: A Casebook, edited by Roberto González Echevarría, 163–­216. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wood, Rega. 1987. “Intuitive Cognition and Divine Omnipotence: Ockham in Fourteenth-­Century Perspective.” In From Ockham to Wyclif, edited by Anne Hudson and Michael Wilks, Studies in Church History: Subsidia 5, 51–­61. Oxford: Published for the Ecclesiastical History Society by B. Blackwell.

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chapter 3

Obscene Onomastics and the Sheep-­Army Episode of Don Quixote Sherry Velasco

In a Spain heavily scrutinized by inquisitors and censors, how might an author in search of a best seller get away with obscene humor? More to the point, what would motivate him to risk his reputation to try? In the case of Cervantes and his transformative novel, the answer to how he got away with more sexual innuendo than many readers give him credit for is found in the ways in which the author—­conversant in Italian and Arabic—­peppers his two-­volume work with semi-­veiled sexual references that can easily go undetected by uninitiated readers. For some of his literate contemporaries, and for readers of early modern texts who are familiar with a variety of erotic traditions (including ancient Greek and Roman, Renaissance Italian and Spanish, as well as medieval Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish), Cervantes’s ribald humor is easily detectable, barely hidden, in fact, in his “alegorías, metáforas y translaciones, de modo que alegran, suspenden y enseñan a un mismo punto” (1998, 571), as the humanist cousin boasts of his own burlesque take on Ovid in part 2 of Don Quixote.1 It’s not by chance that at the start of part 2, the protagonist worries about whether the Arab historian who recorded his adventures portrayed his love for Dulcinea as truly Platonic or if—­given the stereotype of Muslims as liars, womanizers, and sodomites during the early modern period—­he painted him as a lascivious country gentleman fantasizing about a lusty peasant from the countryside. As Sansón confirms, the text’s wholesomeness makes it appropriate for all readers: “Los 51

niños la manosean, los mozos la leen, los hombres la entienden y los viejos la celebran, . . . porque en toda ella no se descubre, ni por semejas, una palabra deshonesta, ni un pensamiento menos que católico” (457). Read literally, there is not a single, indecent word in Cervantes’s famous novel. Yet when we decode certain jokes in conjunction with other discourses that engage sexual topics, it becomes clear that the author was keen to interrogate sexuality’s persistent presence in many of the disciplines and issues of his day. Fearing reprisals premodern writers commonly show their apprehension to discuss sexual topics openly. Those authors—­motivated, obligated, or simply tempted to broach the erotic—­often begin with a disclaimer addressing their choice of sexual lexicon. This is true whether these writers are theologians offering tips for sexual abstinence, medical practitioners counseling married patients suffering from sexual dysfunction, or writers composing bawdy works. In the sixteenth-­century publication Popular Errors (1578), for example, French physician Laurent Joubert, the man who wrote the first fully detailed explanation of the physiological and psychological function of laughter, was accused of obscenity (that is, using immodest words). The reproach was exacerbated by the fact that he dedicated this treatise to a woman (his famous patient, the Queen of Navarre). Defending himself Joubert claimed that he was misunderstood: “How well did I foresee that I would be calumniated because of a few words contained in my Erreurs populaires, . . . . Nevertheless, I think I have written rather modestly, considering the subject (the organs and functions that decency orders us to keep covered and hidden), speaking of them in a similarly covered and masked manner, in disguised words. Furthermore, I did not use words in their literal sense; such words are not in my vocabulary, although the Romans and the Greeks, and perhaps the Hebrews, in their most decent books do not shy away from them” (1989, 6). Joubert continues his discourse on lexicon by invoking Plato’s dialogue on onomastics and etymologies (Cratylus) to justify both literal and figurative terms for the sexual body and its functions: “Literal terms are decent in any language, provided they are used decently and to the point, 52 Velasco

in order to explain the subject being treated. Otherwise, those good people who assigned them in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin would have been gravely mistaken and should rather have taught us how to use periphrases and circumlocutions, which have since been invented in order to speak more secretly about that which we nevertheless wish to have clearly understood when we designate what we are ashamed to look at” (1989, 7). Joubert’s allusion to Plato’s Cratylus is not accidental. The Cratylus, the dialogue in which Plato expounds on the necessary correlation between a thing (animal, object, concept) and its name, demonstrates how a name functions as a kind of blueprint or verbal portrait of the thing it names. More to the point, Plato’s Cratylus was very much on the mind of Alonso López Pinciano, one of the literary scholars who most influenced Cervantes’s theory—­and practice—­of fiction. Plato’s theories in the Cratylus (most likely circulated through Marsilio Ficino’s commentary) served as a kind of unofficial guide for several early modern thinkers in their deliberations about the “correct” names for people, objects, and concepts as well as in their search for accurate etymologies for these words. López Pinciano, for example, (in his Philosophía antigua poética [1596]) refers to Plato’s Cratylus or On the Correctness of Names when he distinguishes literal “proper” terms from obscured language (what he calls peregrino, or “wandering,” signifiers) (1998, 236).2 López Pinciano’s interlocutor Fadrique defines propio, or literal words, as those whose spelling and meaning are known and used by everyone (254). López Pinciano, however, complicates this definition by considering obscene words, which he points out might be widely understood but not used by everyone “since no serious and noble person would ever utter a word that implied some obscenity or indecency and in order to run away from these words he says the thing with circumlocutions and euphemisms that are barely understood” (234).3 Fadrique then qualifies his discussion of literal terms by excluding lewd words: “They respond properly [that is, correctly] by fleeing from those kinds of proper [that is, literal] words. . . . I’m not talking about those words whose lewdness make them improper. I refer to those words that can be spoken in front of all people” (234).4 Obscene Onomastics  53

López Pinciano contrasts literal words with the peregrino, or “wandering,” words, which are those that are either out of use, foreign, or simply unknown to some people—­such as “Arabic or Greek words denoting the French or Basques; or French words denoting Germans or Castilians” (1998, 235).5 Other “wandering” words are those invented by the author, at times by changing letters to create a different name, for example, changing the Pisuerga River to “Pisoraca” (235). Further discussion of why and how some authors choose to write with such obscurity that their work requires decoding leads to the conclusion that they do not want to be understood by everyone for fear that verses such as Petrarch’s “I can no longer sing like I used to” (given the double entendre of “singing” as sexual relations) might provoke the censors to chastise with dangerous punishments—­including death (López Pinciano 1998, 253). Cervantes certainly takes advantage of these models for wandering signifiers in many episodes, but in the sheep/army conflict he pushes the limits of how to disguise sexual innuendo within both serious and playful discourses of his day. Cervantes is intensely aware of “public errors” like those of Joubert and well versed in Platonic ideas about naming. He evades any possible reprimand by avoiding lewd words altogether. But he names the things that should not be named (or said) by using widespread sexual innuendo hidden in the open and by combining fragments of “indecent” terms to create original names with opaque (literally and metaphorically clouded) obscene connotations. Decoding these names requires the kind of specialized etymological competence that Plato boasts of in his Cratylus, and this tactic in turn involves learning to detect the “salient phonetic/ semantic components of a word” as well as consideration of the perceptions and wishes of the name giver (Sedley 2003, 149).6 Cervantes is believed to have taken an almost obsessive interest in both naming and interpreting names in Don Quixote, what Agustín Redondo describes as an “incessant investigation of names” (1997, 479). Many critics have convincingly demonstrated a wide range of possible etymologies for each name given to people and objects (at times offering etymologies of the etymologies articulated in the text). That scholars 54 Velasco

have found obscene wordplay hidden in some Cervantine monikers is not surprising given that the protagonist is a fifty-­something-­year-­old male virgin who fantasizes about sexual encounters yet insists on remaining celibate.7 Assuming that Cervantes had Plato in mind or was making fun of Plato and the philosopher’s claim that a person’s or object’s essence is contained in his, her, or its name (as names are encoded descriptions or resemblances of the “being” of that which they name as well as conveyors of essential information about the name giver), what can we make of the uncertainty or of the mystery in Cervantine onomastics? What do we make of the names that Don Quixote himself assigns to real and imagined characters he encounters or claims to see? Furthermore, as the reader seeks to decode these names, how do the etymologies offered by the protagonist of the names he himself gives affect our ability to interpret these encodings and decodings? Perhaps there is no better episode for exploring Cervantes’s interest in the sexual connotations of names and his reliance on their etymologies than the infamous sheep/army battle described in the extended narration that precedes the confrontation in chapter 18 of part 1. As we recall, this episode begins when Don Quixote suddenly sees a large cloud of dust and announces that it signals the arrival of a great army. When Sancho points out a second cloud, his master interprets it as a second army coming to do battle with the first; Don Quixote explains to his squire that what he is witnessing is really the imminent clash between Muslims and Christians because of the Muslim emperor’s unwillingness to renounce Islam in exchange for the hand of the Christian king’s daughter. Having established the exogamous backstory, Don Quixote focuses on some of the main participants, describing their names, their accoutrements, and the geography of their nations. Ignoring Sancho’s eventual warning that he can hear only the loud sound of bleating sheep, Don Quixote leaps into battle and proceeds to kill more than seven sheep before the shepherds mount a violent counterattack, with disastrous consequences for the aging knight. After an extended preamble that lingers on the visual appearance of the knights, their trappings, and exoticized landscapes, the Obscene Onomastics  55

postbattle action stands in stark contrast to the lengthy narration through its accelerated dramatization of the wounded body at its most grotesque, culminating in reciprocal vomiting between Don Quixote and Sancho. The pitiful appearance of Don Quixote sans teeth (the price he paid for lending his services to the Christian army) will inspire Sancho in the following chapter to invent a new name for his master: El Caballero de la Triste Figura. Even the most unsuspecting Spanish-­speaking reader would immediately find humor in the names of the knights—­they sound funny, even when considered independent of their sexual connotations. But some readers in Cervantes’s time might also have recognized that the author’s inspiration for this chapter emerged from erotic literature, from both Western and Muslim literary traditions. From the European erotic tradition, Cervantes may have been influenced by three works in particular: the provocative romantic-­erotic ballad “Romance Trágico” (1580–­90); the extensive comic-­burlesque poem Carajicomedia (“Phallicomedy” or “Cockcomedy,” published anonymously in the Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a risa of 1519); and the phallocentric dialogue La Cazzaria (the “Book of the Prick” [1525], written by Antonio Vignali).8 All three texts feature anthropomorphized private parts or genitalized warriors in battle, a strategy used by the authors to parody other texts while dramatizing men’s struggles to control their sexual potency. In the Carajicomedia (a pornographic parody of Juan de Mena’s Laberinto de la fortuna), the aging, impotent protagonist Diego Fajardo finds that his temporarily rejuvenated phallus has entered into a violent battle with characters called coños (cunts), pendejos (pubes), culos (assholes), pijas (dicks), carajos (pricks), cojones (balls), and vergas (cocks)—­which takes up almost one-­fourth of the text (Domínguez 2015, 436–­51).9 After a vicious battle, the last two stanzas reveal the emotion and defeat of the phalli, as the hungry “cunts” devour the tired “pricks” in the final death scene: “Los tristes carajos ya no goteaban, / mas so los coños andaban ocultos, / dando y trayendo mortales singultos / de esperma, a la hora que más empujaban. / Las fuerzas de todos así litigaban, / que pijas entraban 56 Velasco

do[nde] coños salían, / la pérfida entrada los coños querían, / la dura salida las pijas negaban” (Domínguez 2015, 450). The Carajicomedia ends with the death of Fajardo’s cock, which has been swallowed up by the insatiable, devouring cunts.10 Antonio Vignali’s Cazzaria also concludes with conflict among the private parts (comprising nearly the last third of the text in an episode that is generally believed to be a political allegory), although here the battling members are not divided simply along gendered lines (Moulton 2003, 26–­35). The male members are separated into factions of the “Big Cocks” (cazzi grossi) and “Little Cocks” (cazzi picciolini) while the female parts are divided into the “Beautiful Cunts” (le potte belle) and “Ugly Cunts” (le potte brutte). Other intermittent allies of both sides are the “Assholes” (culi) and the “Balls” (coglioni). Like the Carajicomedia Vignali’s genital (and decidedly misogynist) battle concludes with the victory of the female parts (although the story doesn’t end with their triumph): “In short, they [the Ugly Cunts] stormed them with the greatest possible slaughter; they did not rest until all the Big Cocks were cut down, and as far as anyone can tell very few escaped, and those only with great difficulty. This was not the case for the Beautiful Cunts, for, being cowardly women and badly suited for flight, they were all killed and wiped out. In fact, from that day to this no one has ever seen one and few have even mentioned them. No memory of their appearance remains” (2003, 138–­39). Perhaps the text that most closely resembles the strategies that Cervantes employs in the sheep/army narration is the late sixteenth-­century “Romance Trágico.”11 Like Cervantes’s scenario in part 1, chapter 18, this ballad is a sexualized parody of a typical battle from a chivalric romance, and unlike the Carajicomedia and La Cazzaria, the warring private parts are identified by specific and suggestive proper nouns. The protagonist is Captain Pijandro (from pija, or penis), who is accompanied by his two “compañeros” (slang for testicles) and the foot soldier “Virgo” (Alzieu, Jammes, and Lissorgues 2000, 110, 212–­13, 236, 242, 254, 256, 263, 265, 298). Marching toward the battle, the warriors pass through the mountains called “Coñares” (a play on coño/cunt) and “Jodiembre” (referencing joder/to Obscene Onomastics  57

fuck) to the rivers “Coñil” and “Horados” (penetrated). With no barco, or boat (a metaphor for genitalia), Captain Pijandro tests the waters first, sloshing around as he yells for backup.12 Stretched between the two ports “Pendulía” (suggests pendejo, or pubes) and “Culantro” (culo, or asshole), Pijandro is covered in a foamy slime (lama espumosa) (espuma was also a euphemism for sperm) (Alonso 1995, 245, 347, 351; and Alzieu, Jammes, and Lissorgues 2000, 166, 203). The two companions join in when they meet a shepherd named Culonio, who lets out a flatulent “sigh.” Pijandro dies at the hands of his tyrannical foe “Carajales” (variation of carajo, or dick), whose violent “stab-­wounds” (puñaladas, slang for sexual relations) leaves the captain rolling in his blood (sangre, or semen) (Alzieu, James, and Lissorgues 2000, 246, 290; and Simons 2014, 160–­63). At this point Pijandro’s mother (doña Papurra—­derived from papo, or vulva) appears to mourn the death of her son.13 Upon hearing another “sigh,” “los tres amigos” (reference to the penis and testicles) returned to the town of “Bragueta” (codpiece). What I hope becomes evident in my multiple etymologies is how Cervantes’s onomastic display in the sheep/army episode is a brilliant example of disguised and transcultural ribaldry that seems to have been inspired—­at least in part—­by the openly bawdy Carajicomedia, La Cazzaria, and “Romance Trágico.” These provocative Castilian and Italian literary traditions, nonetheless, were not the only works that may have influenced the author. From the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish erotic traditions, Cervantes might have borrowed their penchant for encyclopedic taxonomies of genitals and lengthy wordplay to name or hide the name of female and male sexual organs. One widespread feature in Arabic bah-­ books (medical-­scientific books on sexual topics) was the careful attention to the many terms for naming sexual anatomy. The earliest Arabic sexual manual preserved intact, Ibn Nasr al-­Katib’s late tenth-­century Encyclopedia of Pleasure lists over twenty-­six different names for the vulva, twenty-­four terms for the anus, five for the buttocks, and dozens of terms, metaphors, and similes for different parts of the penis (1977, 56–­58). Similarly, the fifteenth-­century Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight (written by North African Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-­Nafzawi) has a chapter titled 58 Velasco

“Names for the Penis” (which lists thirty-­six different terms, such as “poker,” “weeper,” and “bashful” [1999, 39]) and a separate one, “Names for the Vulva,” (which enumerates thirty-­seven names, including monikers such as “gripper,” “nibbler,” and “hostess” [45]). For his part early modern Egyptian polymath al-­Suyuti wrote at least a dozen sex manuals, many of which address at length terminology related to sexual organs and “obscene, lewd, or immodest language, especially during intercourse” (Antoon 2006, 1267).14 In the five years that Cervantes spent in Algiers as a captive held for ransom, he would have had sufficient time to acquaint himself with erotic storytelling traditions in a Muslim context, and he would certainly have been familiar with the indelible traces of Hispano-­Arabic culture in Christian texts. In her analysis of Cervantes’s representations of cross-­cultural desire in the cases of Ana Félix and Zoraida, Leyla Rouhi notes the possible influence of the Arabic erotic tradition on Cervantes, arguing that while he may not have read specific works of this genre, it had already influenced Spain’s popular culture in Cervantes’s time: “I am not interested in proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Cervantes read Arab erotological manuals. What matters most is that Iberian milieux were substantially infused with non-­Christian presence” (2008, 61). Despite the overwhelming Muslim backdrop of the participants, their origins, and the cultural geographies surveyed in Don Quixote’s extended narrative, in the many commentaries that have been written about this chapter, most critics have focused on the influence of epic and chivalric works as the source of the chapter’s comic parody in its use of names. With differing emphases scholars have noted a range of possible exegeses of the protagonist’s impromptu naming performance.15 However, of the many interpretations to which this scene lends itself, a reading that foregrounds personified private parts, genitalized onomastics, eroticized geography, and sexualized medicine seems particularly relevant here, as it fits into the generally hidden, conflicted sexuality that permeates Don Quixote’s psyche. Neither in this episode nor in others that invite bawdy readings does Cervantes name private parts with the well-­known colloquial nomenclature used by Vignali in La Cazzaria or the anonymous author of the Obscene Onomastics  59

Carajicomedia, yet many of his contemporaries—­especially those familiar with burlesque traditions—­would have caught the sexual innuendo in the names by which Don Quixote refers to the Moorish and Christian knights. As evidenced in the earlier mentioned Ovidian Art of Love, the allegory of military battle representing amorous relations is a staple in erotic literature going back to antiquity. Here, as described by Don Quixote to Sancho, the battle between a Muslim army and Christian soldiers has its source in the Moorish king’s refusal to convert to Christianity in exchange for the hand of the Christian king’s daughter, whom he loves. The first Muslim warrior, according to the protagonist, is the emperor Alifanfarón, lord of the great island of Trapobana. As Howard Mancing has argued in his detailed study of the comical chivalric names in Cervantes’s novel, Alifanfarón is a simple reference to an Arabic braggart: Ali was a common Arabic name and fanfarrón meant “show-­off ” (1973, 225).16 While the Muslim emperor’s name characterizes his boastful nature, the name of the place where he reigns, Trapobana, would have alerted his attentive readers to a play on the words trapo (slang for “penis”) and vana (vain). Loosely translated Alifanfarón de Trapobana might be rendered as “Alibraggart of the Arrogant Prick.”17 In this way perhaps the suggestive name that Don Quixote invents for the Muslim protagonist is reminiscent of the names assigned to sexual parts according to their personified characteristics in Arabic erotological works. The character is reminiscent of the “pretentious, stuck-­up prick” named “Jerk” in Nafzawi’s Perfumed Garden: “Approaching a woman when erect, he is full of conceit at his own strength and virility and seems almost to be saying to her vagina: ‘Today, my rival, I’m going to make you love me!’” (1999, 43). Even the Christian warriors, such as the emperor Pentapolén del Arremangado Brazo (whose “rolled-­up sleeve/arm” was slang for an erect penis with foreskin pulled back) are cleverly lewd.18 Pentapolén (or Pentapolín) combines pen and tapo referencing pendejo, or pubes, and tapón (slang for the phallus) (Alzieu, Jammes, and Lissorgues 2000, 112, 188). It is telling that after conjuring the name of this emperor (whose daughter is the love interest of his opponent, Alifanfarón), Don Quixote reassures his squire 60 Velasco

that “para entrar en batallas semejantes no se requiere ser armado caballero” (126).19 In other words one can still participate in erotic intrigues without having an erection (a possible allusion to passive sodomy). In naming the emperor “Pentapolín,” perhaps Cervantes is alluding to the Pentapolis, or five cities, referenced in Genesis 14:2—­of which Sodom and Gomorrah were the most infamous. In fact the link between Pentapolis and sodomy is highlighted in Cristóbal de Fonseca’s Amor de Dios (mentioned in Cervantes’s prologue to part 1 as recommended reading on the nature of love) when the theologian comments on punishments for carnal sins: “Ningunas culpas se hallan en la Escritura, tan severamente castigadas como idolatría y sensualidad. Bien sabemos el castigo de Sodoma, el de Pentapolis” (1598, 385v). In a marginal note Fonseca refers his readers to Genesis 19, which narrates the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Two of the pagan knights have similarly suggestive names: Micocolembo and Brandabarbarán de Boliche de los miembros giganteos (with the gigantic members). Tom Lathrop explains Micocolembo in terms of mico as the slang term for a lecherous man and cola for penis (Cervantes 2007, 127). Mancing’s note that the name plays with mico as monkey reminds us that the animal was also used as a euphemism for the penis, as demonstrated in works such Pietro Aretino’s notoriously pornographic Dialogues (2005) as well as the phallic-­monkey connotations of the name of the fictional author in the Carajicomedia.20 Similarly, it conveys mi coco, which referred to a scary-­faced figure like the “boogeyman,” but coco was also slang for the female pudenda—­as was lembo, or small boat (Alzieu, Jammes, and Lissorgues 2000, 73–­74, 284). Brandabarbarán de Boliche de los miembros giganteos suggests brando, or sword (the phallic symbol par excellence) and “bárbaro” (in other words, a barbaric phallus with gigantic private parts).21 Boliche was a type of fish, but the name also derives from the bolas, or balls used in billiards. Bola, in turn, was slang for penis, and bolas/balls, was a euphemism for testicles (Alzieu, Jammes, and Lissorgues 2000, 287). On the Christian side, Timonel de Carcajona is a pun on timón (“rudder” slang for penis), while Carcajona—­according to Lathrop and Obscene Onomastics  61

Mancing—­suggests carcajada, or hearty laugh (127).22 I would argue, however, that given the consistent obscene innuendo in the other names, carcaj (the box used to store arrows—­but also slang for vagina; while carcajes in Arabic were bracelets, referenced during the episode of the exogamous couple the Captive Captain and Zoraida) can be read as an obscene allusion since both objects were colloquial terms for female genitals.23 Of course this Christian knight might also have laughing genitals—­an obvious reference to the Carajicomedia (Phallicomedy). His shield bears the image of a cat (symbol of female sexuality) with the motto Miau, in reference to Lady Miulina, daughter of the Duke Alfeñiquén del Algarbe. The imagery evoked by alfeñique (sugar paste used as a softening agent; also referring to anything delicate) and Algarbe (defined in Covarrubias Horozco [2006] as the language of the Arabs or anything spoken or written that was not understood) conceals (homo)sexualized, orientalized imagery.24 Pierres Papín (papo/vulva) brings to mind similar connotations within a Western erotic imaginary.25 The name of the last Christian knight—­Espartafilardo del Bosque—­is more subtle yet points to erotic implications when considered with the visual image on the knight’s shield. That esparto, or hemp, is combined with filar—­a form of hilar, “to spin” (a metaphor for sexual relations) as well as bosque, or forest (a euphemism for pubic hair)—­opens the name for hidden meanings (Alonso 1995, 55, 107; Domínguez 2015, 378–­79). While the humor in this last example requires some imaginative work, the image of the asparagus plant (a recognizable phallic symbol with aphrodisiacal properties) is hard to ignore, especially when interpreted with its accompanying caption: “Rastrea mi suerte” (127), which conjures phallic humor recurrent in erotic verses from Muslim and Christian traditions.26 Reading Cervantes’s often anthologized, illustrated, and adapted chapter, one sees that the author both endorses and subverts Plato’s theory on the importance of proper names—­or naming things/people by their (true) properties. Returning to Plato’s insistence that the name contains the image and essence of the object, Cervantes goes beyond Plato and anticipates Jacques Lacan in weighing down the problem of naming with 62 Velasco

the burden of sexuality—­or sexual anxieties. Commenting on Don Qui­ xote’s spontaneous and spectacular onomastic display in this chapter, the narrator tells us: “Viendo en su imaginación lo que no veía ni había” (126). What did Don Quixote see that inspired the original nomenclature? What didn’t he see? We will recall that what he sees in the distance is a “polvareda . . . cuajada de un copiosísimo ejército” (125). The narrator and Sancho explain that the clouds of dust were made by flocks of sheep, but “con el polvo, no se echaron de ver hasta que llegaron cerca” (126), which by that time, Don Quixote had finished his backstory narration. So, what about the dust cloud (polvareda and nubes de polvo)—­described in terms of curded cheese (cuajada)—­inspired such obscene name-­giving, and what do these names say about the name giver? As David Sedley concludes in his analysis of etymologies in the Cratylus, if words are encoded descriptions, our job is to decode them and “by doing so we recover the beliefs of the name-­maker” (2003, 28). Numerous Cervantes scholars have already outlined detailed and persuasive interpretations of Don Quixote’s extravagant names for the knights obscured by the dust clouds—­onomastic decryptions without any reference to sexual innuendo (with the exception of Lathrop’s brief mention in a footnote of the “cola/penis” in Micocolembo [127, emphasis added]). What do we gain by noting the disguised or not so disguised reference to sexual connotations and complications encoded in these names? What else in this episode invites the reader to consider the kind of etymologies that I have offered above? Part of the answer to these questions is found in how the narration and ensuing battle are framed by images of sexual dysfunction. The chapter begins, for example, with the protagonists processing what had just occurred during their exit from the inn in the previous chapter. After failing to save Sancho from an unsettling blanket toss, Don Quixote suggestively wishes for a “sword” with supernatural powers impervious to outside forces, reminiscent of his chivalric hero, whose famous weapon inspired a name change: “De aquí adelante yo procuraré haber a las manos alguna espada hecha por tal maestría, que al que la trujere consigo no le puedan hacer ningún género Obscene Onomastics  63

de encantamentos. Y aun podría ser que me deparase la ventura aquella de Amadís, cuando se llamaba el ‘Caballero de la Ardiente Espada’” (125). Then, once he sees the dust clouds moving on the horizon, he imagines that here is an opportunity for fame through the strength of his “arm”—­a sentiment frequently repeated by the protagonist and which has been interpreted by critics such as John Cull (1990) as a symbol of his desire for sexual potency. In fact those readers familiar with popular medical texts of the era might note Cervantes’s persistent recourse to terms and concepts related to sexual functions that are recurrent in these publications. In his 1572 Tratado del uso de las mujeres (Treatise on coitus with women), physician Francisco Núñez de Coria (without a trace of irony) describes sperm for men who wish to maintain their vow of chastity as “a substance resembling something curdled and condensed” (305). As one who repeatedly declares his intention of preserving his chastity, Don Quixote also sees the clouds of dust as “curdled” (cuajada). Not surprisingly, cuajada is also used as a metaphor for sperm (male or female) in burlesque verses (Alzieu, Jammes, and Lissorgues 2000, 245, 266–­67). In turn the sexual metaphor of curdled or condensed cheese/milk also brings to mind one of the protagonist’s possible surnames: Quesada. As Patricia Simons reminds us, many early modern writers associated ricotta with semen, “an idea that surely derived from the widely known medical analogy between the production of semen and cheese, along with similarities in the properties of color and consistency” (2014, 269). The medicalized eroticism continues into the actual battle, when Don Quixote ceases to narrate and decides instead to participate in the battle, switching from witness to warrior. His first action is to spear the innocent sheep with a lance (alancearlas), which is repeated twice: “Se entró por medio del escuadrón de las ovejas, y comenzó de alanceallas con tanto coraje y denuedo, como si de versa alanceara a sus mortales enemigos” (129). While a literal term for the bellicose activity, alanzar was also commonly used in medical literature as the verb to denote ejaculation; variations of the phallic lanza (lance) were also ubiquitous in burlesque 64 Velasco

contexts (Alzieu, Jammes, and Lissorgues 2000, 8, 35, 38–­9, 100, 134, 196, 241, 302, 309). Núñez de Coria uses the term to describe the importance of expelling semen for optimal health (1572, 292, 302). Likewise Juan de Aviñon, in his 1545 Sevillana medicina repeats variations of “lanzar” sperm when describing the importance of simultaneous orgasms for successful impregnation (1885, 261). Read in terms of medical and burlesque lexicon, Don Quixote is symbolically enacting his desire for masculine potency, perhaps trying to grapple with the ambivalent nature of his self-­imposed name—­a verbal portrait that reveals his anxieties about his own sexual identity. Through his dramatic naming exercise, Don Quixote has identified his opponents as virile competitors, and yet as sheep they would be defenseless without the protection from the shepherds. Again Cervantes relies on his knowledge of medicine—­perhaps acquired through the numerous medical texts that his surgeon father owned and consulted. For instance even though the brief mention of the Scythians in Don Quixote’s narrative of Muslim-­African cultural geography refers explicitly to their reputation as cruel and barbarous (as they were believed to practice cannibalism), the reference also conveys a long tradition in the discourse of impotence. When Sancho points out at the beginning of chapter 18 that their only victory so far (against the Basque in chapter 9) left his master with “half an ear,” readers are reminded of the serious loss of blood from his ear—­a significant link between the Scythians, surgical treatments, and impotence. For those familiar with early modern medical wisdom regarding sexual dysfunction, Don Quixote’s ear injury is revealing. In particular the vein behind the ear was among the arteries believed central for the proper flow of sperm from the brain to the genitals. In his discussion of sterility, Bernardo de Gordonio, a medieval medical authority whose popularity continued into the early modern period, explains that “having cut the jugular vein behind the ears produces sterility because sperm begins in the brain” (1993, 1408).27 Seventeenth-­century French physician Jacques Ferrand expands on this common belief: “The Scythians, according to Herodotus, cut the veins or arteries behind the ears and by this means Obscene Onomastics  65

rendered themselves effeminate and impotent. . . . This remedy would appear easy and useful to those who have made a vow of chastity” (1990, 327). The medical discourse reminding readers of the association of the Scythian practice of cutting the vein behind the ears with sexual dysfunction and chastity was not lost on Cervantes. It is significant that after Don Quixote suffers the severe injury to his ear during the battle with the Basque—­Sancho confirms the serious condition of the wound: “que le va mucha sangre de esa oreja” (74)—­the protagonist insists on brewing the balsam of Fierabrás, which will play an important albeit repugnant role during the bloody battle with the shepherds. After Don Quixote gulps down the last sip of what he claims is a healing potion with magical powers, the effects of the emetic start to set in when he asks Sancho to examine his mouth to count how many teeth are missing: “Llegóse Sancho tan cerca, que casi le metía los ojos en la boca, . . . y al tiempo que Sancho llegó a mirarle la boca, arrojó de sí, más recio que una escopeta, cuanto dentro tenia, y dio con todo ello en las barbas del compasivo escudero” (130). In a hyperbolically grotesque scene worthy of Rabelais, Sancho returns the favor “fue tanto el asco que tomó, que, revolviéndosele el estómago, vomitó las tripas sobre su mismo señor, y quedaron entrambos como de perlas” (131). This reciprocal vomiting scene, undoubtedly intended to disgust and amuse, also can be read for its allusions to sexual dysfunction in medical lore. Physicians such as Gordonio, Ferrand, and Francisco López de Villalobos in his verse translation of Avicenna’s Canon (Sumario de la medicina) describe vomiting and bleeding as two methods of relieving the painful symptoms of priapism (defined by the author as an “extended erection without desire for coitus” [López de Villalobos 1973, 106]). This reading would be hard to ignore for those familiar with both medical treatments for sexual illnesses and comic-­burlesque verses and ribald tales. When Sancho discovers that he is missing his alforjas (“saddlebags,” also slang for testicles), the brief yet encoded conversation leads to a loaded discussion of sexualized food preferences and medicinal cures (Alzieu, Jammes, and Lissorgues 2000, 259). When the two 66 Velasco

confirm that the symbolic testicles are missing, the knight concludes that they won’t have anything to “eat” (another widespread euphemism for sexual relations). When Sancho suggests that they gather herbs to eat, the protagonist dismisses this option by rejecting the authoritative text on medicinal plants (Andrés Laguna’s popular illustrated edition of Dioscórides’s famous herbal), preferring instead two food items that were familiar metaphors for private parts (bread and fish): “‘Tomara yo ahora más aína un cuartal de pan, o una hogaza, y dos cabezas de sardinas arenques, que cuantas yerbas describe Dioscórides, aunque fuera el ilustrado por el doctor Laguna’” (131).28 In fact Vignali’s La Cazzaria links herring to female genitals through olfactory attributes when explaining why “herring smell like cunts” (2003, 135). Given that the “Ugly Cunts” were mutilated by the “Beautiful Cunts” and thrown in muck and slime, unable to wash or clean themselves, they would always smell “like rotten flesh and putrid carrion,” and the herring, then, “was born from this stink” (2003, 135). These sexualized connotations of herring were reinforced in medical literature, as the salted fish was suggested by Arabic and Christian physicians as an aphrodisiac: “Fish herring . . . stimulates Venus” (López de Villalobos 1973, 106). Given the veiled references to plant-­and food-­based remedies to either stimulate sexual potency or suppress carnal urges in this loaded episode, Cervantes’s specific mention of the illustrations included in Laguna’s translation and commentary of the ancient pharmacological text is significant for visualizing sexuality in this episode. Ancient classification of plants was frequently dependent on human perceptions based on visual elements combined with popular beliefs in their efficacious properties; as John M. McMahon explains: “The reason for the connection of such plants to human sexuality becomes evident: several members of these families are found to be regularly linked in ancient culture with the male sexual organ because of visual similarities. . . . In particular, these types of plants exhibit a distinctive floral structure that prompts an association with the erect penis” (1977, 107). A few examples include plants in the orchid family with bulbs that resemble testicles—­hence the name “Compañón Obscene Onomastics  67

Fig. 2. Compañón del Perro. In Pedacio Dioscórides Anazarbeo: Acerca de la material medicinal y de los venenos mortíferos by Andrés Laguna. Anvers: Casa de Juan Latio, 1555. Image courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.

Fig. 3. Orchid. In Phytognomonica by Giambattista della Porta. Rottomagi, 1650. Image courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.

del Perro” illustrated in Laguna’s edition of Dioscórides (see figure 2). Polymath Giambattista della Porta in his Phytognomonica (1650) also reproduces similar images as he claims that the internal healing powers of plants could be determined by observing their external characteristics; in this case the orchid’s appearance advertises its aphrodisiac properties (see figure 3).29 It is not by chance, then, that Don Quixote imagined the suggestive icon of the asparagus plant on the shield of one of the sexualized knights, especially considering Laguna’s comment about the power of the asparagus plant to “notably stimulate sperm” (1999, 208) as well as popular references to espárrago as a metaphor for the phallus in burlesque verses penned by Luis de Góngora and other poets (Alzieu, Jammes, and Lissorgues 2000, 233–­34). By the end of the disastrous defeat, Don Quixote’s quijadas (jaws)—­ perhaps true to one of his original surnames—­are once again the object of pain and complaint. The protagonist suggestively requires—­for a second time—­that his squire count his teeth: “‘Pero dame acá la mano, y atiéntame con el dedo, y mira bien cuántos dientes y muelas me faltan deste lado derecho, de la quijada alta, que allí siento el dolor’” (132). Just as the author’s interlude “El viejo celoso” provides humorous evidence of the old husband’s missing teeth as a sign of his impotence, Cervantes again seems to linger comically on Don Quixote’s concern over losing so many teeth by including two mouth explorations in one episode. Don Quixote’s alarm upon learning that he has lost so many teeth reiterates the sexualized subtext of the episode, now exposing the protagonist’s impotence through a string of familiar metaphors for virility and its absence: “‘Que más quisiera que me hubieran derribado un brazo, como no fuera el de la espada, porque te hago saber, Sancho, que la boca sin muelas es como molino sin piedra’” (132). The chapter ends with a reminder of the painful quijadas: “Porque el dolor de las quijadas de don Quijote no le dejaba sosegar” (132). In the end Cervantes’s erotic subtext, like the anonymous Carajicomedia and Vignali’s Cazzaria, has a political, personal, and artistic agenda at its core. While insisting on the eroticized Arabs throughout the sheep/ army episode (not only in an onomastic register but also through the 70 Velasco

obscene topography of Muslim geography), the genealogy of the Christian knights, like the genealogy of sexual knowledge in the premodern era, was also steeped in carnal imagery that was both independent and interdependent on Arabic participation. Indeed, the Arabic role in producing sexual knowledge by translating and transmitting medical, scientific, and philosophical texts from antiquity provided the West with the core of its material on sexuality. Setting aside the hints of sexual dysfunction that loom over the protagonist’s endeavors, Don Quixote’s prohibitive love for Aldonza Lorenzo, the Morisco farm girl on whose appearance he projected his Dulcinea, would not have been lost on readers in 1605 Spain—­only a few short years before the expulsion of all Spaniards of Arabic descent. It is only appropriate, then, that al-­Andalus’s favorite son—­the eleventh-­century poet-­philosopher Ibn Hazm in his classic treatise on love The Dove’s Neck-­ Ring would quote a warning from the Prophet naming the two sins (and the conspiring body parts) that can prevent men from entering paradise: “Namely, what is between his jaws [quijadas] and his legs” (2014, 345). With an aging protagonist painfully aware of his quijadas and quixotes, there is no doubt that Cervantes, too, recognized the importance of semantics and onomastics for understanding the interdependent history of sexual knowledge and political agendas. Notes

1. All quotations from Cervantes’s Don Quixote are cited from Tom Lathrop’s edition in Spanish (1998), with English translations from Lathrop’s Don Quixote (2007), unless otherwise noted. 2. See also Canavaggio 1958 and Riley 1992. 3. “Porque ninguna persona grave y principal dice jamás vocablo que tenga alguna deshonestidad y fealdad y, por huir dél mil leguas, dice la cosa por circunloquios y rodeos que apenas es entendido” (López Pinciano 1998, 234). Unless otherwise noted translations are mine. 4. “Ellos hacen muy propriaente en huir del vocablo proprio en tal sazón . . . no trato de esos vocablos, cuya fealdad los hace improprios. Digo y hablo de aque­ llos que se pueden decir delante de todas gentes” (López Pinciano 1998, 234).

Obscene Onomastics  71

5. “Como el vocablo arábigo o griego al francés; o el vascongado y francés al alemán” (López Pinciano 1998, 235). 6. See also Ewegen 2013. 7. See Johnson 1983; Redondo 1997; and Weiger 1979, to name just a few. 8. Vignali was founder of the famed Academia degli Intronati, which was praised in Cervantes’s Persiles and widely celebrated during the sixteenth century for its lascivious literary production and erudite philosophical agenda. 9. All quotations from the anonymous Carajicomedia are cited from Frank A. Domínguez’s bilingual edition unless noted otherwise. 10. For other studies on the Carajicomedia, see Alonso 1995; Domínguez 2015; Giles 2009; Pérez-­Romero 2005; and Weissberger 2003. 11. “Romance Trágico” was included in the manuscript Parnaso español 4 (ms 3915, copied ca. 1620; written between 1580 and 1590 [Alzieu, Jammes, and Lissorgues 2000, 318]). All references to “Romance Trágico” are cited from Alzieu, Jammes, and Lissorgues 2000, 296–­98. 12. For references to sexual metaphors using a nautical topos (such as “la flaca barquilla”), see Domínguez 2015, 339, 345. 13. For papo as labia, see Alzieu, Jammes, and Lissorgues 2000, 64, 96, 155, 212, 226, 256; Delicado 2007, 135; and Domínquez 2015, 282. 14. This strategy was also popular in erotic tales such as some featured in the Thousand and One Arabian Nights. In the story of the “Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad,” for example, three mischievous sisters attempt to school the porter on how to name female genitalia, playing with a series of literal and metaphoric terminology for sexual parts (Lyons and Lyons 2010, 88–­89). See also Perfetti 2003, 203–­38. 15. See Carmen Tirado 1999; Flores 1997; González 2009; Labandeira Fernández 1973; Llobet 1981; Mancing 1973; McGaha 1991; Osterc 1981; Palacín Iglesias 1963; Redondo 1997; Rey 1980; Salinas 1961; and Selig 1974–­75. 16. However, when we compare the name to a similar one in Vignali’s Cazzaria, we find the character also has links to an image of Arabic culture in Italian literary tradition: “In the days when Beffania held the dukedom of Archifanfano di Baldracca in Aldalecca, . . . a stone was found on which was sculpted from life a Big Cock and a Cunt” (Vignali 2003, 139, italics added). As Ian Frederick Moulton explains in his note on the passage, Beffania derives from Beffa (fool), while Archifanfano “appears in comic plays as a parodic reference to a Muslim scholarly authority. Baldracca suggests Baldac (Bagdad) as well 72 Velasco

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

as the Baldracca, a Florentine hostel for ‘fallen women.’ Aldalecca is close to ‘al di la’—­over there; ‘lecca’ means ‘lick.’” (2003, 173). As Leo Spitzer declares in his study on the polyonomasia and polyetymology in Cervantes’s prose, proper names are “untranslatable” by nature (1967, 47). Still, Edith Grossman offers her renderings of what she describes as the “ludicrous” associations in the names that Don Quixote invents for the imagined knights: Laurcalco, “Laurelfacsimile”; Micocolembo, “Monkeywedge”; Brandabarbarán de Boliche, “Brandabarbarian of Ninepins”; Timonel de Carcajona, “Helmsman of Guffawjona”; Nueva Vizcaya, “New Basqueland”; Miulina, “Mewlina”; Alfeñiquén del Algarbe, “Mollycoddle of Babble”; Pierres Papín, “Pierres Bonbon”; Espartafilardo del Bosque, “Esparragrass of the Forest” (Grossman 2005, 127, translations in footnote 3). For obscene uses of arremangado, see Alzieu, Jammes, and Lissorgues 2000, 38, 52, 53, 213; and Antoon 2006, 78. For armar as “erection,” see Alzieu, Jammes, and Lissorgues 2000, 191–­92. See Domínguez 2015, 52–­68. Aretino’s Dialogues were heavily censored in a Spanish adaptation/translation in the sixteenth century, with most of the obscene language and actions changed or excised completely (Coloquio de las damas 1548, 1607). The name may also conceal the terms anda and barba—­the former used in reference to the sex act and the latter for both male and female genitals. Mancing also mentions the knight Barbarán from the Florisel de Niquea (1973, 225). Timonel is “helmsman,” as Mancing points out (1973, 225). See also Alzieu, Jammes, and Lissorgues 2000, 197, 287. Nonetheless, carajo (penis) might also be at play (Alzieu, Jammes, and Lissorgues 2000, 222, 224–­25). See Said 1979 and Massad 2008 for theories of Orientalism and the Western tradition of sexualizing Muslims. Mancing notes that Pierres Papín was also a Frenchman who owned a card shop in Seville during the sixteenth century (1973, 225). See also Alzieu, Jammes, and Lissorgues 2000, 64, 212, 226, 256. Interestingly, imagery of rolled-­up sleeves, suggestive arms and heads, and dragging phalli appeared in verses from medieval Arab poet Ibn al-­Hajjaj, a popular innovator of sukhf, obscene and scatological parody: “a man of humongous arms / a man who drags the train of his garment atop glory’s head / on the day of battle you see his sleeves rolled” (Antoon 2014, 78). In a Western Obscene Onomastics  73

erotic context, a poetic parody depicts a personified phallus (“Matihuelo”) so “thick and long” that it “drags on the ground” (“tan gordo largo y tal, / que arastrava por el suelo” (“Una obra” 1974, 167), which was also published in the Cancionero de obras de vurlas provocantes a risa along with the Carajicomedia. See also Alzieu, Jammes, and Lissorgues 2000, 233. 27. “El haber cortado las venas yugulares que están detrás de las orejas producen esterilidad porque el esperma viene del cerebro.” 28. That Laguna’s edition ([1566] 1999) of Dioscórides’s work was mentioned specifically would not be surprising, not only due to its popularity and wide circulation but also because it is believed to have been a part of Cervantes’s personal library. Since herbal remedies were one of the most common ways to treat sexual performance issues—­either to stimulate or suppress the male member—­it is not unexpected that Laguna’s publication includes dozens of recipes aimed to address sexual dysfunction. 29. Claude Duret (1605) follows suit in his Histoire admirable des plantes et herbes esmerveillables & miraculeuses en nature by reproducing images of the “Dutch Phallus” described by Theophrastus in his botanical works. Works Cited

Alonso, Álvaro, ed. and intro. 1995. Carajicomedia. Málaga: Ediciones Aljibe. Alzieu, Pierre, Robert Jammes, and Yvan Lissorgues, eds. 2000. Poesía erótica del Siglo de Oro. Barcelona: Crítica. Antoon, Sinan. 2006. “Suyuti, Jalal al-­Din Al-­.” In Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature, edited by Gaetan Brulotte and John Phillips, 1267–­68. New York: Routledge. —. 2014. The Poetics of the Obscene in Premodern Arabic Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Aretino, Pietro. 2005. Aretino’s Dialogues. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. Introduction by Margaret Rosenthal. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Aviñón, Juan de. (1545) 1885. Sevillana medicina. Seville: Enrique Rasco. Canavaggio, Jean. 1958. “Alonso López Pinciano y la estética literaria de Cervantes en el Quijote.” Anales cervantinos 7:13–­107. Carmen Tirado, Pilar del. 1999. “War Games: Cervantes’s Battle of the Sheep.” In War and Its Uses: Conflict and Creativity, edited by Jürgen Kleist and Bruce Butterfield, 37–­45. New York: Peter Lang. Cervantes, Miguel de. 1998. Don Quijote de la Mancha. Edited by Tom Lathrop. Newark de: Juan de la Cuesta. 74 Velasco

—. 2005. Don Quixote. Translated and notes by Edith Grossman. New York: Harper Collins. —. 2007. Don Quixote. Translated and notes by Tom Lathrop. Newark de: Lingua Text. Covarrubias Horozco, Sebastián de. 2006. Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española. Edited by Ignacio Arellano and Rafael Zafra. Madrid: Iberoamericana. Cull, John T. 1990. “The ‘Knight of the Broken Lance’ and His ‘Trusty Steed’: On Don Quixote and Rocinante.” Cervantes 10, no. 2:37–­53. Delicado, Francisco. 2007. La lozana andaluza. Madrid: Cátedra. Domínguez, Frank A., ed. and trans. 2015. Carajicomedia: Parody and Satire in Early Modern Spain. Woodbridge UK: Tamesis. Duret, Claude. 1605. Histoire admirable des plantes et herbes esmerveillables & miraculeuses en nature. . . . Paris: Nicolas Buon. Ewegen, Shane Montgomery. 2013. Plato’s Cratylus: The Comedy of Language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ferrand, Jacques. 1990. A Treatise on Lovesickness. Edited by Donald A. Beecher and Massio Ciavolella. Syracuse ny: Syracuse University Press. Flores, R. M. 1997. “¿Qué hay en los apellidos Quijada, Quesada y Quijana? Fuentes históricas, teoría narratológica y bibliografía analítica en la crítica literaria.” Bulletin Hispanique 99:409–­22. Fonseca, Cristóbal de. 1598. Tratado del amor de Dios. Toledo: Thomas de Guzman. Giles, Ryan D. 2009. The Laughter of the Saints: Parodies of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. González, Cristina. 2009. “Estandartes, polvaredas, confusión e ira en Enrique Fi de Oliva y en el episodio de los rebaños de ovejas de Don Quijote de la Mancha.” Espéculo 42. http://​www​.ucm​.es​/info​/especulo​/numero42​/enrifide​.html. Gordonio, Bernardo de. 1993. Lilio de medicina. Edited by Brian Dutton and María Nieves Sánchez. Madrid: Arco/Libros. Hazm, Ibn. 2014. The Ring of the Dove; or the Dove’s Neck-­Ring. Eastford ct: Martino Fine. Johnson, Carroll B. 1983. Madness and Lust: A Psychoanalytical Approach to “Don Quixote.” Los Angeles: University of California Press. Joubert, Laurent. 1989. Popular Errors. Translated by Gregory David de Rocher. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Katib, Ibn Nasr al-­. 1977. Encyclopedia of Pleasure. Edited by Salah Addin Khawwam. Translated by Adnan Jarkas and Salah Addin Khawwam. Toronto: Aleppo. Obscene Onomastics  75

Labandeira Fernández, Amancio. 1973. “En torno a Pentapolín.” Anales cervantinos 12:157–­66. Laguna, Andrés. (1566) 1999. Pedacio Dioscórides Anazarbeo: Acerca de la materia medicinal y de los venenos mortíferos. Edited by Pedro Laín Entrago, J. Riera Palmero, F. Puerto Sarmiento, A. M. Alonso, J. Esteva Sagrera, and J. L. Tamargo Menéndez. Madrid: Fundación de Ciencias de la Salud. Llobet, Ana Rosa. 1981. “El problema de la nominación en El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha.” In Primeras jornadas cervantinas 23:78–­98. Bahía Blanca, Argentina: Instituto Superior Juan. López de Villalobos, Francisco. 1973. El sumario de la medicina con un tratado de las pestiferas bubas. Edited by María Teresa Herrera. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca. López Pinciano, Alonso. 1998. Philosophía Antigua poética. Madrid: Biblioteca Castro. Lyons, Malcolm C., and Ursula Lyons, trans. 2010. Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights. Introduction by Robert Irwin. New York: Penguin Books. Mancing, Howard. 1973. “The Comic Function of Chivalric Names in Don Quijote.” Names 21:220–­35. Massad, Joseph A. 2008. Desiring Arabs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McGaha, Michael. 1991. “Intertextuality as a Guide to the Interpretation of the Battle of the Sheep (Don Quixote, I, 18).” In On Cervantes: Essays for L. A. Murillo, edited by James A. Parr, 149–­61. Newark de: Juan de la Cuesta. McMahon, John M. 1998. Paralysin Cave: Impotence, Perception, and Text in the Satyrica of Petronius. Leiden: Brill. Moulton, Ian Frederick. 2003. “Introduction: The Greatest Tangle of Pricks There Ever Was: Knowledge, Sex, and Power in Renaissance Italy.” In La Cazzaria: The Book of the Prick, by Antonio Vignali, edited and translated by Ian Frederick Moulton, 1–­70. New York: Routledge. Nafzami, Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-­. 1999. The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight. London: Kegan Paul. Núñez de Coria, Francisco. 1572. Tratado del uso de la mujer. In Aviso de sanidad. Madrid: Pierre Cusin. Osterc, Ludovik. 1981. “La trascendencia universal del episodio del Quijote sobre los dos ejércitos (I, 18).” In Cervantes, su obra y su mundo: Actas del 1er Congreso Internacional sobre Cervantes, edited by Manuel Criado del Val, 761–­66. Madrid: edi. 76 Velasco

Palacín Iglesias, Gregorio. 1963. “El nombre del hidalgo en quien encarnó Don Quijote.” Romance Notes 5:55–­58. Pérez-­Romero, Antonio. 2005. The Subversive Tradition in Spanish Renaissance Writing. Lewisburg pa: Bucknell University Press. Perfetti, Lisa. 2003. Women and Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Porta, Giambattista della. 1650. Phytognomonica. Whitefish mt: Kessinger. Redondo, Agustín. 1997. Otra manera de leer el Quijote: Historia, tradiciones culturales y literature. Madrid: Castalia. Rey, Arsenio. 1980. “Onomastic Perspectivism of Don Quixote.” Literary Onomastic Studies 7:157–­66. Riley, E. C. 1992. Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel. Newark de: Juan de la Cuesta. Rouhi, Leyla. 2008. “A Handsome Boy among Those Barbarous Turks: Cervantes’s Muslims and the Art and Science of Desire.” In Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire, edited by Kathryn Babyan and Afsaneh Najmabadi, 41–­71. Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press. Said, Edward W. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Salinas, Pedro. 1961. “El polvo y los nombres.” In Ensayos de literatura hispánica (Del Cantar de Mio Cid a García Lorca), edited by Juan Marichal, 127–­42. Madrid: Aguilar. Sedley, David. 2003. Plato’s “Cratylus.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Selig, Karl-­Ludwig. 1974–­75. “The Battle of the Sheep (Don Quixote, I, xviii).” Revista Hispánica Moderna 38:64–­72. Simons, Patricia. 2014. The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spitzer, Leo. 1967. Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics. Princeton nj: Princeton University Press. “Una obra de un cavallero llamado ‘Visión deletable.’” 1974. In Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a risa, edited by Juan Alfredo Bellón and Pablo Jauralde Pou, 166–­68. Madrid: Akal. Vignali, Antonio. 2003. La Cazzaria: The Book of the Prick. Edited and translated by Ian Frederick Moulton. New York: Routledge. Weiger, John G. 1979. The Individuated Self: Cervantes and the Emergence of the Individual. Athens: Ohio University Press. Weissberger, Barbara. 2003. Isabel Rules: Constructing Queenship, Wielding Power. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Obscene Onomastics  77

P ART 2 Cervantes in Comparative Contexts

chapter 4

Befriending and Being Friends in Cervantes’s La Galatea (1585) and Sidney’s Arcadia (1593) Marsha S. Collins

In the inaugural issue of Amity, the first journal devoted to friendship studies, Graham Smith states that the current resurgence of interest in friendship as an area of scholarly inquiry represents a renewed concern with the multifaceted bonds between person and person, group and group, encompassing the entire panoply of human connections—­social, political, religious, and more (2013, 1–­2). Scholars in a variety of disciplines, confident in the insights into the human condition such research will provide, are exploring the many dimensions of friendship in different epochs and cultures through diverse critical lenses. In early modern literary and cultural studies, research on friendship has continued to gather steam over the past thirty years without any sign of slowing down. As Daniel Lochman and Maritere López have pointed out, “although early moderns inherited a rich tradition of friendship, shaped by the ancients and restyled by medieval Christians, the period between 1500 and 1700 saw a flurry of works in which contemporaries flouted many commonplaces while fully embracing others” (2011, 1). This wellspring of friendship materials—­and the often conflicted or conflictive engagement between ancient and modern discourses on friendship—­generated many sources, and boundless inspiration, for early modern authors to turn to artistic purposes and adapt to suit their personal skills, interests, and quests for innovation and experimentation. Moreover, early modern literature proved to be an artistic venue in which writers could bridge the gap between abstract 81

concepts of friendship and their deployment or enactment within the concrete particularities and contingencies of a sociohistorical context, albeit a fictional one. In this way the worlds of early modern fiction offer imaginary laboratories and proving grounds for testing and exploring a complex web of human bonds and types of friendship, including different notions of marriage and community.1 The works of Miguel de Cervantes should clearly occupy a prominent place in current early modern friendship studies, as the author created some of the most memorable and intriguing of friendships in his imaginary worlds, including arguably the world’s most famous fictional friendship, that of Sancho and Don Quixote. Despite the groundbreaking Cervantine friendship studies of Rosilie Hernández, Donald Gilbert-­Santamaría, and Juan Pablo Gil-­Oslé, among others, friendship studies that focus on Cervantes’s creative universe and the fictional worlds of early modern Spanish Literature in general remain remarkably few, which provides Hispanists and comparatists a rich and beckoning field of promising investigation for the present and the future.2 In the case of Cervantes, friendship plays a pivotal role in his art as a theme and structural element with many nuances and multiple functions, and it is a pervasive presence throughout the writer’s literary production. La Galatea (1585), Cervantes’s first published book and likely the most understudied of all his works, provides the foundation and creative nucleus for the complex subject of friendship to which Cervantes would return again and again to explore myriad human relationships—­such as those of amity, love, marriage, society, community, nation, and the like—­in the pages of his fiction, and it thus constitutes the key text to study to understand the privileged and complicated role of friendship in Cervantes’s fictional worlds. Moreover, Cervantes’s engagement with the friendship theme in the experimental La Galatea parallels that of his contemporary Sir Philip Sidney (1554–­86) in the English author’s equally innovative but more famous and more frequently studied pastoral romance Arcadia ([1593] 1977). Such a parallel offers a compelling case for comparative analysis that will contribute to the growing field of Anglo-­Spanish/Iberian 82 Collins

comparative literary studies and lay the groundwork for further research. This chapter accordingly examines potential sources of friendship lore and discourse that likely influenced both authors and also focuses on three major areas of comparison regarding friendship in these romances by Cervantes and Sidney: (1) the ideal friendship embodied by Silerio and Timbrio (Cervantes) and Musidorus and Pyrocles (Sidney); (2) the paradoxical relationships of friendly rivals, or what today we might call “frenemies”; and (3) the presentation of female friendship. Both pastoral romances are born under the sign of friendship. The introductory material to La Galatea contains a prologue (typically Cervantine in its idiosyncratic nature and in its presentation of a sophisticated, personal poetics), followed by a brief dedication to Ascanio Colonna (1559?–­1608), then Abbot of St. Sophia, soon-­to-­be-­named cardinal in 1586, and a distinguished member of the illustrious Roman Colonna family. Ascanio’s father, Marco Antonio Colonna (1535–­84), had served as one of the commanders of the Christian galley ships at the Battle of Lepanto and also became the viceroy of Sicily. This dedication places La Galatea under the nurturing, protective “column” of a rich, heroic, powerful, and aristocratic Roman family with a long history of artistic patronage, close ties to the Spanish Crown, and an intimate link to the victory at Lepanto, which figured so prominently in Cervantes’s life. Three sonnets celebrating the artistry of La Galatea accompany the prologue and dedication, each written by a Castilian poet who had already garnered some acclaim in his own right and who could be counted among Cervantes’s cultivated coterie of Castilian writer friends. All three—­ Luis Gálvez de Montalvo, Luis de Vargas Manrique, and Gabriel López Maldonado—­appear in Calíope’s eulogistic song that honors Castilian poets in book 6 of La Galatea. Today Gálvez de Montalvo—­who studied with Cervantes under the famed schoolmaster Juan López de Hoyos, served in the household of Ascanio Colonna, and composed the pastoral romance El pastor de Fílida (1582)—­retains the highest profile of this group of poets. This is in part due to his association with Cervantes and his Arcadian world, but at that time Cervantes also sought and needed, Befriending and Being Friends  83

or thought he needed, the support of these friends as he embarked on his career as a published author. As Dominick Finello has noted, in this way Cervantes initiates La Galatea in a “spirit of friendship and awareness of his fellow writers,” but in reality the entire romance “serves as a repository of homages to friends and patrons” (1994, 43, 42).3 The Old Arcadia, an earlier version of Sidney’s romance likely completed by 1580, was written as a present for the author’s much-­loved sister Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, who was known as a gifted writer, linguist, and translator in her own right. Sidney composed much of the Old Arcadia at Wilton, the ancestral home of the Earls of Pembroke and the center of an informal gathering of poets sometimes called the Wilton Circle, which included Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, and the countess’s brother, among others. Despite Sidney’s dismissive rhetoric in calling his creation a “toyful book,” along with other self-­deprecatory labels, the countess and her sophisticated group of friends must have found the Old Arcadia complex, entertaining, and worthy of time and consideration. Clearly, Sidney did too, as only the opportunity for military command and social advancement interrupted his rewrite of the romance, a task never to be completed due to his subsequent death at the age of thirty-­one from combat wounds suffered in what is now the Netherlands. Sidney’s friend and biographer Fulke Greville oversaw the first publication of the unfinished, revised Arcadia in 1590, while the countess and her secretary Hugh Sanford edited and published the composite and most influential version of Arcadia in 1593. As a young man navigating the treacherous waters of the Elizabethan court, Sidney found Wilton and the friends and family who embraced him there an important source of pastoral refuge and inspiration, intimately connected to his creation of Arcadia.4 Paul Alpers has emphasized that convenings or gatherings of shepherds are an essential feature of Arcadian fictional worlds, and Jorge de Montemayor developed this feature further in La Diana (1559) by constructing an aggregate community of mutually supportive shepherds and shepherdesses who help one another find a cure to their amorous ills or cases, even if this group of lovers disbands and maintains rather loose ties at the end (Alpers 84 Collins

1996, 81). Nevertheless, in La Galatea and Arcadia, amicitia—­friendship on a personal and social, communal level, that is, love, compassion, and empathy among diverse humans as the basis for ties that unite people in a variety of ways—­appears to decenter, if not displace, eros (romantic and/ or passionate love), as well as the courtly manners and models of conduct traditionally identified with such love in pastoral texts. At the very least, amicitia emerges as a complementary and at times competitive form of love.5 This radical reconfiguration of conventional pastoral thematics in foregrounding amicitia, or merging friendship with eros, forms one of the most innovative and complicated aspects of Cervantes’s and Sidney’s experimentation with Arcadian romance. While Sidney’s concern with the ideal monarchy and polity (along with Arcadia’s important link to the speculum principum tradition) distinguish the English romance from its Spanish counterpart, both texts nevertheless display a similar concern with the triangulated bonds of love, friendship, and community, which are explored in many forms and from many different perspectives within the works, opening up the conventionally sealed pastoral world to a new array of philosophical and sociohistorical concerns. The complex interweave of love and friendship in La Galatea and Arcadia arises from the confluence of a variety of traditions known to Cervantes and Sidney alike, among them the corpus of literature on the philosophy of friendship that extends back to classical antiquity, Byzantine romances that foreground male-­female love and friendship, folktales and short stories with a friendship theme, and contemporary texts that merge friendship with the ideal of Christian marriage. The foundational texts in the continuous study of the philosophy of friendship in the West are Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (books 8 and 9) and Cicero’s Laelius de amicitia, both widely available at the time. The latter, which absorbed many Aristotelian concepts of friendship and reframed amicitia in terms of Roman values and culture, was especially influential in early modern Europe. For Aristotle and Cicero, the best type of friendship is a form of love between virtuous and like-­minded men, in which intellect and ethical conduct moderate desires and temper passions. The friend is an Befriending and Being Friends  85

“other self ” in an enduring relationship that involves shared pleasures, such as conversation, but the mutual benevolence also enables friends to withstand life’s trials of truth and loyalty. A good friend merits unquestioning support and sacrifice, which he receives from his other self in acts of selfless devotion. Friendship is also a dynamic process involving reciprocity in learning and growth in virtue, a relationship that encourages meaningful discourse that allows for debate and disagreement, as well as time spent together in shared endeavors. Significantly for Cervantes and Sidney, Aristotle and Cicero envision friendship within a social context, as a building block for community: for Aristotle in the polis, and for Cicero in the more legalistic context of Roman civism, of reciprocal duties and responsibilities.6 Cervantes and Sidney also adapted the theme of friendship as modeled in the relationships between the heroes and heroines of classical Greek romances, which break the Aristotelian and Ciceronian norms and reserve the highest forms of friendship for males alone. The male and female protagonists experience trials and adventures that move them and the plot through transformations that lead to closure in marriage and return to community (Whitmarsh 2011, 177–­78, 214). David Konstan notes that parity (or “sexual symmetry”) between hero and heroine—­ that is, reciprocal passion, same age and social class, similar actions and reactions, similar tests and trials of fidelity and constancy—­distinguishes these fictional narratives from all other amatory literary genres of classical antiquity (1994, 34). As male and female protagonists share the same or similar adventures, they exhibit equal intelligence, fortitude, ingenuity, and identical emotions and passions. Women show courage and are as active as their male lovers, at times assuming the dominant role in the relationship. The lovers offer each other comfort and support, exhibit unshakeable faith in each other, and alone or together squelch the divisiveness of erstwhile rivalries.7 More contemporary sources nourished the discourse of friendship as well in the sixteenth century. Stories that highlight amity appeared in collections of tales that circulated widely in medieval and early modern 86 Collins

Europe. In a narrative from the Disciplina clericalis of Petrus Alfonsi, for instance, a man accepts blame for a murder mistakenly attributed to his dearest friend, and both are ultimately absolved. Although this anthology dates from the twelfth century, the story in question likely originated long beforehand in the East and was transmitted orally for many years before assuming written form. Several stories on friendship in Don Juan Manuel’s fourteenth-­century collection of tales El conde Lucanor, a text Cervantes most certainly knew, have a similar provenance. One fictional model of friendship important for Cervantes and Sidney can be traced to Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1350), to the tale of the two friends Titus and Gisippus, in love with the same woman, narrated by the character Filomena on the tenth and final day of storytelling. The tale involves a false accusation of murder, selfless sacrifice of each friend on behalf of the other, and a happy resolution with the good friends married to sisters—­elements that resurface in metamorphosed form in La Galatea’s interpolated narrative of the friends Silerio and Timbrio as well as in the climax to Arcadia, in which individually Musidorus and Pyrocles attempt self-­sacrifice to save their other self from the false charges of murder and treason. A number of story collections circulating throughout Europe at the time feature frame tales in which a group of friends gather together in a community linked by amity and united by the communal art of storytelling. This narrative strategy clearly resonated with both Cervantes and Sidney, as countless episodes in La Galatea replicate such gatherings of storytelling friends, as well as in Arcadia, especially in book 2, in which friends and lovers reveal their values and their true selves through storytelling. In addition, Cervantes and Sidney inherited the linguistic code of courtly love, in which the language of eros and amicitia are often conflated or identified with each other, and the lover may be referred to as a dear or beloved friend. While Cervantes did not seek to replicate this semantic code in his romance, he was aware of this literary precedent as a discourse of erotic friendship ripe for repurposing, while Sidney deliberately and systematically reshaped such language, along with other conventions of chivalric romances, in his Arcadian fiction. These more contemporary Befriending and Being Friends  87

sources of inspiration contribute to a nascent fictional cosmovision in which men and women actually share enduring love and friendship.8 Readers of La Galatea and Arcadia cannot overlook the authors’ attention to the characterization of females as protagonists and heroic figures nor the prominence of the frequently intertwined topics of female friendship and marriage. These similarities in the texts offer some measure of both artists’ innovative treatment of the inherited conventions of romance and their imaginative refashioning of a literary form often dismissed as frivolous or criticized as immoral, turning such fiction to serious matters, philosophical and sociohistorical in their implications. Christian marriage was a hot-­button issue at the time, debated and discussed by Protestants and Catholics alike, and while the views of the most famous humanists at the time cannot match the more progressive ideals of women’s equality today, still the opinions on marriage of a highly influential humanist like Erasmus, whose Declamatio Matrimonii (1518) and Institutio Christiani Matrimonii (1526) were widely disseminated in manuscript and print versions, seem like a significant step forward in the West’s long awakening to feminist ideals. Erasmus equates matrimony with the highest form of friendship, a union of two minds and bodies in one, in an eternal bond of amity and perfect love, which does not allow for the divisiveness aroused by destructive passions such as jealousy. He locates matrimony, that is, conjugal friendship, in a social context, as the very foundation for Christian life and community and as the centerpiece of his Christian philosophy, and he envisions marriage as a generative field in which to enact Christian values and virtues in word and deed. According to this humanist, marriage is a school of progressive perfecting, in which as best friends, husband and wife learn and grow together in civic and Christian virtues, which he considers inseparable. The point here is not that either Sidney or Cervantes (the latter of whom was greatly influenced by Erasmus) is attempting to promote a particular humanist ideology on marriage or the female capacity for friendship, but rather that the debate unfolding at the time over this major issue is reflected and enacted in a variety of ways in the respective romances of the authors, 88 Collins

opening up imaginary pathways for alternative forms of friendship and different notions of companionate marriage. Moreover, each author was keenly aware of the personal and political stakes in this matter, for Sidney married in 1583 and Cervantes in 1584, both to much younger women, and each was aware of the potential impact on his respective country of Queen Elizabeth I’s ever-­shifting prospective marital alliances. Sidney’s family was known and admired for its strong and intelligent women, such as the author’s mother and sister, for whom Arcadia was written. And the writer knew firsthand the royal wrath that an aristocrat’s marriage could incur if unapproved in advance by the queen, as experienced by his uncle, the first Earl of Leicester, when he entered into a clandestine marriage with Lettice Knollys.9 Cervantes and Sidney situate their vision of the classical ideal of friendship at the heart of the Arcadian romances, embodied in Silerio and Timbrio and Musidorus and Pyrocles, respectively, and their complicated relationships of amity and love. Of all La Galatea’s embedded stories, that of the two friends is the longest and most dense, starting in book 2 with the narration of Silerio, currently residing in Cervantes’s Iberian Arcadia as a hermit, and ending in book 5 with Timbrio’s narration, performing the role of his friend’s “other self” in acts of storytelling that complete the backstory, as their lives intertwine to the point of inseparability. The narrative thread is cut or interrupted numerous times, and other voices intervene, notably those of the sisters Nísida and Blanca, the future wives of the friends. But the tale proves so compelling and powerful that the verdadera amistad, the true friendship that overcomes harrowing adventures and much adversity, very nearly kidnaps the entire romance and supplants the spotlight initially cast on the pastoral couple Elicio and Galatea. Unlike their Arcadian hosts, Silerio and Timbrio are prosperous gentlemen from Jerez, and they enjoy lives of privilege that include obligations to personal and familial honor and expectations that they will adhere to codes of conduct that involve courtliness commensurate with elevated social standing. They are of the same place and social class, come from similar families, act like and love each other as brothers, and eventually fall in love with the same woman, Befriending and Being Friends  89

Nísida. Cervantes casts Silerio in the role of the perfect friend and lover who sacrifices all for an idealized and ennobled love and for the perfect friendship he shares with Timbrio. The classical view of amicita, however, stresses that friends should share interests, spend time together, and have open and frank discussions. But Silerio and Timbrio spend most of the narrative apart from each other, and while Timbrio seems impetuous and somewhat of a whirlwind of activity and movement, he appears forever following in Silerio’s wake, several steps behind, always reacting and responding and never initiating action. For all his eloquence in telling his tale to the audience of herdsmen, Silerio himself highlights his past communicative errors and failures, his trail of misunderstandings and key moments in which he keeps silent instead of speaking as he should, all of which have led him to an almost solipsistic, tragic solitude.10 According to amicitia literature, while friends should be willing to risk their lives for each other (a test that Silerio and Timbrio both pass), friends do not ask their other selves to perform an act that humiliates or degrades them. Yet Silerio puts himself in precisely that position, for he enters the household of Nísida and Blanca disguised as a jester, never expressing his true feelings to Timbrio. In short Cervantes deliberately problematizes the conventions of classical friendship, perhaps presenting them to readers to consider, debate, and resolve for themselves. The not-­quite-­perfect perfect friends Silerio and Timbrio remind readers that one’s expectations of friends should include reasonable limits, and that friends should exercise thought and reason before acting, with careful consideration of the consequences for themselves and others. Nevertheless, Cervantes rewards the essential goodness of the four protagonists of this interpolated story, as their consistent, sincere, and faithful displays of love and friendship find their full realization in the recovery of one another, their other selves of the same sex, and their newly acquired other selves through marriage in Cervantes’s Arcadia on the banks of the river Tajo. In contrast to Silerio and Timbrio of La Galatea, Sidney’s exemplars of amicitia, Princes Musidorus and Pyrocles, are the undisputed heroes 90 Collins

and protagonists of Arcadia. They model what Aristotle and Cicero consider to be the best type of friendship: that form of love shared between virtuous and like-­minded men whose intellect and ethical conduct moderate desires and restrain passions. Their royalty and blood ties (they are cousins), similar upbringing and education, shared perils, adventures, and triumphs, as well as their reputation for virtue and heroism, generate a relationship in which the princes genuinely mirror each other, with each man serving as the “other self ” of his friend. When Pyrocles falls in love, Musidorus tries to talk his friend out of his unreasonable emotion at first, but he refuses to abandon his enamored friend, and ends up in love with the sister of Pyrocles’s own beloved Philoclea. Throughout Arcadia and their changes of fortune in Arcadia, the princes remain loyal and constant in their devotion and always come to each other’s aid, with that firm, selfless commitment to each other coming to the fore even in book 5, when their honor and lives hang in the balance. Their love for the princesses is tested in book 3, and although inherently virtuous, the princes must learn to moderate desire and restrain their passions vis-­à-­vis their ladies, with Musidorus pledging to guard Pamela’s chastity before seeking to flee Arcadia with her, and Pyrocles reining in his passion even in the intimate space of Philoclea’s bedchamber. While these actions demonstrate Sidney’s absorption and adoption of the Greek romance’s emphasis on chastity as a symbol of virtue and commitment to marital love, they are also related to the concept of friendship as dynamic process.11 The safe return of the young people to Arcadia after book 3’s kidnappings, imprisonments, and scenes of chivalric, ritualized violence and armed warfare confirms the importance of the principles of amicitia to the successful resolution of their love relationships and also to the reestablishment of peace and harmony in Arcadia. Musidorus sufficiently trusts in that friendship and in his friend’s own experience with love to ask Pyrocles’s permission for him to run away with Pamela and return with an army to liberate his friend and Philoclea: “‘My dear cousin, to whom nature began my friendship, education confirmed it, and virtue hath made it eternal, here have I discovered the very foundation whereupon my life is built. Be you the judge Befriending and Being Friends  91

betwixt me and my fortune’” (Sidney [1593] 1977, 626). That friendship and selfless faith in the other self is reciprocated in Pyrocles’s acceding to Musidorus’s request: “‘My only friend,’ . . . ‘I joy in your presence, but I joy more in your good’” (628). Yet Sidney, like Cervantes, elects to problematize this ideal friendship through some of the questionable choices that the princes make. For example, Musidorus and Pyrocles court the princesses through an at times amusing but ultimately deceitful plot of skillful lies and disguises, which finds Musidorus assuming the identity of the shepherd Dorus and Pyrocles adopting the cross-­dressed identity of the Amazon Zelmane to make their way into the sylvan Arcadian court. King Basilius unwisely abrogates his monarchic duties to Arcadia based on irrational fears of a prophecy, imposes exile on his family in the Arcadian wilds, and puts his daughters into a form of protective custody in which they are guarded by witless boors. He then forces the princes to resort to subterfuge to woo the young ladies when their true identities would make them excellent suitors. Yet the disguises put the young men in humiliating, and potentially compromising and dangerous positions, with Musidorus at the mercy of the clownish Dametas, and Pyrocles as Zelmane as the unfortunate object of lust of King Basilius and the lascivious, once-­virtuous Queen Gynecia. Even after the princes reveal their true identities and honest intentions to their respective beloveds, the tissue of lies they tell sets in motion a series of actions that leaves both couples open to accusations of treason and suspicions of murder, with the princes potentially facing dishonor and death, and both princesses potentially facing dishonor, disgrace, and ruined lives. Moreover, since Sidney’s protagonists are lovers who are also potential heirs to thrones, the personal decisions made by the princes, and motivated by love, have serious political repercussions, which push an Arcadia already shaken by acts of rebellion and the irresponsible, self-­imposed exile of the king to the brink of civil war. Only the intervention of Providence, which also rescues Cervantes’s Silerio and Timbrio, can bring about the happy ending that the young people, and Arcadia, clearly merit. Sidney’s “true friendship,” like Cervantes’s, 92 Collins

poses a series of conundrums involving love, amity, responsibilities, and human agency embattled with external contingencies, leaving readers to ponder these complex matters. The conflation of matters of eros and amicitia is woven into the reader’s entrance into the imaginary worlds of these romances in scenes that pay creative homage to the beginning of Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana and celebrate reason and nobility of spirit, which spur rivals and potential enemies into becoming friends who choose to neutralize jealousy and other passions that could erupt in violence. La Galatea introduces the sincere and generous shepherds Elicio and Erastro, who pledge friendship to each other and, acknowledging the love they share for Galatea, reject jealousy, and reconfigure that love as a rational, common ground for amity. Erastro, admitting his inferiority to the more sophisticated Elicio as a potential lover for Galatea, asks and receives permission to love Galatea without hope of the shepherdess ever returning that love. Elicio confesses that so far his loving appeals to Galatea have met with no success either: “‘No dejes por mi respeto de querer a Galatea, que no soy de tan ruin condición que, ya que a mí me falte ventura, huelgue de que otros no la tengan; antes te ruego, por lo que debes a la voluntad que te muestro, que no me niegues tu conversación y amistad, pues de la mía puedes estar tan seguro come te he certificado. Anden nuestros ganados juntos, pues andan nuestros pensamientos apareados’” (Cervantes 1999, 175). Note that Cervantes creatively recalibrates the classical notion that friendship arises between like-­minded men with shared interests. An amoebean exchange of song follows that seals the pact of friendship, as Elicio and Erastro sing of love for Galatea, attempting to provide each other with mutual consolation, as expected of good friends. No sooner does Cervantes present this idyllic and idealized view of friendship than he disrupts that image with the appearance of the homicidal Lisandro, who, in front of them, proceeds to stab the treacherous Carino, the man who readers, along with Elicio and Erastro, subsequently learn has plotted the violent death of his own sister, Leonida, Lisandro’s beloved, as vengeance born of long-­standing envy and hatred between the rival families Befriending and Being Friends  93

of Lisandro, Carino, and Leonida. The narrative, which has its origins in a novella by Matteo Bandello (the same one that inspired Romeo and Juliet), is a story of cruelty, treachery, deception, and bloody violence, in which the duplicity of Carino, his incapacity for generosity and compassion, mock the friendship he offers the deceived Lisandro. Cervantes could not have devised a starker contrast between the true, rational friendship of Elicio and Erastro, identified with harmonious song, and the false friendship of intense, hidden passions of Lisandro and Carino, marked by the lover metamorphosed into a homicidal maniac wielding a dagger dripping blood, leaving behind him a trail of bodies that destroys two families. Cervantes’s narrator makes no comments, but they would be superfluous in this instance, for the author shows which response to love’s frustrations and complications is wiser and more virtuous for the individual and the community and demonstrates dramatically the importance of reason in mitigating the madness-­inducing potential of desire. Sidney similarly begins Arcadia by presenting the virtuous shepherds Claius and Strephon, described as friendly rivals who vie—­both unsuccessfully so far—­for the love of the beautiful shepherdess Urania. Their show of amity in mutual consolation then sets the stage for the appearance of the friends and protagonists Musidorus and Pyrocles, whose friendship mirrors their own without the element of competition in love. Sidney chooses to introduce the element of rivalry into Arcadia through another character, Amphialus, whose evolution he juxtaposes with the princes’ growth in virtue as they and their love for Pamela and Philoclea mature.12 Amphialus is a famous knight and the son of Cecropia, sister of King Basilius, and a woman who covets Arcadia’s throne for her son. Over the course of book 3, Amphialus metamorphoses into the principal antagonist, along with his mother, to all four protagonists, their love and friendship, and their future as founders and rulers of a new society and Arcadia. Amphialus’s very name suggests his conflicted, two-­faced nature, but Sidney’s narrator emphasizes the young man’s initial, fundamental goodness, which quickly proves susceptible to his own desire for Philoclea, making him a rival to Pyrocles, and by extension, enemy of the prince’s 94 Collins

best friend, Musidorus, and vulnerable to the temptation provided by Cecropia: “Amphialus was but even then returned from far countries where he had won immortal fame both of courage and courtesy, when he met with the princesses and was hurt by Zelmane, so as he was utterly ignorant of all his mother’s wicked devices, to which he would never have consented, being (like a rose out of a briar) an excellent son of an evil mother” ([1593] 1977, 444). While Cecropia seeks to force Philoclea or her sister into marrying her son to strengthen his claims to the throne, that same son seeks mainly to claim Philoclea as his own beloved wife against her wishes. Thus when Philoclea demands that Amphialus release them from Cecropia’s prison, he starts the slide down the slippery slope into corruption and immorality, refusing to free his cousins and Pyrocles/ Zelmane, choosing to press the advantage his mother has procured for him, and even going so far as to blame Philoclea for forcing these measures instead of voluntarily reciprocating his emotions. Before the readers’ eyes, Amphialus transforms into an extremely efficient and bloody killing machine in tournaments and on the battlefield, lending his fame and mighty arm to an evil cause in giving in to his own selfish and self-­indulgent desires while actively supporting the treasonous deeds of his mother and pushing Arcadia further towards civil war. Eventually, as he recovers from a wound inflicted by Musidorus, he learns of Cecropia’s sadistic torture meted out to the princesses, and as he threatens his mother with a sword, she falls off the roof to her death in despair. Amphialus then attempts to stab himself to death with the final blows delivered by knives confiscated from Philoclea, after his guilt and moral sense awaken and condemn him. He provides a long list of his many sins before administering his own sentence, recovering some of his noble stature in the process of voicing his confession. Amphialus does not die from the suicide attempt and is carried away by Queen Helen of Corinth, who intends to heal him, and Sidney leaves unresolved the matter of his life and potential redemption. The tragic arc of Amphialus’s slide into immorality and suicidal despair demonstrates how giving into evil, irrational desires and choosing violent rivalry to trample others’ wishes and cousinly friendship underfoot Befriending and Being Friends  95

ultimately leads to isolation from community and self-­destruction, represented visually in the gloomy, forbidding castle on the island that he and his mother inhabit. For despite the encounters with despondency and potential death that the four protagonists experience individually and collectively in these moments of crisis, their friendship, their love for one another, and their faith in goodness and moral behavior inevitably lead them back to Arcadian society, where they will play a crucial role in ushering in a new, morally superior government and community, or so the conclusion borrowed from Old Arcadia implies. The presentation of female friendship in the two romances is even more complex and ambiguous than that of ideal male friendship and that of friendly rivalry. Since the 1980s critics have grown increasingly aware that in La Galatea and Arcadia Cervantes and Sidney adopt a more empathetic and sophisticated approach to female characters and the circumscribed lives that women must lead because of the limited options and freedom available to them, especially in love and marriage, and the vulnerability they experience before power and armed might. Their portrayals likewise reflect an awareness of the inner strength and moral courage women can display and the will they assert in the face of overwhelming evil, adversity, or misfortune. Ruth El Saffar and Rosilie Hernández, among other critics, have noted that Cervantes goes to great lengths to create oppositional symmetry between male and female components, which enables female agency and subjectivity to come to the fore in the text and shows the author’s interest in presenting more-­complex female characters and probing female psychology. Sidney, for his part, makes skilled and deliberate efforts to endow the princess protagonists with more psychological nuances and complexity through the transformation they experience during book 3’s lengthy captivity episodes, which the author greatly expanded during his rewrite of Old Arcadia. In these episodes Sidney advances a strong defense for greater freedom for women in his portraits of the princesses’ heroic resistance to tyranny and temptation, linking virginity and moral force in ways that reflect contemporary concerns about women, marriage, and theology. The plot of romance provides Sidney with a popular template 96 Collins

on which to map “Protestant sexual ethics: the valorization of legal matrimony and wedded chastity over celibacy and single life,” a perspective that despite religious differences, situates Sidney, in this regard, closer to Cervantes, who shows the influence of Erasmus, than one might initially think (Greenhalgh 2004, 16).13 Cervantes also advocates greater freedom for women, as his sympathy clearly lies with Galatea at the end of his romance, when the young maiden’s father arranges a marriage for her to a Portuguese shepherd she has never met and does not want to marry. The author presents her quest for freedom of choice and her selection of Elicio as her champion in that quest in an apparently positive light, although La Galatea breaks off without resolving the matter. Moreover, Cervantes leaves forever unanswered the question of whether the fact that Elicio might have to lead an armed rebellion to liberate Galatea from what seems like parental tyranny is justifiable, and the reader never hears from the shepherdess’s father directly in the text on this marriage issue. Given all the controversy swirling around courtship, marriage, and women’s role in marriage and society at the time throughout Europe, what one can say with confidence is that La Galatea and Arcadia reflect the prominence of such concerns in the thoughts and discussions of a significant portion of contemporary society. And it seems clear that the one question to which Cervantes and Sidney respond with a resounding “yes” is that women are indeed capable of true and deep friendships with other women—­and certainly with their future husbands—­while dramatizing for the reading audience the limits and obstacles imposed on females regarding agency and freedom and in terms of constrained opportunities to develop different types of friendships. In La Galatea Cervantes often organizes his characters in male/female microcommunities, which allows the author to show that amity is by no means exclusive to men. For instance the friendly rivals Elicio and Erastro listen sympathetically to the tragic story of the knife-­wielding Lisandro at the beginning of the romance, while in the next scene the best friends Galatea and Florisa listen empathetically to Teolinda’s tale of her difficult quest for Artidoro’s love. The shepherdesses console, support, and advise Befriending and Being Friends  97

each other, in conformity with the Aristotelian paradigm for ideal male friendship, as well as share similar interests, values, and concerns. They are as articulate and poetically gifted as their male counterparts throughout the romance, and the protagonists Elicio and Galatea are portrayed as equals worthy of each other in mind, body, and spirit. Galatea, like her suitor, displays a noble character and behaves with dignity and honor even when confronted with that unwanted marriage at the end of the romance. In the letter she writes to Elicio to appeal for his help, she does not promise him love and marriage in return for his aid but rather trusts in his willingness to act out of his basic decency and goodness—­in other words, she asks his help and trusts him in these circumstances, confiding in him as an honored and honorable friend. The interpolated story of Silerio and Timbrio contains yet another model of female friendship in the sisters Blanca and Nísida, who share confidences with each other. At one point Blanca asks her sister to intervene and advocate on her behalf so that she might marry Silerio, which indeed is the eventual, felicitous outcome. While far from a complex representation of female friendship, in Nísida and Blanca Cervantes sketches a portrait of devoted sisters who trust and confide in each other and support each other through sadness and harrowing adventures. Their close relationship provides an idealized example of sororal friendship that contrasts strikingly with the betrayal and double-­dealing that divide the sisters Teolinda and Leonarda in another of La Galatea’s subplots. Evidently Sidney also regarded the characterization of sisters as a natural social construct in which to develop more-­complex, female friendship, for this is what he does in his portrayal of Princesses Pamela and Philoclea. Such relationships are commonplace in romances and folklore (for example, Snow White and Rose Red), but in addition, in the sociohistorical world, growth, education, and acculturation in the same household and with the same family more or less provide sisters with a similar environment and set of values in which to cultivate a close, intimate friendship based on like-­mindedness or complementarity in which each daughter can potentially become the “other self” of her sister. Despite their different 98 Collins

personalities (Pamela is more reserved and queenly in demeanor, while Philoclea is more lively and emotional), the sisters share close ties of amity made even stronger by the constraints and confinement in the pastoral wilds of Arcadia imposed on them by their father, King Basilius, and including their oafish, watchdog family of peasant retainers Dametas, Miso, and Mopsa. The sisters show remarkable fortitude and maturity, along with good, rational sense, in their actions and decisions, for the most part, especially when viewed in contrast with the irrational choice of Basilius to exile himself and the rest of his family in response to an ambiguous and unsubstantiated prophecy and the lascivious desires and designs he and his wife, Queen Gynecia, direct at their guest Zelmane, the cross-­ dressed Pyrocles. In book 3 Pamela and Philoclea rise to heroic stature in captivity, in which they prove more than a match for the evil Cecropia, who tortures and torments them and even stages elaborate executions of the sisters to wage psychological warfare. Yet the sisters remain brave and steadfast in their love for each other and for their princes, rely on each other’s strength to withstand their sufferings, and rise to new heights of eloquence and spiritual equanimity before the twisted rhetoric and unsubtle threats of their cruel aunt and their corrupted cousin Amphialus. This display of heroism and unbreakable sororal amity is enacted again in Arcadia’s final scenes, in which the sisters’ generous spirit of love and self-­sacrifice toward each other and the princes they love surfaces before the letter-­of-­the-­law, condemnatory judgments of King Euarchus. Sidney builds his own microcommunity of friends in the four protagonists in this crystallizing conclusion, fashioning superior women who mirror the men they love, even in modeling female amity that is as praiseworthy as the friendship of Musidorus and Pyrocles. Cervantes’s rich, experimental exploration of friendship in La Galatea likely proved to be one of the catalytic forces that moved his creative process in the direction of Don Quixote (1605, 1613), the Novelas ejemplares (1613), and Persiles y Sigismunda (1617), in which the triangulated bonds of love, friendship, and community are explored in many forms, and from many different perspectives. Sidney’s early death means that we will never Befriending and Being Friends  99

know if his equally complex and innovative deployment of amity in Arcadia would have moved or changed his literary work in fundamental ways. His expansive rewrite of book 3, in progress at the time of his death, suggests that friendship would assume an even greater role in the newer version of Arcadia and that like Cervantes, he was intrigued by the opportunities to delve into different types of intersubjective expression and experience opened up by the discourses of friendship in fiction. He was also eager to use friendship to diversify the range of themes and emotions that the newer genres of prose fiction could encompass and bring to life. For critics of Cervantes and Sidney, whether we study these great authors individually or in a comparative context, amity studies offer a challenging but revealing and promising approach to their sophisticated imaginary and sociohistorical worlds. Notes

1. For excellent overviews on friendship in the Middle Ages and the early modern age, see Classen and Sandidge 2010, 1–­83; and Lochman and López 2011, 1–­26. See also Marlow’s article on the fast-­growing field (in 2003) of friendship studies in Renaissance English literature, which presents a number of themes and issues comparable to friendship studies in early modern Spanish literature. 2. See Gilbert-­Santamaría 2007; Gil-­Oslé 2013, 45–­68; and Hernández-­Pecoraro 2006, 102–­29, 170–­79; and the chapters on Cervantes and Sidney respectively in my Imagining Arcadia (2016). 3. On La Galatea’s introductory material see Collins 2016, chap. 4; Finello 1994, 41–­44; Gil-­Oslé 2013, 45–­68; and Rhodes 1986. 4. On Sidney, the genesis of Old Arcadia and Arcadia, the reception of the author and his works, and the English literary canon consult Alexander 2007; Davis 2011; Duncan-­Jones 1991, 141–­93, 251–­74; and Patterson 1987. Duncan-­Jones is my primary source of information on Sidney’s life. 5. Alpers states: “Pastoral poems make explicit the dependence of their conventions on the idea of coming together. Pastoral convenings are characteristically occasions for songs and colloquies that express and thereby seek to redress separation, absence, or loss” (1996, 81). Finello writes of friendship, community, academy, and colloquium in regard to the prevalence of the communal ideal and theme in La Galatea, noting: “Thus, happy reunions consume much of 100 Collins

6.

7.

8.

9.

the characters’ time in the Galatea, with the result that at times they become the novel’s guiding force” (1994, 50). Irigoyen-­García raises the issue of the political context of La Galatea’s Arcadian community: “The Arcadia of La Galatea (and of most of the pastoral romances) is based on the repression of cultural and ethnic heterogeneity and of the history that may hinder their concept of purity” (2014, 172). On the philosophy of friendship according to Aristotle and Cicero, see Fiore 1997, 59–­76; Hyatte 1994, 1–­41; Konstan 1997; Pangle 2003; and Schroeder 1997, 35–­57. On sexual parity in the ancient Greek romances, see Konstan 1994, 14–­59, 218–­ 31. On friendship in the ancient Greek romances, see Hock 1997, 145–­62. On the recovery and engagement with Heliodorus’s Ethiopica in sixteenth-­century Europe, a creative phenomenon integral to the work of Cervantes and Sidney, consult Forcione 1972, 48–­87; Mentz 2006, 47–­71; and Plazenet 1997. On traditional stories of friendship likely influential for Cervantes, consult Avalle-­Arce 1975. For a somewhat different approach to the impact of various types of amity discourse on Cervantes, see Gil-­Oslé 2013, 17–­38. On medieval Spanish tales and commentaries related to friendship, see Classen and Sandidge 2010, 52–­57; and Liuzzo Scorpo 2010, 445–­75. On Boccaccio’s engagement with friendship, see Classen and Sandidge 2010, 60–­63; Hutson 1994, 52–­90; and Hyatte 1994, 143–­63. On the problematic matter of women friends in the Middle Ages, see Classen and Sandidge 2010, 81–­105. Consult Crowley’s (2009) groundbreaking study on Sidney’s transformation of motifs and conventions of Spanish chivalric romances for a variety of purposes. On Cervantes’s and Erasmus’s views on marriage, consult Forcione 1982, 93–­223. On marriage and friendship in Vives and Erasmus, consult Furey 2010. My synopsis of Erasmus’s views on friendship in Christian marriage is based on Telle 1954, 160–­76, 347–­420. On clandestine marriage in chivalric romance and in the sociopolitical world of Elizabethan England, with reference to canon law, the political stakes of such a union, and their tie to the Earl of Leicester and Sidney, consult Crowley 2009, 187–­226. Hutson (1994) discusses the problematic nature of viewing clandestine marriage as an advantageous union for female agency and benefit in actual social practice. On changing concepts of house husbandry and ethical accountability, see Hutson 1994, 17–­51. On the use of a humanist education for women in fifteenth-­century Italy, see Jardine 1999. Befriending and Being Friends  101

10. Cull (1986) examines Silerio’s oscillation between extremes before he learns to temper love with reason. On the problematic exemplarity of Silerio, see also Egido 1994. 11. Regarding the adaptability of romance, Arthur Kinney observes: “The extraordinary gift of the genre of romance, then is that it can accommodate both classical and Christian resources and abide Catholics and Protestants alike” (2008, 16). 12. Carey (1987) addresses the pivotal role of Amphialus in the revised Arcadia. Hopkins (2004) links Amphilaus to the romance’s passion/reason conflict. 13. On Cervantes’s more complex characterization of female characters, consult El Saffar 1984, 16–­19, 37–­40; and Hernández-­Pecoraro 2006, 170–­96. On Sidney’s engagement with contemporary concerns about women, see Olmsted 2008, 89, 97–­99; and Starke 2007, 73–­83. Works Cited

Alexander, Gavin. 2007. Writing after Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–­1640. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alpers, Paul. 1996. What Is Pastoral? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Avalle-­Arce, Juan Bautista. 1975. “El cuento de los dos amigos.” In Nuevos deslindes cervantinos, 153–­211. Esplugues de Llobregat: Ariel. Carey, John. 1987. “Structure and Rhetoric in Sidney’s Arcadia.” In Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism, edited by Dennis Kay, 245–­64. Oxford: Clarendon. Cervantes, Miguel de. 1999. La Galatea. Edited by Francisco López Estrada and María Teresa García-­Berdoy. 2nd ed. Madrid: Cátedra. Classen, Albrecht, and Marilyn Sandidge. 2010. “Friendship—­The Quest for a Human Ideal and Value from Antiquity to the Early Modern Time.” In Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Explorations of a Fundamental Ethical Discourse, edited by Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge, 1–­183. Berlin: De Gruyter. Collins, Marsha S. 2016. Imagining Arcadia in Renaissance Romance. London: Routledge. Crowley, Timothy D. 2009. “Feigned Histories: Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Spanish Chivalric Romance.” PhD diss., University of Maryland, College Park. Cull, John T. 1986. “Another Look at Love in La Galatea.” In Cervantes and the Pastoral, edited by José J. Labrador Herraiz and Juan Fernández Jiménez, 102 Collins

63–­80. Cleveland: Pennsylvania State University, Behrend College, Cleveland State University. Davis, Joel B. 2011. “The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia” and the Invention of English Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Duncan-­Jones, Katherine. 1991. Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier-­Poet. New Haven ct: Yale University Press. Egido, Aurora. 1994. “El eremitismo ejemplar: De La Galatea, al Persiles.” In Cervantes y las puertas del sueño: Estudios sobre “La Galatea,” “El Quijote,” y “El Persiles.” 333–­48. Barcelona: Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias. El Saffar, Ruth. 1984. Beyond Fiction: The Recovery of the Feminine in the Novels of Cervantes. Berkeley: University of California Press. Finello, Dominick. 1994. Pastoral Themes and Forms in Cervantes’s Fiction. Lewisburg pa: Bucknell University Press. Fiore, Benjamin. 1997. “The Theory and Practice of Friendship in Cicero.” In Greco-­Roman Perspectives on Friendship, edited by John T. Fitzgerald, 59–­76. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Forcione, Alban K. 1972. Cervantes, Aristotle and the “Persiles.” Princeton nj: Prince­ ton University Press. —. 1982. Cervantes and the Humanist Vision: A Study of Four Exemplary Novels. Princeton nj: Princeton University Press. Furey, Constance M. 2010. “Bound by Likeness: Vives and Erasmus on Marriage and Friendship.” In Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–­1700, edited by Daniel T. Lochman, Maritere López, and Lorna Hutson, 29–­43. Farnham UK: Ashgate. Gil-­Oslé, Juan Pablo. 2013. Amistades imperfectas: Del Humanismo a la Ilustración con Cervantes. Pamplona: Universidad de Navarra; Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert. Gilbert-­Santamaría, Donald. 2007. “Love and Friendship in Montemayor’s La Diana.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 84, no. 6:745–­60. —. 2011. “Guzmán de Alfarache’s ‘Other Self ’: The Limits of Friendship in Spanish Picaresque Fiction.” In Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–­1700, edited by Daniel T. Lochman, Maritere López, and Lorna Hutson, 83–­98. Farnham UK: Ashgate. Greenhalgh, Darlene C. 2004. “Love, Chastity and Woman’s Erotic Power: Greek Romance in Elizabethan and Jacobean Contexts.” In Prose Fiction and Early Befriending and Being Friends  103

Modern Sexualities in England, 1570–­1640, edited by Constance C. Relihan and Goran V. Stanivukovic, 15–­42. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hernández-­Pecoraro, Rosilie. 2006. Bucolic Metaphors: History, Subjectivity, and Gender in the Early Modern Spanish Pastoral. North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures 287. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Department of Romance Languages. Hock, Ronald F. 1997. “An Extraordinary Friend in Chariton’s Callirhoe: The Importance of Friendship in the Greek Romances.” In Greco-­Roman Perspectives on Friendship, edited by John T. Fitzgerald, 145–­62. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Hopkins, Lisa. 2004. “Passion and Reason in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia.” In Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570–­1640, edited by Constance C. Relihan and Goran V. Stanivukovic, 61–­75. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hutson, Lorna. 1994. The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-­Century England. London: Routledge. Hyatte, Reginald. 1994. The Arts of Friendship: The Idealization of Friendship in Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature. Leiden: Brill. Irigoyen-­García, Javier. 2014. The Spanish Arcadia: Sheep Herding, Pastoral Discourse, and Ethnicity in Early Modern Spain. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Jardine, Lisa. 1999. “Women Humanists: Education for What?” In Feminism and Renaissance Studies, edited by Lorna Hutson, 48–­81. Oxford UK: Oxford University Press. Kinney, Arthur F. 2008. “A Poetics of Romance.” Sidney Journal 26, no. 2:1–­16. Konstan, David. 1994. Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres. Princeton nj: Princeton University Press. —. 1997. Friendship in the Classical World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liuzzo Scorpo, Antonella. 2010. “Spiritual Friendship in the Works of Alfonso X of Castile: Images of Interaction between the Sacred and Spiritual Worlds of Thirteenth-­Century Iberia.” In Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age, edited by Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge, 445–­75. Berlin: De Gruyter. Lochman, Daniel T., and Maritere López. 2011. “The Emergence of Discourses: Early Modern Friendship.” In Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–­1700, edited by Daniel T. Lochman, Maritere López, and Lorna Hutson, 1–­26. Farnham UK: Ashgate.

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Marlow, Christopher. 2003–­4. “Friendship in Renaissance England.” Literature Compass 1, no. 1:1–­10. Mentz, Steve. 2006. Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction. Aldershot UK: Ashgate. Olmsted, Wendy. 2008. The Imperfect Friend: Emotion and Rhetoric in Sidney, Milton, and Their Contexts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Pangle, Lorraine Smith. 2003. Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Patterson, Annabel. 1987. “‘Under . . . Pretty Tales’: Intention in Sidney’s Arcadia.” In Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism, edited by Dennis Kay, 265–­85. Oxford: Clarendon. Plazenet, Laurence. 1997. L’Ébahissement et la delectation: Réception comparée et poétiques du roman grec en France et en Angleterre aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles. Paris: Honoré Champion. Rhodes, Elizabeth. 1986. “The ‘Poetics’ of Pastoral: The Prologue to the Galatea.” In Cervantes and the Pastoral, edited by José J. Labrador Herraiz and Juan Fernández Jiménez, 139–­55. Cleveland: Pennsylvania State University, Behrend College, Cleveland State University. Schroeder, Frederic M. 1997. “Friendship in Aristotle and Some Peripatetic Philosophers.” In Greco-­Roman Perspectives on Friendship, edited by John T. Fitzgerald, 35–­57. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Sidney, Philip. (1593) 1977. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Edited by Maurice Evans. London: Penguin. Smith, Graham M. 2013. “Introduction. Friendship: An Unanswered Question.” Amity: The Journal of Friendship Studies 1, no. 1:1–­4. Starke, Sue P. 2007. The Heroines of English Pastoral Romance. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Telle, Émile. 1954. Érasme de Rotterdam et le septième sacrement: Étude d’évangélisme matrimonial au XVIe siècle. Geneva: Droz. Whitmarsh, Tim. 2011. Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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chapter 5

Cervantine Curiosity and the English Stage Marina S. Brownlee

Curiosity is the pursuit of knowledge by empirical means. And while curiosity killed the cat and got Adam and Eve thrown out of the garden, curiosity became perceived in the early modern period as the currency of cultural progress. It led to scientific discoveries and life-­changing insights derived from exploration, massive encyclopedic ventures, intense self-­ study, the surveillance of the Inquisition, the voyeurism of pornography, and to the tremendous popularity of tabloid journalism. The fascination with curiosity and its perils is famously explored by Cervantes in part 1, chapters 32–­35, of Don Quixote in “El curioso impertinente.” It is well known that not only was this intercalated narrative disseminated in English when Shelton translated Don Quixote into English in 1612 (a translation begun in 1607) but this tale was also accessible to readers of French when it was translated from the original Spanish in 1607. We know, in addition, that seventeenth-­century English playwrights were fascinated by this story since at least six of them wrote plays with Cervantes’s “Curioso impertinente” as their inspiration—­Thomas Middleton, Aphra Behn, Thomas Southerne, John Crowne, Nathan Field, and Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher.1 In spite of this recognition of “El curioso impertinente” for the English stage, however, comparative work on these texts has been somewhat limited in its reach for two reasons. The first is the issue of artistic “fidelity.” Being faithful to the original is a criterion routinely invoked in translations and also adaptations. Yet an artist is expected to be faithful only to himself 107

or herself. So to judge a play according to its greater or lesser fidelity to a model text is shortsighted. An author is just as likely to subvert the values of the prototype as to perpetuate them. An adaptation engages with the model rather than seeking to replicate it. The second issue that needs attention is the move from page to stage—­the potential and constraints of a novella and of a play. Reading or hearing a story is markedly different from being shown or told it. The kinetic visual display that the theater involves is unlike the cognitive process of a book. Each mode has its own specificity, and this is clear when one considers Cervantes’s text and the stage renderings inspired by “El curioso impertinente.” In this connection the film theorist Dudley Andrew’s distinction between reading a novel and seeing a film of it is quite relevant. He explains that “the original artwork can be likened to a crystal chandelier whose formal beauty is a product of its intricate but fully artificial arrangements of parts while the cinema would be a crude flashlight interesting not for its own shape or the quality of its light, but for what it makes appear in this or that dark corner . . . an experience of the original modulated by the peculiar beam of light” (Dudley 1984, 99). This analogy of the chandelier and the flashlight is useful in articulating both the conception and the effects of the theatrical renderings and the Cervantine narrative. In addition the verbal and visual media are worlds apart in the way that each constructs meaning. Indeed, they are, to a great degree, opposites. The visual media of film—­and also theater, I would add—­take us “from perception toward signification, from external facts to internal motivations and consequences, from the givenness of a world to the meaning of a story cut out of that world. Literary fiction works oppositely. It begins with signs (graphemes and words) building to propositions which attempt to develop perception. As a product of human language it naturally treats human motivation and values, seeking to throw them out onto the external world, elaborating a world out of a story” (Dudley 1984, 101). Texts we read, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, are less about the narrative’s “message” than, as Peter Brooks puts it, about “its interstices, its gaps, its moments of passage, the moments where something falls silent to indicate a transference, the moment when 108 Brownlee

one begins to be able to hear other possible voices in response” (Brooks 1994, 86). It’s all about the reader or the auditor. What makes this Cervantine tale so compelling—­beyond the fascinatingly destructive idealism of its mad protagonist—­is its dual nature as both narrative and theater. When the priest praises the “modo de contarlo” (371), he is signaling the extraordinary metageneric meditation that Cervantes constructs.2 “El curioso impertinente” is an autonomous narrative—­a closed circuit that does not involve either Don Quixote or any of the other characters. It is an eight-­folio manuscript found in a mysterious suitcase left at the inn by an unknown guest, and it is read as a result of the priest’s curiosity about its contents (326). This story details a married man’s obsession with his wife’s chastity to the point where he repeatedly implores his best friend to attempt a seduction of his wife. The friend finally succeeds, ultimately leading to the husband’s death of sadness and remorse for being the “fabricador de [su] deshonra” (370), leading also to the death of his wife and friend. This text combines two mythical narratives (two male fantasies)—­one involving the legendary pair of paradigmatic male friends reminiscent of Damon and Pythias or Nisus and Eurialus, and the other, the well-­known, if unfortunate, wife-­testing scenario, like the one Gualtieri imposes on Griselda in the narratives of Boccaccio and Petrarch (Ife 2005). By this pairing in “El curioso impertinente,” the two most fundamental social ideals—­namely, friendship and marriage—­makes for a particularly compelling testing ground. Witness its avid reception in English theater. Cervantes was keenly aware of the impact this powerful study of domestic madness and psychological manipulation would have, given the three disapproving references made to it by his own characters. As soon as the reading of the story is concluded, the priest gives it seriously mixed reviews: “No me puedo persuader que esto sea verdad; y si es fingido, fingió mal el autor, porque no se puede imaginar que haya marido tan necio, que quiera hacer tan costosa experiencia como Anselmo. Si este caso se pusiera entre un galán y una dama, pudiérase llevar, pero entre marido y mujer, algo tiene del imposible; y en lo que toca al modo de Cervantine Curiosity  109

contarlo, no me descontenta” (371). Verisimilitude is intolerably violated in the priest’s estimation. The other two times this story is judged to be questionable (in chapters 3 and 44 of part 2) the objection is irrelevance to the main plot: since “El curioso impertinente” takes place in Florence, the second of the three references is not about Spain and does not have anything to do with Don Quixote (562). Moreover, in the third reference, we are told that the Morisco narrator, Cide Hamete, chose in part 1 to narrate both it and “The Captive’s Tale” (which likewise apparently has nothing to do with the book’s eponymous protagonist) out of frustration, that is, because sticking to only one topic (the exploits of Don Quixote and Sancho) was too boring (848).3 It is these two unexpected qualities—­ both the shock value and the piece’s alleged irrelevance—­that appeal to readers of the text as much as to playwrights and theatergoers. Needless to say, when Cervantes puts up a red flag as he does with “El curioso impertinente,” reader beware! (When he has a character at the beginning of part 2 proclaim that “segundas partes nunca fueron buenas” [567], for example, he is playfully yet boldly underscoring the fact that it is the experimental, innovative nature of the second part we are reading that resulted in universal recognition of the text’s exceptional status as the first modern European novel.) “El curioso impertinente” is a prime example of what Benjamin conceives of as the “allegorical ruin,” as he remarks in his now-­famous formulation: “allegory is to thought as ruins are to things” (1998, 178). That is, words do not mean what they purport to mean: for Benjamin, “allegory is the act of recognizing and embracing the space between: emptiness, borders, margins, detritus”—­it represents an “ontological dead end” (Snider 2006, 323). Cervantes’s text has been read as a study of friendship, of marriage, passion, madness, homoeroticism, or epistemology.4 It is all of these, but at the root of each interpretation we find Cervantes’s powerful interrogation of myth designed to explore language itself, the production of meaning that subtends social reality, as well as the social imaginary itself—­its values, expectations, and its dysfunctions. Regardless of the text in question or the 110 Brownlee

time frame, myth and language are always positivistically linked. Myth purports to offer explanations for laws of nature, ethics, and human behavior. “Myths aspire to be tautologous” (Gould 1981, 19). The words that represent the people and ideas of myth are transparently clear, offering a kind of prelapsarian referentiality. By contrast Benjamin construes allegory as a postlapsarian phenomenon in which referentiality has been irreparably lost. Ambiguous and deceptive communication results from the subjective severing of meaning, and this severing is unforgettably dramatized by Cervantes with the myth of the two paradigmatic friends, “los dos amigos” (Anselmo and Lotario), who were so well synchronized in their thoughts, values, and actions that “no había cocertado reloj que así lo anduviese” (327). We see the referentiality of myth turned into its negative with Benjaminian allegory in the context of the two most venerable social values of friendship and marriage. At the story’s inception, as the newly wed Anselmo’s dear friend Lotario announces that he will be visiting his house less often for the sake of propriety (that is, to ensure the newlyweds’ upstanding reputation in the community), Anselmo stuns his friend by saying that had he known Lotario would react with such circumspection, he would never have wed: “Si él supiera que el casarse había de ser parte para no comunicalle como solía, que jamás lo hubiera hecho” (328). This is a shocking admission from any point of view: Camila is a paragon of virtue, appearance, and wifely devotion, so Anselmo’s revelation here seems aberrant indeed. Moreover, his attitude cannot be attributed to the valuing of his friendship over marriage, since as Lotario points out, the request that he attempt to seduce Camila constitutes a grave dishonor not only to her, to Anselmo, and to the institution of holy matrimony, but also to Lotario’s honor and sense of friendship. Instead, a same-­sex longing seems to be the reason for his attitude, whether or not he is aware of it. He may be fantasizing by putting himself in Camila’s position: the two have become one flesh according to the marriage contract, so if Lotario seduces her, he is also enjoying Anselmo. The words friendship, marriage, and honor—­the qualities they signify as much on the private level as they do in the public, social sphere—­are, in Cervantine Curiosity  111

Anselmo’s usage, in ruins, having been emptied of their semantic content. Seeing that Lotario is aghast at this proposition that he seduce Camila, Anselmo confesses that he is suffering from the disease of geophagy (the eating of dirt): “Yo padezco ahora de la enfermedad que suelen tener algunas mujeres, que se les antoja comer tierra, yeso, carbón, y otras cosas peores” (338). As a result of this admission about the gendered nature of geophagy, we may well ask why Cervantes identifies his male protagonist as suffering from a disease known to afflict females. It is odd that this gender discrepancy is not explicitly addressed by Camila, Lotario, or the shadowy, anonymous first-­person authorial narrator of the tale either (though it is presented as a sudden and very strange change in behavior). On the one hand, it reminds us that Cervantes is always foregrounding the unpredictability of human response, in this case of gender stereotyping ( Jehensen 1998). But Anselmo’s strange self-­identification with this female pathology is striking not only because of the gender switch but even more because this is the one and only time that he even remotely puts himself in anyone else’s shoes, getting outside his solipsistic megalomania. On another level Anselmo’s anomalous affliction—­something he shares with women—­foreshadows Camila’s anomalous behavior of a very different sort. That is, she will use her powers of reasoning (a quality traditionally ascribed to the domain of men) once Anselmo has lost his, with dazzling results.5 She introduces the transition to theater when she stages a play, pretending to kill herself because her husband’s reputation has been questioned. Camila is keenly aware that Anselmo is voyeuristically spying on the scene, and her thespian gifts culminate as she convincingly feigns suicide by means of a dagger. Lotario is so amazed at her inventiveness here that, we are told, as soon as he found himself alone, in a place where no one could see him, he “crossed himself over and over again” (Cervantes 2000, 328), marveling all the while at Camila’s ingenuity: “Cuando se vio solo y en parte donde nadie le veía, no cesaba de hacerse cruces, maravillándose de la industria de Camila” (361). These many signs of the cross were made presumably because of Lotario’s fear of Camila’s extraordinary power to deceive—­the engaño a los ojos that is based on 112 Brownlee

visual as well as verbal distortion. Cervantes goes to great lengths in his characters to dramatize the move from perception to signification, from external facts to interior motivations. The same holds true for the shameless maid, Leonela. In this, the longest speech of the intercalated tales in the entire book, Anselmo’s disease attacks his brain, in turn, attacking referentiality. Dismayed at his best friend’s request that he try to seduce his wife, Lotario finally capitulates both sexually and discursively. After repeated attempts to reason with his mad friend, Lotario expresses his belief that Anselmo’s perverted trust in his friend and reckless defiance of human nature is worse than his own betrayal of his friend, as the narrator now differentiates the two friends as “el impertinente” and “el traidor” (348). The engaño a los ojos that Camila fabricates is exquisite. The mythic analogies made by her regarding her behavior and the paradigmatically immortalized wives Lucretia, Penelope, and Portia seal the deal, as it were, in the demolition of referentiality that Benjamin’s allegorist signals. Finally, aware of his dreadfully flawed construction, Anselmo—­we are told—­dies of grief because of his “costly experiment,” Lotario dies in battle, and Camila dies of grief at the news of Lotario’s demise. So much deceit, so much playacting makes the labyrinth a particularly appropriate architectural symbol—­a figure evoked on two occasions to describe the convoluted psyches and twisted words and deeds of this tale. The figure of the house is used to reference Camila metaphorically as “tan ilustre edificio” (362), and literally the couple’s abode, “desierta y sola” (369), at the tale’s end, defiled as a result of Anselmo’s mad design. Anselmo admits in his final moments to having been the “fabricador de mi deshonra” (370), and though it does not literally fall down Usher-­style, the house as dwelling place, as emblem of conjugal union of flesh and spirit, and as locus of social identity has, because of his distressed subjectivity and its linguistic distortion, irreparably crumbled to ruin. One of the many, and perhaps the first, English appropriations of “El curioso impertinente” for the stage, Middleton’s Lady’s Tragedy (1611), is a fascinating remake of the Cervantine novella that preserves the significance of the house, of madness, the love triangle, as well as the names of Cervantine Curiosity  113

Anselmo/Anselmus and the maid, Leonella. It offers images and verbal resonances as well. Yet it treats the destructive—­subjective—­potential of language in an even more surprisingly complex manner. In accord with the practice of Jacobean plays’ preference for multiple plots to make the story more visually and verbally engaging for an audience of physically present spectators (rather than leaving readers to focus on their metaphorical mind’s eye), we find here two plots involving two women—­one betrothed, the other already married—­each caught in a lethal love triangle (the generically identified Lady betrothed to Govianus and the Wife of Anselmus).6 Each woman is pursued by another male, the Lady by the unnamed Tyrant, the Wife by Votarius, and in both cases, the legitimate male kills the panderer, and each of the women commits suicide. Yet this play is much more than just a doubling of the issues of adultery, madness, and the deadly twisting of discourse originally found in the Cervantine narrative. It is compelling in terms of Benjamin’s obsession with subjectivity and language—­especially here in the context of religious discourse—­in a way that was meaningful to contemporary English debates over Catholic and Protestant beliefs: over the viability of relics and inner, as opposed to outer, displays of faith. When the Lady dies, her body is, in the Tyrant’s view, the “house,” whereas the soul, he says, is “but a tenant.” He is focused on the body, the material essence, as he has been all along. The inner quality of the soul has never been of interest to him. When the Lady’s beloved Govianus visits the crypt, he finds the Lady’s tomb occupied not by her body but rather by her ghost—­dressed in white and bearing a crucifix. When the ghost reveals the Tyrant’s intention to have postmortem intercourse with her corpse, he disguises himself as a painter contracted to paint his beloved’s face so that she will still seem to be alive. Unbeknown to the Tyrant, however, Govianus paints the Lady’s lips with poison—­thereby causing the necrophiliac’s sudden death as he kisses her. The secondary plot resembles “El curioso impertinente” much more closely, with Anselmus, his Wife, and his best friend, here known as Votarius. Anselmus is invited to spy on the charade that he and the Wife perform. As she deceptively complains that the friend has attempted to 114 Brownlee

seduce her, she stabs him—­convinced that he is wearing protective armor that will protect him. This is not the case, however, since another enemy (Bellarius, the paramour of the maid, Leonela) makes sure that no protection is available. The Wife—­inspired by her sister-­in-­law, Govianus’s Lady, inspired specifically by her integrity—­runs between the swords of Anselmus and Bellarius, thereby meeting her end as well. Aphra Behn (1640–­89), who demonstrated a keen interest in Spanish literature and its possibilities for the English stage in the 1670s, provides us with an appreciably different rendering of Cervantes’s extreme idealist, Anselmo (his perverse and destructive example), in her second play, titled The Amorous Prince or The Curious Husband (1671). Unlike “El curioso impertinente,” which each reader or auditor must interpret ethically as well as esthetically, the prologue to Behn’s play pointedly asserts a clear ethical frame: “The aim is not to please those who want sin, fops, vices, or smutty jest.” This work, like its model, takes place in Florence, yet it veers away from the Spanish prototype rather surprisingly by concluding not in tragedy and multiple deaths but in multiple marriages. In accord with the tastes of her day and her own interest in foregrounding timely issues of sex and gender, Behn engineers multiple plots, which, like so many Restoration comedies, make it somewhat difficult to keep the characters straight. Unlike other playwrights, though, she focuses especially on clever women who outsmart their licentious male counterparts (with daring cross-­dressing as well as keener wits), at the same time explicitly addressing the homoeroticism that had only been suggested implicitly in Cervantes.7 The insanely jealous husband (here named Antonio) is tricked by having an unmarried woman stand in for the tempted wife, while his closest friend (Alberto) is deceived by Ismena (Antonio’s sister). Thus he courts a woman who loves him, though he mistakes her for Antonio’s faithful wife, Clarina. On the one hand, Behn’s husband figure is as tormented by doubt as his Spanish predecessor, but he is radically different in offering an unexpected articulation of his doubt, saying: “This uncertainty disturbs me more, / Than if I knew Clarina were a-­W hore” Cervantine Curiosity  115

(1.4.229–­30). Antonio is torn between his fidelity to marriage and to male friendship, as he explains: Oh how my Soul’s divided, Between my Adoration and my Amity! Friendship, thou sacred-­band, hold fast thy interest, For yonder Beauty has a subtle power, And can undo that knot, which other Arts Could ne’re invent a way for. (1.4.101–­06) Alvin Snider crystallizes the relationship between these protagonists, saying: “In Behn’s Cervantine subplot, marriage and friendship emerge as rough equivalents, and the position of husband, lover, wife, and prostitute become vertiginously unstable categories” (2006, 323). And this is the case from the start of the play, where we perceive a wealth of kinetic, visual displays rather than the progressive cognitive development of the characters. Beyond the disguises that include cross-­dressing, we find such scenes as an amazing masque in which a group of exclusively speechless women disguised as prostitutes, present themselves to men who do not recognize them (5.3.69–­93). Portraits are admired, women are gazed upon, but, of course, wives are forbidden from public view (1.3.188–­89). With this play Behn is interested in charting not the unfortunate progress of the pathological idealism of the husband but rather the detrimental effects of the treatment of women in her day, male hypocrisy, and libertinism. At the same time, she highlights the power of female subjectivity and agency, attributes not so fully developed by other (that is, male) playwrights at the time. And in spite of the positive outcome, with Antonio begging the faithful Clarina’s pardon and Alberto and Ismena being reunited and marrying, a generalized indictment of society’s emptiness closes the play with an epilogue spoken by Cloris, in which we are told that she opts for the pastoral escape, rejecting court hypocrisy for the country by tending her flocks. Nonetheless, she admits that the rural setting is no guarantee of safety either. Thirteen years later the Irish playwright Thomas Southerne (1660–­ 1746) also situates the plot of his Cervantine recasting in Florence. And 116 Brownlee

like Behn he too is interested in transposing the misguided quixotism of Anselmo’s husband-­wife-­friend plot to a new type of theater. His provocatively titled play The Disappointment, or the Mother of Fashion (1684) is recognized as a new departure, as “innovative and experimental” because of its focus on sentiment and its notably uncomplicated plot (1988, 1:80). An additional feature of this play noted by a few scholars is that Southerne borrows a number of lines or phrases from Shakespeare’s Othello. At least as interesting as these features, though, is the generic identification Southerne gives to his work on the title page, calling it a “play,” which is “a rare designation for the period” ( Jordan and Love 1988, 80). This genre tag is meant to signal the innovative nature of The Disappointment. Recalling Dudley Andrew’s chandelier-­flashlight analogy discussed above, we can identify the “peculiar beam of light” that Southerne’s Cervantine adaptation unambiguously foregrounds as of society’s debauchery, as expressed in the work’s epilogue, which was penned by Dryden. This play references its “sweating Muse [that] does almost leave the Chase, / She puffs, and hardly keeps your Protean Vices pace” (155, verses 16–­17). Southerne borrows from the novella its Florentine setting, the friendship of the husband and his best friend, and also the husband’s feigning a trip in order to spy on his wife. In addition the friend mistakenly suspects the wife of infidelity when he sees a stranger furtively exiting the house. Yet these visual vestiges of the model serve the single-­minded purpose of exposing and lamenting society’s debauchery and hypocrisy. Unlike Cervantes Southerne does not offer a case study in psychological development—­of the abnormal extreme represented by Anselmo and the normal but corruptible psychology that Lothario and Camila exhibit in a polysemous study of friendship, marriage, passion, madness, homoeroticism, and epistemology. The jaded and unprincipled relations between the sexes are foregrounded on page after page of The Disappointment. To give a few examples, Alphonso (the Anselmo figure) in speaking to Albino, a general Undertaker, laments his wife’s integrity, saying: “My Wife . . . Young as she is now . . . spins her youth away. . . . This vulgar, wife-­like virtue, huswifry, / Cervantine Curiosity  117

In a young Lady, is scandalously old, / Quite out of Fashion and must be forgotten” (2.1.41–­56). While Alphonso is capable of tremendous jealousy regarding his wife’s fidelity, he voices this typical view. The word fashion in the title of the work is repeatedly evoked in the play to signal the pervasiveness of promiscuity.8 Likewise, “The Mother of Fashion” refers to a Madam who seeks to pimp her foster daughter. Finally, the “disappointment” of the title is uttered by Alphonso’s friend Lorenzo when he mistakenly construes Erminia’s tears as prompted by being unjustly vilified by her husband as an adulteress instead of seeing them as tears of frustration—­of disappointment—­for, in Lorenzo’s words, “the disappointment / Your lewd Adulterer, Alberto, met with” (3.2.161–­62, p. 126). The slander of Erminia is exposed, and Alphonso asks her forgiveness, yet the work ends (5.2.330–­ 38, p. 153) with the obvious observation that men and women are equally unprincipled and untrustworthy. In this play we witness an illustration of the jaded relations between the sexes that we have known since the beginning. Here—­as in the case of Behn’s work—­we do not experience the downward Cervantine spiral precipitated by a disturbed husband that leads to the depravity of those who are closest to him. Nor are we in the presence of an audience that disapproves of such depraved behavior. By way of conclusion, two final observations deserve mention. The first concerns Southerne’s evocation of lines from Shakespeare’s Othello. Indeed, John Wendell Dodds affirms that this was the play that influenced Southerne the most (1933, 57). Of course, given the ignoble behavior exhibited by Alphonso compared to Othello, the disconnect is stunning. The second interesting feature deserving mention is the unexpected metatheatrical nod that Juliana, the slighted mistress of Alberto, provides. When she learns of the deception, she offers a soliloquy, saying: “To play the Woman right, now I should swoon, / Call Curses down from Heaven on his head. . . . But why reveng’d? or how have I been wronged? / I knew him false before; the sad experience / of other Women, warned me of my fate” (1.1.163–­68). These features, like the actions and information we see passing before us on the stage underscore the kinetic thrust of the play and its illustration of a thesis revealed from the beginning rather than the 118 Brownlee

ambiguity and cognitive detective work required by the Cervantine tale, with its interstices and gaps in need of interpretation. The neat structure of “El curioso impertinente,” its small cast, and its stunning ironies make it especially attractive to playwrights. But the time constraints of a theatrical script and the different cultural climates of production yield dramatically different results. And as such the plays of Middleton, Behn, and Southerne illustrate the dynamic nature of Benjamin’s “material content” (the work and its initial historical context and the ensuing dialogue of the author, the text, the reader, and successive works) in the textual “afterlife.”9 Notes

1. See Rosenbach 1902. For recent studies of the Shakespeare-­Cervantes-­Cardenio material, see Bourus and Taylor 2013; Chartier 2013; and Hamilton 1994. Two fine studies of Spain’s influence in seventeenth-­century English literature are Darby and Samson 2009; and Fuchs 2013. 2. Unless otherwise noted all quotations of “El curioso impertinente” are taken from Cervantes 1968. Américo Castro (1925) polled a dozen Don Quixote enthusiasts to ascertain where readers stood on the issues of plausibility and the degree to which it added or detracted from the book as a whole (1925, 121–­28). 3. “No se puede imaginar que haya marido tan necio que quiera hacer tan costosa experiencia como Anselmo. Si este caso se pusiera entre un galán y una dama, pudiérase llevar, pero entre marido y mujer, algo tiene del imposible” (371). 4. Among the most insightful interpretations are Clamurro 1994; Hahn 1972; Krueger 2009; Mancing 2006; Sieber 1970–­71; Wardropper 1957; Wey Gómez 1999; and Wilson 1989. 5. “I manufactured my own dishonor” is Rutherford’s wording (Cervantes 2000, 337), which I think is less desirable since Anselmo has fabricated deception and his personal and familial dishonor—­metaphorically destroying (rather than fabricating) his house and causing the destruction of three lives. 6. For useful observations on the device of the double plot in this play, see Levin 1963 and 1971. 7. For an illuminating presentation of Behn’s interest in gender and its bending, as well as her publicly acknowledged relationship with John Hoyle, an openly gay male, see Todd 2000.

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8. The rake who has seduced Juliana and is attempting to have his way with another young lady by enlisting the aid of her brother provides another, among many, examples of the promiscuous behavior in a play characterized by deceit, disguise, and sexual ambiguity. 9. For an interesting discussion of “The Task of the Translator,” see Moradi 2011. Works Cited

Behn, Aphra. 1671. The Amorous Prince or the Curious Husband. London: Thomas Dring. Benjamin, Walter. 1998. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London: Verso. Bourus, Terri, and Gary Taylor, eds. 2013. The Creation and Recreation of Cardenio: Performing Shakespeare, Transforming Cervantes. New York: Palgrave. Brooks, Peter. 1994. Psychoanalysis and Storytelling. Chichester UK: Wiley. Castro, Américo 1925. El pensamiento de Cervantes. Madrid: Hernando. Cervantes, Miguel de. 1968. Don Quijote de la Mancha. Edited by Martín de Riquer. Barcelona: Juventud. —. 2000. The Ingenious Don Quixote de la Mancha. Translated by John Rutherford. Introduction by Roberto González Echevarría. New York: Penguin. Chartier, Roger. 2013. Cardenio between Cervantes and Shakespeare: The Story of a Lost Play. Cambridge: Polity Press. Clamurro, William. 1994. “The Quijote, the Curioso and the Diseases of Telling.” Revista de estudios hispánicos 28:378–­93. Darby, Trudi L., and Alexander Samson. 2009. “Cervantes on the Jacobean Stage.” In The Cervantean Heritage: Reception and Influence of Cervantes in Britain, edited by J. A. G. Ardila, 206–­22. London: Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing. Dodds, John Wendell. 1933. Thomas Southerne: Dramatist. New Haven ct: Yale University Press. Dudley, Andrew. 1984. Concepts in Film Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fuchs, Barbara. 2013. The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gould, Eric. 1981. Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature. Princeton nj: Princeton University Press. Hahn, Juergen. 1972. “El curioso impertinente and Don Quijote’s Symbolic Struggle against Cervantes.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 49:128–­40. 120 Brownlee

Hamilton, Charles. 1994. “Cardenio,” or “The Second Maiden’s Tragedy.” Lakewood co: Glenbridge. Ife, Barry. 2005. “Cervantes, Herodotus, and the Eternal Triangle: Another Look at the Sources of the Curioso impertinente.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 82:671–­81. Jehensen, Yvonne. 1998. “Masochisma versus Machismo or Camila’s Re-­writing of Gender Assignations in Cervantes’ Tale of Foolish Curiosity.” Cervantes 18, no. 2:26–­52. Jordan, Robert, and Harold Love, eds. 1988. The Works of Thomas Southerne. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford English Texts. Krueger, Alison. 2009. “Cervantes’s Laboratory: The Thought Experiment of El curioso impertinente.” Cervantes 29, no. 1:17–­65. Levin, Richard. 1963. “The Double Plot of The Second Maiden’s Tragedy.” Studies in English Literature 3:219–­31. —. 1971. The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mancing, Howard. 2006. “Camila’s Story.” Cervantes 25, no. 1:9–­22. Middleton, Thomas. 1909. The Second Maiden’s Tragedy. Edited by W. W. Greg. London: Malone Society Reprints. Moradi, Hossein. 2011. “The Afterlife of a Text in Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Translation.” Journal of English Studies 1, no. 4:53–­58. Rosenbach, A. S. W. 1902. “The Curious Impertinent in English Dramatic Literature before Shelton’s Translation of Don Quixote.” Modern Language Notes 17, no. 6:79–­84. Sieber, Harry. 1970–­71. “On Juan Huarte de San Juan and Anselmo’s Locura in El curioso impertinente.” Revista hispánica moderna 36:1–­8. Shakespeare, William. 1997. Othello. In The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans, 1246–­96. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Snider, Alvin. 2006. “The Curious Impertinent on the Restoration Stage.” Seventeenth Century 21, no. 2:315–­34. Southerne, Thomas. 1988. The Disappointment, or the Mother of Fashion. In The Works of Thomas Southerne, edited by Robert Jordan and Harold Love, 1:75–­ 156. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Todd, Janet. 2000. The Secret Life of Aphra Behn. London: Bloomsbury. Wardropper, Bruce W. 1957. “The Pertinence of El curioso impertinente.” pmla 72, no. 4:587–­600. Cervantine Curiosity  121

Wey Gómez, Nicolás. 1999. “The Jealous and the Curious: Freud, Paranoia and Homosexuality in Cervantine Poetics.” In Cervantes and His Postmodern Constituencies, edited by Anne J. Cruz and Carroll B. Johnson, 170–­98. New York: Garland. Wilson, Diana de Armas. 1989. “‘Passing the Love of Women’: The Intertextuality of El curioso impertinente.” Cervantes 7, no. 2:9–­28.

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chapter 6

QuixoNation Unfinished Adaptations of Don Quixote in Cold War U.S. Cinema

William P. Childers

This chapter focuses on three never-­completed film projects from the Cold War era: Orson Welles’s Don Quixote, begun in 1955; Harold L. “Doc” Humes’s Don Peyote, filmed in 1960 but never released; and Waldo Salt’s screenplay, written in 1965–­67, revised in 1971 and in the 1990s (by other hands), yet to date never filmed. For each I make use of material not previously studied. Orson Welles’s 1957 screenplay finally resurfaced in 2016 after nearly sixty years. Humes’s film, lost for decades, was recovered by his daughter, Immy Humes, while working on her 2008 documentary about him, Doc. Waldo Salt’s Don Quixote screenplay is conserved at the University of California, Los Angeles (and, in other versions, the University of Michigan), while his artwork and notebooks remain under the care of his daughter, Jennifer Salt.1 My aim is to demonstrate the special attraction that Don Quixote had for Cold War filmmakers working outside or against the dominance of Hollywood. They associated Cervantes’s novel with a reflexive, critical form of cultural production, antithetical to the conventional style prevailing at the time. For them “Quixote” stands for experimentation, self-­awareness, and challenging the status quo, both artistically and politically. To understand the significance of their use of Cervantes, it is helpful to remind ourselves of the limitations on U.S. filmmakers during the first two decades of the Cold War. In its golden era, the Hollywood model of moviemaking was driven by the star system, high production values, and 123

a near monopoly on distribution, established soon after World War I. The major studios’ ownership of the means of cultural production amounted to a virtual cartel. Due to the expense involved in producing such films and the expectation of strong returns on investment, the “media-­industrial complex” (Rosenbaum 2002) was (and remains) extremely risk-­averse. To prevent controversy that could undermine their hold on the market, the studios submitted to a strict regime of self-­censorship, known as the Hays Code, in effect from 1934 through 1967. After World War II, as Hollywood consolidated its influence over the American psyche, its aesthetic ideology became still narrower. McCarthy-­era blacklisting, reinforced by covert cia infiltration, converted the film industry into a de facto propaganda machine for the dominant order. Since the late 1960s, first the New Hollywood and then the independent film movement have loosened restrictions on filmmaking in the United States, both in terms of technique and sensibility. Though it would be naive to say that the system of production/distribution is now truly open, comparatively speaking the quarter century prior to that liberalization was a much more difficult time for any filmmaking practice resistant to the hegemony of the Hollywood studios.2 The efforts of the counterhegemonic filmmakers examined here do not necessarily pull in exactly the same direction, but all three seek to unleash potential in the film medium that remains largely untapped, even to this day. For Humes and Salt, their activist quixotism is overtly political, directed against militarism, inequality, and the authoritarian role of the state in the context of the Cold War; though the political element is not absent for Welles, he focuses more on artistic freedom and the power of imagination. All three share an appreciation for the satirical dimension of Cervantes’s novel. Historically, the presence of such “activist quixotism” within the film community in the United States has been obscured by the invisibility of projects that were never completed, as well as by the success of Man of La Mancha, whose romantic quixotism eclipsed the activist model, siphoning away the energy it had accumulated to fuel a more saccharine approach to Cervantes.3 124 Childers

Pointing out that these three filmmakers all participated in an activist quixote-­paradigm is easier than explaining how or why this paradigm emerged during the Cold War. Certainly one factor is the ongoing association of Don Quixote with the “lost cause” of Loyalist Spain, whose importance as a catalyst for the radical left before World War II can hardly be exaggerated.4 Another, undoubtedly, is the resurgence of satire in the postwar United States as a reaction to the arms race and its doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” (mad). It is not out of place here to recall the analogy between these filmmakers’ circumstances vis-­à-­vis McCarthyism and the conditions under which Cervantes’s own novelistic practice developed. The parallels between Lope’s comedia nueva and classic Hollywood cinema have been rigorously explored by Bruce Burningham (2008).5 The function of both the comedia nueva and the Hollywood studios as entertainment industries results in an ideologically conservative outlook, not because their creators are deliberate propagandists for the Spanish Empire, on the one hand, or global capitalism, on the other, but because they want to please their audiences and avoid ruffling feathers.6 Again in both cases, the high cost of production incentivizes this conservatism, and the public visibility of the spectacle makes controversy doubly undesirable. What appears on stage or on screen is scrutinized by officialdom to a degree that private reading experiences are not. In this regard it is crucial to keep in mind that Cervantes was driven from the stage by Lope de Vega, and that the novelistic practice he developed as a result addressed itself to an individuated reader whose freedom was the first tenet of the new aesthetic announced in the prologue to the 1605 Quixote: “Estás en tu casa, donde eres señor della, como el rey de sus alcabalas, y sabes lo que comúnmente se dice, que debajo de mi manto al rey mato” (Cervantes 1978, 1:51).7 How aware Welles, Humes, or Salt were of this background is of little consequence. The questioning, critical stance and the satirical techniques embedded in Cervantes’s work have appealed to generations of maverick artists who recognize themselves in the eccentric, self-­defining character he invented, who is benignly mocked at the same time that he is given license to implicitly criticize the Crown, the church, QuixoNation  125

the nobility, and the emerging class of wealthy commoners. The appeal of activist Quixotism to those resisting Hollywood’s hegemony circa 1955–­65 can be considered a convergence of all the factors mentioned above, which overdetermined an interest in Cervantes on the part of independent-­minded filmmakers working in isolation from one another. Finally, let us note the undeniable attraction at that time of identifying with an insane hero, for all those who could repeat with Allen Ginsberg, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” (1956, 9). Orson Welles’s Don Quixote (1955–­1985)

Orson Welles presents a unique instance in cinema history of a major auteur who started out in Hollywood during the classic era, then left in search of greater control over the creative process. His career is emblematic of the struggle for artistic autonomy in the face of the studios’ aesthetic hegemony. Welles’s emphasis on innovative techniques such as dissolves, inserts, and cross-­cutting, meant it was in the editing process that his films were really constructed, and he repeatedly clashed with producers over the version to be released. It frustrated and angered him to see his second film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), butchered by rko, including the addition of a happy ending intended to please audiences. In the case of Touch of Evil (1958), Welles was taken off the film after shooting was over, but nonetheless sent Universal a fifty-­eight-­page memo detailing how he thought it should edited, which the studio largely ignored.8 He then went to Mexico to film Don Quixote and never again directed a film for a Hollywood studio. Thus his Quixote was literally born out of exasperation with lack of control over his own work. For nearly three decades, while other projects came and went, and Welles worked for hire or had to find backers, Don Quixote continued to symbolize his “independence”—­it was the one film for which he used only his own money and followed his own schedule. Paradoxically, its role as an emblem of his artistic integrity led to its never being completed, since he was neither beholden to anyone for it nor had to please anyone but himself. Over the years he called it his “home movie” and his “child”—­“il mio bambino.” Tired of being asked 126 Childers

when it would be released, he began to joke that he had changed the title to When Are You Going to Finish Don Quixote?9 Hindsight reveals that Welles’s Don Quixote was less a single film than an ongoing cinematic project that changed over the decades along with political and cultural circumstances, though in all its permutations it plays in Cervantine style with levels of representation, the self-­reflexivity of fiction, and the ambiguity of the boundaries between fictive and real, past and present.10 As reconstructed by Welles scholars, the project seems to have passed through at least four separate conceptions. First, it began as a project for television. The earliest screen tests were done in the Bois de Boulogne, outside Paris, in 1955, with Micha Auer as Don Quixote and Akim Tamiroff as Sancho. Frank Sinatra backed the idea of a version for television, with Charlton Heston to star. When that fell through, Welles decided to go ahead on his own. Second, in 1957 a film complete unto itself was made in Mexico, starring Francisco Reiguera as Don Quixote, Akim Tamiroff as Sancho, and Welles as himself, with Patty McCormack as a young girl, “Dulcie” (short for Dulcinea), to whom Cervantes’s characters appear. At Cannes in 1958, Welles gave an interview in which he stated that the film was eighty minutes long, and only “the H-­bomb scene” remained to be filmed. Third, from 1959 until at least the midsixties, Welles continued to film and edit Don Quixote in between other projects, in both Italy and Spain. The conception gradually shifted to a film-­within-­a-­film (perhaps inspired partly by the success of Fellini’s 8½, released in 1963), in which Sancho and Don Quixote discover that they are characters in a film being shot in Spain by Orson Welles. And fourth, by the early 1970s, Welles had apparently developed a new concept for this film, to turn it into an essay film about Spain.11 At first this was to be a commentary on the Franco regime, but at the end of his life Welles talked of wanting to turn it into a meditation on the transition to democracy and the relation of Cervantes’s timeless characters to post-­Franco Spain. While Welles was alive, he repeatedly declared it “almost” finished, then repeatedly gave excuses for not releasing it. First, he wanted just to film the H-­bomb scene; then he had a different final scene to shoot, a large QuixoNation  127

dress ball at the Ducal palace, in which Sancho and Don Quixote show up dressed as . . . themselves. He fretted that the film would be misunderstood, so he wanted to have a major success first, then release it. Neither The Trial (1962) nor Chimes at Midnight (1965) provided the springboard he was hoping for. In 1972 he told Jonathan Rosenbaum that he was “still undecided about whether to release the film fairly soon, in ‘competition’ with the two other Quixote films that [were] currently being prepared by others [that is, Man of La Mancha and Waldo Salt’s Don Quixote], or to wait still longer” (2007, 50). Each time he put off finishing it, the film took on a different meaning due to changing times. Rather than bringing this process to an end, Welles’s death in 1985 only complicated matters further. Several months before he died, he signed over the rights to all his unfinished films to his longtime lover, Oja Kodar. Around 1989 she entered into negotiations to produce a version of Orson Welles’s Don Quixote with Mamoun Hassan of the bbc and also, separately, with Paxti Irigoyen, of El Silencio, a Spanish company. Irigoyen and El Silencio wanted it for the inauguration of Expo ’92 in Seville, so they were eager and offered cash, which Oja Kodar took in exchange for the work print she had and distribution rights in Europe. But two other people were in possession of footage, some of it important. One was Suzanne Cloutier, who had served as executive producer on an unsuccessful attempt at finishing and marketing the film in the 1980s. The other was Mauro Bonanni, who at one stage had worked with Welles on the editing of the film and had ended up taking custody of a negative that included the early footage from the sequences filmed in Mexico with Patty McCormack. Oja Kodar blocked Bonanni from having any involvement, claiming that he had never really been an editor on the film and was entitled to neither compensation nor credit. With none of the Mexican footage, the resulting reconstruction by Spanish director Jesús ( Jess) Franco utterly failed to do justice to any conception Welles had of the film at any time, but this version was unfortunately released on dvd, to the great disappointment of all who hoped it would prove to be a “lost classic.”12 Though he never gave any of the segments with Patty 128 Childers

McCormack to the Spaniards, Bonanni did sell a six-­minute segment of it to Italian television, and those six minutes, as we will see, have had a remarkable afterlife. Under current circumstances it is all but impossible to imagine a renewed attempt at finishing Welles’s Don Quixote.13 This is regrettable, not least because some of Welles’s freest experimentation as a filmmaker was done while working on this project. Consider this description emphasizing the improvisatory technique that he and his crew used in Mexico, as told to André Bazin and Charles Bitsch at Cannes in 1958: It was made without cuts, without even a narrative trajectory, without even a synopsis. Every morning, the actors, the crew and I would meet in front of the hotel. Then we’d set off and invent the film in the street, like Mack Sennet. . . . The story, the little events, everything is improvised. It’s made of things we found in the moment, in the flash of a thought, but only after rehearsing Cervantes for four weeks. Because we rehearsed all the scenes from Cervantes as if we were going to perform them, so that the actors would know their characters. Then we went into the street and performed not Cervantes, but an improvisation supported by these rehearsals, by the memory of the characters. (Estrin 2002, 38)

In the context of his disputes with the studios over artistic control of his films, this way of working reflects his rejection of Hollywood style in favor of a more experimental, spontaneous technique. Welles told Bazin and Bitsch that he was almost ready to cut a ninety-­minute silent film with voice-­over narration, but that he still needed to shoot “the H-­bomb scene,” a final sequence of nuclear holocaust in which everything is destroyed except Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (Estrin 2002, 37–­39; Truffaut 1978, 24). Based on what Welles said in this 1958 interview about improvising without so much as a synopsis, it has been assumed that there was no screenplay as such when filming began in Mexico in 1957. Now, however, one has turned up in the Margaret Wallace Scripts collection of the Charles E. Young Library at ucla, boxes 17, 18, and 19. It consists of a jumble of QuixoNation  129

versions, with some handwritten originals, typescripts, multiple carbons (sometimes with handwritten changes), notes, and even song lyrics. The dates range from August 23, 1957, to October 10, 1957. While it is unclear how these script materials came to be included in this collection or whether they were used at all during the Mexican shooting, they help to clarify Welles’s intentions during the first phase of filming. They consist mainly of dialogue between Welles and the precocious Dulcie, whose mother is hospitalized due to complications in the birth of her baby brother, leaving Dulcie on her own to wander the streets with her camera. She meets Welles when she snaps a picture of him. As she is curious about the book he has with him, Welles reads to her from it, explains who Cervantes was, and answers her questions about Don Quixote and Sancho. Her experience of the characters is the focal point of the film; as she visualizes them, they begin to “come alive.” When she next sees Welles, she tells him of her sightings of them. Some footage has survived that is at least loosely based on this script, although it was either filmed without sound or the soundtrack has been lost. The most memorable sequence of the project takes place in a movie theater, where Don Quixote slashes the screen in an updating of Maese Pedro’s puppet show. This is the six-­minute sequence Bonanni sold to rai, to which we will return shortly (Rosenbaum 2007, 304; and 2001, where it can be viewed online). Whether this and similar scenes are only the product of her vivid imagination is ambiguous in the screenplay. Her belief in the characters’ extraliterary reality contrasts with the skepticism of her governess, the dour Miss Gump. With her parents she discusses the difference between literal and poetic truth.14 The final scene, which Welles had told Barzin and Bitsch he had yet to film, provides the link between this initial approach and the Cold War context of the 1950s. Here is how he describes it in the screenplay: Don Quixote’s “last and most terrible adventure”—­the one he wrote to Dulcie about—­now begins . . . The scene is the testing grounds where some new and unthinkably powerful bomb is about to be tried out . . . . 130 Childers

Bidding his squire farewell Don Quixote goes off to do battle with the bomb itself. Loudspeakers warn him away but—­while Dulcie watches in horror on the tv—­He gallops on—­closer and closer—­ At zero hour he reaches the bomb, charging it with his wooden lance at the very instant of the world’s biggest explosion!!! When the smoke clears Sancho is at first convinced that the world itself has been blown up . . . Then he begins mourning the destruction of his beloved master . . . Suddenly, wiping away her tears, Dulcie sees a familiar figure looming up out of the smoke . . . Don Quixote can never be destroyed! With her at the television set is Dulcie’s mother, holding her very young brother . . . To Dulcie’s questions about Quixote (“Is he true?”) her mother explains that there’s a lot more to truth than mere facts . . . If Dulcie believes in Don Quixote and in little Sancho, why then of course, they’re true—­both of them. A triumphal parade of devoted children accompanies the knight and his squire to the edge of the next horizon—­beyond which, we are sure, more windmills are waiting . . . more adventures . . . (Welles 1957a, ellipses in original)

This scene, watched by Dulcie and her mother on a television screen, is the culmination of the strategic updating of Don Quixote Welles had in mind when he chose to structure his approach around a child’s experience of the characters’ coming to life in the present. As he explained in an often-­ cited statement that nonetheless bears repeating, this was his attempt to re-­create the sensation of timelessness that Cervantes had produced by combining anachronism and self-­conscious literariness: The anachronism of Don Quixote in relation to his era has lost all its efficacy now, because the differences between the sixteenth and the fourteenth QuixoNation  131

centuries are not very clear in our minds. I’ve simply translated this anachronism into modern terms. As for Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, they’re timeless. In the second volume of Cervantes . . . people always say, “Look! There’s Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. We read a book about them.” In this way, Cervantes gives them an amusing side, as if they were both fictional creatures and more real than life itself. My Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are exactly and traditionally based on Cervantes, but they’re our contemporaries. (Estrin 2002, 37–­38)

Being simultaneously in time, in this world, and out of it, in a semimythical dimension, was what made the characters such a powerful tool for satire; right from the start, Welles clearly intended to hold a mirror up to his own age, the Cold War, and was interested in the role of media—­film and television—­vis-­à-­vis the representation of world events, including the threat of nuclear war. Thus his adaptation of Don Quixote would necessarily entail dismantling the illusion of cinematic transparency through self-­reflexive techniques, not unlike those Cervantes uses in the novel to disrupt reading habits based on escapist chivalric romances. In the first version, shot in Mexico, this dismantling included the updated version of Maese Pedro’s puppet show in which the mad knight enters a movie theater and slashes the screen itself to shreds. These are the six-­minutes that Bonanni sold, which retain their power, despite the unfinished and mutilated state of Welles’s film. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben saw them on television and wrote an appreciation, “The Most Beautiful Six Minutes in the History of Cinema,” which serves as the final chapter of his 2005 book, Profanations. Agamben describes the scene in detail, how Quixote approaches the movie screen, lunging at it with his sword, “implacably devouring the images” until, “in the end, nothing is left of the screen, and only the wooden structure supporting it remains visible,” while “the little girl down on the floor [Dulcie] stares at him in disapproval” (2007, 93). Agamben goes on to comment: What are we to do with our imaginations? Love them and believe in them to the point of having to destroy and falsify them (this is perhaps 132 Childers

the meaning of Orson Welles’s films). But when, in the end, they reveal themselves to be empty and unfulfilled, when they show the nullity of which they are made, only then can we pay the price for their truth and understand that Dulcinea—­whom we have saved—­cannot love us. (93–­94)

This lyrical evocation has drawn a good deal of comment in the context of Agamben’s other writings on film and literary culture. Alex Murray (2010) relates these lines to remarks Agamben has made about Bergman; Silvia Casini (2014) uses them to explore his interest in Godard and Debord; and Vivian Liska (2017) connects them to his place in the Jewish intellectual tradition, alongside Benjamin and Kafka.15 These and other scholars generally agree, however, that Agamben’s emphasis here is on the self-­referential nature of the gesture of the misunderstood artist—­and by extension the philosopher—­whose unmasking of the scaffolding hidden behind empty representations cannot be appreciated by the public he wishes to “save” (Liska 2017, 53). Welles’s revelation through Don Quixote of “the ‘nullity’ of images” thus serves Agamben as “an ironic allusion to the film-­philosophy relationship” (Sinnerbrink 2011, 196). Janet Harbord’s approach has particular relevance here, for she emphasizes that it is the radical incompleteness of the film fragment that devours the film medium itself. Precisely because it is unfinished, it undoes the polished, coherent image, unraveling it to create “a version of cinema that exists at the edges, that proffers a glimpse of an unlived cinema. . . . This enigmatic deconstruction of cinema enables Agamben to speculate on what ‘supports’ cinema, revealing the unthought cinema beneath or behind it, a cinema of materials, entities and substances” (2016, 14). Indeed, the subject of this chapter is precisely the use that Welles and other experimentalists make of Cervantes’s self-­reflexive novel in their effort to create a self-­reflexive cinema that deconstructs the depoliticized filmmaking of Hollywood under the Hayes Code and McCarthyism. Paradoxically, as Harbord notes, the unfinished, fragmentary condition of these projects can itself be interpreted as an intrinsic element of their strategy, though it would seem to condemn them to inevitable QuixoNation  133

failure—­unless, somehow, they can be recovered, reconstructed, after the filmmakers have abandoned them. Welles’s work on Cervantes’s novel was less a single adaptation than an occasion for endless formal and thematic experimentation, a personal laboratory for sabotaging Hollywood conventions. Adalberto Muller calls it Welles’s “artist’s studio,” an idea he says he got from Welles’s daughter, Chris Welles-­Feder (2013, 135). From the start Welles’s approach displayed features that we will see repeated by other filmmakers participating in the activist paradigm. His improvised variations on the characters allowed him to bring Don Quixote and Sancho into contact with the present, through a particular understanding of their “timelessness.” Anachronistic already in Cervantes’s text, Don Quixote could serve as a challenge to the prevailing values and social practices of any time. At first, with the H-­bomb scenario and the demolition of a movie theater, the satirical brunt fell on the Cold War and Hollywood’s complicity in it. Later he redirected that focus toward the Franco dictatorship. Already in 1957 Welles had established the parameters of activist quixotism: open-­ended experimentation, the juxtaposition of past and present, and sociopolitical satire. Harold L. “Doc” Humes, Don Peyote (1960)

After World War II a young Navy veteran named Harold L. Humes (1926–­ 92), known to his friends as Doc, hung around Paris, where he and Peter Matthiessen founded the Paris Review in 1951. But Humes’s brilliant, inventive mind always seemed to push him to the next thing. Before long he was back in the States, studying literature at Harvard with Archibald MacLeish. He penned a 750-­page novel of political intrigue in postwar Paris, The Underground City (1958), which, in addition to astonishing literary virtuosity, displays an intimate understanding of the private traumas caused by the suddenness with which former allies against fascism found themselves on opposite sides after 1945. The novel deals with the conflict between public and personal loyalty in a climate of distrust brought on by internal spying and denunciation, issues Humes faced in his own life, and which may have contributed to his mental breakdown seven years 134 Childers

later.16 He followed up this successful debut novel with Men Die (1959), a shorter book written in an impressionistic, stream-­of-­consciousness style. Again his subject is political and military, and he writes with the sure hand of an insider exposing the workings of power. In this second novel, Humes also addresses racial tensions in U.S. society. There was serious discussion of adapting each of these novels for the big screen.17 At thirty-­three, then, Humes had embarked on a successful literary career. His talent as a novelist notwithstanding, playing the part of “budding young writer,” could not contain Doc’s boundless energy; he aspired to the role of public intellectual. Over the next three years, he engaged in a dizzying range of projects, including managing Norman Mailer’s first campaign for mayor, inventing a “paper house” to provide inexpensive shelter from recycled materials, planning a book on the therapeutic value of marijuana, and helping organize protests against restrictions on folksingers in Washington Square Park. In the midst of all of this, he directed Don Peyote, an experimental film about a young man in Greenwich Village who is inspired by reading On the Road to reinvent himself and embark on a series of adventures.18 The background to Don Peyote is a window on the avant-­garde film scene in New York City circa 1960. The New American Cinema Group, which formed around the journal Film Culture, edited by Jonas Mekas, included, along with Humes, figures such as John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke, Gregory Markopoulos, and Adolfas Mekas. Though their filmmaking practices varied, they were united in opposition to conventional Hollywood cinema and in their commitment to developing an alternative model of production and distribution. Humes was beginning Don Peyote when this group took shape in the fall of 1960, and two years later when they signed “The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group,” famously calling for cinema “the color of blood,” his film was named alongside such outstanding avant-­garde films of those years as Shadows, Pull My Daisy, The Connection, and Guns of the Trees (Mekas 1962). Humes was at the epicenter of the experimental film movement in New York at the most decisive moment of its history.19 QuixoNation  135

So what happened? Serious as he may have been about participating in the filmmakers’ cooperative, Humes was simultaneously developing as an activist, and these two lines fatally collided in November 1960. He had planned Don Peyote as a silent film, improvised and with no screenplay, to which a combination jazz/voice soundtrack would be added afterward. This approach was a pastiche of the most two influential experimental films at that moment—­Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s Pull My Daisy (1959), filmed without sound, with a Beat voice-­over narration added later by Jack Kerouac; and Ron Rice’s The Flower Thief (1960), featuring Taylor Mead, who thereby became the first “movie star” of American underground cinema.20 Humes intended Ornette Coleman to provide the music and spoken word artist Lord Buckley to do the voice-­over narration. Buckley’s comic monologues transposed well-­known narratives into hipster slang, such as his versions of the life of Jesus (“The Nazz”) and Marc Anthony’s funerary oration for Julius Caesar, which rewrote Shakespeare’s “friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” as “hipsters, flipsters, and finger-­ popping daddies, knock me your lobes” (both these pieces were included on his 1951 album His Royal Hipness). Buckley was an ideal choice to retell Don Quixote’s story as an accompaniment to the images of the film. When Humes brought him to New York to record the voice-­over, he also booked him for a series of public performances. As it turned out, Buckley had a marijuana arrest on his record, and his cabaret card was revoked. In 1960 anyone working or performing in a nightclub in New York City needed a cabaret card issued by the police, who could refuse to issue or confiscate these cards without due process. Humes took this as an occasion to fight the nypd’s unconstitutional curtailment of free speech.21 At the height of the controversy, the fifty-­two-­year-­old Buckley died of a sudden stroke. Humes poured himself into the struggle to end the cabaret card requirement, which finally succeeded a few years later, but without Buckley to do the voice-­over, Don Peyote was never finished.22 In fact the film disappeared for decades and was only recovered, after Humes’s death, by his daughter Immy Humes, while she was making 136 Childers

Doc. She has preserved the dailies for the film and produced a coherent cut of most of the sequences, to which she added a jazz soundtrack, but without voice-­over narration.23 Filmed in rich black-­and-­white by then-­eighteen-­year-­old Daniel Drasin in 1960, Don Peyote stars F. Cavitt Sharp, aka Ojo de Vidrio. His African American sidekick is played by the great Roscoe Lee Brown, who in those days was just beginning his career as an actor—­it would have been his first screen credit had the film been released, but instead that honor belongs to Shirley Clarke’s The Connection (1962). The film opens with an eccentric youth living as a squatter in a Village walk-­up slated to be demolished. As each floor of the building is knocked down by the wrecking ball, he and his girlfriend descend to the floor below. When the final floor is gone, the young man camps in a nearby demolition site.24 Sitting by the fire at night, he reads On the Road and is inspired to take on a new identity: Don Peyote. He buys a motorcycle, dons sunglasses and a leather jacket, and finds himself a sidekick, who looks on bemused as Don Peyote attacks a street construction site, replete with flashing traffic safety lights and striped sawhorse barriers. The culminating sequence recasts Grisóstomo, the shepherd poet from part 1 of Don Quixote, as a conventional poet who has accepted a cushy academic position at nyu. We see him in Washington Square, taking out his “tame” typewriter for a walk “on a leash,” a domestication that metaphorically expresses his having “sold out.” The equivalent of the goatherds in Don Quixote are here a group of young jazz musicians, among them Ornette Coleman in a cameo role, who taunt the poet by yelling, “Fink” and crowding him into a phone booth, which they then turn on its side as a makeshift coffin and carry, pallbearer fashion, through the heart of Greenwich Village, the intersection of MacDougal and Bleecker, before laying him to rest in a Con Edison ditch adorned with the slogan, “Dig we must.” Given its unfinished state, it is hard to get a clear idea of what Humes intended the film to convey. His choice of a mixed-­race pair for knight and squire is suggestive. Lord Buckley enacted a similar bridging of black and white, part of the cultural significance of jazz itself for the Beat generation. QuixoNation  137

In this context Don Peyote’s youth, in contrast to Cervantes’s middle-­aged protagonist, represents the creation of new values, rather than a mere revival of old ones. Humes evidently saw his parody-­pastiche of the Beats as a mocking rejection of Cold War policies and tenets. The copy of the Penguin edition of Don Quixote that he used during the filming has been preserved. On a blank page at the front he wrote, “The film is dedicated to the memory of John Foster Dulles, whose works remain a monument to knight errantry; and to his faithful squire Nikita Khrushchev, to whom he gave a kingdom, of whom Frances Gary Powers once said: ‘Baby, you bring me down’” (H. L. Humes 1950–­80). Dulles and Khrushchev, of course, were the chief architects of the Cold War policy of brinksmanship, which Bertrand Russell represented as a game of “chicken” ([1959] 2001, 19). Doc here seems to share Russell’s view that “both are to blame for playing such an incredibly dangerous game” ([1959] 2001, 19).25 Gary Powers was the cia spy shot down in May over the Soviet Union, provoking what became known as the 1960 u-­2 incident. What is particularly interesting about the wry comment, “Baby, you bring me down” is that Humes planted a sign proclaiming “Now Leaving Bringdowntown” at the demolition site where Don Peyote begins his adventures when he sallies forth after his squat is flattened. Becoming heimatlos and going “on the road” were thus the way to escape the conformist bringdown of the Eisenhower era. In a gesture repeating that of Welles’s Quixote when he charges the H-­bomb, the Beats’ rejection of prevailing societal norms and values is here interpreted as a quixotic nihilism prompted by the insanity of the arms race. Dulles and Khrushchev are Quixote and Sancho on one plane, for the purpose of a political satire anticipating Dr. Strangelove, but on another, Don Peyote and his “squire” belong to an alternative, carnivalesque vision in which the homeless and marginalized can join forces and leave behind the oppressiveness of Cold War cultural politics. While Orson Welles and Waldo Salt devoted most of their lives to cinema, for Humes it seems to have been more or less a passing fancy. Even during the relatively short period of his life when he was most engaged with filmmaking, he was also busy with other things. Over the next few 138 Childers

years, he tried to get the film of Men Die produced, and he began another novel, “The Memoirs of Dorsey Slade.”26 But harassment by police, covert surveillance, and incipient paranoia took their toll. He left for England to a kind of self-­imposed exile shortly after the Kennedy assassination. In London he worked on his third novel along with numerous other projects. After he met Timothy Leary, he began experimenting with lsd, perhaps not the best choice given his state of mind. In 1965 he was hospitalized for mental illness, and although his lifelong underground efforts at healing others’ minds and bodies might earn him the title of real-­life Quixote, he never completed another literary or cinematic project.27 Nonetheless, his Don Peyote may be the most significant of all the unfinished Quixote films because of its engagement with the avant-­garde cinema movement of the time. In this regard it is worth mentioning, though it falls outside the scope of this chapter, that in 1965 Bruce Baillie, an experimentalist based in San Francisco but with close ties to the New York group, produced a diary film highly critical of the United States in both socioeconomic and politico-­military terms, which he titled simply Quixote. This choice of title confirms that Cervantes’s novel was still a living presence in the sensibilities of experimental filmmakers as late as 1965.28 Waldo Salt, Don Quixote (1965–­1971)

duchess: Are you really mad? don quixote: Only a madman would insist he’s sane when the whole world says he’s mad. Since I consider myself sane, I must admit I’m mad, I suppose. —­Waldo Salt, Don Quixote (1967, 68)

Waldo Salt (1914–­87) was a master of the adaptation of novels to the silver screen. Blacklisted for refusing to answer questions about his political affiliations when called before the House Un-­American Activities Committee in 1951, and still frustrated over a decade later by the caliber of the work he was able to get for film and television, he found himself at age QuixoNation  139

fifty, separated from his wife and his career going nowhere, wondering what he was doing with his life. As he explains in Eugene Corr and Robert Hillmann’s documentary Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter’s Journey (1990), he received a visit at that time from his daughter Deborah, who said to him, “Daddy, no one would mind if you were doing something you really wanted to do, something really important to you.” Thus encouraged, Salt put everything else aside and worked for the next two years on an adaptation of Don Quixote. His screenplay has never been filmed, though filming was scheduled to begin in April 1971 with Richard Burton to star and Chaim Topol to play Sancho; in the mid-­1990s, after Salt’s death, a script with revisions by Susan Shilliday stalled in preproduction. In this case Fred Schepisi was to direct, with John Cleese to play the lead and Robin Williams his sidekick.29 Despite never having been filmed, however, indirectly Salt’s screenplay had a decisive impact on the emergence of the New Hollywood. British director John Schlesinger caught wind of it while he was looking for a writer to fix Jack Gelber’s botched adaptation of James Leo Herlihy’s novel Midnight Cowboy.30 Being called to work on Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger 1968) was the break that jump-­started Salt’s career, and his work on Don Quixote had prepared him to take advantage of that opportunity. He went on to win an Oscar for his innovative screenplay, and over the next ten years, he was sole or lead writer on, among other projects, Serpico (nominated for a screenwriting Oscar), The Day of the Locust, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, and Coming Home (for which he won his second Oscar). He received the Writer’s Guild Laurel Award in 1986. In this triumphant final phase of his career, Salt profoundly influenced the understanding of the screenwriter’s craft within the emerging independent film movement. He taught screenwriting at nyu from 1977 to 1985. After his death in 1987, the annual Waldo Salt Award for screenwriting was established at the Sundance Festival, where he had given workshops since its founding in 1981.31 The material Salt produced for his adaptation of Don Quixote is much more voluminous than a simple screenplay. His rigorous and disciplined 140 Childers

technique for adapting fiction to film consisted of three main stages: (1) meditation on the principal characters and their motivation, written up in dozens of typed pages; (2) creative outpouring of extended scenes and copious dialogue, much more than could finally be incorporated into a single feature film; and (3) tightening of plot lines, elimination of extraneous scenes, whittling down the screenplay until it acquired its own internal unity. The result, though it might take longer to produce, has the advantage of being more than a mere scene-­by-­scene translation from words into images; Salt transposes the entire problematic underlying the text he adapts and then re-­creates it in accordance with the demands of the film medium. Moreover, he understands the characters so well that he can ring seemingly endless changes on the scenarios he has created, giving his screenplays a flexibility and adaptability that makes him an ideal collaborator as filming proceeds.32 In the case of Don Quixote, he created six complete versions, not to mention discarded scenes, notes on characters and continuity, and artwork that aided him in visualizing the finalized film. Thus Salt’s version of Don Quixote implies a full-­fledged interpretation and analysis of Cervantes’s vast novel, inseparably bound up with transformations intended to make the story more appealing for a movie audience, since, unlike Welles and Humes before him, his goal was to make a Hollywood movie. Over the months during which Salt experimented with the possibilities, he tried out, discarded, and reconfigured numerous bold ideas, the vicissitudes of which are too complex to describe here in detail. While he understood Don Quixote to be a profoundly ambiguous work, in his reading it was essentially anti-­imperialist, using the parody of knight-­errantry to mock the militarism of the Spanish Crown while simultaneously upholding what is truly noble in chivalry’s moral outlook. Even as he restored this mission to its historical context, Salt also sought to provoke his audience to recognize its applicability to current political and moral realities. In his notes he theorized on several occasions about this “primary problem” of getting audiences to identify with Don Quixote in a way that would lead them to understand his struggle in historic terms but also to apply it to the present day. The most fully developed QuixoNation  141

discussion of this problem is contained in the “Notes on Polish” from September 16, 1966, in which Salt situates Don Quixote in relation to the counterculture and decides to emphasize both the public, urban space of Barcelona as the goal of his wanderings and the Inquisition as the embodiment of what he opposes: A man—­or student—­rebelling today could say he is against conformity, the Establishment, the corruption, the computer, Madison Avenue, status symbols, Puritanism, atomic war, etc. He would be understood by everyone whether they agreed or not—­because the environment is the same for everyone. A beard, sandals, a guitar would be immediately recognizable in the same way that Quixote’s armor was recognizable in Cervantes’ day. In a mild way, Bod Dylan put on Woody Guthrie’s armor. We need a way to define Quixote’s armor—­motive and aspiration—­as immediately and clearly as a picket sign, a bumper sticker or a button defines rebellion today. Barcelona is the objective. . . . If a lovable crackpot today decided to revive the spirit of the frontier—­or start a march—­his objective would be Washington or New York. It would be as beautiful and ridiculous as the feeling of the audience varied about the possibilities of accomplishing what he intended. This comes nearer to Quixote. He wants to revive chivalry—­as opposed to the iron age—­translated into specific related modern terms. . . . He wants to defeat the petty selfishness and discover the greatness in himself. It isn’t necessary to show the conditions against which he is fighting if he is rejecting the reflection of those conditions in himself. Bearded beatniks are rejecting Gillette, Right Guard, discrimination, Puritanism in themselves—­reflecting the social scene which produces them. . . . So—­for real consideration—­what are the human conditions in Renaissance Spain which correspond today—­which Quixote is rejecting in himself? The Inquisition is certainly key. (Salt 1965–­70, box 28, folder 5)

In pursuit of the contextualization that would make his understanding of Quixote’s “rebellion” clear, Salt invented and embellished a number of 142 Childers

elements. For example, he endowed his hero with a backstory explaining his decision to become a knight. In the earliest version of this backstory, he told Sancho, “Once I saw a Moor beaten to death by bullies who called themselves Christians. I didn’t do anything . . .” (Salt 1965–­70, box 29, folder 2, p. 18, ellipsis in original). That is, he had witnessed a lynching and was wracked by guilt at not having intervened, an experience to which the U.S. audience circa 1965 could undoubtedly relate. Eventually, however, in later versions this backstory was changed so that it could also serve to motivate the choice of Aldonza Lorenzo as Dulcinea: she became the one bullied; in fact, she was stoned and ostracized as punishment for promiscuity, while he stood by and watched, a traumatic experience that would be repeated in fragmentary flashbacks throughout the first half of the final versions (Salt 1965–­70, box 29, folders 5 and 7).33 In Salt’s adaptation the Holy Brotherhood pursues Don Quixote from the moment he leaves on his first sally. Eventually, the Brotherhood does so in the name of the Inquisition, for he heretically claims the defense of the faith as part of his mission; when he fights the Knight of the White Moon in Barcelona, it is because Sansón Carrasco has agreed to be the Inquisition’s knight. The Inquisition in Salt’s screenplay is undoubtedly a veiled attack on the House Un-­American Activities Committee, often referred to by blacklistees among themselves as “this Inquisition.”34 The trauma worked through in Don Quixote’s ongoing struggle against the forces of intolerance and authoritarianism is thus Waldo Salt’s own, dating from his 1951 huac testimony and subsequent blacklisting for refusing to name names. Salt experiments in several ways with the metafictional element in Cervantes’s novel and the quality of timeless, semimythic status that also interested Welles. The narrator’s comment that there are competing accounts of the order of the hero’s adventures in Don Quixote, part 1, chapter 2, is introduced by freezing the action just as Don Quixote rides by a windmill and adding an onscreen footnote: “All action freezes momentarily. A large black asterisk appears, high on screen right, near the tip of the windmill. A second asterisk follows immediately, low on screen QuixoNation  143

left, directing our attention to a subtitle: footnote: some claim that don quixote’s first exploit was a windmill. but the camera cannot lie . . .” (Salt 1965–­70, box 29, folder 1, p. 9, ellipsis in original). Salt repeatedly incorporates the use of “imposters,” which Cervantes deployed, especially in part 2, to create scenes of playful self-­ reflexivity, such as the Knight of the Wood and his squire; Maese Pedro as a “disguised” Ginés de Pasamonte; and the characters from Avellaneda’s Quixote that he incorporated into his own book. Thus, for example, in Salt’s adaptation the Basque, out of his sense of honor, actually goes to El Toboso to tell Dulcinea how her knight defeated him but spared his life. Because he goes about asking where he can find “Dulcinea,” the authorities take him for Don Quixote himself, so they arrest him and turn him over to the Inquisition. When the real Don Quixote arrives in El Toboso, he hears he has been captured and is about to be punished in an auto-­da-­fé. Taking a more cinematic approach to the conversation from the beginning of Cervantes’s part 2, in which Don Quixote and Sancho learn from Sansón Carrasco that a book about them is already in print, Salt cleverly has Maese Pedro do a puppet show based on the previous sallies, with a puppet Sancho, a puppet Quixote, a puppet Dulcinea, and so forth. In eminently Cervantine fashion, moreover, he uses this moment to distance himself from Dale Wasserman and Joe Darion’s romantic idealism in Man of La Mancha (1965), where Don Quixote famously declares in song that his Quest is to “dream the impossible dream” (49). When “the puppet Don brags that he undertakes only the impossible,” Salt’s Quixote comments, “The man’s a sentimental fraud. Only a fool or a madman would undertake the impossible” (Salt 1965–­1970, box 29, folder 7, p. 81). Thus the quixotic here is emphatically not a purely abstract, unrealizable ideal, “The Impossible Dream,” but implies, rather, an active commitment to making a real difference in this world. Again, unlike in Man of La Mancha, Alonso Quejana (Salt’s spelling) finally dies renouncing quixotism, associated, in the last sequence, with the cinematic illusion itself:

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sancho I see it—­beyond the horizon—­like an apocalypse—­every generation—­ new Quixotes—­like grasshoppers. Every puppet maker without a play—­making up new Quixotes. Bigger Quixotes. I see puppet shows the size of a wall . . . In reverse—­the scene in the pavilion fills the entire screen. Sancho stares directly into camera, creating the illusion that we are the audience at the puppet show of his imagination. sancho Thousands of people out there watching a puppet Don Quixote dying in his bed. And some puppet Sancho Panza saying—­if you want my advice, you’ll stand up! Get out of that bed! There’s things to be done! Rivers to be crossed! Lost causes to be won! quixote Don’t be quixotic, Sancho . . . (Salt 1965–­70, box 29, folder 3, pp. 174–­75, ellipses in original)

Don Quixote’s telling Sancho not to be quixotic is a subtle anachronism that gestures ironically toward the same larger-­than-­life quality of the characters that Welles sought to re-­create by having them appear on the streets of Pamplona during the San Fermín festival. In Doc Humes’s unfinished film, the coolly bemused gaze of Roscoe Lee Brown (“Sancho”) watching Don Peyote tripping over himself as he attacks a street excavation plays similarly on our awareness that the scene serves as a low-­budget substitute for the famed windmills. Although Salt aspired to make a mainstream Hollywood film, his unconventional attempts at conveying Cervantes’s metafictional self-­reflexivity by breaking the fourth wall point beyond the existing filmmaking tradition toward the New Hollywood, to techniques borrowed from the Nouvelle Vague that would be employed in Midnight Cowboy and other films of the late 1960s and early 1970s.35 Once more, then, despite its being toned down in the hope of getting backing from a

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major studio, the activist Quixote paradigm is present in Salt’s screenplay as well, combining experimentation, presentism, and oppositional politics.36 Conclusion

In the years following the quadricentenary of Cervantes’s birth in 1947, Don Quixote was in the air. Boris Karloff and Lee J. Cobb both played him on television, in 1952 (Lumet) and 1959 (Genus) respectively. In 1954 Jean Rikhoff started a literary magazine that she decided to call Quixote when friends warned that her first choice for a name, Protest, sounded too political, and no one wanted to be labeled a “subversive” (Rikhoff 1961, 46). Two years later, perhaps sniffing trouble, Hollywood’s fiercely anti-­Communist gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper, remarked, upon reporting that Desi Arnaz had bought the rights to an adaptation by Hungarian Jewish refugee Lazlo Vadnay (another version that has never been filmed), “It’s odd there’s so much interest in Cervantes’s Don Quixote after all these years” (Hopper 1956). Odd, indeed. And that was before any of the versions discussed here, before Kerouac read it while writing The Dharma Bums (1958), before Man of La Mancha (1965) or Bruce Baillie’s experimental film Quixote (1965–­67), and a full decade before the Richard Powell novel, Don Quixote U.S.A. (1966), on which Woody Allen and Mickey Rose would later base Bananas (1971). It is true that Welles, Humes, and Salt, each in his own way, can be said to have quixotic personalities. Modern subjectivity plants a little Quixote inside all of us, but some offer it more fertile ground than others. These three independent-­minded creators worked best on their own schedule, following their own lights. There is a principle of freedom here, an ideological stance in favor of what, along the lines of Herbert Marcuse’s understanding of the “aesthetic dimension,” we might call the (relatively) unalienated labor of the autonomous artist (Marcuse 1981, 417–­19). Paradoxically, though, one of the hallmarks of their work—­when they achieve their end, at least—­is that it is extraordinarily disciplined and controlled. Witness Welles’s Citizen Kane, Humes’s The Underground City, or Salt’s screenplays for Midnight Cowboy, The Day of the Locust, and Serpico. The 146 Childers

principles of spontaneous experimentation, on the one hand, and of rigorous discipline, on the other, are intertwined at the root of creativity, which cannot exist without freedom. Here it is valuable to recall Aurora Egido’s analysis of Alonso Quijano’s elaborate preparations in chapter 1 of Don Quixote as belonging to “another discretion” (2008), that is, an idiosyncratic understanding of morals, values, and standards of conduct, which appears “mad” from outside but obeys its own rigorous internal logic. Don Quixote rejects received ideas and conventional notions of self and identity and instead starts from scratch with a role he has created for himself. It is this open stance toward life and rejection of the status quo that appeals to experimenters. Welles, Humes, and Salt, like Alonso Quijano, seek to create their own form of discretion in a social and political environment that is intolerant of deviance. The fact that each of them gravitated independently toward Don Quixote is a sign of the times, but it is also, I would argue, a valid, insightful approach to Cervantes. What finally squelched this approach was Man of La Mancha, which debuted in 1965. Curiously, Dale Wasserman had commissioned W. H. Auden the year before to write lyrics for the musical, but in the end he turned down the darkly satirical, Brechtian songs the great poet offered, preferring instead the insipid romanticism of “The Impossible Dream.” Of course for what Wasserman wanted, a hit musical, he was right (Wasserman 2003, 84–­94).37 Though perhaps no one would have thought so at the time, the moment he took Auden off the project and gave it instead to Joe Darion was a turning point in the history of the reception of Don Quixote. Of the three projects examined here, Salt’s came closest to successfully challenging this imposition of an abstract, one-­sidedly spiritual version of quixotism promulgated by Wasserman, Leigh, and Darion in keeping with the romantic tradition.38 In reconstructing Cervantes’s role in these unfinished films, I wish to assert that the pervasive impact of the activist quixotism present in all three, combining satirical humor and a liberating, experimental attitude toward life and art, extended beyond these failed adaptations to many films of the time that had no immediate link to Cervantes, such as Dr. Strangelove, Easy Rider, and M*A*S*H. And Midnight QuixoNation  147

Cowboy, which it turns out does have an intimate tie to Don Quixote, as we have seen. As previously mentioned, another film that reveals such a hidden connection is Woody Allen’s political satire Bananas (1971), loosely based on Richard Powell’s jovially satirical novel titled Don Quixote U.S.A. (1966). Activist quixotism remains strongest today in the work of self-­ exiled filmmaker Terry Gilliam, whose many quixotic endeavors include Brazil, The Fisher King, and the film that eluded his efforts to complete it for so long, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018b), now completed and, as of this writing, available in multiple online platforms for instant streaming. At last an independent U.S. filmmaker has succeeded in creating a feature-­length adaptation of Cervantes’s masterpiece that rejects the aesthetic hegemony of Hollywood. This puts an end, not just to Gilliam’s own decades-­long effort, but also to sixty years during which Welles, Humes, and Salt, as well as the posthumous caretakers and continuers of their work, have striven to make available to audiences a counterculture version of Don Quixote.39 Notes

1. I wish to take this opportunity to thank Jennifer Salt and Immy Humes for giving me access to their fathers’ work. I am also grateful to Julie Graham at ucla’s Charles E. Young Library for drawing my attention to the Orson Welles screenplay of Don Quixote, which she assisted in cataloging, and to Philip A. Hallman, Film Studies Field librarian at the University of Michigan, for meeting with me to discuss the Welles holdings of the Screen Arts Mavericks and Makers archive. 2. Under the Hays Code, according to Doherty, “Hollywood undertook a wholesale depoliticizing of its subject matter and a desexualization of its atmosphere, language, and bodies” (1999, 337; the text of the Production Code is reprinted on pp. 347–­67). During McCarthyism, Whitfield explains, “It was safer to produce films without any political or economic themes or implications at all” (1991, 131). Saunders offers specific examples of undercover cia agent Carlton Alsop’s role in reinforcing the Hays Code in the 1950s (1999, 290–­ 93). Jowett (1996) gives a nuanced view of the gradual decline in censorship leading up to the final overturning of the Hays Code in 1968. 148 Childers

3. For further discussion of the relationship between Man of La Mancha and countercultural approaches to adapting Don Quixote, see my forthcoming article, “‘A Most Timely Message for This Tired and Cynical World’: Man of La Mancha (1965) as the Depoliticization of Counterculture Quixotism.” 4. That the defense of the Spanish Republic was in any sense “Quixotic” is not an uncontroversial claim. James D. Fernández (2016) has recently noted that Hemingway’s Robert Jordan (in For Whom the Bell Tolls) is too individualistic and isolated to be taken as typical of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade volunteers, who were overwhelmingly urban-­dwellers involved with the labor movement and saw volunteering to fight Franco as an extension of their political activism, not some romantic personal quest. Nonetheless, Alvah Bessie, the only one of the Hollywood Ten to have fought in Spain, did read Don Quixote during the year he spent in prison for contempt of Congress (Nelson 2001, 181–­83). Cabañas Bravo (2014) has also shown that the Spanish loyalist exiles celebrated Don Quixote as a symbol of their defeated cause. The tension between individualism and collectivism on the radical left is too large a subject for this chapter. The least one can say is that leftists of all political stripes tend to idealize the Spanish Republic, and that even at the most trivial level, Don Quixote, the best-­known Spanish literary classic, is often taken as emblematic of Spain. 5. David R. Castillo (2012) also deserves to be credited in the development of this analogy into a serious analytical tool. Yvonne Yarbro-­Bejarano’s feminist approach to Lope is indebted to Laura Mulvey’s (1975) work on the gaze in conventional film, further demonstrating the validity of reading the comedia through the lens of Hollywood cinema (Yarbro-­Bejarano 1994, 237–­56). My understanding of the ideological function of the Spanish comedia vis-­à-­vis its audience draws as well on José María Diez Borque (1978), Anthony J. Cascardi (1997), and Walter Cohen (1985). 6. As Vaughn explains, “Hollywood moguls . . . were reluctant to take stands on controversial issues that risked alienating the moviegoing public, and they were extraordinarily sensitive to pressure groups that threatened the box office” (1996, 238–­39). In fact, when the major producers did meet in December 1947, “they made it clear that they had blacklisted the Ten not because of moral reservations about communism but because of the public’s reaction” (239–­40). 7. In “Destierro del teatro, invención de la novela” (forthcoming), I discuss Don Quixote as a two-­step, strategic response to Lope’s domination of the theater, QuixoNation  149

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

whereby Cervantes created a new genre and in the process invented a new kind of audience, the self-­reflexive reader of fiction. Heylin (2005) examines all of Welles’s clashes with the studios in painstaking detail. The famous Touch of Evil memo was used in 1998 to restore the film to an approximation of a “director’s cut” and is included with the dvd released by Universal. Though Welles’s abandonment of Hollywood is usually interpreted as his own choice, he was effectively graylisted by inclusion in the pamphlet Red Channels for his association with twenty-­one organizations considered Communist-­affiliated by the House Un-­American Activities Committee or other federal and state government bodies. Several of these organizations provided aid to Spanish Loyalists (Red Channels 1950, 155–­57; McBride 2006, 101–­4). He also answered, testily, when asked when he would release the film, “When I’m finished with it,” prompting Audrey Stainton (1988) to note that his phrasing draws attention to his deep attachment to the material: not when I finish it, but when I am finished with it; when I’ve toyed with it enough, the rest of you can have it. Welles’s personal affection for the project is also evident in the interview with Mauro Bonanni. Rosenbaum discusses Welles’s refusal to finish it and the tongue-­in-­cheek change of title in Discovering Orson Welles (2007, 50, 78, 279–­80, 298, 306–­7). The history of Welles’s Don Quixote is a fraught and labyrinthine subject. The version released by Jess Franco in 1992 with the title Don Quijote de Orson Welles has been rejected by just about everyone in a position to judge, particularly Rosenbaum (2007, 231), Bonanni (2015), and, ironically, Kodar herself (2006). The most valuable firsthand accounts of the decades of work Welles put into this labor of love are by Mauro Bonanni (2015), who worked with him on it, and Audrey Stainton (1988). Muller (2013), Riambau (2005), and Rosenbaum (2007, 296–­307) offer the best overviews of the material, the stages of its production, and how it might be reconstructed. At that time Welles was pioneering the essay film genre with F for Fake (1973). Similar hopes surround several of Welles’s unfinished projects, including another highly personal film, The Other Side of the Wind, which was finally edited by Bob Murawski and released in October 2018. As a project this experimental film, which concerns a older director (played by John Huston) who is making an erotic Antonioni-­style film while having innumerable conversations about filmmaking with a younger protégé filmmaker (Peter Bogdanovich), went through many of the same permutations as Welles’s Don Quixote: sporadic

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filming over a prolonged period, changes in concept as the film evolved in the director’s mind, and finally a version released decades later that offers, at best, an approximation of Welles’s intentions. As of this writing, The Other Side of the Wind appears to be a much more successful reconstruction than the lamentable Jess Franco–­Don Quixote debacle. Joseph McBride (2018), for example, wrote on Wellesnet, “The final result exceeds even my high expectations.” The release of The Other Side of the Wind was timed to coincide with a Netflix-­produced documentary about the making of the film, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, directed by Morgan Neville (2018), in which the similarities with the history of the Don Quixote project are quite apparent. 13. This paragraph summarizes my reading of Oja Kodar’s files on the negotiation surrounding Don Quixote, files she recently sold to the University of Michigan. It is hard not to conclude that at least on this occasion she put her need for ready cash first and the integrity of Welles’s film as an artistic product last. Of course Bonanni also profited from the footage he has under his care, as she repeatedly points out, referring always to the “six minutes” he sold to rai (Kodar 1990–­91, box 2). In “When Will—­and How Can—­We Finish Orson Welles’s Don Quixote?” Rosenbaum explains that Kodar, who is Croatian, needed money urgently in 1991 to protect relatives caught up in the war in the Balkans (2007, 306). On the dismal prospects for another attempt, Beatriz Welles (2015) recently wrote in an online chat hosted by Wellesnet, “Quijote? No, nobody is interested. no money! . . . There isn’t a soul in the world interested in spending money! The footage should be seen! It’s so so beautiful, but have no idea how this could happen. . . . Let’s talk about something else!!!” 14. These early scripts are not identical, as far as I can tell, with the “black book” that Mauro Bonanni says Suzanne Cloutier had. In Oja Kodar’s papers there is a copy of a contract to produce Don Quixote that Orson Welles made with Cloutier and Claude Giroux around 1980 (Kodar 1990–­91, box 2). It seems the plan at that point was to edit the existing footage and release it. This would explain why Cloutier had a script in her possession. Who knows where that is now? Yet another lost screenplay, from the 1970s, is the one Juan Cobos says Orson Welles gave him to translate when he was still hoping to bring Francisco Reiguera to Spain one last time and finish the film (Cobos and Riambau 2005, 87–­88). Cobos has published his Spanish translation as “Secuencias de Don Quixote de Orson Welles” (2005, 91–­119). Though valuable, QuixoNation  151

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

this material belongs to different conceptions of the film and lacks a coherent thread. Cobos admits he does not know how to organize the scenes. By way of Kafka’s parable on Sancho Panza, Agamben’s brief evocation of the scene from Welles’s Don Quixote has curiously gotten caught up in discussions of the intertextuality of Agamben-­Benjamin-­Kafka. Thus Weber brings in the concluding text from Profanations without even mentioning Welles (2006, 78–­80). Agamben, for his part, refers tangentially to Benjamin’s reading of Kafka’s parable of Sancho and Quixote in his discussion of the Angel of History in “Benjamin and the Demonic,” collected in Potentialities (1999, 154). The delicate topic of Humes’s mental illness is tactfully handled by his daughter Immy Humes in the documentary she made about her father’s life (2008a), as well as in a subsequent interview (2008b). In Finks Joel Whitney suggests that Doc’s paranoia was at least exacerbated, if not caused, by the distrust and betrayal brought on by the anti-­Communist fervor of the Cold War, including the fact that his friends were spying for the cia (2016, 120–­22, 220–­24, 250–­54). Among the Harold L. Humes papers now housed at the Morgan Library are dozens of reviews of The Underground City, most of them praising the book highly, some hinting that it would make an excellent film. Jean Ennis, director of publicity at Random House, sent them to Doc with a note assuring him that “The Underground City was more widely reviewed than any first novel within [her] memory at Random House.” There is also a personal letter from Noel Coward, who admired the characters and style and insisted, “If the book, or part of it, is ever made into a film, I absolutely insist on playing the Ambassador” (1950–­80, box 2). In 1961 there was a serious project to make a film of Men Die on location in Vieques, with Shirley Clarke to direct, and Jason Robards to star. By 1962, however, Humes was planning to direct it himself. A partial undated screenplay by Humes adapting Men Die has also been preserved (H. L. Humes 1950–­80, box 6). The single best source of information about Doc’s life is Immy Humes’s documentary film (2008a). Concerning the protest on April 9, 1961, in Washington Square, sometimes called “the Beatnik riot,” Drasin’s Sunday (1961) is a moving testimony. Doc is arrested during minute fifteen of the seventeen-­minute film. Asked by interviewer Scott MacDonald about “other people” he remembers from the heyday of the experimental film movement, P. Adams Sitney, the leading critic/theorist of U.S. avant-­garde cinema, gave a moving portrait of

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20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

Doc Humes’s “charismatic figure,” confirming his role as a leading member of the group circa 1960–­62 (Sitney 2005, 29). Jack Sargeant emphasizes the importance of these two films for Beat cinema in Naked Lens (2008, 18–­54, 70–­90). In practice the cabaret card functioned as a jazz equivalent of the Hollywood blacklist, and Humes’s opposition to it should be seen as part of the larger struggle for freedom of speech during the Cold War. Whitney considers the law “racist” and links Humes’s fight against it with his concern for racial equality (2016, 122–­23). His efforts succeeded only to the extent that the nypd’s control over the cards was revoked in 1962. Humes’s organizing is discussed in The Police Card Discord by Maxwell T. Cohen (1993), including a transcription of Humes and Lord Buckley’s precinct house interview. Under the title “Music Decriminalized” (2016), wnyc has posted the recorded testimony of labor leaders on behalf of musicians and other performers before city council in September 1967, when the provision of the cabaret law requiring individual performers to be licensed was repealed. See also Sara Ramshaw’s detailed and well-­documented article on law and improvisation (2010), which includes extended discussion of the cabaret card. A final provision of the Cabaret Law, prohibiting dancing in unlicensed venues, remained in effect until November 27, 2017, when Mayor Bill De Blasio signed the repeal (Aswad 2017). Letters from the cinematographer, Dan Drasin, and the lead actor, who went by the stage name Ojo de Vidrio, demonstrate their continued interest in completing the project as late as early 1962. Ojo de Vidrio, living in Mexico, wrote Humes that he had lined up several screenings there and publicity in local newspapers, if Doc could get him an edited version. Drasin wanted to edit the film, but needed $3,000, which was probably more than Doc could afford at the time (H. L. Humes 1950–­80, box 10). Though Immy Humes screened this version of Don Peyote for my class on the reception of Don Quixote on December 1, 2016, it had its official “world premiere” on June 9, 2019, at Madrid’s Cine Doré as part of the Filmadrid festival’s posthumous tribute to Jonas Mekas and the New American Cinema Group. I am grateful to Immy for allowing me to view the film as she has edited it, as well as the rushes themselves, and for showing the film at Brooklyn College in the context of my course. Immy Humes explained to me that her father used to say Don Peyote was “about homelessness.” Although he had an interest in literal homelessness (witness QuixoNation  153

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

the “paper house”), I believe that in Don Peyote Humes was referring to Heimatlosigkeit as a dimension of the human condition in Heidegger, Sartre, and other Existentialists (see Colonnello 1999). The “kingdom” that Dulles gave Khrushchev is Egypt. Dulles was widely blamed for the increased Soviet influence over Nasser as a result of the Suez Crisis (see Louis 1990). Doc Humes evidently shared Bertrand Russell’s critique of the superpowers, as he wrote an undated letter recommending the British philosopher for the role of acting secretary general of the United Nations (H. L. Humes 1950–­80, box 12). At one point while living in London and ostensibly working on his third novel, Humes also wrote a treatment for a film based on the same quasi-­ autobiographical character, referred to there as Dorcy (rather than Dorsey) Slade. The film sounds quite a bit like Dr. Strangelove: “a sort of science fiction satire with a happy ending” whose hero is a physicist (H. L. Humes 1950–­80, box 12). Humes wrote a funding proposal as well and seems to have been seriously interested, at one point, in skipping the novel and going straight to the film “adaptation” instead. In the same period, roughly 1962–­65, he was floating ideas for television talk shows on both sides of the Atlantic (Humes 1950–­80, box 13). Clearly, his ambitions at this point were moving him beyond literature and into film and television. Doc traces his subsequent career as activist-­cum-­physical-­therapist-­cum-­ alternative-­professor. Paul Auster tells of his friendship with Humes during his student years in Hand to Mouth (1997, 49–­59). Interesting in this respect is the fact that in 1964, immediately before beginning to film his Quixote, Baillie, apparently inspired by The Flower Thief, tried to get funding to make a satirical road film starring Taylor Mead, to be titled “If There’s Sometime There’s Forever; or The White People’s Last Ball.” He wrote Mead concerning his availability, and in seeking the $15,000–­$18,000 he would need, he wrote to none other than Stanley Kubrick, whose Dr. Strangelove had just premiered. When the project failed to materialize, he picked up his camera and went on the road by himself to film Quixote instead (Baillie 1964). Over the years many people have been connected with one or another attempt at filming Salt’s Quixote. Notices concerning the unfinished 1971 production can be found at ucla in the Waldo Salt Papers, box 80, folder 14. Richard Burton’s connection to the project through producer A. Ronald Lubin dates

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back to 1966, as attested in Burton 2012, 126. On December 14, 1970, Peter Noble declared in the Hollywood Reporter that filming was to begin in Almeria in April 1971, directed by Peter Yates, who perhaps not entirely coincidentally did eventually direct an entertaining but generally mediocre adaptation of Don Quixote in 2000 for Hallmark, starring John Lithgow. Hollywood agent Jon Levin revived the screenplay in the 1990s and managed to interest Quincy Jones in the project, as well as Steven Haft. Susan Shilliday produced a revised version of the screenplay, updated for the nineties but very respectful of Salt’s original. She explained to me that the original plan, in 1994, was for Sean Connery to play Don Quixote (pers. comm., February 2016). But by the time Fred Schepisi was brought on to direct, the stars were Cleese and Williams. Jon Levin told me that they reached the point of having a read-­through, and that they were hilarious together (pers. comm., June 2016). Schepisi brought playwright John Guare on to do further rewrites, but unlike Shilliday’s, his version aggressively reconceives Salt’s project, restoring scenes cut from the original novel and seriously undermining the coherence of the whole. Unfortunately, this led to the screenplay’s being judged too “episodic.” Phoenix Pictures chose to pull the plug for that reason, as Schepisi explained to Cynthia Fuchs (2001). After that setback Haft sent two versions of the screenplay to Robert Altman to try to interest him, but the director of M*A*S*H* and Nashville did not choose to take it on (Robert Altman Papers, University of Michigan, box 541). Elisabeth Robinson, connected with the Schepisi project as a producer, fictionalized the experience in her entertaining 2004 epistolary novel, The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters. 30. The significance of Salt and Schlesinger’s film for the New Hollywood is emphasized by Peter Biskind in “Midnight Revolution” (2010). Salt discusses his association with Schlesinger in the 1981 Borowsky Lecture for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, transcribed in the Waldo Salt Papers, box 83, folder 6. In the course of that lecture, he explains that the sample of his work John Schlesinger read that prompted him to offer Salt the job of fixing the script was not from Don Quixote itself but rather from his next screenplay, The Artful Dodger, an original satirical script about a draft dodger who feigns madness to avoid going to Vietnam. Jennifer Salt told me that this character, Billy Shine, was based on a real person, James (“Jimmy”) Swan. The picaresque portrayal of Shine in the unpublished, unfilmed screenplay owes a good deal to Salt’s prolonged contact with Don Quixote, Sancho QuixoNation  155

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

Panza, and Ginés de Pasamonte during the preceding two years (Waldo Salt Papers, box 59, folder 2). Salt’s life is movingly presented in Corr and Hillmann’s documentary (1990). I have researched details of this account in his papers at the Charles E. Young Library at ucla. I am grateful to Jennifer Salt for talking to me about her father and allowing me to look through his notebooks and artwork. Robert Hillman has also generously discussed his impressions of Waldo with me. This talent cannot be fully appreciated only by reading the final version of Salt’s justly famed Midnight Cowboy screenplay. The multiple versions and notes for Midnight Cowboy conserved among his papers at ucla (Salt 1967–­68) attest to the parallels between the process he employed on that film and his previous adaptation project, Don Quixote. Another valuable source of insight into Salt’s role as a collaborator in the filming process is the running commentary on Midnight Cowboy recorded by John Schlesinger and Jerome Hellman (1991) for the Criterion Laserdisc release, in which Salt’s constant presence on set is amply attested. Interestingly, Salt used precisely this technique of the fragmentary flashback to incorporate the scenes of Crazy Annie’s rape in Midnight Cowboy, a traumatic experience motivating Joe Buck’s bizarre choice of mission, becoming a gigolo to save the sex-­starved maidens and widows of New York City. Biskind discusses the importance of this innovative technique for the film’s success and influence in “Midnight Revolution” (2010). This reference is evidenced in various letters and writings by Salt and fellow blacklistees concerning the huac hearings (Salt 1936–­87, box 77). Indeed, the comparison seemed so obvious to Ceplair and Englund that they titled their study of the blacklist The Inquisition in Hollywood (1983) with no further explanation. The role of the French New Wave in the New Hollywood sensibility is approached from very different perspectives by Biskind (1998) and Ray (1985, 261–­95). For a more detailed account of Salt’s screenplay in relation to his life and work, before and after the blacklist, with reproductions of drawings from his notebooks, see Childers 2017. I study the Wasserman-­Auden case in detail in “A Most Timely Message for This Tired and Cynical World” (forthcoming).

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38. This same year, 1965, saw Balanchine’s equally romantic and even more otherworldly Quixote ballet debut in New York, with a score composed by Nicolas Nabokov (Farrell 1990, 107–­27). From 1951 to 1967, Nabokov, a cousin of the famous novelist, was the general secretary of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a cia front that funded propaganda efforts aimed at enhancing the image of the United States among the non-­Communist left in Europe. Nabokov is a leading figure in Saunders’s book The Cultural Cold War (1999). In fact his biographer, Vincent Giroud, says it was Nabokov’s cia handler, Michael Josselson, who encouraged him to finish his Don Quixote score (2015, 359–­60). Perhaps this was to counter the popularity of the Russian Minkus-­Petipa ballet, which had only recently begun to be performed in its entirety outside the Soviet Union. 39. Gilliam’s history with this project dates back two decades, to the ill-­fated production starring Jean Rochefort and Johnny Depp, documented in Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s 2002 film Lost in La Mancha. The finished film is dedicated to Rochefort and to John Hurt, two late actors each slated to play Don Quixote at some point. Robert Duvall was also rumored to be in line for the role at one time, as was Michael Palin, but in the end it was played by Jonathan Pryce. After Depp dropped out, Ewan McGregor was to play Toby (the modern ad executive who serves as Quixote’s sidekick), but the role finally went to Adam Driver. The film had its world premiere at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival (Gilliam 2018a). Works Cited

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—, dir. 1965–­67. Quixote. Experimental film. San Francisco: Canyon Cinema. Biskind, Peter. 1998. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. New York: Simon & Schuster. —. 2010. “Midnight Revolution.” Vanity Fair, April 8. http://​www​.vanityfair​ .com​/hollywood​/2010​/04​/midnight​-revolution​-200503. Bonanni, Mauro. 2015. “Interview with ‘Don Quixote’ editor Mauro Bonanni.” Aniballi, Alessandro. Wellesnet July 21. http://​www​.wellesnet​.com​/interview​ -with​-don​-quixote​-editor​-mauro​-bonanni/. Buckley, Lord. 1951. His Royal Hipness. Sound recording. Los Angeles: Elektra Records. Burningham, Bruce. 2008. Tilting Cervantes: Baroque Reflections on Postmodern Culture. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Burton, Richard. 2012. The Richard Burton Diaries. Edited by Chris Williams. New Haven ct: Yale University Press. Cabañas Bravo, Miguel. 2014. “Don Quijote entre los artistas del exilio.” eHumanista/ Cervantes 3:419-­49. Cascardi, Anthony J. 1997. Ideologies of History in the Spanish Golden Age. University Park pa: Pennsylvania State University Press. Casini, Silvia. 2014. “Engaging Hand to Hand with the Moving Image: Serra, Viola and Grandrieux’s Radical Gestures.” In Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image, edited by Henrik Gustafsson and Asbjorn Gronstad, 139–­60. New York: Bloomsbury. Castillo, David R. 2012. “Monumental Landscapes in the Society of the Spectacle: From Fuenteovejuna to New York.” In Spectatorship and Topophilia: Reading Early Modern and Postmodern Hispanic Cultures, edited by David R. Castillo and Bradley Nelson, Hispanic Issues 38, 3–­18. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Ceplair, Larry, and Steven Englund. 1983. The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–­1960. Garden City ny: Doubleday. Cervantes, Miguel de. 1978. El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Edited by Luis Murillo. 2 vols. Madrid: Castalia. Childers, William. 2017. “Surviving the Hollywood Blacklist: Waldo Salt’s Adaptation of Don Quixote.” In Don Quixote: The Re-­accentuation of the World’s Greatest Literary Hero, edited by Slav N. Gratchev and Howard Mancing, 153–­80. Lewisburg pa: Bucknell University Press. —. 2019. “Destierro del teatro, invención de la novela: La ambientación de la revancha cervantina en territorios de Órdenes Militares.” In En el país de 158 Childers

Cervantes, estudios de recepción e interpretación, edited by Esther Bautista Naranjo, Francisco Javier Escudero, and Jorge Jiménez, 195–211. Madrid: Visor Libros. —. Forthcoming. “‘A Most Timely Message for This Tired and Cynical World’: Man of La Mancha (1965) as the Depoliticization of Counterculture Quixotism.” In Tunes, tv, and Tweets: Teaching Early Modern Spanish Literature through Popular Culture, edited by Mindy Badía and Bonnie Gasior. Cobos, Juan, and Esteve Riambau. 2005. Don Quijote: Páginas del guión cinematográfico; Artículos. 2nd ed. Madrid: Publicaciones de la Asociación de Directores de Escena de España. Cohen, Maxwell T. 1993. The Police Card Discord. New Brunswick nj: Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers, the State University; Metuchen nj: Scarecrow Press. Cohen, Walter. 1985. Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain. Ithaca ny: Cornell University Press. Colonnello, Pio. 1999. “Homelessness as Heimatlosigkeit?” In The Ethics of Homelessness: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by G. John M. Abbarno, 41–­54. Atlanta: Rodopi. Corr, Eugene, and Robert Hillmann. 1990. Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter’s Journey. Documentary film. pbs, American Masters. Diez Borque, José María. 1978. Sociedad y teatro en la España de Lope de Vega. Barcelona: Antoni Bosch. Doherty, Thomas. 1999. Pre-­code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–­1934. New York: Columbia University Press. Drasin, Dan, dir. 1961. Sunday. Independent documentary short. https://​www​ .youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=​gEvKe2WLumI. Egido, Aurora. 2008. “El bivio humano y la discreta elección de don Quijote en sus primeras salidas.” Cervantes 27, no. 1:31–­70. Estrin, Mark W., ed. 2002. Orson Welles: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Farrell, Susan. 1990. Holding on to the Air: An Autobiography. New York: Summit. Fernández, James D. 2016. “Facing Fascism in the Archives.” Paper presented at “Brooklyn at War: Spain 1936–­1939; A Hidden Memory,” Brooklyn College, April 14. Franco, Jesús, ed. 1992. Don Quijote de Orson Welles. Reconstruction of incomplete film by Orson Welles. Produced by Patxi Irigoyen. Madrid: El Silencio. Fulton, Keith, and Louis Pepe, dirs. 2002. Lost in La Mancha. Quixote Films/ Low Key Pictures. QuixoNation  159

Genus, Karl, dir. 1959. I, Don Quixote. Featuring Lee J. Cobb and Eli Wallach. Teleplay by Dale Wasserman. The DuPont Show of the Month, November 9. 88 min. Gilliam, Terry. 2018a. Interview with Agence France-­Presse. The Nation, March 20. —, dir. 2018b. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Featuring Richard Pryce and Adam Driver. Screenplay by Terry Gilliam and Tony Grisoni. Alacran Pictures. Ginsberg, Allen. 1956. Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights. Giroud, Vincent. 2015. Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harbord, Janet. 2016. Ex-­centric Cinema: Giorgio Agamben and Film Archaeology. New York: Bloomsbury. Heylin, Clinton. 2005. Despite the System: Orson Welles versus the Hollywood Studios. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. Hopper, Hedda. 1956. Looking at Hollywood for January 3–­4. Chicago Daily Tribune, part 2, January 4, 4. Humes, Harold L. 1950–­80. Harold L. Humes Papers. Morgan Library, New York City. —. 1958. The Underground City. New York: Random House. —. 1959. Men Die. New York: Random House. —. 1960. “Don Peyote.” Unfinished film project. Featuring F. Cavitt Sharp (Ojo de Vidrio) and Roscoe Lee Brown. Photographed by Daniel Drasin. Humes, Immy, dir. 2008a. Doc. Documentary film. Independent Lens. —. 2008b. “Mastering Archival Footage: How to Find It, When to Use It.” Interview by Mike Hofman. Independent (online magazine), January 22. http://​ independent-​ magazine.​ org/​ 2008/​ 01/​ mastering​-archival​-footage​-how​-find​ -it​-when​-use​-it/. Jowett, Garth. 1996. “‘A Significant Medium for the Communication of Ideas’: The Miracle Decision and the Decline of Motion Picture Censorship, 1952–­1968.” In Movie Censorship and American Culture, edited by Francis G. Couvares, 258–­76. Washington dc: Smithsonian Institution. Kodar, Oja. 1990–­91. Oja Kodar Papers. University of Michigan, boxes 2 and 33. —. 2006. “Oja Kodar on Orson Welles’ Don Quixote.” Wellsnet, June 1. http://​ www​.wellesnet​.com​/oja​-kodar​-on​-orson​-welles​-don​-quixote/. Liska, Vivian. 2017. German-­Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Louis, William Roger. 1990. “Dulles, Suez, and the British.” In John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War, edited by Richard H. Immerman, 133–­58. Princeton nj: Princeton University Press. 160 Childers

Lumet, Sidney, dir. 1952. Don Quixote. Featuring Boris Karloff and Grace Kelly. Adapted by Alvin Sapinsley. cbs Television Workshop, January 13. 30 mins. Marcuse, Herbert. 1981. “On The Aesthetic Dimension: A Conversation with Herbert Marcuse.” Interview with Larry Hartwick. Contemporary Literature 22:417–­24. Reprinted in Art and Liberation: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, edited by Douglas Kellner, 4:218–­24. New York: Routledge, 2007. McBride, Joseph. 2006. What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. —. 2018. “‘The Other Side of the Wind’ Exceeds Even My High Expectations.” Wellesnet, September 4. http://​www​.wellesnet​.com​/joseph​-mcbride​-other​ -side​-wind​-exceeds/. Mekas, Jonas. 1962. “The Film-­Maker’s Cooperative: A Brief History.” Includes “The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group.” http://​film​ -makerscoop​.com ​/about​/history. Muller, Adalberto. 2013. “O Don Quixote de Orson Welles: História e recontrução.” Rebeca: Revista brasileira de estudios de cinema e audiovisual 2:111–­38. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3:6-­18. Murray, Alex. 2010. Giorgio Agamben. New York: Routledge. “Music Decriminalized: The End of ‘Cabaret Cards.’” 2016. wnyc, January 28. http://​www​.wnyc​.org​/story​/cabaret​-cards​-repealed/. Includes recording of the proceedings when the cabaret card was repealed, with written commentary by Ben Houtman. Nelson, Cary. 2001. Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left. New York: Routledge. Neville, Morgan. 2018. They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. Documentary film. Tremolo Productions. Noble, Peter. 1970. “London.” Hollywood Reporter, December 14, 4. Powell, Richard. 1966. Don Quixote U.S.A. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Ramshaw, Sara. 2010. “The Creative Life of Law: Improvisation, between Tradition and Suspicion.” Critical Studies in Improvisation 6. http://w ​ ww.​ criticalimprov​ .com​/article​/view​/1084​/1733. Ray, Robert B. 1985. A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–­1980. Princeton nj: Princeton University Press. Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. 1950. New York: Counterattack. QuixoNation  161

Riambau, Esteve. 2005. “Don Quixote: The Adventures and Misadventures of an Essay on Spain.” In The Unknown Orson Welles, edited by Stefan Drössler, 71–­77. Munich: Filmarchiv. Rikhoff, Jean. 1961. The “Quixote” Anthology. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Robinson, Elisabeth. 2004. The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters. Boston: Little Brown. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. 2001. “Unseen Orson Welles.” Includes movie theater sequence. https://​vimeo​.com​/347632. —. 2002. Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. —. 2007. Discovering Orson Welles. Berkeley: University of California Press. Russell, Bertrand. (1959) 2001. Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare. New York: Routledge. Salt, Waldo. 1936–­87. Waldo Salt Papers, 127 boxes, University of California, Los Angeles. —. 1965–­70. “Don Quixote.” Unfilmed screenplay in six distinct versions. Waldo Salt Papers, boxes 23, 28, and 29, University of California, Los Angeles. —. 1967–­68. Midnight Cowboy. Screenplay. Waldo Salt Papers, boxes 1–­3, University of California, Los Angeles. Sargeant, Jack. 2008. Naked Lens: Beat Cinema. Berkeley ca: Soft Skull. Saunders, Frances Stoner. 1999. The Cultural Cold War. New York: New Press. Published in the United Kingdom as Who Paid the Piper? (London: Granta, 1999). Schepisi, Fred. 2001. Interview with Cynthia Fuchs. Pop Matters, December 7. http://​www​.popmatters​.com​/feature​/schepisi​-fred/. Schlesinger, John, dir. 1968. Midnight Cowboy. Screenplay by Waldo Salt. Featuring Jon Voigt and Dustin Hoffman. mgm. Schlesinger, John, and Jerome Hellman. 1991. Audio commentary on Midnight Cowboy. Criterion Laserdisc. Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2011. New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images. London: Continuum. Sitney, P. Adams. 2005. Interview with Scott MacDonald. In A Critical Cinema 4: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, edited by Scott MacDonald, 16–­35. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stainton, Audrey. 1988. “The Inside Story of the Film Orson Welles called ‘Il Mio Bambino.’” Sight and Sound, Autumn. Available on Wellesnet. http://​www​ .wellesnet​.com​/don​-quixote​-orson​-welles​-secret/. 162 Childers

Truffaut, François. 1978. Foreword to Orson Welles: A Critical View by André Bazin. Translated by Jonathan Rosenbaum, 1–27. New York: Harper & Row. Vaughn, Stephen. 1996. “Political Censorship during the Cold War: The Hollywood Ten.” In Movie Censorship and American Culture, edited by Francis G. Couvares, 237–­57. Washington dc: Smithsonian Institution. Wasserman, Dale. 2003. The Impossible Musical: The “Man of La Mancha” Story. New York: Applause. Wasserman, Dale, Mitchell Leigh, and Joe Darion. 1966. Man of La Mancha. New York: Random House. Weber, Samuel. 2006. “Going Along for the Ride: Violence and Gesture; Agamben Reading Benjamin Reading Kafka Reading Cervantes.” Germanic Review 81, no. 1:65–­83. Welles, Beatriz. 2015. “Online Chat Transcript” prepared by Ray Kelly. July 9. Wellesnet. http://w ​ ww.​ wellesnet.​ com/​ beatrice-​ welles​-online​-chat​-transcript/. Welles, Orson. 1957a. “Don Quixote.” Unpublished, incomplete screenplay. Margaret Wallace Scripts, box 17, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. —. 1957b. “Touch of Evil: Notes from Director Orson Welles.” Fifty-­eight-­page memo dated December 5. Published by Universal with Fiftieth Anniversary Edition of Touch of Evil. Los Angeles: Universal, 2008. —. 1957–­85. “Don Quixote.” Unfinished film, 1955–­85. Some footage available online in Rosenbaum 2001 or included in Franco 1992. —. 1973. F for Fake. Docudrama. Les Films de l’Astrophore. —. 2018. The Other Side of the Wind. Featuring John Huston, Oja Kodar, and Peter Bogdanovich. Royal Road Entertainment. Whitfield, Stephen J. 1991. The Culture of the Cold War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Whitney, Joel. 2016. Finks: How the cia Tricked the World’s Best Writers. New York: or Books. Yarbro-­Bejarano, Yvonne. 1994. Feminism and the Honor Plays of Lope de Vega. West Lafayette in: Purdue University Press. Yates, Peter, dir. 2000. Don Quixote. Featuring John Lithgow and Bob Hoskins. Hallmark.

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P ART 3 Cervantes in Wider Cultural Contexts

chapter 7

Don Quixote and the American Culinary Arts Carolyn A. Nadeau

The most recent generation of chefs in America is shifting the culinary landscape to include Spanish cuisine. In part this trend is due to the molecular gastronomy revolution of the nineties that began in Cataluña under the creative leadership of Ferran Adrià. But credit also lies with one of Spain’s cultural icons whose presence has enhanced Spanish restaurants in the United States for the past century: Don Quixote of La Mancha. Throughout the twentieth century, the popularity of the Spanish restaurant in the United States was intrinsically tied to Don Quixote; his presence lent a certain authenticity to the establishment, perhaps even a safe comfort zone that put patrons at ease. Into the twenty-­first century, Spanish cuisine has become further entrenched in the American culinary scene, and although less visually connected to Don Quixote, Cervantes’s masterpiece still shares an intimate space with chefs and food critics alike who are renovating Spanish cuisine in America. This chapter explores the connection between Cervantes’s most famous novel and the American culinary arts by first bringing to light the presence of food in Don Quixote and then considering the effect of both the novel and Spanish cuisine on American dining and culinary sensibility. The Presence of Food in Don Quixote and Other Works of Cervantes

Writers use food imagery to define characters and regions, lend verisimilitude to the text, transform relationships, and offer a fixed social identity 167

to readers. These images create a culinary sense of materiality with which readers can identify, and there is no better example than Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote de la Mancha in which the essence of the central character is defined by the food he eats in the second sentence of the novel.1 “Una olla de algo más vaca que carnero, salpicón las más noches, duelos y quebrantos los sábados, lantejas los viernes, algún palomino de añadidura los domingos, consumían las tres partes de su hacienda” (1:69–­70).2 These dishes regularly consumed by the humble hidalgo give readers insight both into who Don Quixote is and into the social values of Castile in the early modern period (see figure 4). Cervantes summarizes the hidalgo’s dietary habits as those consisting of one-­pot meals and salads and guided by traditions associated with abstinence and feasting. This single phrase, together with the works of other early modern writers, confirms the relationship between food and social inclusion and exclusion. It distinguishes midday meals from those taken at night. It accentuates Spain’s history of multiple faiths that, although it ended in the expulsion of Jews and Muslims, demonstrates the vestiges of both in Spain’s culinary heritage. Through this single phrase, Cervantes alludes to food’s primacy in the early modern understanding of health and diet and also references the role of food in celebrations, even those as simple as a Sunday dinner. Undoubtedly, the early modern period is one of the most significant transformative moments for foodstuffs and food preparation in Spain (as in other parts of Europe) due to Europe’s contact with the New World. But as seen in the meals served in Alonso Quijano’s home, the basic food selections of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and how they were prepared come from long-­established culinary traditions that play a fundamental role in Spain’s regional, national, and international gastronomy today. Cervantes’s introductory sentence, which sets the stage for understanding the novel’s hero, is arguably the most discussed phrase Fig. 4. The Housekeeper Serves Alonso Quijano His Meal by Daniel-­Nicolas Chodowiecki, illustrator, Berlin, 1771. Image courtesy of the Eduardo Urbina Cervantes Collection, Texas a&m University Libraries.

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of food imagery in the early modern period. But the food images do not stop there. In part 1 Don Quixote’s first sally culminates at the inn where two “ladies” feed him abadejo (dried salted cod) and wine before the lord of the castle or innkeeper knights him (see figure 5). When he sallies forth with Sancho, they dine under the open sky with simple pleasures of wine, cheese, and bread; later they share a meat stew and roasted acorns with goat herders (1:153–­55). Don Quixote’s love interest, Dulcinea, is most colorfully described as “la mejor mano para salar puercos” (1:143). In fact when the narrator serendipitously finds the rest of the manuscript of the Historia de don Quijote de la Mancha escrita por Cide Hamete Benengeli, the translator humbly requests his payment in food staples: “dos arrobas de pasas y dos fanegas de trigo” (1:143). Of course, the absence of food is also relevant to Don Quixote’s story as he prides himself on abstaining from food as all good knights do: “Es honra de los caballeros andantes no comer en un mes, y, ya que coman, sea de aquello que hallaren más a mano. . . . Su más ordinaria comida sería de viandas rústicas, tales como las que tú ahora me ofreces” (1:153). But these restrictions do not prohibit him from fantasizing about food. Upon discovering that Sancho’s packs are missing, Don Quixote responds by imagining other tasty food options: “Con todo eso . . . tomara yo ahora más aína, un cuartal de pan o una hogaza y dos cabezas de sardinas arenques, que cuantas yerbas describe Dioscórides” (1:226). Upon returning to Don Quixote’s village, the travelers meet a goat herder with whom they share “lomos de un conejo fiambre” (1:589). In this quiet meal that prefaces the last intercalated tale of part 1, the travelers also feast on empanada (1:590), and the goat herder cordially invites all back to his hut for fresh milk, cheese, and “otras varias y sazonadas frutas, no menos a la vista que al gusto agradables” (1:596). Thus in part 1 of the novel, food is seen as part of life’s simple pleasures: stews, salted meats and fish, cheese, bread, and wine. In part 2 food Fig. 5. Eating abadejo at the Inn by Antoine Clouzier, engraver, Paris, 1700. Image courtesy of the Eduardo Urbina Cervantes Collection, Texas a&m University Libraries.

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Fig. 6. Sancho Enjoying the Feast at the Wedding of Camacho by Albert, illustrator. Paris: Louis-­Janet, 1862. Image courtesy of the Eduardo Urbina Cervantes Collection, Texas a&m University Libraries.

takes on an even greater role. Staples of a rustic diet are replaced by more sophisticated meals shared at tables of wealthy villagers (Camacho) or served to a governor (Barataria). Even the roadside meals that Sancho spontaneously shares with others are more festive and elaborate than those in part 1 (see figure 6). Structurally, food events reflect decisive moments in the text. In the early chapters, they build positive interactions with the many characters whom Don Quixote and Sancho meet along the way. The turning point for food representation and, I would argue, the shift in Don Quixote’s quest occurs as a result of his stay at the ducal palace. During these central chapters with the Duke and Duchess, the absence of food; its negative portrayal via insults, contempt, and destructive moments; and the satirization of food’s role in health and social status all illustrate the cruel ridicule that the two protagonists endure as guests of the Duke and Duchess. Once Don Quixote and Sancho are free from their control, positive connotations of food images are restored and begin to focus on critiques of and reflections on food moments rather than on the moments themselves. This is certainly the case when Don Quixote becomes disillusioned with his journey, when Sancho and the innkeeper discuss food, and when diners on the road and in Barcelona ask Sancho to defend himself against the claim of gluttony and debauchery that the false sequel puts forth. Here food images support Cervantes’s critique of Avellaneda’s false version. Finally, when they are at home once again, food motifs and metaphors return to their most basic state as Sancho reintegrates into his family with an alimentary proverb and Don Quixote’s niece continues to eat as she grieves her uncle’s death.3 The Impact of Food from the Americas in the Early Modern Period

Returning once again to Alonso Quijano’s fare, and specifically to what he eats for dinner, salpicón, we can trace the journey of established Old World foodstuffs to revolutionary changes within Spanish cuisine provoked by culinary contact points with the New World and from there to how Spain is making its mark on American gastronomy. With the possible exception of refrigeration and industrial farming of the twentieth Don Quixote and the Culinary Arts  173

century, there is no greater global food shift than that which took place in the early modern period. As New World travelers returned to Spain, we witness the early stages of transculturation through food that laid the groundwork for revolutionizing Spanish cuisine. Mary Louis Pratt coined the term “contact zones” to identify those “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (1992, 4). Columbus and later Cortés and other explorers returned to Spain with food products that established culinary contact zones between the New and the Old Worlds and transformed regional and national cuisines around the globe. Perhaps the best-­known of these are tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and cocoa.4 Although these products and their uniquely Spanish culinary treats—­gazpacho andaluz, tortilla española, pimientos de Padrón, and the delightful chocolate con churros—­would take decades, if not centuries, to become established within the Spanish gastronomic system, we find the first references to them in multiple early modern discourses. Research on the 1659 registry of the House of Aguilar in Montilla (descendants of Fernando González de Córdoba, “el gran capitán,” whom Cervantes mentions in Don Quixote) indicates that “pollos con tomates” and “cazuela de tomates con huevos duros” were eaten for lunch (Garrido Aranda 1999, 207).5 The Franciscan Juan Altamiras penned Nuevo arte de cocina (1745?) with specific instructions for feeding the poor and included more than a dozen recipes for stews, organ meats, poultry, fish, eggs, rice, and vegetables that have tomatoes among their ingredients. In his recipe “Abadejo con tomate,” he highlights the importance of the tomato: “Freirás cebolla, y tomates con abundancia; compondrás las raciones [de abadejo] en una vasija ancha, cubre la primera superficie de ella con las raciones, sobre que echarás la cebolla, y tomate, perejil, y pimienta, ajos machacados . . . este no necesita de otra especie, por cuanto, suple el tomate; es así muy gustoso y cómo conservarás los tomates todo el año, verás más adelante” (2000, 87). This could very well be the same abadejo that Doña Molinera and Doña Tolosa serve the knight on the eve when he is granted knighthood. Peppers, while not appearing in Don Quixote, are fully established on the Iberian Peninsula at the beginning of the seventeenth century. They 174 Nadeau

appear in several novels, poems, and plays as seen in Cervantes’s own short story, “Rinconete y Cortadillo,” where Monipodio and his gang enjoy a basket of stolen food that includes “alcaparrones ahogados en pimientos” (1985, 1:252).6 The potato, or solanum tuberosum, is more difficult to track in the early modern period as there exists a linguistic confusion with the sweet potato, Ipomoea batatas.7 Not until the eighteenth-­century do we begin to see more clearly evidence of both the sweet potato and the potato in Spanish cookbooks. Finally, cocoa beans and chocolate track earlier than the other New World foodstuffs and become popular among the Spanish aristocracy and ecclesiastics from their arrival in the mid-­sixteenth century. Spanish Food’s Effect on American Taste and Culinary Sensibility

When we fast forward to the twenty-­first century and cross the Atlantic once again, we find in the United States today trendy Spanish restaurants punctuating the urban landscape from New York to Los Angeles. In fact, of all cities with a population of over four hundred thousand, only three of forty-­six—­ Memphis, Oklahoma City, and Tulsa—­do not boast a Spanish restaurant or a tapa bar.8 In the last decade, locales promising authentic Spanish tapas have sprouted up across the country in smaller urban centers such as Barsa in Charleston, South Carolina, Reality Bites in Bloomington, Illinois, and Leonardo’s in Chico, California. Essentially, three main currents define Spanish cuisine in the United States today: the authentic Spanish restaurant, the trendy tapa bar, and the high gastronomy experience. Although Spanish restaurants in the United States most certainly existed before the twentieth century, the one that claims to be the oldest today is Columbia in Tampa, Florida, established in 1905 (see figure 7). The Hernandez and Gonzmart families are fourth-­generation owners of a now 1,700-­seat establishment with nightly flamenco and jazz performances. Located in a historic Cuban American neighborhood, the restaurant, not surprisingly, serves a hybrid mix of Spanish and Cuban food. Next to the variety of paellas—­valenciana, campesina, and marinera—­one finds on the menu ropa vieja, roast pork a la cubana, or unique Florida specialties Don Quixote and the Culinary Arts  175

Fig. 7. The “Don Quixote” dining room at Columbia restaurant, Tampa, Florida, December 2015. Photo by Carolyn A. Nadeau.

like shrimp criollo. Among the desserts the owners of Columbia describe their flan as the best: “We think our Flan is the best we have ever tasted. . . . The recipe dates back to 1935 when the Columbia opened Tampa’s first ‘Conditioned Air’ dining room, the Don Quixote. Our grandmother and great grand-­mother, Carmen Hernandez, helped the Columbia gain national fame with her great recipes, especially her Flan. Spanish caramel egg custard, prepared the old-­fashioned way, using only the best natural ingredients” (“Flan” 2015). What is telling about this description is the inclusion of the Don Quixote room, which both advertises the technological advancements of the restaurant and lends an air of Old World authenticity to the dessert.9 Another long-­standing “Spanish” restaurant is El Cholo, Spanish Cafe in Los Angeles. Operating since 1923, this establishment serves primarily Mexican fare that, like the offerings at Columbia, reflects its demographic 176 Nadeau

surroundings. El cholo, meaning a person of both European and Amerindian heritage, underscores the hybridity of two radically different cuisines, but when one explores the menu, it quickly becomes clear that the only connection to Spanish cuisine is the actual word, Spanish, in the name. In fact by calling El Cholo a Spanish café, the establishment promotes the fundamental misunderstanding that Spanish food is synonymous with Mexican food, or on other occasions and in different venues, Caribbean or Latin American food.10 A few years before El Cholo opened, the Los Angeles Times published the third volume in its series of cookbooks, Los Angeles Times Cook Book Number Three, which combined Spanish, Mexican, and Californian recipes, often conflating the three. In the introduction the editor focuses on those recipes identified as Spanish: “With pardonable pride, attention is called to the chapter on Spanish dishes, nearly two hundred of which have been contributed by the best cooks of the great Southwest, many of them members of the families of the Dons whose hospitality was notable and from whose kitchen there issued in the past, and still issue, savory dishes of an excellence that has tickled the palates of epicures for ages and which have lost none of their charm for old residents and for newcomers to this land” (1911, 2). While some of the recipes, “Cream, Spanish,” “Fritter puffs, Spanish,” and “Toast, Spanish,” do resemble flan, buñuelos, and torrijas respectively, many of the recipes use “Spanish” in their titles but are clearly Mexican, for example, “Corn cakes, Spanish,” and “Tamales, Spanish.” When I interviewed Carlos Rivero, the owner and chef of Don Quixote in Valparaiso, Indiana, he reflected on the first twenty years in business, when customers would regularly enter his restaurant and express confusion when they realized that he didn’t serve burritos, tamales, and margaritas (author’s interview, March 12, 2013). Within the last decade, this misconception has begun to change as many diners now acknowledge that Mexican and Spanish cuisines are actually very different. But a walk through the Detroit airport, where Diego’s Mexican Cantina displays a statue of a pensive Don Quixote wearing his helmet of Mambrino (see figure 8), reminds us that Spanish food is still intimately connected to Don Quixote and the Culinary Arts  177

Mexican food (and I would also argue to Caribbean or more generally Latin American food) in the minds and stomachs of many Americans. Restaurants that re-­create an authentic Spanish experience typically prepare a wide variety of tapas found in any reputable bar in Spain. Menus carry expected favorites—­tortilla española, croquetas, pulpo a la Gallega, pincho moruno, champiñones al ajillo, cheeses, and olives—­and also specialize in paellas. Chefs pride themselves on the simple flavors of their dishes, and restaurant owners offer a diverse selection of Spanish wines. Among these “authentic Spanish restaurants” are Valparaiso’s Don Quixote, Chicago’s Café Ibérico, and Boston’s Taberna de Haro. Carlos Rivero (chef and host) and Elena Jambrina (assistant chef and business manager) run the Don Quixote restaurant in Valparaiso, Indiana. Carlos’s history mirrors that of many Spanish immigrants. His family left its native Puentearias, Galicia, for Madrid in the economic boom of the 1960s. There he worked in a successful family restaurant, Casa Rivero, and probably would have stayed had it not been for an American student with whom he fell in love. Together they moved to the United States, and after Franco’s death they were able to transfer funds out of Spain and fulfill Carlos’s dream of opening his own restaurant. Carlos knew that it was a high-­risk decision given its location and that Valparaiso had not fully recovered from the economic recession of the early eighties, but he said that he chose the name because “only Don Quixote would do something like this” (see figure 9). Carlos and Elena are both aware of how their restaurant has enhanced Valparaiso’s dining options over the past thirty years. They were the first to open a sidewalk café; they sponsor regular events like a St. James Wine tasting, a wild game dinner buffet, and a week-­long flamenco fiesta; and they regularly host student events for local universities and high schools. After thirty years, Carlos reflects easily on his business venture and states, “It is the most rewarding thing I have ever done. It has made coming to work, not a job, but a passion.” Like Carlos the owner of Chicago’s Café Ibérico, José Lagoa, hails from Galicia, has spent his entire life in the restaurant industry, and came to the United States in the mid-­seventies for family reasons. He, too, took 178 Nadeau

Fig. 8. Don Quixote in front of Diego’s Mexican Cantina, Detroit Metropolitan Airport, January 2013. Photo by Carolyn A. Nadeau.

Fig. 9. Mural of Don Quixote and Sancho in the Don Quixote restaurant, Valparaiso, Indiana, March 2013. Photo by Carolyn A. Nadeau.

several years to open his own Spanish restaurant, but after his success at Giordano’s in Chicago, he found a perfect locale at 737 North LaSalle and opened Café Ibérico in 1992. While Carlos’s cultural framework is squarely tied to Don Quixote and flamenco, José Lagoa maintains cultural ties via Spain’s premiere soccer league, La Liga, and bullfighting. On the triple screens that form part of the décor of the main restaurant, when soccer and bullfighting are not on, Televisión española runs news and cooking programs to further connect diners with Spain. However, Café Ibérico is not devoid of connection to Cervantes’s novel. Throughout the restaurant decorative tiles display iconic moments of Spanish culture. In the center of the main dining room, tile work of a pig slaughter catches patrons’ eyes and reminds them of the importance of pork in the Spanish diet. In fact it was during the era of Cervantes that pork products became so thoroughly entrenched in the Spanish diet, in part as a result of the Muslim and Jewish aversion to them and the state’s attempt to homogenize religious practices. 180 Nadeau

Fig. 10. Don Quixote Tilting at Windmills. Tile work at Café Ibérico, Chicago, Illinois, April 2013. Photo by Carolyn A. Nadeau.

Other works display a wine seller and a rustic bakery and, of course, Don Quixote in his most famous adventure, tilting at windmills (see figure 10).11 Each of these well-­established Spanish restaurants proclaims its uniqueness in superlative terms. Columbia is the oldest Spanish restaurant, Don Quixote is the only authentic one in the entire state of Indiana, and in a byline that continually scrolls across the bottom of the tv screen at “Café Ibérico,” viewers are greeted with the slogan: “Welcome to Café Ibérico the largest Spanish restaurant in the world.” When I interviewed both owners, neither noted any substantial changes since their opening. José Lagoa reflected that “the restaurant is always growing; people learn about Spanish food and like the small portions” (author’s interview, March 22, 2013). Both owners travel regularly to Spain to buy products or travel the country. Both restaurants also house a deli and small shop where patrons can take home select cheeses, cold cuts, or hard-­to-­find ingredients, like Spanish paprika, pickled garlic, or white asparagus. Cooking items, for example, the classic Don Quixote and the Culinary Arts  181

cazuela de barro and paelleras or even Spanish souvenirs also fill the shelves. When asked about their favorite dishes, soups and pulpo a la plancha were their respective answers, echoing back to Alonso Quijano’s olla and lentils and to the seafood dishes that Don Quixote consumed on the road. Boston’s Taberna de Haro fits into this first category of re-­creating an authentic Spanish experience but also serves as a bridge to the second category of Spanish cuisine in the United States today, “the trendy tapa bar.” Opened in 1998 this eatery is younger than the other two and run by Deborah Hansen, an American who did her master’s work at nyu in Madrid in the late eighties and, like so many Americans, fell in love with all things Spanish (author’s interview, November 30, 2012). She fashioned her Beacon Street establishment after the typical taberna in Madrid and serves over fifty different dishes, any of which Sancho Panza would envy. The grilled sardines instantly brought to mind Don Quixote’s own sardinas arenques fantasies while he and Sancho spent a hungry evening under the stars (see figure 11). One of the reasons Deborah’s restaurant bridges the classic and the trendy is that she creates unique specialty pairings between the food and wine. Deborah is a trained sommelier, and her taberna stocks over three hundred Spanish wines with thirty-­three different denominaciones de origen.12 For example, for a spring meal she highlighted a wine from the Lopez de Heredia winery in none other than Haro, Spain, located in La Rioja. Her pairing began with a 1991 Viña Tondonia Gran Reserva Blanco that she submitted as “surely one of the world’s greatest white wines” (“Try This Pairing” 2013). She continued with a description of the grapes and aging process before illustrating the wine’s aroma and flavor as she built to her suggested pairings: “Redolent of warm hay, Seville oranges, marzipan, bread dough, lanolin, and seckel pear, the wine has you crazy in love even before the first kiss. The mouth feel is rich and soft, but powerfully vibrant. Lemony notes of acidity and mellow notes of chamomile intertwine with savory hints of salt marsh grass, macadamia nuts, tart apple sauce, tangerine, and honeycomb. Unreal, really. I love this regal wine with our humble croquetas de jamón (ham and bechamel 182 Nadeau

Fig. 11. Grilled sardines from the Taberna de Haro, reminiscent of Don Quixote’s sardinas arenques (herring), November 2012. Photo by Carolyn A. Nadeau.

croquettes) as well as our so-­savory arroz negro (black paella)” (“Try This Pairing” 2013). Sancho, who claims to know a wine’s region, flavor, and vintage simply by smelling it, would approve of her olfactory and gustatory descriptions. Before moving into the second type of Spanish culinary trend, I will close by saying that another defining feature of the establishments in the “authentic Spanish restaurant” category is that they are exceptionally hospitable and simply fun. Tapas are the common ground that all establishments in the “trendy tapa bar” category share. But what sets apart this second category is that these establishments embrace Spanish cuisine with a trendier edge and a mission of incorporating local products and responding to American tastes and culinary expectations. Their success has directly benefited from the increase of American tourism to Spain since the 1992 Olympics and the 1992 World’s Fair (in Barcelona and Seville, respectively) (“Historical U.S. Travel” 2015) and, I would also argue, the rise in Americans studying abroad in Spain (see figures 12 and 13), generated in part from the rapid increase of Spanish as the second most spoken language in the United States (“Open Door Factsheet: Spain” 2015). Trendy tapa bars emulate José Andrés’s vision of re-­creating Spanish food within an American context. His restaurant, Jaleo, in Washington dc, and the more recent Mercat a Don Quixote and the Culinary Arts  183

Fig. 12. U.S. visitors to Spain in 100,000. Information from Office of Travel and Tourism Industries, U.S. Department of Commerce. Graph by Carolyn A. Nadeau.

Fig. 13. Americans studying abroad in Spain. Information from “Open Doors Fact Sheet: Spain,” Institute of International Education. Graph by Carolyn A. Nadeau.

la planxa of Jose Garces in Chicago are clear markers of this trend, but its influences are seen in dozens if not hundreds of smaller cities such as Mas in Charlottesville, Virginia, Pamplona Tapas Bar in Lafayette, Louisiana, and Toro Bravo in Portland, Oregon. José Ramón Andrés Puerta is a Cervantine figure. The young Asturian-­ born and Bulli-­trained chef is owner of over a dozen restaurants from dc to Los Angeles and is credited with incorporating small dishes into American cuisine. In 2011 he was named the James Beard Foundation’s Outstanding Chef. In 2012 he appeared among Time magazine’s most influential people. And more recently, in 2014 he was awarded the McCall-­Pierpaoli Humanitarian Award for his work in combating worldwide hunger. He thrives on simplicity and creativity, two essentials of Cervantes’s work. In a TedTalk a few years back, he explained the importance of finding creativity in the simplest of places and of not being afraid to move beyond one’s comfort zone: “In order to be creative people of the world, we have to make sure we will not be afraid to look beyond the horizon, that we don’t know what’s behind. To take really that challenge of saying. ‘I’m going to move away from my comfort zone and I’m going to reach beyond what I don’t know.’ This is really where we become creative” (Andrés 2011, 2:46–­3:16). Consciously or not his words recall the ethos of Cervantes and his ability to create inspirational and enduring works of art. Opening his own place just a year after Café Ibérico, José Andrés brought to the American restaurant scene something different, new, and creative. Where Café Ibérico is a culmination of America’s twentieth-­century curiosity with Spain, Jaleo kicks off America’s twenty-­first-­century fascination with this Mediterranean country (see figures 14 and 15). Many of the same dishes can be ordered in both types of venues, but at the trendy bars, the food presentation, the dishware and glassware, the décor, and the architecture all have a more upscale feel.13 These new hotspots are less likely to include visuals reminders of Cervantes’s masterpiece, but the food served there still has much to do with the culinary markers found in Don Quixote. Cheese; cold cuts; assorted olives; chicken, rabbit, and plenty of pork dishes are complemented with selections of Spanish wine. Moreover, the enterprise to which these 186 Nadeau

restaurants and bars belong is written between Quixotic margins. Journalists certainly allude to Cervantes’s literary influence to explain new Spanish niches in American cuisine. In the New York Times article “Putting Spain Back in Spanish Food,” Glenn Collins begins with the following statement: “It seems an impossible dream, if not the one that the Man of La Mancha crooned onstage. But here it goes: Over the next decade, dozens of American cooks schooled in the authentic cooking of Spain and trained in Spanish restaurants will begin to populate the United States. In due time, hundreds, then thousands, will serve up a cuisine that is not Mexican, or Caribbean, or Latin American, but one faithful to Spain” (2012). He continues by addressing the advances of José Andrés and the ways he has shaped American dining. In 2013 José Andrés launched the Spanish Culinary Arts program at the International Culinary Center in New York. During eleven weeks students train with top chefs and learn firsthand in New York and in Spain the fundamentals of both traditional and avant-­garde Spanish cuisine. The program includes “the art of the asador [rotisserie oven], the subtleties of paella, the authentic ways to prepare meat and fish and bake bread, and cultural and regional influences that go into every dish” (“Professional Culinary Arts Programs” 2014). In Spain students visit well-­known cheese and seafood producers, vineyards, food markets, tapa bars, and restaurants (“Spanish Culinary Arts” 2014). This culinary program dedicated exclusively to Spanish cuisine will undoubtedly deepen Spain’s foothold in American dining culture. The third major thread, inspired by the Ferran Adrià revolution of the early nineties, is the one least associated with Don Quixote and best defined as “the high gastronomy experience.” Building from the creative, risk taking of the world-­renowned Catalan chef, today in the United States, examples of this avant-­garde trend include Washington dc’s Minibar and Las Vegas’s é (both established, in 2003 and 2011 respectively, by José Andrés, who serves as a bridge between “the trendy tapa bar” and “the high gastronomy experience”; for examples of interpretations of the latter at é, see figures 16 and 17), Chicago’s Alinea (2005, by Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas), and San Francisco’s Atelier Crenn (2011, by Dominique Don Quixote and the Culinary Arts  187

Fig. 14. (above) Aceitunas “Ferran Adrià” from Jaleo restaurant. Washington dc, June 2013. Photo by Carolyn A. Nadeau. Fig. 15. (opposite) Croquetas from Jaleo restaurant. Washington dc, June 2013. Photo by Carolyn A. Nadeau.

Fig. 16. Modern salpicón: smoky oysters in escabeche with pearl onion confit at é restaurant. Photo by Epicuryan, 2011. Used with permission.

Crenn). In José Andrés’s deconstructed versions of Spanish classics, echoes of salpicón and “duelos y quebrantos” that Alonso Quijano regularly ate, and wafers and quince paste that the doctor Pedro Recio de Agüero allowed Sancho to eat during his stint as governor are present, but only literary gastronomes would appreciate the connection. The other celebrity chefs also recognize certain connections to Spain. Early in 2016 Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas temporarily closed Alinea to travel to Madrid and work with David Muñoz of DiverXo fame. In preparation for their visit to the city of Cervantes, the Alinea team planned on “paying homage and honoring the culinary heritage of Spain” (Pang 2015). Dominique Crenn also references Spain in her menus at Atelier Crenn. In a description for “trout marmitako” in one of her tasting menus, Crenn writes, “I touch the earth and play / Where the broad ocean leans against the Spanish land / I remember an oceanic feeling” (2015, 9). In another, “Squid with lardo,” she writes, “I was inspired by the full range of Spanish cuisine, from innovative modernism to classical technique” (133). 190 Nadeau

Fig. 17. Modern quince and wafers: la Serena cheese and quince paste cone at é restaurant. Photo by Epicuryan, 2011. Used with permission.

At the close of part 1, as Don Quixote and Sancho return home, the knight-­errant muses, “Jamás he leído, ni visto, ni oído, que a los caballeros encantados los lleven desta manera . . . . Los encantos destos nuestros tiempos deben de seguir otro camino que siguieron los antiguos. . . . Podría ser que . . . se hayan inventado otros géneros de encantamentos y otros modos de llevar a los encantados” (557). Of course he is talking about rules of chivalry, but his words can equally apply to artistic endeavors, both literary and gastronomic. As Spanish cuisine continues to shape the American culinary arts and finds its rightful place among classic, trendy, and even revolutionary modes of dining, it is fitting that we pay homage to the role that Don Quixote has played in this facet of the American imagination.

Don Quixote and the Culinary Arts  191

Appendix

Spanish Restaurants and Tapa Bars in America (in cities with population of four hundred thousand or more) 1. Albuquerque nm



Cafe Broadway The Cellar Gecko’s Bar and Tapas Más Tapas

2. Atlanta ga

Bar Mercado Barcelona Ironworks Barcelona Wine Bar Bulla Gastrobar Cooks and Soldiers Eclipse di Luna Gypsy Kitchen Iberian Pig Krog Bar Tapa Tapa 3. Austin tx

Barlata La Bodega Gourmet Bullfight El Chipirón Wine Belly 4. Baltimore md

La Cuchara Tapas Teatro Tio Pepe

192 Nadeau

5. Boston ma

Barcelona Brookline Barcelona Wine Bar La Bodega Café Pamplona Dalí Estragón Tapas Bar Kika Tapas Madera 83 Matador Pagu Pintxo Pincho Sangria Restaurante Taberna del Haro Toro Tres Gatos 6. Charlotte nc

Malabar Miro Spanish Grill Zen Asian Fusion 7. Chicago il

Azucar Bar Biscay Black Bull Bulerías Tapas Bar Café Ba-­ba-­reeba Café Ibérico

Café Marbella Emilio’s Tapas La Taberna Tapas on Halsted Mercat a la Planxa Rustico Salero Spanish Square Tapas Barcelona Twisted Tapas La Vieja Castilla Vera 8. Colorado Springs co

Tapatería 9. Columbus oh

Barcelona 10. Dallas-­Fort Worth tx



Bulla Gastrobar Café Madrid The Spanish Lunch Box Tapas Castile

12. Detroit mi

La Feria 13. El Paso tx

Tabla 14. Fresno ca

Santa Fe Basque 15. Houston tx

Andalucía Restaurant and Bar bcn Taste and Tradition Boca2 Bar Costa Brava Restaurant Ibiza Food and Wine Bar El Mesón Restaurant Mi Luna Tapas El Toro 16. Indianapolis in

Txuleta Basque Cider House 17. Jacksonville fl

13 Gypsies

11. Denver co

Barcelona Wine Bar RiNo Gozo Rioja Paella Cuisine Solera Restaurant Tapas de España The 9th Door 9th Door Capitol Hill Ultreia

18. Kansas City mo

Extra Virgin La Bodega Tapas and Lounge Trago 19. Las Vegas ne

Barcelona Tapas Bar é by José Andrés Forte European Tapas Bar

Don Quixote and the Culinary Arts  193

Firefly Jaleo by José Andrés Julian Serrano Picasso 20. Long Beach ca

Café Sevilla 21. Los Angeles ca

Baco Mercat The Bazaar by José Andrés bcn Casa Córdoba El Cid LA Paella Restaurant Manchego Somni Spain Vino Wine and Tapas Room 22. Louisville ky

Artesano La Chasse Mojito Tapas 23. Memphis te

none 24. Mesa az

Tapas Papa Frita 25. Miami fl

100 Montaditos Alma Asador 5 Jotas Barceloneta 194 Nadeau

The Bazaar by José Andrés Bazaar Mar Belmont Spanish Restaurant Bocaito Spanish Restaurant La Bodeguita Buleria Bon Picat Brisa de España Bulla Casa Juancho Casa Paco El Carajo Cava Flamenco Delicias de España Delicias Espana 2 Delicias Espana 3 La Despensa Diego’s Andalucía La Dorada El Gallegazo Restaurant El Gallego Los Gallegos Jamón Ibérico Kebo Lizarran Lola’s Gourmet Madrid Restaurant Tapas y Vinos El Manchego Mesón Ría de Vigo El Mencey niu Kitche Paco’s Way

Paellas 305 Petit Madrid El Pimiento El Rincón Asturiano Rincón Escondido Tapas Rincón Español El Rinconcito Sancho La Taberna Giralda La Taberna Ignacio La Taberna de San Roman Las Tapas de Rosa Tapelia Town Xixón 26. Milwaukee wi

Amilinda La Merenda Movida La Vermutería 27. Minneapolis mn

Costa Blanca Rincón 38 28. Nashville tn

Americano Free Style Tapas Barcelona Peninsula El Quetzal 29. New York ny

Alcala Restaurant Alta Amada

Bar Jamón Barraca: Tapas, Paella, Sangría Bocadillo Boqueria Boqueria-­Upper Eastside Boqueria-­Flatiron Boqueria-­Fort Green El Boquerón El Born Buceo 95 Café Español Café Ole Café Riazor Casa Mono Casita Cata La Churreria Despaña Donostia La Fonda del Sol Fornos of Spain Gata Huertas Kaña Tapas Bar Manolo Tapas Marcha Cocina Marcha Cocina-­East Village Mesón Sevilla Nai Tapas El Olivo Ortizi The Paella Shack

Don Quixote and the Culinary Arts  195

Pil Pil El Porrón: Una Tasca Moderna El Pote Español El Quijote El Quinto Pino Las Ramblas Bar de Tapas La Rioja Sala One Nine Salinas Salón de Tapas Sancho’s Restaurant Sangria 46 Sevilla Restaurant Socarrat Paella Bar Spain Restaurant Tertulia Tía Pol Tío Pepe Toledo Restaurant Tomiño Taberna Gallega Txikito La Vara VinoTapa 30. Oakland ca

Duende Duende Bodega La Marcha Telefèric Barcelona 31. Oklahoma City ok

none 196 Nadeau

32. Omaha ne

Little España 33. Philadelphia pa

Amada Restaurant Barcelona Wine Bar Jamonera: Raciones and Wine Bar Oloroso Tinto Restaurant 34. Phoenix-­Scottsdale az

Tapas Papa Frita Prado 35. Portland or

Ataula Bar Botellón Bar Vivant Can Font Portland Crown Paella Navarre Pollo Bravo Toro Bravo Urdaneta 36. Raleigh nc

Mateo Taberna Tapas Vinos Finos 37. Sacramento ca

Aioli Bodega Española Tapa the World

38. San Antonio tx



Acú Bistro Bar The Bin Tapas Las Ramblas Toro Kitchen and Bar

39. San Diego ca



41. San Jose ca

Cascal La Catalana Iberia Juerga Picasso Tapas PintxoPote

Bar Bodega Café-­Bar Europa The Turquoise 42. Seattle wa Café Sevilla Bottle and Bull Costa Brava Barnacle Pata Negra Market Harvest Vine 40. San Francisco ca Herb and Bitter Public House Alegrías Itto’s Asiento Itto’s West Seattle b44 JarrBar Barcino Ocho Barvale Pintxo Bask Spanish Caravan Catering Beso Bistromania Tango Bota Tapas and Paella Bar Tarsan I Jane Canela Bistro Commissary 43. Tucson az Contigo Casa Vicente Coqueta Restaurant Esperpento 44. Tulsa ok Lolo none La Marcha 45. Virginia Beach va Paella and Cos Crackers Patio Español Empire Piperade Fresh Tapas and Tonics Thirsty Bear Pacifica Zarzuela Don Quixote and the Culinary Arts  197

46. Washington dc

anxo Pintxos Bar Arroz Barcelona Barcelona-­Cathedral Heights Bodega Boqueria Calle Cinco Churreria Madrid Del Mar Estadio Guardado’s

Jaleo Joselito La Malinche Mola Montaditos Pamplona ser Sunny Day Taberna del Alabardero Tapas Truck La Tasca Top Spanish Cafe and Catering

Notes

1. For more on the relationship between food and identity in early modern Spain, see Nadeau 2016. 2. All Don Quixote citations are from Luis Murillo’s edition (Cervantes 1978). 3. For more on the importance of food in part 2 of Don Quixote, see Nadeau 2015. 4. New World products also include corn, avocado, pineapple, haricot, kidney and butter beans, lima beans, scarlet runners, French beans, chocolate, peanuts, vanilla, tapioca, turkey, tobacco, chewing gum, and quinine (Tannahill 1988, 197–­276). For more on the introduction of New World products to Europe, see Garrido Aranda 1999; Pérez Samper 1996; Terrón 1992; for their conservative reception in Europe, see Coe 1994, 48–­49. For information on food’s role in the representation of the New World and textual authority, see Myers 1993 and Rabasa 1993. 5. For more on the study of the House of Aguilar, see Garrido Aranda (1999), who cites Prieto Garramiola. For more on the arrival of the tomato and the history of its incorporation into Spanish cuisine, see Long-­Solis 1995. 6. For more on the history of pepper production and the use of paprika, see Long-­Solis 1986 and Pérez de Espinardo 2000. 7. For more on the social effects of the potato, see Earle 2018; Salaman 1970; and Gallager 2000. 198 Nadeau

8. Population data are from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2016 (U.S. Census Bureau 2017). For a complete listing of Spanish restaurants and tapas bars in America, see the appendix. 9. The Don Quixote dining room includes a custom-­built wine cellar with over 15,000 bottles of Spanish red wine. 10. In the early twentieth century, “Spanish” was routinely applied to objects and concepts that were more precisely Latin American (or at least not specifically Iberian), such as “Spanish rice,” “Spanish Harlem.” Even today some restaurants specializing in specific Caribbean or Latin American food use “Spanish” to describe items on their menus. 11. At Café Ibérico over 5,000 bottles of wine are displayed around the restaurant on racks hung from the ceiling. Over 60 Spanish wines are offered. 12. The denominación de origen label denotes a regulatory system that acknowledges both high quality and authenticity of a geographic region for wine and food products. For the past four years, the Wine Spectator has given the Award of Excellence to Taberna de Haro’s unique list (“About Us” 2013). 13. Places named after Spanish cities or regions—­Sevilla, Tapas Valencia, Café Marbella, Ibiza food and wine bar, Costa Brava, Majorca bistro and tapas, Malaga Tapas—­or that carry culturally significant names such as Estadio, La Tasca, Toro Bravo, Picasso, Sangría, and, perhaps my favorite, Tapa the World, have opened in the last 10 years and flourished in small and large urban areas due in no small part to José Andrés’s vision. Works Cited

“About Us.” 2013. Taberna de Haro. Accessed April 10. http://​www​.tabernaboston​ .com​/about. Albert, illustrator. 1862. “Sancho Enjoying the Feast at the Wedding of Camacho.” Paris: Louis-­Janet. In Iconografía textual del “Quijote,” edited by Eduardo Urbina and Fernando Gonzalez Moreno. Cervantes Collection Cushing Memorial Library and Archives. Texas a&m University. http://c​ ervantes.​ dh​ .tamu​.edu​/dqiDisplayInterface/​ displayMidImage​.jsp​?edition​=2​ 87​&i​ mage​=​ 1862​-Paris​-Louis​-Janet​-01​-021​.jpg. Altamiras, Juan de. 2000. Nuevo arte de cocina. Madrid: Magalia Ediciones. Andrés, José. 2011. “Creativity in Cooking Can Solve Our Biggest Challenges.” tedxMidAtlantic, January. YouTube. https://​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​ =​j0qs9euiewo. Don Quixote and the Culinary Arts  199

Cervantes, Miguel de. 1978. El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. Edited by Luis Andrés Murillo. 2 vols. Madrid: Clásicos Castalia. —. 1985. “Rinconete y Cortadillo.” In Novelas ejemplares I, edited by Juan Bautista Avalle-­Arce. Madrid: Castalia. Chodowiecki, Daniel-­Nicolas, illustrator, and J. F. Schuster, engraver. 1771. The Housekeeper Serves Alonso Quijano His Meal. In Der Ritter Dom Quichotte denkt auf seinen Auszug. Berlin. In Iconografía textual del “Quijote,” edited by Eduardo Urbina and Fernando González Moreno. Cervantes Collection Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, Texas a&m University. http://​ cervantes​.dh​.tamu​.edu​/dqiDisplayInterface​/displayMidImage​.jsp​?edition​ =​503​&​image​=​1771​-Berlin​-001​.jpg. Clouzier, Antoine, engraver (?). 1700. Don Quixote Eating abadejo at the Inn. In Don Quixotte de la Manche. Paris: Libraires. In Iconografía textual del “Quijote,” edited by Eduardo Urbina and Fernando Gonzalez Moreno. Cervantes Collection Cushing Memorial Library and Archives. Texas a&m University. http://​cervantes​.dh​.tamu​.edu​/dqiDisplayInterface​/displayMidImage​.jsp​ ?edition​=​543​&​image​=​1700​-Paris​-Libraires​-04​-001​-f​.jpg. Coe, Sophie D. 1994. America’s First Cuisines. Austin: University of Texas Press. Collins, Glenn. 2012. “Putting Spain Back in Spanish Food.” Dining and Wine, New York Times, September 10. https://​www​.nytimes​.com​/2012​/09​/12​/dining​ /jose​-andres​-sees​-a​-future​-filled​-with​-spanish​-kitchens​.html. Earle, Rebecca. 2018. “Potatoes and the Hispanic Enlightenment.” The Americas 75, no. 4: 639–60. “Flan.” 2015. The Columbia Restaurant, Tampa menu, October. http://​www​ .columbiarestaurant​.com​/Menus​-By​-Location. Crenn, Dominique. 2015. Atelier Crenn: Metamorphosis of Taste. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Epicuryan. 2011a. “Membrillo and La Serena Cone.” Photograph. “é restaurant.” January 16. http://​tangbro1​.blogspot​.com​/2011​/01​/e​-restaurant​-01142011​.html. —. 2011b. “Smokey Oysters in Escabeche.” Photograph. “é restaurant.” January 16. http://​tangbro1​.blogspot​.com​/2011​/01/​ e-​ restaurant-​ 01142011.​ html. Gallager, Catherine. 2000. “The Potato in the Materialist Imagination.” In Practicing New Historicism, edited by Catherine Gallager and Stephen Greenblatt, 110–­35. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Garrido Aranda, Antonio. 1999. “La revolución alimentaria del siglo XVI en América y Europa.” In Los sabores de España y América, edited by Antonio Garrida Aranda, 197–­212. Huesca: La Val de Onsera. “Historical U.S. Travel and Tourism Statistics and Analyses (U.S. Outbound).” 2015. ita , Office of Travel and Tourism Industries. U.S. Department of Commerce. Accessed December 18. https://​travel​.trade​.gov​/research​/reports​ /recpay​/index​.asp. Long-­Solis, Janet. 1986. Capsicum y cultura: La historia del chili. Mexico df: Fondo de cultura económica. —. 1995. “El tomate: De hierba silvestre de las Américas a denominador común en las cocinas mediterráneas.” In Cultura alimentaria de España y América, edited by Antonio Garrido Aranda, 215–­35. La Huesca: Val de Onsera. Los Angeles Times Cook Book, Number Three . . . Including California, Spanish and Mexican Dishes; Recipes of Old-­Time, Famous Pioneer Spanish Settlers. 1911. Los Angeles: Times Mirror. Myers, Kathleen A. 1993. “New World Phenomena in Oviedo’s Illustrations.” In Early Images of the Americas: Transfer and Invention, edited by J. M. Williams and Robert E. Lewis, 183–­213. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Nadeau, Carolyn. 2015. “A Gastronomic Map of Don Quixote Part 2.” eHumanista/Cervantes 4:140–­58. http://​www​.ehumanista​.ucsb​.edu​/sites​/secure​.lsit​ .ucsb​.edu​.span​.d7​_eh​/files​/sitefiles​/cervantes​/volume4​/9​%20ehumcerv4​ .nadeau​.pdf. —. 2016. Food Matters: Alonso Quijano’s Diet and the Discourse of Early Modern Food in Spain. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. “Open Doors [2014] Fact Sheet: Spain.” 2015. Open Doors. Institute of International Education. September. http://​sites​.miis​.edu​/iemabroad​/files​/2015​ /09​/Spain​-Open​-Doors​-2014​.pdf. Pang, Kevin. 2015. “Alinea Closes for Renovation Jan. 1, Plans Pop-­ups in Madrid and Miami.” Chicago Tribune, October 15. https://​www​.chicagotribune​.com​/dining​ /ct​-alinea​-closes​-renovations​-pop​-up​-madrid​-miami​-20151012​-story​.html. Pérez de Espinardo, Jesús. 2000. El libro del pimentón. Murcia: Turbinto. Pérez Samper, María de los Angeles. 1996. “España y América: El encuentro de dos sistemas alimentarios.” In Las raíces de la memoria: América Latina, ayer y hoy, quinto encuentro debate, edited by Pilar García Jordán, 171–­88. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona.

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Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge. “Professional Culinary Arts Programs: Carlos Castera.” 2015. International Culinary Center. 2014. https://​www​.internationalculinarycenter​.com​/alumnis​ /carlos​-castera/. Rabasa, José. 1993. Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentricism. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Salaman, Redcliffe N. 1970. The History and Social Influence of the Potato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. “Spanish Culinary Arts.” 2014. The International Culinary Center: Study in New York. Accessed December 20. https://​www​.internationalculinarycenter​.com​ /spanish​_culinary​_arts/. Tannahill, Reay. 1988. Food in History. New York: Three Rivers Press. Terrón, Eloy. 1992. España, encrucijada de culturas alimentarias: Su papel en la difusión de los cultivos americanos. Madrid: Ministerio de Agricultura, Pesca y Alimentación. “Try This Pairing.” 2013. Taberna de Haro. Accessed April 10. http://​www​ .tabernaboston​.com​/media. United States Census Bureau. 2017. “American Fact Finder: Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for Incorporated Places of 50,000 or More, Ranked by July 1, 2016 Population.” Census​.gov. Accessed April 2, 2018. https://​factfinder​ .census​.gov​/faces​/tableservices​/jsf​/pages​/productview​.xhtml​?src​=​bkmk.

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chapter 8

Cervantes, Reality Literacy, and Fundamentalism David Castillo and William Egginton

We are closing on two decades since George Mariscal asked himself and his fellow Cervantes scholars, What kind of Cervantes do we want or need? While this question may have come across as a provocation in the context of the 1999 collection Cervantes and His Postmodern Constituencies, we would like to pick up Mariscal’s thread today as we take stock of the place of humanistic disciplines in a market society that is redefining education as a commodity and reality and truth as matters of individual entitlement. To be blunt the kind of Cervantes that we believe we need in the new millennium is an old-­fashioned humanist, a defender of the humanistic ideals going back to Cicero’s notion of humanitas as a cultivation of moral and political responsibility built on a willingness to question the orthodoxy of the day. We would argue that the ideology of global neoliberalism has effectively become the orthodoxy of the day in the current market society. The neoliberal orthodoxy is quickly expanding its footprint in every area of human endeavor, including educational institutions. In fact we suspect that the so-­called crisis of the humanities serves as a cover under which resources are being pulled away from core university disciplines in the name of efficiency models imported from the corporate world (Castillo and Egginton 2016). It is not the humanities that need “rescuing” from their alleged crisis. Quite the opposite: we need an engaged and engaging humanities to rescue our universities and, we would argue, our communities, from the 203

neoliberal orthodoxy that defines our reality through media framing, “the glass cage,” to use Nicholas Carr’s felicitous coinage (2014, 1). This is what we mean by “reality literacy,” the need to pause and reflect on our media condition and the neoliberal orthodoxy that is coextensive with it. As the above-­mentioned 1999 volume demonstrated, there is no shortage of subjects on which Cervantes scholars love to disagree. Over the years, though, most specialists have come to accept the notion that Cervantes invites reflection on the media of his time and how that media framed his world, from the nascent but vibrant print culture of the late 1500s and early 1600s, to the wildly popular theater of Lope de Vega and his followers, to new artistic forms such as portrait paintings. Moreover, critics working on (neo)baroque themes, among them Carlos Fuentes (1976, 11–­51; 1992, 174–­99), Roberto González Echevarría (1993, 45–­65), and most recently and emphatically Alex Nava (2013, 11–­169), have come to see Cervantes’s literary experiments as precursors of modernist and avant-­garde movements and New World baroque interrogations of the dominant paradigm of modernity. While we agree with much of what has been said along these lines, our approach here is slightly different, as we focus the lens on “reality literacy,” which, we claim, is both a big question mark and a horizon for Cervantes. We argue that Cervantes’s insights into the framing function of media, his denunciation of self-­righteous ignorance, and his diagnosis of what passes for reality in imperial and Counter-­Reformation Spain can help us see (and possibly break through) the walls of our own “glass cage” in order to expose the anti-­enlightened denialism that we associate with the most irresponsible, cynical, and dangerous promise of the market society: the right to your own reality! In his 2016 State of the Union address, President Obama referenced the space race of the Cold War years. The reminder that the United States was first to the moon is not particularly remarkable or surprising in the context of national politics. What is interesting (and from our perspective worthy of commentary) is the context provided by the president and the lessons he wanted us to draw for the here and now: “Sixty years 204  Castillo and Egginton

ago, when the Russians beat us into space, we didn’t deny Sputnik was up there. We didn’t argue about the science, or shrink our research and development budget. We built a space program almost overnight, and twelve years later, we were walking on the moon. . . . If anybody still wants to dispute the science around climate change, have at it” (Obama 2017). Remarkably, President Obama’s mention of the space race in his final State of the Union address was motivated by a desire to caution the public against the crippling effects of anti-­science stances (we would expand the statement’s reach to include anti-­intellectualist or anti-­smarts attitudes) and the cynical denial of such facts as global warming. He then goes on to remind us that democracy is essentially unsustainable “when even basic facts are contested, and we listen only to those who agree with us” (Obama 2017). But this is exactly what the twenty-­four-­hour news cycle has given us, a media bubble that protects us from inconvenient facts. Our choice of networks is based on whether their programming speaks to us directly, that is, whether the news they cover and their framing of that news (and the world with it) justifies and reinforces our own views and opinions. As long as we remain inside the comfort zone provided by Fox News, to provide a particularly apt example, we hardly have to hear from those who disagree with us or even be exposed to scientific or historical facts that might contradict our sense of the world. To be sure, this is not a matter of opinion or perspective. In fact the standard “modern” concept of reality as fundamentally dependent on perception and communal negotiations, subject to individual and collective opinions, perspectives, expectations, dreams, and fears, can be traced back to Cervantes’s own time. Yet this (early) modern notion of reality is based on the assumption that although reality may be contested and ultimately ineffable (since only God has complete knowledge of it), it is nonetheless independent from our partial and wholly inadequate version of it. The aesthetics of desengaño, dis-­illusion or un-­deception that we associate with golden age art and literature offer a range of explorations of this notion of reality, from the theologically correct view that entrusts reality to the church and the king as the representatives of God Reality Literacy and Fundamentalism  205

on earth to the more nuanced (and potentially dissenting) versions of authors like Cervantes (1982, 154–­55, 220–­30; 1998, 1:22, 2:23, 2:26, 2:65) who repurpose the aesthetics of desengaño to invite reflection, not on the theological absolutes (the afterlife as the soul’s true awakening from the dream or illusion that is our human existence), but on framing techniques and the conditions of visibility that different media formats impose on reality (Castillo and Egginton 2017).1 Thus the reason we see Cervantes as a model for critical humanist thought is that he had a privileged vantage on the medialogy of the first inflationary age, when mass media first created a crisis in the concept of reality. From that vantage he developed a special insight into how the media frame not only what we see but what we want to see. And his response was not to deny that reality, not to stake a different claim to truth, but to depict himself, his contemporaries, us, in the act of being formed by that medialogy. By showing us not a different version of the world but how the world can produce so many versions of itself, Cervantes created a form of cultural production, which we now call fiction, which has the power to attune minds to actively reading reality as opposed to passively receiving it. While the reality created by Cervantes’s medialogy was different, his fundamental strategy is still sound. Only a short time after Cervantes, the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz wrote: “If someone looks attentively at more pictures of plants and animals than another person, and at more diagrams of machines and descriptions and depictions of houses and fortresses, and if he reads more imaginative novels and listens to more strange stories, then he can be said to have more knowledge than the other, even if there is not a word of truth in all that he has seen and heard” (1982, 355). We continue to believe that Leibniz’s words hold a special wisdom. Literature, art, and philosophy have the capacity to teach us to think differently, precisely and especially when they are not captive to a strictly representationalist or objectivist logic. Hence our almost obnoxiously simple yet totally urgent prescription: more humanities! 206  Castillo and Egginton

Reading and/or writing literature, creating and/or viewing art, and thinking and commenting on these experiences is the vital and indispensable foundation for any possible liberation from today’s medialogy and the self-­destructive traps of desire it engenders. This is not a reductively idealistic prescription, too far removed from the real dangers that threaten us. We know that we are destroying the environment, but we continue to do nothing. Encouraging narrow, technologically and instrumentally oriented education is clearly not solving the problem and is most likely contributing to it. Global fragmentation continues to increase, and our responses make the situation worse. Yet in less time than it takes the oceans to rise a meter, an entire generation could be introduced to the humanities and the practices of interpretation that characterize them. A new generation of people more likely to be reflective, more likely to see how their own desires and actions impact the world, could arise. We know we are preaching to the choir, but the choir needs to become more strident. The choir needs to stop being embarrassed about its interests and methods, stand up proudly, and insist that there is no such thing as an adequate education, at any level, that does not include humanistic inquiry. The humanities are not a luxury, not just a shiny patina to make our bleak lives prettier; they are vital to our very survival as a species. Without them we will continue on our present course, each with his own reality in hand, self-­contained fiefdoms in an empire of solitude, doomed, as in the prophetic closing words of García Márquez’s great novel, “because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth” (García Márquez 2003, 383). As for the current state of our institutions of higher learning, we would argue that the incorporation of market values into our colleges and universities runs counter to the spirit of humanitas, that ancient nonconformist ideal that demands that we step outside our comfort zone and challenge the limits of what we take to be true: outside-­the-­box thinking, to put it in the language of university administrators. This is why we are calling for an engaged public humanities to push back against the orthodoxy of the market society and its colonization of our colleges and universities. Reality Literacy and Fundamentalism  207

This is also why we propose mobilizing the Cervantine legacy to refocus our gaze on what passes for reality today and on the framing media that are responsible for it. If we accept the idea that Cervantes encourages reflection on the mass media of his time (print, theater, and so on) and its effect on the public, we are only doing the Spanish juggernaut historical justice when we let his astonishing critical insights speak to our own media condition. This is no doubt what such cultural critics as Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin had in mind when they foregrounded the devastating effect that Cervantes’s literary experiments had on the inherited views of his age and potentially on the “counterfeit” notions of their own time, to paraphrase Benjamin. This is also why, as one of us has argued, a fascist ideologue like Ernesto Giménez Caballero would come to think of Don Quixote as the definitive blow against not only the Spanish Empire of the early seventeenth century but also the fascist Spain of his own day, which, in his revealing words, depended on the same kind of “mystical and blind pride”: “La soberbia—­mística y ciega—­de la España yugada en haz” (Castillo 2015, 39). Like Benjamin, Giménez Caballero believes that Cervantes’s irony transcends the confines of the standard literary parody to ridicule the mystical and blind pride of a nation that sees itself as God’s worldly instrument. And of course the quintessential Quixotesque trait (Don Quixote’s defining attribute) is his aprioristic rejection of anything that might contradict his view of the world as the predestined historical scenario of his prophesied deeds; this is, to be sure, a world in dire need of saving from its present condition. Sancho’s burlesque reenactment of his master’s messianic stance at the conclusion of Don Quixote part 1, chapter 20, is a good illustration of just how far Cervantes’s caustic irony can take us in the direction of ideological criticism: “[Sancho] tuvo necesidad de apretarse las ijadas con los puños, por no reventar riendo . . . de lo cual ya se daba al diablo don Quijote, y más cuando le oyó decir, como por modo de fisga: ‘Has de saber, ¡oh Sancho amigo! que yo nací por querer del cielo en esta nuestra edad de hierro para resucitar en ella la dorada, o 208  Castillo and Egginton

de oro. Yo soy aquél para quien están guardados los peligros, las hazañas grandes, los valerosos fechos . . .’ Y por aquí fué repitiendo todas o las más razones que don Quijote dijo’” (1998, 103). We could certainly draw a close parallel with Spain’s view of itself as God’s chosen nation to save the world from the imminent danger of present maladies (the Turks, Lutheranism, and other heresies) and to resurrect the “original” Christian utopia in Europe and the Americas. This reading would in fact line up with José Antonio Maravall’s (1976) interpretation of Cervantes’s novel as a counter-­utopia directed against the kind of regressive utopianism that seeks to prevent change. This view of Spain as God’s soldier nation and spiritual reservoir of the best human virtues comes up often in Cervantes’s posthumously published novel Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, which has traditionally been read as a Christian romance, even as a straightforward defense of Counter-­Reformation utopianism. In the last few decades, however, a series of revisionist readings have emerged. These new interpretations have called attention to the presence of irony in those passages that appear to reinforce the messianic notions that we associate with imperial propaganda. As the pilgrims are about to set foot on the western edge of the Iberian Peninsula, Antonio reminds his daughter that Iberia is the land that offers copious and saintly tributes to the heavens: “Ésta es la tierra que da al cielo santo y copiosísimo fruto” (1997, 431). In fact the narrator had alluded earlier to this view of the Iberian Peninsula as the promised land: “Les pareció que ya habían llegado a la tierra de promisión que tanto deseaban” (430). Auristela herself paints a picture of Spain as the most saintly and peaceful nation on earth: “Ya los cielos, a quien doy mil gracias por ello, nos han traído a España . . . ya podemos tender los pasos seguros, porque, según la fama, que sobre todas las regiones del mundo, de pacífica y de santa, tiene ganada España, bien nos podemos prometer seguro viaje” (460).2 Yet what happens next is the kind of narrative turn that one might expect from the great ironist. A young man, presumably a prominent gentleman, comes out of the bushes with a sword deeply embedded in his back simply to die in the presence of the newcomers. Reality Literacy and Fundamentalism  209

Shortly thereafter the travelers are seized and imprisoned by officers of the Inquisition and exposed “como es uso y costumbre” (1997, 470) to the customary extortionist practices of Spanish legal officials, “sátrapas de la pluma” (470)—­so much for the previously offered images of the Iberian Peninsula and Catholic Spain as the promised land that bears abundant heavenly fruits, the heaven on earth known for its devout, peace-­loving, and saintly inhabitants. No wonder fascist ideologue Giménez Caballero was suspicious of Cervantes’s “excessive orthodoxy,” which he perceptively viewed as an effective cover and also as a dangerous corrective against the “mystical blindness” needed to secure the public’s faith in imperial ideals in Cervantes’s time as well as in his own twentieth-­century present. Indeed, we would argue that Cervantes’s caustic irony can have equally devastating effects today if applied to America’s claims of historical exceptionalism. But don’t take our word for it; take Stephen Colbert’s. His 2012 America Again, Re-­becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t provides a much needed (Cervantine) perspective on the recurrent theme of America’s exceptionalism in modern conservative politics, from Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich and beyond: Ronald Reagan said it first: “America is the shining city upon a hill.” And no matter how dark our days, or how low we sink, we will always be shiny and hilly. Reagan also said, “I have always believed that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage.” He is right, America was put here by God for us to find. America was like the sculpture existing inside the block of marble, waiting for the Artist to chip away a few Cherokee to find it. (2012, 13–­14)

It is easy to imagine how Colbert’s comedic contextualization of the discourse of American exceptionalism might extend to expose the fallacious nature of other traditional political themes, such as the familiar motto “We need to bring America back” and its variations, or Donald Trump’s presidential campaign slogan, “Make America great again.” Although 210  Castillo and Egginton

Colbert’s 2012 book obviously predates Trump’s 2016 presidential bid, its very title would seem to have been crafted as an ironic response to the billionaire’s campaign slogan: America Again: Re-­becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t. Giménez Caballero (1932) used to refer to the Cervantine irony as an instrument of ideological war, a weapon to combat stupor: “instrumento de combate frente al estupor” (1932, 40). It would be hard to come up with a better description of Colbert’s own use of irony in his popular books and tv shows. We should also note that the target of Colbert’s brand of political satire is the politics and punditry of denialism. This is especially true of his trademark tv show, The Colbert Report. Denialism was also the key theme of his hard-­hitting roasting of President Bush during the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. Here’s a good portion of Colbert’s masterful speech: Guys like us, we are not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We are not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That’s where the truth lies, right down here, in the gut. Do you know that you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know that some of you are going to say “I looked it up, and that’s not true.” That’s ’cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works. Every night on my show, the Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut, ok? I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument. I call it the “No Fact Zone.” . . . Reality has a well-­known liberal bias. . . . The greatest thing about this man is that he’s steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man’s beliefs never will.

What Colbert is getting at here is precisely what President Obama warns us against in his 2016 State of the Union Address, the anti-­smarts denialism that has taken over much of our political reality, making it hard to sustain democracy while emboldening fundamentalists as well as political opportunists. And of course for anyone familiar with Cervantes’s writing, Reality Literacy and Fundamentalism  211

Colbert’s satirical portrait of “hero president” Bush would sound like déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra used to say. As one of us (Castillo 2015) has written elsewhere: “The protagonist of Cervantes’s novel does not see the need to change his mind about what he knows to be castles, giants, and armies just because these things look and act like inns, windmills, and herds of livestock. The knight-­errant is convinced that what shines on the barber’s head is Mambrino’s helmet, even though, on closer inspection, the object looks and feels like a barber’s basin. . . . President Bush does not need to adjust his convictions about global warming or Iraq’s weapons of mass-­destruction despite all the evidence to the contrary” (Castillo 2015, 175). As for Colbert’s strategic mocking of anti-­intellectualism, we could hardly find him a better ally than Cervantes himself. We are thinking of his short theatrical interlude “La elección de los alcaldes de Daganzo.” As the various candidates campaign for the highest political office in town, a college graduate asks one of them, Humillos, whether he can even read, to which he responds: No, por cierto, Ni tal se probará que en mi linaje Haya persona tan de poco asiento Que se ponga a aprender esas quimeras, Que llevan a los hombres al brasero Y a las mujeres a la casa llana. Leer no sé, más sé otras cosas tales, Que llevan al leer ventajas muchas. . . . Sé de memoria Todas cuatro oraciones, y las rezo Cada semana, cuatro y cinco veces . . . Con esto, y con ser yo cristiano viejo, Me atrevo a ser un senador romano. (1982, 154–­55) As we can see, Humillos takes pride in his inability to read, which shields him from the kind of dangerous learning that could be deemed immoral or, worse, heretical in the context of Counter-­Reformation Spain. 212  Castillo and Egginton

Remarkably, we find plenty of anti-­smarts attitudes and pronouncements today, especially in politically conservative circles, prompting Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin to admonish some of her fellow Republicans, including public officials like Texas governor Rick Perry and Minnesota senator Michelle Bachmann against “the trap of being proudly ignorant” (Rubin 2011). She comments on remarks made by Governor Perry at Liberty University: “Perry came out with a series of ‘See how dumb I am?’ one-­liners. He observed that he needed to pull out a dictionary to see what ‘convocation’ meant. . . . And then the real howler: He was in the top 10 in a high school class of 13. . . . It’s disturbing to see that he thinks being a rotten student and a know-­nothing gives one street cred in the gop” (2011). The larger point that Rubin makes in her article is that inside the bubble of campaign-­style politics, anti-­elitism is often conflated and confused with anti-­smarts. If we can go back to the campaign statements made by candidate Humillos in “Los alcaldes de Daganzo,” we can see that he boasts of his Christian qualifications, his frequent prayer, and especially his uncontaminated lineage. In the cultural context of Counter-­Reformation Spain, uncontaminated lineage or pure Christian blood is the one thing the lower (non-­noble) populace could be shown to be proud off, which explains why blood purity, that is, old Christian stock, is linked to the peasants’ sense of self-­worth, their honor, in so many of the popular plays of the age. This is of course what another Cervantine interlude, “El retablo de las maravillas,” is all about. As many others have argued before us, among them Nicholas Spadaccini (1982, 62–­68; 1986, 167–­72) and Michael Gerli (2015, 95–­109), “El retablo” is a devastating critique of the myth of Christian superiority and, just as importantly, a denunciation of the manipulative pandering to which the lower classes were subjected at a time when they were becoming or threatening to become a collective historical agent. Maravall said it best in Teatro y literatura en la sociedad barroca (1972, 79) when he referred to this expansive, nonaristocratic brand of honor as a new religión de la obediencia that was propagated from the stage. The manipulative mythology of honor as everyone’s individual right (everyone Reality Literacy and Fundamentalism  213

of Christian stock that is) and “patrimony of the soul”—­as the alderman of Zalamea famously put it in Calderón’s El alcalde de Zalamea—­is ultimately entangled in nationalistic claims of Spanish (read Catholic) exceptionalism. At the onset of “El retablo,” the producers themselves inform their audience that the reason their puppet show is considered magical is that those contaminated by religious and racial illness or illegitimacy (converts or descendants of converts and bastards) will be blind to its marvels: “Ninguno puede ver las cosas que en él se muestran, que tanga alguna raza de confeso, o no sea habido y procreado de sus padres de legítimo matrimonio; y el que fuere contagiado destas dos tan usadas enfermedades, despídase de ver las cosas, jamás vistas ni oídas, de mi retablo” (1982, 220). What this means for members of the audience is that they will have to pretend to see the never-­seen wonders of the magic tableau if they hope to steer clear of the stigma of blood and lineage impurity. This is why the spectators warn one another to be on their best behavior. As Castrada admonishes her cousin: “Y pues sabes las condiciones que han de tener los miradores del Retablo, no te descuides, que sería una gran desgracia” (225). The characters’ asides confirm that no one in the audience can see the tableau’s wonders, for there is nothing to see, but they all act as if they see them on account of their honor. As the governor tells us: “Basta; que todos ven lo que yo no veo; pero al fín habré de decir que lo veo por la negra honrilla” (229). We would be hard pressed to find a better illustration of Maravall’s assertion that in the context of the theatrical culture of the baroque, the peasants’ symbolic right to honor is a call to obey and to do so blindly.3 They must be willing to embody—­that is, to give their body to—­the exceptionalism that defines them as purebred Christians and legitimate members of the honorable community. As healthy Christians and true Spaniards, they have no alternative but to believe that they can “see” what converts and bastards cannot. Who are the puppets in this tableau if not the spectators who are manipulated into blind obedience? And what are 214  Castillo and Egginton

honor and the myth of Christian exceptionalism on which this notion of honor depends if not a vehicle for mass manipulation? While this theatrical version of honor and the mythology of Christian blood purity cannot be said to have the same kind of symbolic weight in twenty-­first century America, the discourse of individual and communal exceptionalism functions today in much the same way to hail or interpellate us (to use Althusser’s terminology) as members of the nation proper. Here’s Stephen Colbert again, quoting from Newt Gingrich’s A Nation like No Other (2011), while adding his own satirical commentary: “‘America’s greatness, America’s exceptional greatness is not based on that fact that we are the most powerful, most prosperous—­and most generous—­nation on earth. Rather, those things are the result of American Exceptionalism.’ Amen! America is Exceptional because of our Greatness and the source of all our Greatness is how Exceptional we are” (2012, 13). In calling attention to the perfect circularity of Gingrich’s proclamation of America’s exceptionalism, Colbert undresses the emperor, or rather the empire, making it crystal clear that—­as in the case of Cervantes’s “Retablo”—­our exceptionalism is a matter of blind belief. But the Spanish ironist goes even further to point out that belief is not enough; the tableau requires not simply belief but a show of belief; we must act out our belief. Remarkably, Cervantes is making—­in imperial and Counter-­Reformation Spain—­the point that philosophers Peter Sloterdijk (1988) and Slavoj Žižek (1991) have repeatedly emphasized in our own day. Simply put ideology is a matter not of belief but of acting as if we believe, which is why whistle-­blowing is not enough, as Julio Baena (2015) has recently argued in his comparative commentary of Don Juan Manuel’s “Los burladores que fizieron el paño” and Cervantes’s “Retablo.” We agree with Baena that Cervantes’s interlude offers a much more sophisticated illustration of the trappings of ideology than Žižek’s standard go-­to reference, namely, Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” In his conclusion Baena states that “critical theory must go on being critical if it wants to be theory and being theoretical if it wants to be critical” (13). We make Reality Literacy and Fundamentalism  215

a similar argument here with regard to the humanities as a whole, albeit with an emphasis on reality literacy. As we mentioned earlier, in the context of the present market society and the culture of the twenty-­four-­hour news media cycle, reality is increasingly treated as a commodity or, better said, as an entitlement for those who can pay for it. If reality used to be entrusted to God and his representatives in accordance with the orthodoxy of the day in Cervantes’s time, the new orthodoxy has turned reality over to the market. Hence, in What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Michael Sandel makes the point that in the age of market triumphalism, we have “drifted from having a market economy to being a market society . . . in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor” (2012, 10–­11). And the market profits from reality on demand. Indeed, the current notion of reality promotes an endless war of unanchored identities; the notion of the commons abandoned, a new commons develops, not “underlying” those identities but “above” them, unseen, siphoning off profits at unprecedented levels on a global scale. Terrorist fundamentalists strengthen right-­wing isolationists, who demonize immigrants and hence further reify national, ethnic, and religious difference. Governments aren’t weakened, though; rather, the constant threat of an irrational other strengthens “democratic” regimes that are little else than symbolic cover for oligarchies whose purpose is the creation and maintenance of rules leading to greater siphoning power. This picture is reminiscent of the “reality” revealed in the film The Matrix (Wachowski and Wachowski 1999) when the virtual reality program that humanity is plugged into is disrupted: thousands of isolated minds each plugged into its own screen, all feeding a system none of them is aware of. And of course the system of global capital benefits from humanity not realizing its common ground or its common plight. In this sense sociopolitical phenomena like the rise of right wing, xenophobic parties and candidates in the United States and Europe; the apparently ubiquitous threat of terror attacks, often committed by homegrown extremists; and the dramatic rise in school shootings in the United States since the nineties 216  Castillo and Egginton

are not disparate cases, examples of a world devolving into chaos. Rather, they are tightly interconnected pieces of a machine that is functioning with great precision, even as it multiplies death and destruction. Today’s political pundits of all persuasions struggle to explain the unprecedented appeal of Donald Trump. And yet what Trump promises his boisterous audiences is no different from what the media culture of the market society is already promising them every day: the right to be unlimited, if we can borrow from the phrasing of the familiar Sprint/iPhone commercial. To put it bluntly, Trump’s populist message is simply an updating of the theme of American exceptionalism for the new millennium and a reissuing of the American dream on a global and unlimited scale: he is going to build a wall on the southern U.S. border to keep rapists out, to prevent them from taking our women, and Mexico is going to pay for it; he is going to stop China from stealing our riches and reclaim our markets around the world; he is going to bomb the hell out of isis and take the oil. In other words he is going to make sure no one steals your enjoyment rights; he is going to deliver you the keys to the world. This is nothing more than what our medialogy already promises on a regular basis: your (American) right to unlimited enjoyment in a world that’s yours to own. Turning John F. Kennedy’s legendary turn of phrase on its head, he’s saying, “Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country, and the world, can do for you!” There’s no nuance in Trump’s populist nationalism, no analysis, no insight into historical realities, no talk of structural inequalities, social justice, global warming; there’s only a promise “to make America great again” so that you can enjoy your birthright: America’s exceptionalism unlimited! This is ultimately what the new neoliberal American fundamentalism looks like: You have the right to your own reality! In other words reality is simply your entitlement as an American. But, of course the most recognizable form of fundamentalism today is the sort that we associate with terrorist organizations like the inaptly named Islamic State—­inapt because it lacks the attributes normally associated with a state, and its organizing principle is not Islam in any theologically coherent form. In Reality Literacy and Fundamentalism  217

fact what isis most resembles is an online community dedicated to a particularly noxious perversion—­like those frequented by the so-­called cannibal cop who fantasized online about killing and eating women—­the difference being that its members take the next step and carry out the grim fantasies they encourage in one another. This phenomenon, whereby group dynamics permit the overriding of borders determined by norms of social acceptability, was first theorized by the Stanford psychologist Mark Granovetter in the 1970s, as he tried to explain why otherwise law-­abiding citizens would, in the context of a riot, commit acts of violence that they would individually find appalling under normal circumstances. What he argued was that the “thresholds” separating members of the group from such actions could be collectively lowered by the proximity of these members to others whose own thresholds were respectively lower. In other words a few agitators with extremely low violence thresholds could influence a next layer, which in turn would influence a larger group with far higher thresholds, and so forth. But whereas the phenomena Granovetter was describing were localized, what we can now see is the same process liberated by the possibilities of virtual space. This is what, as Malcolm Gladwell (2015) argues in a recent piece in the New Yorker, explains the dramatic increase in school shootings since the nineties and in particular since the tragedy at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999. News of the massacre of thirteen fellow students by duster-­sporting outsiders Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold was interspersed at the time with television ads for an innovative martial arts film starring a duster-­sporting Keanu Reeves as a Kung Fu–­wielding member of a cyber-­revolutionary group intent on freeing humanity from the all-­encompassing virtual reality program that has it in its grips. Who could have foreseen the irony that these two figures would become internet legends themselves, inspiring dozens of isolated young men over the next two decades to lower the thresholds keeping them from enacting their revenge fantasies, convincing them that their own psychic reality was the true, the revealed, the one? 218  Castillo and Egginton

Indeed, this is what we’re missing when we point out the racist discrepancy involved in denoting any violence perpetrated by Muslims as terrorism while refusing to use the same term for the shootings committed by non-­Muslim white males, despite their often explicitly racist and misogynist reasoning in the manifestos they leave behind. Yes, these are essentially the same as the acts of terror committed by isis, but not merely because of the hate that inspires them. They are structurally congruous acts because they are symptoms of a medialogy in which disparate islands of solitude meet in a virtual space to commiserate and share their fantasies, thereby lowering the threshold to enacting these fantasies and hence creating a new reality. What Gladwell writes of the two-­decade-­ long epidemic of school shootings is equally true of the growth of isis and al-­Qaeda before it: they are like “slow-­motion, ever-­evolving” riots unfolding over years instead of hours (2015, 35) and over the whole globe instead of a few city blocks. This theory also helps us solve the puzzle of why radicalization fails to track accurately with socioeconomic oppression. Many of the young men who kill and blow themselves up come from well-­established middle-­class families. Their allegiance to radical groups is similar to the adherence of the other, isolated young white men to the cult of the black duster. They believe it is about history, religion, and culture, but it is not; it is about an entirely constructed identity whose online proponents proffer it as a solution to all their pain. This is not to say that there are no real social and cultural factors underlying the fragmentation of groups according to ethnic and religious identity. France’s failure to offer equal opportunity for the full economic integration of its citizens is absolutely central to the sense of exclusion, of being strangers in their own nation, that so many young men of African and Near Eastern descent growing up in the banlieue feel. As George Packer reports, “Banlieue residents joke that going into Paris requires a visa and a vaccination card” (2015, 63). And this is true of young people who are French, born in France, and speak only French. But again it is vital to note that the alienation of the banlieue is not founded on a positive, historical identity. As Andrew Hussey has put it, “The kids in the banlieues live in Reality Literacy and Fundamentalism  219

this perpetual present of weed, girls, gangsters, Islam. . . . They have no sense of history, no sense of where they come from in North Africa, other than localized bits of Arabic that they don’t understand, bits of Islam that don’t make sense” (quoted in Packer 2015, 64). This is the ground of fundamentalism—­not a return to the substantial reality of the past but the frantic desires of an unmoored present. Fundamentalism is fragmentation. But what is true of the new medialogy’s production of terrorism in all its forms is also true of its more gentrified version, the nativism of right-­wing politics in the United States and Europe. As we have suggested earlier, Donald Trump’s popularity in the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination is primarily an effect of his populist nationalism, a position that mirrors and follows on the growth of formerly fringe parties on the European anti-­immigrant right such as the Front National in France. As Thomas Edsall writes, citing Ivo Daalder, the president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, “Just as the ‘disaffected, lower educated/working-­class native folks’ in Europe ‘are fueling the rise of the Front National, ukip and other parties,’ similar constituencies are drawn to the Trump campaign in the United States” (Edsall 2015). Daalder continues: “These are the folks who have lost out, at least in their perception, to globalization and immigration—­they feel threatened by cheaper labor abroad and migrants at home” (Edsall 2015). Fear of outsiders buttresses and inflates another illusory value, the “real” of Sarah Palin’s famous “real America,” that sense of who “we” white, Christian, U.S. or European citizens are in the face of the threatening influx of other kinds of people. Just as Barack Obama was resoundingly criticized by Republicans for citing climate change rather than terrorism as the real threat to humanity (which, of course, it is), rank-­and-­file citizens can more comfortably focus on the visible threat of a militant other than on the invisible but far more ubiquitous damage that our way of life is inflicting on the planet as a whole. This is why we agree with Žižek when he wrote, in the aftermath of the Paris attacks of November 2015, “The greatest victims of the Paris terror attacks will be refugees themselves, and the true winners, behind the platitudes in the style of je suis Paris, 220  Castillo and Egginton

will be simply the partisans of total war on both sides. This is how we should really condemn the Paris killings: not just to engage in shows of anti-­terrorist solidarity but to insist on the simple cui bono [sic] (who stands to gain or for whose benefit?) question” (2015). But does it solve the problem to ask cui bono when our very notion of reality and the desires it supports remain unchanged? Do we not run into the very problem so eloquently analyzed by Žižek when he notes that the structure of ideology today is such that awareness is not enough, that we know very well what we are doing but we do it anyway? Does not the current medialogy demand a different response, one that Žižek himself theorized in his first book (1989), when he argued that the effective step required not merely seeing through the illusion but also realizing how one’s desire itself is implicated in that illusion? And isn’t this precisely the Cervantine lesson in reality literacy effectively conveyed in such works as Don Quixote and Persiles, and most explicitly in “El retablo de las maravillas”? If we can go back to the question at the onset of our chapter, what kind of Cervantes do we want or need? How about a culture and media critic and a champion of the old humanitas ideals? Indeed, we believe that Cervantes’s devastating critique of the orthodoxy of his day and his insights into the media framing of reality that sustains and propagates that orthodoxy can function in our own age as a model of humanities engagement and critique. Notes

1. Some of the arguments in this paper are excerpted from Castillo and Egginton, Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (Bloomsbury, 2017). 2. Auristela is also depicted—­with properly Cervantine irony—­in Marian portraits that enjoy wide circulation (Alcalá Galán 2009, 97–­106; 2016, 4–­17). See also chapter 1 of the present volume. 3. Maravall’s investigation of baroque theatrical culture has recently been critiqued for its failure to distinguish socioeconomic subtleties between authors and between subgenres such as the comedy or entremés; see among others McKendrick (2000, 1–­20, 203–­13); Stroud (2006, 288–­302); and the introduction Reality Literacy and Fundamentalism  221

and contributions to a special issue of the Bulletin of the Comediantes dedicated to Maravall (Bass 2013), in particular Bergman (2013, 109–­11). Maravall’s observations can nonetheless inform our specific reading of “El retablo.” Works Cited

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Colbert, Stephen. 2006. “Transcript of White House Stephen Colbert’s whca Speech: You Be the Judge.” Editor and Publisher, May 4. http://​www​ .editorandpublisher.​ com/​ news/​ transcript-​ of-​ stephen​-colbert​-s​-whca​-speech​ -you​-be​-the​-judge/. —. 2012. America Again: Re-­Becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t. New York: Grand Central Publishing. Edsall, Thomas. 2015. “Euro-­Trump.” New York Times, November 18. http://​www​ .nytimes.​ com/​ 2015/​ 11/​ 18/​ opinion/​ campaign-​ stops​/euro​-trump​.html ?​ action​ =​click​&p​ gtype​=H ​ omepage​&c​ lickSource​=s​ tory-​ heading& ​ m ​ odule= ​ o​ pinion​ -c​-col​-left​-region​&​region​=​opinion​-c​-col​-left​-region​&​W T​.nav​=​opinion​-c​ -col​-left​-region). Fuentes, Carlos. 1976. Don Quixote, or, The Critique of Reading. Austin: University of Texas, Institute of Latin American Studies. —. 1992. The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World. Boston: Houghton. García Márquez, Gabriel. 2003. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. Harold Bloom’s Modern Classics. Philadelphia: Chelsea. Gerli, E. Michael. 1995. Refiguring Authority: Reading, Writing, and Rewriting in Cervantes. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Giménez Caballero, Ernesto. 1932. Genio de España: Exaltaciones a una resurrección nacional y del mundo. Madrid: La Gaceta Literaria. Gladwell, Malcolm. 2015. “The Thresholds of Violence: How School Shootings Catch On.” New Yorker, October 19. http://​www​.newyorker​.com​/magazine​ /2015​/10​/19​/thresholds​-of​-violence. Gonzáles Echevarría, Roberto. 1993. Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature. Durham nc: Duke University Press. Leibniz, Gottfried. 1982. New Essays on Human Understanding. Translated and edited by Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maravall, José Antonio. 1972. Teatro y literatura en la sociedad barroca. Madrid: Seminarios y Ediciones. —. 1976. Utopia y contrautopía en el “Quijote.” Santiago de Compostela: Pico Sacro. Mariscal, George. 1999. “The Crisis of Hispanism as Apocalyptic Myth.” In Cervantes and His Postmodern Constituencies, edited by Anne Cruz and Carroll Johnson, 201–­17. New York: Garland. Reality Literacy and Fundamentalism  223

McKendrick, Melveena. 2000. Playing the King: Lope de Vega and the Limits of Conformity. Woodbridge UK: Tamesis. Nava, Alex. 2013. Wonder and Exile in the New World. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Obama, Barack. 2017. “Transcript: President Obama’s Final State of the Union Address.” National Public Radio. http://w ​ ww.​ npr​.org​/2016​/01​/12​/462831088​ /president​-obama​-state​-of​-the​-union​-transcript. Packer, George. 2015. “The Other France: Are the Suburbs of Paris Incubators of Terror?” New Yorker, August 31. http://​www​.newyorker​.com​/magazine​/2015​ /08​/31​/the​-other​-france. Rubin, Jennifer. 2011. “gop Should Not Fall into the Trap of Being Proudly Ignorant.” Washington Post, September 14. https://​www​.washingtonpost​.com​/blogs​/right​ -turn/​ post/​ gop-​ should-​ not-​ fall-​ into-​ the-​ trap-​ of​-being​-proudly​-ignorant​/2011​ /03​/29​/gIQA1glFSK​_blog​.html. Sandel, Michael. 2012. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Sloterdijk, Peter. 1988. Critique of Cynical Reason. Translated by Michael Eldred. Foreword by Andreas Huyssen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Spadaccini, Nicholas. 1982. “Introducción.” In Entremeses, edited by Nicholas Spadaccini, 11–­87. Madrid: Cátedra. —. 1986. “Writing for Reading: Cervantes’s Aesthetics of Reception in the Entremeses.” In Critical Essays on Cervantes, edited by Ruth El Saffar, 162–­75. Boston: Hall. Stroud, Matthew D. 2006. “Defining the Comedia: On Generalizations Once Widely Accepted That Are No Longer Accepted So Widely.” Bulletin of the Comediantes 58, no. 2:285–­305. Wachowski, Larry, and Andy Wachowski, dirs. 1999. The Matrix. Screenplay by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski. Featuring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-­Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving, and Joe Pantoliano. Warner Brothers. Color, 136 min. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London, Verso. —. 1991. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso. —. 2015. “In the Wake of Paris Attacks the Left Must Embrace Its Radical Western Roots.” In These Times, November 16. http://​inthesetimes​.com​/article​/18605​ /breaking​-the​-taboos​-in​-the​-wake​-of​-paris​-attacks​-the​-left​-must​-embrace​-its). 224  Castillo and Egginton

chapter 9

Don Quixote and the Rise of Cyberorality Bruce R. Burningham

There are three significant moments in Miguel de Cervantes’s two-­part novel, Don Quixote, where the narrative takes a meaningful turn due to something that happens to the title character at a crossroads. The first such moment begins in part 1, chapter 8, when Don Quixote crosses paths with a certain Basque rider (“el vizcaíno”) on horseback and enters into a scene of combat that is abruptly cut short by the narrator’s sudden admission that he has run out of “source material” and therefore cannot narrate the ending of this encounter.1 Shortly thereafter, at the beginning chapter 9, the narrator digresses in order to explain how he unexpectedly found a forgotten manuscript written by an Arab historian named Cide Hamete Benengeli that not only narrates the conclusion to Don Quixote’s encounter with the Basque horseman but then also provides the primary source text for almost all the rest of the novel (that is, both the rest of the 1605 part 1 as well as Cervantes’s subsequent 1615 part 2). The second important crossroads moment occurs later in part 1, chapter 44, during an episode in which the several characters hold a “vote” to determine the exact nature of a barber’s basin that Don Quixote insists is Mambrino’s golden helmet. And the third crossroads moment occurs in part 2, chapter 59, where, in a deliberate response to the publication of an unauthorized sequel to Cervantes’s part 1 (written by a pseudonymous author calling himself “Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda”), Don Quixote decides to travel to Barcelona, rather than Zaragoza (as Cervantes’s own first part had promised, and as Avellaneda’s unauthorized sequel had delivered), in order to pointedly put the lie to Avellaneda’s text. 225

Recent scholarship on the “neo-­baroque” has examined the ways in which the culture of the seventeenth century is reflected in contemporary twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century discourse. One prominent example is David Castillo and William Egginton’s recent book Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (2017), in which they argue that the technological changes that occurred first around 1600 and then again around 1900 constitute moments of “inflationary media” that marked important shifts in world culture. For my part as I argue in Tilting Cervantes: Baroque Reflections on Postmodern Culture, the culture of golden age Spain and that of the twentieth-­century United States exist as “bookends” of Western colonial expansion (2008, 3). My focus in Tilting Cervantes is therefore to trace the ways in which these bookends reflect each other as they mark the beginning and the end of the European invasion and conquest of the Americas. In this chapter I take an even longer view of Western culture by arguing that the so-­called information age in which we currently find ourselves, while certainly a new development in global culture, represents in many ways a return—­albeit a high-­tech return—­to a set of cultural paradigms more familiar to the premodern era. In this regard the roughly five-­ hundred-­year period stretching from 1492 to 1992 should be seen not as an inevitable linear progression that has led us closer and closer to what futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil (2005) calls the impeding “singularity” but rather as something of a digressive anomaly, a contingent cultural arc that is now beginning to give way to what might be called an “older” set of values and concerns. One of the central developments that marked the shift from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, of course, was Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in the early fifteenth century. As numerous scholars have thoroughly documented, what to that point in European history had been a primarily oral culture gave way to a “culture of print” and mass production of knowledge that radically reshaped the world for the next five centuries, thus allowing Marshal McLuhan to famously describe a “Gutenberg galaxy” inhabited by what he called “typographic 226 Burningham

man” (1962, iii). In short as McLuhan remarks, the oral/aural nature of a medieval manuscript tradition—­in which, as he says, “reading was necessarily reading aloud” (82)—­was radically transformed by the printing press. However, with the twentieth-­century arrival of the “information age” (and especially with the creation of the World Wide Web in the 1990s), our globally “wired” culture has returned to what I call a quasi-­medieval “cyberorality.” As Alexander Nagel astutely observes in Medieval Modern: Art out of Time, McLuhan’s twentieth-­century project necessarily involves a connection to the medieval past in his understanding that “the pre-­typographic era was a necessary counterpart to the electronic revolution” (2012, 156). Thus while much of what we do still involves the written word (in text messages, tweets, Facebook posts, and so forth), such writing is often as fleeting and unmemorable as the kind of gossip two medieval neighbors may have exchanged in the town square some eight hundred years ago. Indeed, “snapchats” (which consist of ephemeral “conversations” between people simply taking pictures with their cell phones) are deliberately engineered to disappear from existence shortly after being sent (often within minutes but not more than twenty-­four hours), thus making these fleeting visual images less like conventional photographs—­that is, as tangible artifacts that “document” reality—­and more like voiced words that immediately dissipate into the ether at the very moment of their utterance. Examining the issue of cyberorality from the perspective of historical linguistics, John McWhorter has recently argued that “texting, in that it is casual, rapid, and vernacular, is executed via the physical process of writing, but is actually better described as a written kind of speech” (2016, 52). Moreover, as Nora Caplan-­Bricker (2018) has demonstrated, even “important” electronic publications may often exist no more than a handful of years in the same cyber-­location due to the hazards of website hosting, server addresses, coding innovations, and so forth. In this regard Caplan-­Bricker writes specifically about the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and notes that much of the early reporting on this incident occurred precisely via the Twitter feeds The Rise of Cyberorality  227

of various activists. More to the point, however, she laments the fact that most of this important “historical record” became quickly unavailable due to the way in which the search function of Twitter’s Application Programming Interface (api) deliberately renders older tweets invisible after only a few days (59). And while Caplan-­Bricker acknowledges subsequent efforts by the U.S. Library of Congress to archive “more than half trillion tweets,” she still asks the crucial question that lies at the heart of the new ethics of cyberorality: “When no one is likely to lay eyes on a particular post or web page ever again, can it really be considered preserved?” (61). Thus while we are constantly warned that nothing on the internet ever really goes away, the precise location in cyberspace of the countless documents that constitute this vast and every-­growing archive is often as slippery as the physical location of medieval manuscripts that may have been passed from owner to owner and library to library across the centuries. Indeed, even within a medieval culture where, as John Dagenais reminds us, written manuscripts were necessarily unique objects existing alongside the oral tradition (1994, xvi), one of the problems for medieval communities was simply keeping track of the competing (and often contradictory) narratives that made up the archive of the period, both physical and cognitive. Such is the primary concern raised in the early chapters of Don Quixote, part 1, and which culminates in the episode of the Basque horseman in chapter 8. The first few chapters of Don Quixote lay bare the contingency of knowledge within a primarily oral culture, even one that makes use of the technology of writing. In telling the story of Don Quixote, the narrator invokes oral traditions and several disparate authors in order to highlight the difficulty of pinning down knowledge in a cultural context that was still largely informed by medieval praxes. Thus the shift from chapter 8 (where knowledge is the indeterminate product of a whole set of cacophonous and competing source texts) to chapter 9 (where knowledge primarily resides in Cide Hamete’s single “authorized” source text, however hermeneutically ambiguous) can be read as a figure of the shift from premodern oral culture to its early modern, typographic 228 Burningham

successor. As McLuhan says of Don Quixote: “Fundamentally the themes of [Cervantes’s] novel are those of an old way of life being replaced by a new order” (1962, 213)—­an analysis that complements Michel Foucault’s very well-­known comments on Cervantes’s novel as a “boundary” that marks “the end of the old interplay between resemblance and signs and contains the beginnings of new relations” (1994, 46). In this regard Foucault uncannily (and playfully) echoes McLuhan’s notion of “typographic man” when he characterizes Cervantes’s title character as “a long, thin graphism, a letter that has just escaped from the open pages of a book” (46). Thus the narrator’s attempt in part 1, chapter 9, to pin down the “true” history of Don Quixote by jettisoning the cacophony in order to rely on a single source text epitomizes Western culture’s post-­Gutenberg attempts to account for the totality of all knowledge, efforts that would culminate a century and a half after Cervantes with the French encyclopedists, whose Enlightenment project was nothing less than the writing down of the totality of everything that was then known. Of course this will to scriptorial totality has been carefully analyzed by Walter Ong in his book Orality and Literacy, where he argues that it is precisely the fixity of typographic culture that has changed the psychodynamics of our restructured consciousness: “Print encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion. . . . By isolating thought on a written surface . . . , writing presents utterance and thought as uninvolved with all else, somehow self-­contained, complete” (1982, 130). From this point of departure, Ong analyzes the extent to which much of twentieth-­century literary criticism and theory—­from Russian formalism to American New Criticism to structuralism and post-­structuralism—­depends precisely on this kind of self-­contained view of language. In fact for Ong, Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction is the bête noire of typographic culture. “Words,” insists Ong, “are not signs” (74). And while Ong’s quarrel with Derrida in Orality and Literacy is perhaps excessively informed by his own commitment to the biblical logos (“In Trinitarian theology, the Second Person of the Godhead is the Word” [74]), his critique of Derrida is not without merit. The Rise of Cyberorality  229

To quickly (and very briefly) summarize Derrida’s deconstructive project, in his extended essay Speech and Phenomena (1973) Derrida takes issue with Edmund Husserl’s notion that speech (as opposed to other, more “tangible” forms of communication) is a kind of pure expression and thus a manifestation of pure experience. Derrida, as is very well known, mounts a lengthy attack on this phenomenology in order to show that speech is no more essential than writing, and that an awareness of the sound of one’s own voice is no less mediated an experience than, say, an awareness of one’s own appearance in a mirror. In short he seeks to put to rest once and for all what he calls the “metaphysics of presence.” Terry Eagleton succinctly summarizes the main arguments of Derrida’s ideas in his own introduction to contemporary literary theory and makes the assertion that “the Western philosophical tradition, all the way from Plato to Lévi-­Strauss, has consistently vilified writing as a mere lifeless, alienated form of expression, and consistently celebrated the living voice” (1983, 130). Western philosophy, says Eagleton, has been “deeply suspicious of script” (131). Of course the problem with Eagleton’s statement above, at least to my mind, is his use of the term consistently. While his assertions on a tradition of phonocentrism in Western philosophy are certainly true enough, we would find it very difficult indeed to demonstrate that this tradition is anything but inconsistent. For every instance in which a thinker has excoriated the “artificiality” and “secondary” nature of writing, we can find an alternative vilification of orality as something inferior, unsophisticated, dangerously common, or barbaric. Any positing of an absolute phonocentrism ignores the existence of an equally lengthy tradition in Western culture that has been deeply suspicious of the “living voice.” We can just as easily point out, for instance, that during the very period mentioned by Eagleton—­from Plato to Lévi-­Strauss (indeed from Plato to Derrida)—­ Western society has invested very little in the orality it has been said to privilege. There have been few sustained oral philosophical traditions, few sustained oral religious traditions, few sustained oral juridical traditions. For most of the endeavors that Western culture has considered worthy of undertaking, it has concomitantly provided some kind of written system 230 Burningham

of justification. Plato’s Phaedrus comes to us in written form as does every other philosophical text deemed worthy of study; the words of Jesus are available to contemporary Christians because a written “record” of those words has been carefully and painstakingly preserved over the millennia; citizens of the United States routinely speak of the “constitutionality” of a particular question, knowing that they have recourse to a written document and a written body of associated case law that constrain the adjudication of important legal issues. In fact there is almost no system in contemporary Western society that is not profoundly dependent on written documents for its existence (including the now-­ubiquitous “user agreements” we routinely click to “accept” as an existential condition of our own cyber-­ontology). And regardless of the orality that may occur at the margins of these systems, the written word has clearly proclaimed itself to be the authoritative nucleus. We could thus make the claim that Western culture has shown itself to be profoundly “graphocentric,” not phonocentric, and that in many ways Derrida’s deconstructive unpacking of the “metaphysics of presence” is little more than a sophisticated continuation of this graphocentrism. We could argue, in fact, that what Western culture has privileged, at least for the last five hundred years, is not orality itself but the idea of orality—­orality as metaphor—­while at the same time maintaining a guardedly safe distance from that orality within the delimited confines of typographic culture. Having said that, if we have learned nothing else from the information age it is that all information is indeed “written,” which is to say “coded.” And in this regard, Derrida is absolutely right when he insists that there is nothing beyond the “text” (1976, 158). For instance, Stephen Hawking reminds us that the scientific definition of the “event horizon” of a black hole is precisely that point where information (in the form of electromagnetic waves such as visible light) is no longer accessible to an observer on the opposite side of the gravitational boundary (1988, 87–­ 89). Likewise, and as far as we know, all life on this planet is dependent on the chemical codes written into our dna. And this is not to mention the binary codes of computer programing that allow visual images—­like The Rise of Cyberorality  231

those of Snapchat—­to be sent over wireless networks. Some thirty years into the information age, I for one no longer see the lps, cassette tapes, and cds of my youth as meaningful objects—­as my “record collection.” Rather, I have come to see these physical objects as nothing more than information storage systems for a record collection that now sits virtually on my iPod. Indeed, the current vogue among music enthusiasts for “vinyl” may certainly be motivated by an acute sense that the analogue sound quality of lp records is richer, but it also strikes me as a meaningful fetishization, as a nostalgic backward glance toward a time when vinyl records (including their cover art and slip covers) were objets d’art in and of themselves. In this regard the age of cyberorality has moved Walter Benjamin’s “work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” (1999) one step further along a continuum founded by Gutenberg and greatly enlarged by the Industrial Revolution: where early technologies such as photography, sound recording, and motion pictures had caused an “aura” to become attached to an assumed “original” rather than to its mechanically reproduced copies, the later technologies of cyber culture have shifted this aura onto the copies themselves, so long as these copies exist in the physical world—­as tangible totems—­rather than solely in the virtual world(s) of cyberspace. Moreover, as scientific models of relativity, quantum physics, and string theory have expanded our view of the universe (at least imaginatively, if not always empirically), the neatly tied-­up Newtonian space that we thought we inhabited has morphed into something no less slippery than cyberspace itself. Time is no longer fixed; Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead; our universe may be just one of an infinite variety of parallel and/or embedded universes that exist within what is called the “multiverse.” As string theorist Brian Greene argues, “Every black hole [may be] the seed for a new universe that erupts into existence through a big bang–­like explosion, but is forever hidden from our view by the black hole’s event horizon” (1999, 369). Such notions, of course, are not at all unfamiliar to humanists; which is to say, such a multiverse consisting of parallel, complementary, and 232 Burningham

conflicting universes has long been the stuff of fiction. For instance in his well-­known story “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan,” Jorge Luis Borges—­whom “new media” critics like Nick Montfort have come to see as one of the founders of the notion of “hyptertext” (2003, 29)—­explores just such a concept of parallel universes when he describes the intradiegetic novel that lies at the heart of his short story: El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan es una imagen incompleta, pero no falsa, del universo tal como lo concebía Ts’ui Pên. A diferencia de Newton y de Schopenhauer, su antepasado no creía en un tiempo uniforme, absoluto. Creía en infinitas series de tiempos, en una red creciente y vertiginosa de tiempos divergentes, convergentes y paralelos. Esa trama de tiempos que se aproximan, se bifurcan, se cortan o que secularmente se ignoran, abarca todas las posibilidades. No existimos en la mayoría de estos tiempos; en algunos existe usted y no yo; en otros yo, no usted; en otros, los dos. En éste, que un favorable azar me depara, usted ha llegado a mi casa; en otro, usted, al atravesar el jardín, me ha encontrado muerto; en otro, yo digo estas mismas palabras, pero soy un error, un fantasma. (1989, 147)

Borges, of course, was a particularly Cervantine reader and writer, and this description of Ts’ui Pên’s infinite book is clearly informed by Borges’s reading of Don Quixote, a text that contains (by my count) at least sixteen parallel, overlapping, and intersecting time lines, each encompassing its own particular reality (Burningham 2016, 173–­83). Still, such a dizzying multiplication of realities as described above by Borges is certainly compelling (whether through Cervantes or string theory), but parallel universes are ultimately anathema to the will to totality—­the will to completeness—­that has characterized Western culture since the days of Gutenberg. Which brings us to the second of Cervantes’s three important crossroads moments: the “vote” on the nature of the baciyelmo. Readers will recall that the narrative related to this object begins in part 1, chapter 21, when Don Quixote and Sancho, observe the arrival of “un hombre a caballo, que traía en la cabeza una cosa que relumbraba como si fuera de oro” (1:252).2 The Rise of Cyberorality  233

This newcomer—­who is nothing more than a common barber riding an ass—­had placed his brass shaving basin on top of his hat in order to protect the hat from the rain that was then falling. Seeing this shimmering object from afar, Don Quixote insists that it can be nothing less than the famous golden helmet of the Moorish king Mambrino. And assuming that such a common barber cannot possibly be worthy of possessing an object so important to the world of chivalry, Don Quixote decides to attack the man in order to relieve him of this helmet, at which point the shocked and beleaguered barber falls from his donkey and escapes on foot, abandoning to its fate the object in question along with his packsaddle. In this way Don Quixote wins for himself a trophy of war that he will proudly wear on his own head throughout the rest of the novel (and by which he will be iconically known for the next four centuries). More importantly, this shimmering object immediately becomes the center of a metaphysical and philosophical debate—­what Martín de Riquer calls the “plieto del yelmo” (1995, 1:459)—­that will continue for the next several chapters. In fact this debate begins almost immediately following the barber’s hasty retreat when Sancho, now examining the object a little more carefully, tells his master that he does not think it is anything other than a common barber’s basin, to which Don Quixote responds: “—­¿Sabes qué imagino, Sancho? Que esta famosa pieza deste encantado yelmo, por algún estraño acidente debió de venir a manos de quien no supo conocer ni estimar su valor, y, sin saber lo que hacía, viéndola de oro purísimo, debió de fundir la otra mitad para aprovecharse del precio, y de la otra mitad hizo ésta, que parece bacía de barbero, como tú dices; pero, sea lo que fuere; que para mí que la conozco no hace al caso su trasmutación” (1:255). The word trasmutación here is extremely important because for Don Quixote this object enjoys a double existence (a slippery duality that Sancho will later encapsulate with his neologism baciyelmo (1:540). On the one hand, this object has a distinct set of physical properties that make it appear to be a plain brass basin. Yet on the other hand, it seems to have an essential, metaphysical quality that only Don Quixote can see. As he himself says a few chapters later: “Y fue rara providencia del sabio que es de mi parte 234 Burningham

hacer que parezca bacía a todos lo que real y verdaderamente es yelmo de Mambrino, a causa que, siendo él de tanta estima, todo el mundo me perseguirá por quitármele; pero como ven que no es más que un bacín de barbero, no se curan de procuralle, como se mostró bien en el que quiso rompelle y le dejó en el suelo sin llevarle; que a fe que si le conociera, que nunca él le dejara” (1:307). In this way the shimmering object in question becomes a symbol of an encoded chivalric reality that only the brave, only the knowledgeable, only the privileged can read. This narrative sequence involving Mambrino’s helmet culminates a few chapters later (in part 1, chapter 44) in the denouement of the Dorotea and Don Fernando episode, when the narrator remarks: “Ya a esta sazón estaban en paz los huéspedes con el ventero, . . . cuando el demonio, que no duerme, ordenó que en aquel mesmo punto entró en la venta el barbero a quien don Quijote quitó el yelmo de Mambrino y Sancho Panza los aparejos del asno” (1:538). In this second encounter with the knight-­ errant, the barber believes—­or at least presumes—­that he is surrounded by reasonable people who have a firm grasp on reality. And thus assuming the support of his fellow travelers, he demands that the mad knight give back the items that were “stolen” from him. What follows—­at least for me—­is one of the most interesting moments of the entire novel. Don Quixote continues to insist that the object in question “fue, es y será yelmo de Mambrino” (1:539), while the other characters—­who already know of the mad knight’s idiosyncrasies and who perhaps want to have a little fun at the barber’s expense—­decide to hold a vote on the matter: “No hay duda—­respondió a esto don Fernando—­, sino que el señor don Quijote ha dicho muy bien hoy, que a nosotros toca la definición deste caso; y porque vaya con más fundamento, yo tomaré en secreto los votos destos señores, y de lo que resultare daré entera y clara noticia” (1:542). In this promise of “entera y clara noticia,” we begin to hear echoes of the narrator’s earlier attempts to pin down the “truth,” along with the narrator’s desire to do for the baciyelmo what Cide Hamete’s manuscript does for the story of Don Quixote in chapter 9. At the same time, however, the narrator immediately begins to undo The Rise of Cyberorality  235

this attempt to fix reality by describing the scene in a discourse clearly loaded with ambiguity: “Para aquellos que la tenían del humor de don Quijote era todo esto materia de grandísima risa; pero para los que le ignoraban les parecía el mayor disparate del mundo. . . . Pero el que más se desesperaba era el barbero, cuya bacía allí delante de sus ojos se le había vuelto en yelmo de Mambrino, y cuya albarda pensaba sin duda alguna que se le había de volver en jaez rico de caballo” (1:542, emphasis added). In other words what happens in this moment is that the novel suggests—­ even if only ironically—­that reality is somehow negotiable, that reality can be established through some kind of proto-­democratic consensus. Of course the problem with this idea is that it raises a whole series of moral, political, and philosophical questions, not the least of which are the following: Is any interpretation of reality as valid as any other interpretation so long as a sufficient number of people support it? Is the nature of reality truly a matter of consensus? Is everything just a question of perspective? The issue of perspectivism is fundamental to Don Quixote. More than fifty years ago, as Rosilie Hernández notes in chapter 2 of this volume, Leo Spitzer (1948) observed that such perspectivism is inherent to Cervantes’s novel from start to finish, from what Manuel Durán (1960) calls the “ambiguity” built into such elements as the protagonist’s name—­ Quijada, Queseda, Quejana, and finally Quijano—­to the question of whether the large objects seen in the distance are menacing giants or just windmills. For Spitzer “perspectivism informs the structure of the novel as a whole: we find it in Cervantes’ treatment of the plot, of ideological themes as well as in its attitude of distancing towards the reader” (1948, 41). For Castillo and Egginton, this perspectivism is an important component of their medialogies: “Reality after the first inflationary age was uprooted and subject to perspective, but also posited as independent of our knowledge and unknowable in itself ” (2017, 2). Nevertheless, and despite its omnipresence throughout the novel, such perspectivism reaches its apogee precisely in the baciyelmo episode when Don Quixote says: “Y así, eso que a ti te parece bacía de barbero, me parece a mí el yelmo de Mambrino, y a otro le parecerá otra cosa” (1:307). Or 236 Burningham

as Américo Castro argues, the novel offers us what he calls a “realidad oscilante” (1972, 83). Yet as much as we may enjoy reveling in Castro’s “oscillating reality” as we read through the pages of Don Quixote, the problem posed by the baciyelmo persists and in fact reinscribes the medieval orality that Cide Hamete’s authoritative manuscript had sought to eliminate. If all perspectives—­like those of the various “authors” and oral traditions mentioned in part 1, chapter 1—­are equal, how do we select between them? How do we avoid pure relativism? More to the point, in a world today of more than seven billion people, how do we avoid the acceptance of more than seven billion equally valid but idiosyncratic perspectives? Stanley Fish has proposed a solution to the problem in what he calls “interpretive communities” that preclude the existence of any purely isolated perspective. Together with Derrida and other post-­structuralist theorists writing in the wake of Ferdinand de Saussure, Fish recognizes the arbitrary relationship between signified and signifier, an arbitrariness that necessarily casts doubt on any notion of universal (or totalizing) meaning. In fact what makes interpretation even possible, says Fish, is that we are all part of one or another a priori interpretive community: “Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading but for writing texts, for constituting their properties. In other words these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around” (1980, 14). For Fish the individual can never arrive at an interpretation without always already participating in an interpretive community. With respect to the baciyelmo, Don Quixote interprets this resplendent object as a golden helmet because his interpretive community is precisely that of readers of the romances of chivalry, where it is anticipated that a gleaming object placed on a rider’s head will be a helmet, while the barber interprets the same shining object as a basin because his own interpretive community is that of barbers for whom such an object must have a very particular and utilitarian function. Again, as Fish says: “The facts one The Rise of Cyberorality  237

points to are still there . . . but only as a consequence of the interpretive (man-­made) model that has called them into being. The relationship between interpretation and text is thus reversed: interpretive strategies are not put into execution after reading; they are the shape of reading” (1980, 13). Nevertheless, whatever value Fish’s notion of “interpretive communities” may have for literary theory, it still does not provide a satisfactory resolution to the problem of the baciyelmo. It only transfers the problem of perspective from a point of view centered on the individual to one centered on the collective. In other words, and re-­imagining Cervantes’s baciyelmo narrative, we might ask ourselves what might have happened had the barber indeed found himself among a group of allies who voted with him in favor of the “basin”? Can reality actually be determined by a simple majority of “plus one”? Again, says Fish in different essay: “When any claim has a right to be heard . . . just because it is one, judgment falls by the wayside and is replaced by the imperative to let a hundred (or a million) flowers bloom” (2005, 72). Still, Don Quixote itself offers its own resolution to the baciyelmo problem. After the vote this episode appears to conclude as follows: “Finalmente, el rumor se apaciguó por entonces, la albarda se quedó por jaez hasta el día del juicio, y la bacía por yelmo y la venta por castillo en la imaginación de don Quijote” (1:545). Nevertheless, this narrative sequence of the baciyelmo actually contains one more small moment that occurs early in the very next chapter, when Cervantes’s narrator adds an important detail: “Finalmente, . . . en lo que tocaba a lo del yelmo de Mambrino, el cura, a socapa y sin que don Quijote lo entendiese, le dio por la bacía ocho reales [al barbero], y el barbero le hizo una cédula del recibo y de no llamarse a engaño por entonces, ni por siempre jamás amén” (1:548–­49). In the end, and despite the fact that Don Quixote maintains in his possession “Mambrino’s helmet” as such, the reality of the object is ultimately confirmed both for the barber and for Cervantes’s reader through an economic and legal exchange. Notice that the priest does not pay the barber the price of a helmet made of pure gold; rather, he pays the 238 Burningham

price of a common brass basin. What is more, the barber gives the priest a receipt renouncing now and forever his property rights to this object. Whenever I read this passage from Don Quixote, I cannot help but think of a sentence from Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, which sheds light on the baciyelmo episode: “The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it” (1992, 553). As it turns out, the baciyelmo is precisely that object whose reality is ultimately proven by paying for it. That is to say, what Cervantes’s novel suggests is that its famous perspectivism has a price, that what we might today call “alternative facts” (again, see Castillo and Egginton in chapter 8 of this volume) create debts in the world that ultimately must be paid off. Indeed, at the very end of Cervantes’s part 2 of Don Quixote, the title character ends up performing Rushdie’s aphorism as his final gesture, as his valediction: the mad knight proves the reality of his all-­too-­prosaic world by dying in it, not as a knight-­errant but as Alonso Quijano el Bueno. In this way Cervantes’s ordinary hidalgo from La Mancha ultimately pays off the debts established by the various “alternative facts” that he himself has declared from the beginning of part 1. Which brings us to the third crossroads moment in Don Quixote, which occurs in part 2, chapter 59. Having become aware of the existence of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda’s unauthorized sequel (1980) to Cervan­ tes’s own published part 1 (which, as readers will recall, is itself a constant presence in Cervantes’s part 2), Don Quixote makes a fateful decision on the road to Zaragoza: “Preguntáronle que adónde llevaba determinado su viaje. Respondió que a Zaragoza, a hallarse en las justas del arnés, que en aquella ciudad suelen hacerse todos los años. Díjole don Juan que aquella nueva historia [de Avellaneda] contaba como don Quijote, sea quien se quisiere, se había hallado en ella en una sortija, falta de invención, pobre de letras, pobrísima de libreas, aunque rica de simplicidades” (2:489). To which Don Quixote replies: “Por el mismo caso . . . no pondré los pies en Zaragoza, y así sacaré a la plaza del mundo la mentira dese historiador moderno, y echarán de ver las gentes como yo no soy el don Quijote que The Rise of Cyberorality  239

él dice” (2:490). Instead, Cervantes’s Don Quixote decides to change his itinerary and travel to Barcelona. Here, precisely through the agency of its title character, Cervantes’s “authorized” source text deliberately morphs itself in order to once again attempt to “control” a narrative that has been called into question by the existence of a completely different competing narrative, one that describes a parallel universe created by Avellaneda’s “unauthorized” sequel. Don Quixote deliberately changes his trajectory—­like an errant subatomic particle on the very edge of an event horizon—­in order to undermine the reality of an Avellanedian universe whose existence has challenged his own. On the one hand, such a strategy is immediately successful in glossing over the rupture in space-­time created by the unauthorized sequel. On the other hand, however, having initiated this process of erasure—­which is to say, by not only countering Avellaneda’s apocryphal sequel but also by countering the very narrative thread that Cervantes himself had promised at the end of his 1605 first part—­the 1615 text continues to work against itself from that point onward through to the final page of Cervantes’s own second part. Indeed, this is precisely the “price” Cervantes pays toward the debts incurred by his own “alternative facts.” At the end of Cervantes’s 1605 part 1, the narrator abandons Cide Hamete Benengeli’s “authorized” source text in chapter 52 and returns to the original conceit of a cacophony of competing sources: “Pero el autor desta historia, puesto que con curiosidad y diligencia ha buscado los hechos que don Quijote hizo en su tercera salida, no ha podido hallar noticia de ellas, a lo menos por escrituras auténticas; sólo la fama ha guardado, en las memorias de la Mancha, que don Quijote la tercera vez que salió de su casa fue a Zaragoza, donde se halló en unas famosas justas que en aquella ciudad hicieron, y allí le pasaron cosas dignas de su valor y buen entendimiento” (1:604). Furthermore, as with the earlier admission in chapter 8 (of having run out of source material), the narrator also stipulates that he could find no information regarding Don Quixote’s death either, other than to transcribe a series of epitaphs that were supposedly found among the ruins of a chapel in the town of Argamasilla: 240 Burningham

Ni de su fin y acabamiento pudo alcanzar cosa alguna, ni la alcanzara ni supiera si la buena suerte no le deparara un antiguo médico que tenía en su poder una caja de plomo, que, según él dijo, se había hallado en los cimientos derribados de una antigua ermita que se renovaba; en la cual caja se habían hallado unos pergaminos escritos con letras góticas, pero en versos castellanos, que contenían muchas de sus hazañas y daban noticia de la hermosura de Dulcinea del Toboso, de la figura de Rocinante, de la fidelidad de Sancho Panza y de la sepultura del mesmo don Quijote, con diferentes epitafios y elogios de su vida y costumbres. (1:604)

Yet some ten years later, at the end of Cervantes’s 1615 part 2, not only does Cide Hamete Benengeli’s published history now contain the mad knight’s previously omitted deathbed scene, but it also mentions a set of “fresh epitaphs” (including the transcription of one written by Sansón Carrasco) to commemorate the occasion. In this way the 1615 part 2 supplants the original 1605 epitaphs—­“overwriting them” in the jargon of our information age—­with new ones that ultimately seek to prevent future texts from competing with Cervantes’s own (now-­compromised) source text. Indeed, given the narrator’s 1605 admission that he lacks any real knowledge about what happens during the third sally (apart from Don Quixote’s journey to Zaragoza, now erased), Cervantes’s 1615 part 2 itself represents as much a parallel universe of “alternative facts” as does the unauthorized sequel written by Avellaneda. Such a hermeneutical competition between the two sets of epitaphs at the end of Cervantes’s own parts 1 and 2—­what new media critic Robert Coover might call the “multivocalism” of hyptertext (2003, 708)—­prefigures the kind of cyberorality that we now see emerging in the information age. Where once writing was seen as almost sacred (Ong 1982, 74), it is now eminently deletable. Where once the early modern French encyclopedists could declare all that was then known, we now have Wikipedia, in which anyone with internet access can add her own contribution to the global body of knowledge. Moreover, where the French encyclopedists did not have to worry about being contradicted in their The Rise of Cyberorality  241

declaration of all that was known (at least not from within the pages of their own printed texts), Wikipedia is now often the battleground for competing epistemological narratives such that the editors of Wikipedia (and I note with some irony that there is still a final authority figure here) occasionally must suspend their open-­source editing process because of a hermeneutical circularity that bursts into existence when opposing contributors keep changing each other’s previous edits to reflect their own preferred but conflicting perspectives. The cacophony that Don Quixote’s narrator eliminates in chapter 8 of the 1605 part 1 (along with the slippery “perspectivism” of the baciyelmo episode) returns with a vengeance at the end of Cervantes’s 1615 part 2 precisely because the two sets of competing epitaphs are not just a function of an amorphous oral tradition that exists somewhere “out there” but rather are the product of the supposedly “complete” source text itself: Cide Hamete’s authorized manuscript that has been translated, glossed, and duly printed. And the return of this cacophony is what gives rise, at least in the early twenty-­first century, to cyberorality, as Eugene Provenzo (1986) presciently suggests in his pre-­internet book Beyond the Gutenberg Galaxy: Microcomputers and the Emergence of Post-­Typographic Culture: The mutable and changing character of the computer makes it difficult to anticipate what type of culture and society the new technology is likely to create. An analogy with the ancient Greek sea god, Proteus, comes to mind. If one could capture and hold on to Proteus, he would grant his captor whatever he or she wanted. The only problem was that Proteus could change his shape or form at will. . . . Like Proteus, the computer and telematic systems are mutable and changing, constantly redefining themselves as we advance further and farther into a post-­typographic culture. At the same time, they are redefining our understanding of the world we live in and our traditional definitions of knowledge and intelligence. (1986, 92–­93)

Writing of the technological advent of “deepfake” media, whereby digital photos and videos can be easily altered to create what Jean Baudrillard 242 Burningham

has called the “simulation and simulacrum” of a hyperreality that never really existed (2001, 169), Rebecca Solnit argues that such manipulated imagery “may well finish off photography as what we wanted it to be since 1839—­a largely trustworthy documentation of the actual” (2018, 9). For Ong (and to an extent, Derrida), speech and writing stand in opposition to each other; in our current information age, not only is this opposition breaking down, but the boundary between them is increasingly effaced, thus creating a postmodern paradox: in the age of cyberorality, writing is both permanent and fleeting at one and the same time. Of course, in quoting Provenzo and Solnit above, I am not suggesting that Cervantes somehow foresaw the rise of computers and the internet. Don Quixote is very much a product of its own time and place. Indeed, the title character’s visit to the Barcelona print shop (1978, 2:518–­21), where he witnesses the processes through which Avellaneda’s parallel universe comes into existence, is clearly centered on the advent of early modern print culture, rather than on its post-­typographic counterpart. Still, what I am suggesting here is that Cervantes was perhaps the very first culture-­of-­print author who had to contend with what today we might call unauthorized “fan fiction” (a term I use even if Avellaneda’s motivation was significantly different from that of the kind of people who today write Star Trek porn for internet sites like fanfiction​.net). As tap dancer Alexander MacDonald argues in a ted talk provocatively titled “Oral Tradition in the Age of Smart Phones,” “social media thrives on repetition and collective authorship” (2016, 07:47). Thus by incorporating Avellaneda’s alternate universe into his own, rather than simply ignoring it in the hopes that it would go away, Cervantes anticipates both the challenges and the opportunities of what would eventually become a world where narrative authority is once again returned to anyone who wants to tell a tale. And in this regard, Don Quixote’s three crossroads moments point to both the beginning and the end of five centuries of print culture, as well as to a future whose narrative totality is as infinite as cyberspace itself. Again, as Coover rightly notes, “‘Text’ has lost its The Rise of Cyberorality  243

canonical certainty. How does one judge, analyze, write about a work that never reads the same way twice?” (2003, 709). To this question Don Quixote himself might respond that reality—­actual, simulated, or alternative—­is always subject to a “contínua mudanza” (1:130). Such a Cervantine theory of incessant mutability not only forecloses the will to fixity long associated with McLuhan’s “typographic man” (McLuhan 1962, iii; Ong 1982, 130), but it also reinscribes what Hernández characterizes in chapter 2 of this volume as a fourteenth-­century view of reality in which, per William of Ockham, the universe is “composed of ever-­proliferating singular and contingent iterations of particulars from which no universals can be securely drawn.” At the same time, however, it is the emergence of a high-­tech—­though uncannily medieval—­oral tradition during the first two decades of the new millennium that allows people to demand what Castillo and Egginton describe in the previous chapter as “the right to your own reality” precisely because this new, Protean cyberorality greatly accelerates the complete fragmentation and breakdown of Fish’s interpretive communities into smaller and smaller units whose isolation across vast conceptual distances is only aggravated by the speed of light, and whose walled ramparts are increasingly impermeable to all but the most insular of perspectives. Notes

1. Segments of this chapter were presented at the Forty-­First International Symposium of Hispanic Literature, California State University, Dominguez Hills, Dominguez Hill, California, April 15, 2015, and at the II Congreso Internacional América-­Europa, Europa-­América, Villanueva de los Infantes, Spain, June 29, 2017. 2. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of Don Quixote are from Cervantes 1978. Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. 2001. Selected Writings. Edited by Mark Poster. Stanford ca: Stanford University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 731–­51. New York: Oxford University Press. 244 Burningham

Borges, Jorge Luis. 1989. “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan.” In Ficciones, 127–­ 49. Buenos Aires: Emecé. Burningham, Bruce R. 2008. Tilting Cervantes: Baroque Reflections on Postmodern Culture. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. —. 2016. “Screening Quixote: Cervantes and Media Culture.” In Baroque Projections: Images and Texts in Dialogue with the Early Modern Hispanic World, edited by Frédéric Conrod and Michael J. Horswell, 167–­90. Newark de: Juan de la Cuesta. Caplan-­Bricker, Nora. 2018. “Preservation Acts: Toward an Ethical Archive of the Web.” Harper’s Magazine, December, 59–­63. Castillo, David, and William Egginton. 2017. Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media. New York: Bloomsbury. Castro, Américo. 1972. El pensamiento de Cervantes. Barcelona: Noguer. Cervantes, Miguel de. 1978. El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. Edited by Luis Andrés Murillo. 2 vols. Madrid: Castalia. Coover, Robert. 2003. “The End of Books.” In The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-­Fruin and Nick Montfort, 706–­9. Cambridge ma: mit Press. Dagenais, John. 1994. The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the “Libro de Buen Amor.” Princeton nj: Princeton University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena. Translated by David B. Allison. Evanston il: Northwestern University Press. —. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Durán, Manuel. 1960. La ambigüedad en el “Quijote.” Xalapa, Mexico: Universidad Veracruzana. Eagleton, Terry. 1983. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fernández de Avellaneda, Alonso [pseud.]. 1980. Don Quixote de la Mancha (Part II): Being the Spurious Continuation of Miguel de Cervantes’ Part I. Translated by Alberta Wilson Server and John Esten Keller. Newark de: Juan de la Cuesta. Fish, Stanley. 1980. Is There a Text in This Class: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press. —. 2005. “Academic Cross-­Dressing: How Intelligent Design Gets Its Arguments from the Left.” Harper’s Magazine, December, 70–­72. Foucault, Michel. 1994. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage. The Rise of Cyberorality  245

Greene, Brian. 1999. The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. New York: Vintage. Hawking, Stephen. 1988. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. Introduction by Carl Sagan. Toronto: Bantam. Kurzweil, Ray. 2005. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. London: Penguin. MacDonald, Alexander. 2016. “Oral Tradition in the Age of Smart Phones.” tedx Talk. YouTube. Accessed March 4. https://​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=e​ gO​ _46p894k​&​feature​=​share. McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McWhorter, John. 2016. Words on the Move: Why English Won’t—­and Can’t—­Sit Still (Like, Literally). New York: Henry Holt. Montfort, Nick. 2003. “Introduction: The Garden of Forking Paths.” By Jorge Luis Borges. In The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-­Fruin and Nick Montfort, 29–­30. Cambridge ma: mit Press. Nagel, Alexander. 2012. Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time. New York: Thames & Hudson. Ong, Walter J. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen. Provenzo, Eugene. 1986. Beyond the Gutenberg Galaxy: Microcomputers and the Emergence of Post-­Typographic Culture. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University. Riquer, Martín de, ed. 1995. Don Quijote de la Mancha. By Miguel de Cervantes. 2 vols. Barcelona: Juventud. Rushdie, Salman. 1992. The Satanic Verses. Dover: The Consortium. Solnit, Rebecca. 2018. “Easy Chair: Driven to Distraction.” Harper’s Magazine, May, 7–­9. Spitzer, Leo. 1948. “Linguistic Perspectivism in the Don Quixote.” In Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics, 41–­85. Princeton nj: Princeton University Press.

246 Burningham

Contributors

Mercedes Alcalá Galán is an associate professor of Spanish at the University of

Wisconsin-­Madison. She has published Escritura desatada: Poéticas de la repre­ sentación en Cervantes (2009); La silva curiosa de Julián de Medrano: Estudio y edición critica (1998); and Discursos sobre el cuerpo femenino: Mujer y sexualidad en la España de Cervantes (forthcoming). She is the author of some sixty articles on early modern literature and has coedited two volumes on Cervantes’s works. Marina S. Brownlee is the Robert Schirmer Professor of Spanish and Comparative

Literature at Princeton University. She writes on a variety of issues pertaining to medieval and early modern literature and history. Her interests include cultural and linguistic translation, the literary representation of the senses, and the relationship of early tabloid print to seventeenth-­century fiction. Bruce R. Burningham is a professor of Hispanic Studies and Theatre at Illinois

State University. He is the author of Tilting Cervantes: Baroque Reflections on Postmodern Culture (2008) and Radical Theatricality: Jongleuresque Performance on the Early Spanish Stage (2007). He is the editor of Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America. David Castillo is the Humanities Institute director and a professor of Spanish at

suny Buffalo. He has authored Awry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes, and the Early Picaresque (2007) and Baroque Horrors: Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities (2011) and coauthored Zombie Talk: Culture, History, Politics (2016) and Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (2017).

247

William P. Childers is an associate professor of Spanish at Brooklyn College and

cuny Graduate Center. He is the author of Transnational Cervantes (2006) and some three dozen articles on Cervantes, Moriscos, the Inquisition, and other topics relating to early modern Spain. His contribution here is part of a project titled “Counterculture Quixotes.” Marsha S. Collins is a professor of comparative literature at the University of North

Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Imagining Arcadia in Renaissance Romance (2016) and additional books and articles focusing on the literature and culture of early modern Spain in a European context. William Egginton is the Decker Professor in the Humanities and director of the

Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins. He is the author of How the World Became a Stage (2003), Perversity and Ethics (2006), A Wrinkle in History (2007), The Philosopher’s Desire (2007), The Theater of Truth (2010), In Defense of Religious Moderation (2011), and The Man Who Invented Fiction (2016). He is coauthor with David Castillo of Medialogies (2017). His most recent book is The Splintering of the American Mind (2018) Rosilie Hernández is a professor and the associate dean for student academic

affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Bucolic Metaphors: History, Subjectivity, and Gender in the Early Modern Spanish Pastoral (2006) and Immaculate Conceptions: The Power of the Religious Imagination in Counter-­Reformation Spain (2019). Carolyn A. Nadeau teaches medieval and early modern Spanish literature and

culture classes at Illinois Wesleyan University. Her research focuses on food representation in early modern Spain. Her book Food Matters: Alonso Quijano’s Diet and the Discourse of Early Modern Food in Spain was published in 2016. Sherry Velasco is a professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian

Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her most recent books include Lesbians in Early Modern Spain (2011); Male Delivery: Reproduction, Effeminacy, and Pregnant Men in Early Modern Spain (2006); The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and Catalina de Erauso (2000).

248 Contributors

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. abadejo, 170, 171, 174 abstinence, 52, 169 Achatz, Grant, 187, 190 activism, 124–­26, 134, 136, 146–­48, 149n4, 154n27, 228 adaptation, xix, 62, 73n20, 81, 86, 102n11; of Don Quixote xxii–­xxiii, 123, 132, 134–­35, 139–­41, 143–­44, 146–­48, 149n3, 152n17, 154n26, 155n29; of “El curioso impertinente,” xxii, 107–­8, 117 adoration, 16, 116 Adriá, Ferran, 167, 187, 188 adultery, 114, 118 Africa, xxiii, 58, 65, 219, 220 Agamben, Giorgio, 132–­33, 152n15 agency, xxi–­x xii, 32, 35, 40, 93, 96–­97, 101n9, 116, 240 al-­Andalus, xxiii, 71 Albert (illustrator), 172 Aldonza Lorenzo. See Dulcinea Alegoria de la Virgen Inmaculada (Roelas), 11, 12, 13, 20n7 Alinea (restaurant), 187, 190

allegory, 7, 9, 13, 57, 60, 110–­11, 113 Allen, Woody, 146, 148 Alonso Quijano: diet, xxiv, 147, 168, 169, 173, 182, 190; identity, 147, 236, 239; self-­fashioning, 35–­36, 41–­45. See also Don Quixote (character) Altamiras, Juan, 174 alternative facts, 239–­41, 244 ambiguity, 8, 96, 99, 111, 117, 119, 120n8, 127, 130, 141, 228, 236 the Americas, xvii, 173, 209, 226 amicitia, 85, 87, 90, 91, 93 amity, xxii, 81–­82, 86–­89, 93–­94, 97, 99, 100, 101n8, 116 anachronism, 33, 131–­32, 134, 145 Andersen, Hans Christian, 215 anti-­intellectualism, 205, 212 antiquity, 9, 38, 60, 71, 85–­86 anus (including slang terms), 56–­58. See also genitalia Arabic language, 51, 54, 58, 60, 62, 220 arbitrariness, 27, 31, 40–­41, 44–­45, 237 249

Arcadia, xxi–­x xii, 81–­85, 87–­92, 94–­100, 100n2, 100n4, 101n5, 102n12 Aretino, Pietro, 61, 73n20 Aristotelianism, 26–­28, 85–­86, 98 Aristotle, 47n14, 85–­86, 91, 101n6 arms race, 125, 138 art (visual), xvii, xx, 3–­5, 7, 9–­19, 20n4, 204–­7, 227, 232; for film production, 123, 141, 156n31. See also ekphrasis; portraiture asador, 187, 194 asparagus, 62, 70, 181 Atelier Creen (restaurant), 187, 190 Auden, W. H., 147, 156n37 Augustine, 37, 39–­40, 46n5, 47nn13–­14 Auristela, xix–­x x, 3–­10, 13–­19, 20n10, 209, 221n2 authoritarianism, 124, 143 authority, 65, 72, 198n4, 242–­43 avant-­garde, 135, 139, 152n19, 187, 204 Avellaneda, Alonso Fernández, 144, 173, 225, 239–­41, 243 baciyelmo, 233–­39, 242. See also barber’s basin; Mambrino’s helmet Baillie, Bruce, 139, 146, 154n28 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 32, 44, 208 ballads, 56–­57 banlieue (Paris), 219 Barataria, 32, 47n10, 173 barber’s basin, 46n2, 212, 225, 234, 237–­ 39. See also baciyelmo; Mambrino’s helmet Barcelona, 142–­43, 173, 183, 192–­93, 195–­ 96, 198, 225, 240, 243 baroque period, xxiv–­x xv, 3, 9, 18–­19, 204, 214, 221n3, 226. See also postmodernism: and neo-­baroque 250 Index

Basque, 54, 65–­66, 73, 144, 193, 225, 228 Baudrillard, Jean, 242 Bazin, André, 129 beans, 169, 198n4 beat poets, 136–­38, 142, 152n18, 153n20 behavior, 96, 111–­13, 118, 120n8, 214 Behn, Aphra, xxii, 107, 115–­19, 119n7 Benjamin, Walter, xxii, 108, 110–­14, 119, 133, 152n15, 208, 232 Bitsch, Charles, 129–­30 blacklist (Hollywood), 124, 139, 143, 149n6, 153n21, 156n34, 156n36 blood, 18, 58, 65–­66, 91, 94–­95, 135, 213–­15 blood purity, 213–­15 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 87, 101n8, 109 Bonanni, Mauro, 128, 130, 132, 150nn9–­ 10, 151nn13–­14 Borges, Jorge Luis, 233 Boston, 178, 182, 192 bread, 67, 170, 182, 187 Brooks, Peter, 108–­9 Brown, Roscoe Lee, 137, 145 buñuelos, 177 Burton, Richard, 140, 154n29 Bush, George W., 211–­12 cabaret card, 136, 153n21 Café Ibérico, 178, 180–­81, 181, 186, 192, 199n11 California, xv, xvii–­xviii, 123, 175, 177, 244n1 Camacho, 172, 173 Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a risa (anonymous), 56, 74n26 Cannes Film Festival, 127, 129, 157n39 Canon (Sumario de la medicina) (Avicenna), 66

canvases, 3–­8, 17, 19. See also copies: of paintings; painting The Captive’s Tale (Don Quixote), 59, 62, 110 Carajicomedia (anonymous), 56–­58, 60–­62, 70, 72nn9–­10, 74n26 Cardenio (Shakespeare), xxii, 119n1 Casalduero, Joaquín, 9, 19n1 Casa Rivero (restaurant), 178 Castile, 169, 193 Castilian language, 58, 83 Castro, Américo, 119n2, 237 Catholicism, 4, 9, 17, 88, 102n11, 114, 210, 214 Cavitt Sharp, F. See Ojo de Vidrio cazuela, 174, 182 La Cazzaria, 56–­57, 59, 67, 70, 72n16 censorship, 51, 54, 73n20, 124, 148n2 Centiloquium theologicum (Ockham), 30, 47n12 Central Intelligence Agency (cia), 124, 138, 148n2, 152n16, 157n38 Cervantes, Miguel de, 19n3, 47n10, 74n28, 149n8; and Algiers, 59; and authority, 240–­41; and Counter-­ Reformation, 19, 209, 215; and curiosity, 107–­11, 115; and cyberorality, 242–­44; and ekphrasis, xix–­xx, 3, 10, 20n4; female characters of, xxi–­xxii, 83, 85–­86, 88, 96–­99, 101n9, 102n13, 112–­13, 116; and fiction, 32, 225; and food, xxiv, 167, 169, 173–­75, 180, 186–­87, 190; and friendship, xxi, 81–­ 90, 92–­94, 96–­100, 101nn7–­9, 117; and Harold Humes, 138–­39; and humanism, 203, 206, 221; and hypertext, 233; and irony, 210–­12; and language, 53–­ 55, 62–­63, 73n17; and media, xxiv–­xxv, 204, 206, 208; and medical literature,

65–­67; and modernity, 46n2, 204–­5, 229; and nominalism, xx, 28, 34, 36, 41, 45, 46n3; and Orson Welles, 126–­ 34; and pastoral, 81, 83, 90, 100n2; and perspectivism, 25–­27, 34, 39, 236, 238–­39, 242; and postmodernism, 203, 226; and reflexivity, 123, 132–­33, 138–­39, 141–­48; scholarship on, xiv–­ xix, xviii, xxvin2; and sexuality, xxi, 51–­52, 55–­58, 60–­61, 64, 70–­71, 72n8, 115; and subjectivity, 37–­38, 42, 44; and Waldo Salt, 141–­46; and world literature, xxii–­xxiii, 119n1, 124–­26. See also “El curioso impertinente”; Don Quixote (Cervantes); La elección de los alcaldes de Daganzo; La Galatea; Persiles y Sigismunda; El retablo de las maravillas; “Rinconete y Cortadillo” chaos, 30, 217 chastity, 17, 64, 66, 91, 97, 109 cheese, 63–­64, 170, 178, 181, 186–­87, 191 Chicago, xvii–­xviii, xx, 178, 180, 181, 186–­87, 192, 220 chicken (pollo), 138, 174, 186, 196. See also turkey chivalry, 36, 43, 141–­42, 191, 234, 237. See also literature: chivalric chocolate, 174–­75, 198n4 Chodowiecki, Daniel-­Nicolas, 169 El Cholo (restaurant), 176–­77 Christianity, 27, 38, 47n5, 47n14, 60, 220; and blood purity, 213–­15; and Christians, 55–­56, 60, 71, 81, 143, 231; and devotion, 20n8; and literature, 9, 18, 59, 67, 102n11, 209; and marriage, 85, 88, 101n9; and theology, 37; traditions of, 61–­62, 83, 213 Index  251

Christians. See Christianity: and Christians churros, 174 Cicero, 85–­86, 91, 101n6, 203 Cide Hamete Benengeli, xx, xxvi, 110, 170, 225, 228, 235, 237, 241–­42 cinema, 108, 127, 132, 148n1, 153n22; of Harold Humes, 134–­39; Hollywood, 125–­26, 149n5; New American, 135, 153n23; of Orson Welles, 126–­34; U.S., xxii, 123, 152n19, 153n20; of Waldo Salt, 139–­46 Clarke, Shirley, 135, 137, 152n17 Cleese, John, 140, 155n29 climate change, 205, 220. See also global warming Cloutier, Suzanne, 128, 151n14 Clouzier, Antoine (engraver), 170–­71 cocoa, 174–­75 Colbert, Stephen, xxiv, 210–­12, 215 Cold War: cinema, xxii, 123; culture, 152n16, 157n38; period, 123–­25, 130, 132, 134, 153n21, 204; U.S. policy, 138 Coleman, Ornette, 136–­37 Colorado, 193, 218 Columbia (restaurant), 175–­76, 176, 181 comedia nueva, 125 comedy, 18, 56, 62, 221n3 commodification, 203, 216 communism, 149n6, 150n8, 157n38; anti-­, 146, 152n16 community, xxv, 11, 82, 84–­88, 94, 96, 99, 100n5, 111, 124, 203, 214, 218, 228, 237, 244 Compañón del Perro (Laguna), 67–­70, 68 conservatism (political), xviii, 125, 198, 210, 213, 216, 220

252 Index

contingency: and knowledge, 226, 228; and society, 82, 93; and theology, 30–­33, 35–­36, 40–­41, 45, 46n2, 244 cookbooks, 175, 177 cooking, 180–­81, 187 copies: of copies, xx, 3; of paintings, 4, 8, 13; and print culture, 232 Corr, Eugene, 140, 156n31 counterculture, xxiii, 142, 148, 149n3 Counter-­Reformation, 4, 9–­10, 13–­19, 204, 209, 212–­13, 215 Cratylus (Plato), 52–­54, 63 creation (divine), 28–­31, 35 Crenn, Dominique, 187, 190 croquetas, 178, 182, 188–­89 cross-­dressing, 115–­16 Crowne, John, xxii, 107 cuisine: African, xxiii; American, 186–­ 87; Caribbean, 177–­78, 187, 199n10; Cuban, 175; Mexican, 176–­79, 187; Spanish, xxiv, 167, 173–­75, 177, 182–­ 83, 187, 190–­91, 198n5. See also food culinary arts, xix; in Don Quixote, 167, 169, 186; and Iberian culture, xxiii–­x xiv, 167, 169, 175, 187, 190; and New World, 173–­74; in U.S. culture, xxiii–­x xiv, 183, 187, 190–­91 curiosity, xxii, 107, 109, 186 “El curioso impertinente” (Cervantes), xxii, 107–­10, 113–­15, 119n2 The Curious Husband (Behn), xxii, 115–­19 cyberorality, xxv, 225, 227, 228, 232, 241–­44 cyberspace, 228, 232, 243 Darion, Joe, 144, 147 debauchery, 117, 173

deception, 94, 118, 119n5, 205 deconstruction, xiii, xvi, 133, 229–­31 de Gordonio, Bernardo, 65–­66 della Porta, Giambattista, 69, 70 democracy, 127, 205, 211 denialism, 204, 211 Depp, Johnny, 157n39 Derrida, Jacques, xvi, 229–­31, 237, 243 desengaño, 205–­6 desire, xxi–­x xii, 34, 44, 59, 64–­66, 85, 91, 94–­95, 99, 205, 207, 220–­21, 235 deviance, xxiii, 147 Dialogues (Aretino), 61, 73n20 Diego’s Mexican Cantina, 177, 179 diet, xxvi, 169, 173, 180. See also food Dioscórides, 67, 68, 70, 74n28, 170 dishonor, 92, 111, 119n5 DiverXo (restaurant), 190 divinity, 44, 46n2, 210; and Auristela, 5, 15–­16; and theology, xx, 25–­27, 29–­ 31, 33, 35–­36, 39–­42, 46n5 Doc (Immy Humes), 123, 137, 154n27 Don Juan Manuel, 87, 215 Don Peyote (Humes, unfinished film), 123, 134–­39, 145, 153nn23–­24 Don Quixote (Cervantes), xv, xvii, xix–­x x, xxiv, 99, 119n2, 125, 149n4, 149n7, 151n12, 221, 225; adaptations of, 123, 146–­48, 149n3, 154nn28–­29, 155n30, 157nn38–­39; and crossroads, 225, 228, 233, 239, 243; “El curioso impertinente,” xxii, 107; and food, xxiii–­x xiv, 167, 169–­70, 174, 186–­87, 191, 198n3; and Harold Humes, 134–­ 39, 153n23; and humanism, 41–­43, 51; and Islam, 59; and media, xxiv; and modernity, 31, 45, 45n1, 46n4, 229; and onomastics, 54; and orality,

xxv, 237; and Orson Welles, 126–­34, 148n1, 150n10, 150n12, 151nn13–­14, 152n15; and perspectivism, 25–­28, 44, 46n2, 236–­38, 242; and politics, 208; and sexuality, xxi; and subjectivity, 32–­34, 37–­38; and theology, xx, 27, 29–­31, 36, 39; and Waldo Salt, 139–­46, 154n28, 156n32 Don Quixote (character), 30, 109–­10, 191, 208–­9, 225, 228–­29, 239–­41, 243–­44; in adaptations, 127–­34, 136, 138–­40, 142–­47, 149n4, 151n13, 152n15, 154n29, 155n30, 157n39; and chivalry, 31, 33–­35, 43, 56, 60; and food, xxiii, 167, 169–­70, 173, 182, 183; and friendship, 82; and nominalism, 30; and onomastics, 55, 63, 73n17; and perspectivism, 36, 233–­38; in restaurant names and iconography, 176, 176–­78, 179, 180, 180–­81, 181, 199n9; and sexuality, 64–­66, 70–­71; and subjectivity, 37, 41–­42, 44–­45, 48n17, 59 Don Quixote (restaurant), 178, 180 Don Quixote (Salt, unfinished film), 128, 139–­46, 154nn28–­29, 155nn29–­ 30, 156n32 Don Quixote (Welles, unfinished film), 123, 126–­34, 148n1, 150n12, 151nn13–­ 14, 152n15 Don Quixote U.S.A. (Powell), 146, 148 The Dove’s Neck-­Ring (Ibn Hazm), 71 Drasin, Daniel, 137, 152n18, 153n22 Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick), 138, 147, 154n26, 154n28 duelos y quebrantos, 169, 190 Dulcie (from Welles film), 127, 130–­32 Index  253

Dulcinea, 36, 51, 71, 127, 133, 143–­44, 170, 241 dysfunction, sexual, 52, 63, 65–­66, 70–­ 71, 74n28. See also sexuality é (restaurant), 187, 190, 191, 193 Eagleton, Terry, xxiii, 230 early modern period: food, 170, 173–­75, 198n1, 205; friendship, xxi, 100n1; Iberia, xix, xxii, xxiv, 169; literature, 51, 53, 59, 64–­65, 81–­82, 85–­86, 107; print culture, 226, 228, 241, 243; society, xx; studies, xviii, 81; subjectivity, xxi, xxiv–­x xv, 32, 146; theology, 26, 29, 37; women in, xvi, xxii education, xv, 91, 98, 101n9, 185, 203, 207 eggs, 174 ekphrasis, xviii, xix, 3–­5, 20n4 La elección de los alcaldes de Daganzo (Cervantes), 212–­13 empanadas, 170 “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (Andersen), 215 encyclopedists, 241 engaño, 112–­13, 238 England, xxii, 101n9, 139 English theater, xxii, 107, 109, 115 the Enlightenment, 36–­37, 45, 229 epic poetry, 17–­18, 59 epistemology, 26, 41, 110, 117, 242 epitaphs (in Don Quixote), 240–­42 equality, 88, 124, 153n21, 217 Erasmus, 88, 97, 101n9 eros, 85, 87, 93 eroticism, 51–­52, 56, 58–­62, 64, 70, 87, 150n12; in Arabic culture, 51, 58–­60, 62, 70–­71, 72n14, 72n16, 74n26; homo-­, 110, 115, 117 254 Index

ethics, 31–­33, 35, 46n2, 85, 91, 97, 101n9, 111, 115, 228 etymology, 25, 52–­55, 58, 63, 73n17 euphemism, 53, 58, 61–­62, 67. See also innuendo Europe, xxi, 27, 56, 110, 128, 157n38, 193, 216, 220; and Americas, 169, 177, 198n4, 209, 226, 244n1; early modern, 27, 85–­87, 97, 101n7 event horizon, 231–­32, 240 exceptionalism, 210, 214–­15, 217 existence: divine, 35; human, 26, 30–­33, 39–­40, 42, 154n24, 206; individual, xxi, 31, 37, 44–­45, 233; and ontology, 28, 227, 232, 234, 240, 242–­43 experimentation, 123; cinematic, 129, 133–­36, 139, 141, 143, 146–­47, 150n12, 152n19; literary, xxii, 81–­82, 85, 99, 110, 117, 204, 208 facts, 108, 113, 131, 183, 205, 237, 239–­41 fascism, 134, 208, 210 feasts, 169–­70, 172 feminism, xiii, xvi, 17, 88, 149n5 film. See cinema fish, 61, 67, 170, 174, 187. See also abadejo; sardines; seafood; shrimp; squid Fish, Stanley, 237–­38, 244 flan, 176–­77 Florence, 110, 115–­16 The Flower Thief (Rice), 136, 154n28 Fonseca, Cristóbal de, 61 food: in Don Quixote, xxiv, 167, 169–­70, 173, 198n3; New World, 173–­75, 177–­78, 198n4, 199n10; and sexuality, 66–­67; Spanish, 175, 177, 181–­83, 186–­ 87, 198n1, 199n13 Foucault, Michel, 41–­42, 229

France, 5, 7, 11, 20n5, 28, 52, 54, 65, 73n25, 156n35, 219–­20, 229, 241 Franco, Francisco, 127, 134, 149n4, 178 Franco, Jess, 128, 150n10, 151n12 freedom, 26, 36, 157n38, 210, 218; and agency, 32, 40; artistic, 40, 124, 129, 146–­47; and divine will, 28, 30, 36; individual, 26, 146; of speech, 136, 153n21; of women, 96–­97 free will. See agency; freedom: and divine will French language, 54, 72n5, 107, 219 friendship, xxi–­x xii, 81–­100, 100n1, 100n5, 101nn6–­9, 109–­11, 116–­17, 154n27. See also amicitia fundamentalism, xxiv, 203, 217, 220

globalism, xvii, 174, 205, 207, 212; and capitalism, 125, 216–­17; and neoliberalism, 203, 220; and technology, 226–­27, 241 global warming, 205, 212, 217. See also climate change God, xx, 25–­33, 35–­41, 44, 46n2, 46n5, 47n15, 205, 208–­10, 216, 229 grace, 29–­31, 35, 37, 39, 44, 46n5 Greek language, 51, 53–­54 Greek literature, 19, 51, 86, 91, 101n7, 242 Greeks, 38, 52 Greene, Brian, 232 Greenwich Village, 135, 137 Gutenberg, Johannes, 226, 229, 232–­33 Gutenberg galaxy, xxv, 226, 242

La Galatea (Cervantes), xxi–­x xii, 81–­85, 87–­90, 93, 96, 100n3, 100n5 garlic (ajo), 174, 181 gastronomy, 167, 169, 173–­74, 175, 187, 190–­91 gaze, 18, 116, 145, 149n5, 208 gazpacho, 174 gender, xix, xxi, 57, 112, 115, 119n7 genealogy, xx, 3, 8, 71 genitalia, xxi, 56–­59, 62, 65, 67, 72n14, 73n21. See also penis; pubic hair; semen; sexuality; testicles; vagina; vulva Germany, 28, 54, 206 Gilliam, Terry, 148, 157n39 Giménez Caballero, Ernesto, 208, 210–­11 Ginés de Pasamonte, 36, 130, 132, 144, 155n30 Gingrich, Newt, 210, 215 Ginsberg, Allen, 126

ham, 182, 194. See also meat Hawking, Stephen, 231 Hays Code, 124, 148n2 H-­bomb, 127, 129–­31, 134, 138 health, 65, 169, 173, 214 Hebrews, 52–­53 hegemony, 124, 126, 148 hermeneutics, 228, 241–­42 Hernandez, Carmen, 176 Hillmann, Robert, 140, 156n31 Hollywood, 146, 149n5, 150n8, 155n29; blacklist, 153n21, 156n34; conventions, 123, 126, 129, 133–­35, 141, 145–­46, 148, 149n4; Hays Code, 148n2; New, 140, 145, 155n30, 156n35; studios, 124–­ 26, 149n6. See also cinema honeycomb, 182 honor, xvii, 29, 170; and blood purity, 213–­15; family, 89, 109, 113, 119n5; national, 11; personal, 91–­92, 98, 111, 144; of Virgin, 10–­11, 15 Index  255

Hopper, Hedda, 146 House Un-­American Activities Commitee (huac), 143, 156n34 humanism, 46n3, 51, 88, 101n9, 203, 206–­7, 232; and nominalism, xx, 25, 28, 32, 35, 37–­38, 40–­42, 44–­45 humanitas, 203, 207, 221 humanities, xiii–­xiv, xviii, xix, xxv, 203, 206–­7, 216, 221 Humes, Harold L. (“Doc”), xxiii, 123–­ 25, 134–­38, 141, 145, 148, 152nn16–­18, 153nn21–­22, 153–­54n24, 154nn25–­27 Humes, Immy, 123, 136, 148n1, 152n16, 153nn23–­24 hybridity, 175, 177 hyperreality, 243 hypocrisy, 116–­17 Iberia, 199n10, 209–­10; and Iberian culture, xiii–­xiv, xvi, xix, xxi, xxiii, 59, 82–­83, 89, 174, 192, 197. See also Spain ibn Muhammad al-­Nafzawi, Muhammad, 58, 60 ibn Nasr al-­Katib, Ali, 58 iconography, xix–­x x, 3–­4, 10–­11, 13, 16, 19, 180, 234 idealism, 17, 35, 90, 93, 98, 109, 115–­16, 144, 149n4, 207 ideology, xiii, 25–­26, 31–­32, 88, 211, 215, 221, 236; aesthetic, 124–­25, 146; Counter-­Reformation, 9; early modern, xxv, 149n5; fascist, 208, 210; humanist, 88; neoliberal, 203 imagination, 9, 38, 124, 130, 132, 145, 191 Immaculate Conception, 4, 10, 13–­14, 19 immaculism, 10–­11, 13, 15, 20nn6–­7, 20n9 256 Index

immigration, 178, 216, 220 imperialism, 14, 141, 204, 209–­10, 215 impotence, 56, 65–­66, 70 improvisation, 129, 134, 136, 153n21 independence, 32, 37, 48n17, 124, 126, 146, 148 individuality, 26, 28–­29, 31–­45, 47n13, 47n15, 48n16, 149n4, 203, 205, 213, 215, 237–­38 information age, xiv, 226–­27, 231–­32, 241, 243 innuendo, 51, 54, 60, 62, 63. See also euphemism Inquisition, 46n2, 51, 107, 142–­44, 156n34, 210 insanity, 138. See also madness intellect, 38, 85, 91 intercourse (sexual, including slang terms), 57–­59, 114 interpretation, xvi, xvii, 3, 9, 27, 110, 115, 119, 119n4, 209; and adaptation, 141; and interpretive communities, 237–­38, 244; and onomastics, 54–­55, 59, 62–­64; and perspectivism, 236; strategies, 207, 209, 238 irony, 64, 119, 133, 145, 150n10, 208–­11, 215, 218, 221n2, 236, 242 isis, 217–­19 Islam, 55, 217, 220; and Muslims, 51, 55–­ 56, 59–­60, 62, 65, 71, 72n16, 73n24, 169, 180, 219 Islamic State, 217 Italy, xx, 51, 72n16, 101n9, 127, 129, 132 Jaleo (restaurant), 183, 186, 188, 189, 194, 198 “El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan” (Borges), 233

jazz, 136–­37, 153n21, 175 jealousy, 16, 20n10, 88, 93, 115, 118 Jews, 133, 146, 169, 180 Joubert, Laurent, 52–­54 Kennedy, John F., 139, 217 Kerouac, Jack, 136, 146 Khrushchev, Nikita, 138, 154n25 knight-­errantry, 33–­34, 44, 138, 141 knowledge, xiii, xv, 28, 107, 205–­6, 226, 228–­29, 235–­36, 241–­42; self-­, 42; and sexuality, xxi, 71 Kodar, Oja, 128, 150n10, 151n13 Kokonas, Nick, 187, 190 Kurzweil, Ray, 226 Lady’s Tragedy (Middleton), 113–­15 Lagoa, José, 178, 180–­81 Laguna, Andrés, 67–­68, 68, 70, 74n28 language, 52–­53, 87, 108, 110–­11, 114, 148n2, 183, 207, 229; and nominalism, 25, 34–­36, 46n2; scholarship, xiv; and sexuality, 59, 62, 73n20 Latin America, xiii–­xiv, xxi, 177–­78, 187, 199n10 Latin language, 53 law, xvii, 28, 30–­31, 101, 111, 153n21, 231 Leibniz, Gottfried, 206 Leigh, Mitch, 147 lentils, 182. See also beans lewdness, 53–­54, 59–­60, 118 liberal bias, 211 lienzos. See canvases Lisbon, 3–­5, 7–­8, 13 literacy, xxiv, 203–­4, 216, 221, 229 literature, xiii, xvii, xxiii, 3, 27, 45n1, 134, 154n26, 206–­7; chivalric, 33–­35, 43, 57, 59–­60, 63, 87, 91, 101nn8–­9,

132, 235; early modern, 81, 85, 90, 100n1; English, 119n1; erotic, 56, 60; Hispanic, 115, 205, 244n1; medical, 64, 67; pastoral, xx–­x xii, 44, 82–­85, 89, 99, 100n5, 116 Lithgow, John, 155n29 London, 139, 154n26 Lope de Vega, xxi, 125, 204 López de Villalobos, Francisco, 66–­67 López Pinciano, Alonso, 53–­54, 71n3, 72n5 Lord Buckley, 136–­37, 153n21 Los Angeles, xv, 123, 175–­77, 186, 194 lost cause, 125, 145 Lost in La Mancha (Fulton and Pepe), 157n39 love, 132–­33, 150n10, 151n12, 178, 182, 204, 210; in “El curioso impertinente,” 113–­16; and friendship, 82, 85, 88–­96, 99; of God, 29, 39, 61; and pastoral, 84–­99, 102n10; in Persiles y Sigismunda, 13, 15, 17, 20n10; Platonic, 51; and sexuality, 60, 71 Loyalists, 125, 149n4, 150n8 Luther, Martin, 10, 46n5 Lutheranism, 209 macademia nuts, 182 madness, 33, 94, 109–­10, 113–­14, 117, 126, 155n30. See also insanity Madrid, 153n23, 178, 182, 190, 193–­95, 198 Maese Pedro. See Ginés de Pasamonte Mambrino’s helmet, 46n2, 177, 212, 225, 234–­38 Man of la Mancha (Wasserman), xxiii, 124, 128, 144, 146–­47, 149n3, 187 manuscripts, xiv, 72n11, 88, 109, 170, 227–­28, 235, 237, 242 Index  257

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (Gilliam), 148 Maravall, Antonio, 209, 213–­14, 221n3 Marian devotion, xix, 3, 10–­11, 15–­17, 19, 20n8, 221n2 mariscos. See seafood market society, xviii, 203–­4, 207, 216–­17 marriage, 17, 82, 85–­86, 88–­90, 96–­98, 101, 109–­11, 115–­17 Mary (the Virgin), 10, 15, 20n8 marzipan, 182 Más (restaurant), 186 material culture, xxiii, 4, 14, 135, 169 The Matrix (Wachowskis), 216 McCarthyism, 124–­25, 133, 148n2 McCormack, Patty, 127–­28 McLuhan, Marshall, xxv, 226–­27, 229, 244 McWhorter, John, 227 Mead, Taylor, 136, 154n28 meals, 169–­70, 173, 182 meat, 170, 174, 187. See also abadejo; chicken; fish; ham; pork; rabbit; salpicón media, xxiv–­x xv, 124, 132, 205, 216–­17, 242; framing, xxv, 204–­6, 208, 221; medialogy, xxv, 207, 217, 219–­21, 221n1, 226, 236; new, 233, 241; social, xvii, 243; visual, 108 medicine, 59, 65–­67, 68 medieval period, xxv, 26–­27, 86, 100n1, 101n8, 226; Christianity, 47n14, 81; Islam, 51, 73n26; medicine, 65; orality, 227–­28, 237, 244; theology, 26, 28–­29 Mekas, Jonas, 135, 153n23 memory, 7–­8, 18, 42, 48n16, 57, 129 Mercat a la planxa, 183–­86, 193 metamorphosis, 6, 87, 94, 232, 240, 244 258 Index

metaphysics, 27–­29, 234; of presence, 230–­31 Mexico, xxiii, 126–­29, 132, 153n22, 217 Michelangelo, 9, 19 Middle Ages. See medieval period Middleton, Thomas, 107, 113, 119 Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger), 140, 145–­47, 156nn32–­33 militarism, 124, 141 Minibar (restaurant), 187 misogyny, 57, 219 modernity, xx, xxv, 25–­29, 31, 35, 41, 45–­46, 204 Modern Language Association (mla), xiv–­xv, xxvin2 monarchy, 11, 85, 92 Montemayor, Jorge de, xxi, 93 Montesinos, Cave of, 31, 35 Moors, 60, 143, 234 Muñoz, David, 190 museums, 3, 9, 19 Muslims. See Islam: and Muslims mythology, 213, 215 national identity, 11, 174, 204 nationalism, 214, 217, 220 Nemours, Duke of, 7–­8, 14–­15 neoliberalism, xxv, 203–­4, 217 neoplatonism, 25, 27 New American Cinema Group, 135–­37, 153n23 news cycle, 205, 216 Newton, Isaac, 232–­33 New World, 169, 173–­75, 198n4, 204, 225. See also the Americas New York City, 135–­36, 139, 142, 156n33, 157n38, 175, 187, 195

New York Police Department (nypd), 136, 153n21 New York University (nyu), 137, 140, 182 1960s, xiii, xv, 124, 145, 178 nobility, 93, 126 nominalism, xx, 25, 27–­42, 44–­47 nuclear war, 129, 132 Nuevo arte de cocina (Altamiras), 174 Núñez de Coria, Francisco, 64–­65 Obama, Barack, 204–­5, 211, 220 obedience, 213–­14 obscenity, xxi, 51–­55, 59, 62–­63, 71, 73n18, 73n20, 73n26. See also sexuality Ockham, William of, xx, 27–­30, 33–­34, 36, 38–­39, 41, 46n3, 47nn6–­8, 244 Ockhamism, 28 Ojo de Vidrio, 137, 153n22 olives, 178, 186, 188 olla, 169, 182 omnipotence, 28–­30, 36–­37, 45 omniscience, xx, 33 Ong, Walter, 241, 243–­44 onion (cebolla), 174, 190 onomastics, xxi, 51–­52, 55, 58–­59, 63, 70–­71 ontology, 26, 28–­29, 34, 38, 110, 231 orality, xxv, 7, 225–­32, 237, 241–­44 Orality and Literacy (Ong), 229 oranges, 182 Orchid (della Porta), 69, 70 orthodoxy, xxv, 14, 203–­4, 207, 210, 216, 221 Othello (Shakespeare), 117–­18 Ovid, 51, 60 paella, 175, 178, 183, 187, 193–­97 paganism, 15, 18, 61

painting, xix, 16, 18, 19n1, 20n5, 114; and ekphrasis, 3–­4, 6–­9, 13; portraiture, xx, 3–­5, 7–­10, 13–­19, 116, 204 palomino de añadidura, 169 Pamplona, 145, 186, 192, 198 Pamplona Tapas Bar, 198 paprika, 181, 198n6 parallel universes, 232–­33, 240–­41, 243 Paris, xviii, 127, 134, 219–­21 parody, 56–­57, 59, 73n26, 138, 141, 208 pasas (raisins), 170 passion, 14, 40, 85–­86, 88, 91, 93–­94, 102n12, 117, 178 pastiche, 136, 138 pears, 182 Pedacio Dioscórides Anazarbeo (Dioscórides), 67, 68, 70. See also Dioscórides penis (including slang terms), 56–­61, 63, 67, 70, 72n16, 73n23, 74n26, 74n29. See also genitalia; semen; testicles Pepe, Louis, 157n39 pepper, 198n6 peppers, 51, 174–­75, 195 perception, 19, 26, 67, 108, 113, 205, 220 performance, xiii, xix, xxi, 34, 59, 74n28, 114, 129, 136, 153n21, 157n38, 175 Periandro, 4–­9, 13, 15, 17 Persia, 51, 58 Persiles. See Periandro Persiles y Sigismunda (Cervantes), xix–­x x, 3–­5, 7, 9, 10–­11, 13, 15–­19, 19nn1–­2, 99, 209 perspectivism, xx–­x xi, 25–­29, 31–­37, 39, 42, 44, 46n2, 205, 236–­39, 242, 244 Petrarch, 28, 30, 37–­44, 47, 54, 109 phenomenology, 39, 230 Index  259

philosophy, 72n8, 101n6, 132–­33, 154n25, 206, 215, 230–­31, 234, 236; and Christianity, 88; and friendship, 85; and Islam, 71; and modernity, 45; and onomastics, 53, 55; and theology, xx, 26–­27, 37–­38, 42, 46n5, 47n14 phonocentrism, 230–­31 photography, 227, 232, 243 Phytognomonica (della Porta), 69, 70 pilgrimage, 8–­9, 13, 15, 17–­19, 20n8, 209 pinchos, 178, 192, 197–­98 Plato, 52–­55, 62, 230–­31 Platonism, 26, 28, 54 plays, 72n16, 107, 114, 119, 175, 213 playwrights, 4, 107, 110, 115–­16, 119, 155n29 politics, 81, 89, 92, 101n5, 101n9, 134, 141, 149n4, 203, 236; Cold War, 124, 138–­39, 148n2, 204; conservative, xviii, 210, 213, 216–­17, 220; counter-­cultural, xxiii, 123–­24, 127, 133, 135, 139, 146, 149n3; Counter-­ Reformation, 4, 10–­11; and satire, xix, 134, 138, 148, 211; and sexuality, xxi, 57, 70–­71 popular culture, xxiv, 59, 204, 211, 213 populism, 217, 220 pork, 175, 180, 182, 186. See also meat pornography, 56, 61, 107 portraiture, xx, 3–­5, 7–­10, 13–­19, 116, 204. See also canvases; painting positivism, xiii, 111 postmodernism, xv–­xvi, xxv, 203, 226, 243; and neo-­baroque, xxiv–­x xv, 204, 226 post-­structuralism, 229, 237 potatoes, 174–­75, 198n7 260 Index

potency, sexual, 64, 67. See also sexuality poultry, 174. See also chicken Powell, Richard, 146, 148 predestination, 32, 41, 47n8, 208 print culture, xxv, 88, 144, 204, 208, 226–­27, 229, 242–­43 promiscuity, 118, 120n8, 143 promised land, 209–­10 propaganda, 124–­25, 157n38, 213, 221 Protestantism, 88, 97, 102n11, 114 psychology, 25, 52, 96, 99, 109, 117, 218 pubic hair (including slang terms), 56, 58, 60, 62. See also genitalia Puerta, José Ramón Andrés, 186 pulpo (octopus), 178, 182 punditry, 211, 217 Puritanism, 142 quantum physics, 232 queer theory, xiii, xxii quince, 190, 191 quixotism, xxiii, 117, 124, 126, 134, 144, 147, 148, 149n3 rabbit (conejo), 170, 186 Raphael, 9, 19 Reagan, Ronald, 210 realism, 18, 26, 28, 34–­35, 41 reality, 4, 34, 41, 46n2, 48n17, 130, 203, 205, 211; in flux, 236–­37, 244; hyper-­, 243; literacy, xxiv–­x xv, 203–­4, 206, 216–­21, 226; and media, 208, 221n1, 226–­27; and morality, 141; and multiple realities, 207, 233, 235, 238–­40; and representation, 16, 18; social, 110 reality literacy. See reality: literacy

reason, xxi, 31, 38, 235; divine, 26, 30; Enlightenment, 31, 36–­37; human, 27, 30, 38–­40, 43, 90–­91, 93–­94, 102n10, 102n12, 112–­13; and misogyny, 219 Recio de Agüero, Pedro, 190 referentiality, 16, 27, 36, 41–­42, 44–­45, 111, 113, 133 relativism, 25, 237 relativity, 232 religion, 9–­10, 219 Renaissance period, xx–­x xi, 3, 9, 19, 51, 100n1, 142 Republican party, 213, 220 resemblances, 41–­42, 55, 229 resistance, 96, 124, 126 El retablo de las maravillas (Cervantes), 213–­15, 221, 222n3 rice (arroz), 174, 183, 199n10 “Rinconete y Cortadillo” (Cervantes), xxiv, 175 La Rioja, 182, 193, 196 Rivero, Carlos, 177–­78 Roelas, Juan de, 11–­13, 12, 20n7 romance (literary genre), xxii, 102nn11–­ 12; chivalric, 43, 57, 101nn8–­9, 132, 237; Christian, 209; Greek, 19, 86, 91, 101n7; pastoral, 82–­89, 93, 96–­98, 101n5, 102n12 romantic approach to Don Quixote, xxiii, 124, 144, 147, 157n38 Rome, 3, 5, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17–­19 ropa vieja, 175 Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 124, 128, 130, 150nn9–­10, 151n13 Rubin, Jennifer, 213 Rushdie, Salman, 239 Russell, Bertrand, 138, 154n25

salad, 169 salpicón, 169, 173, 190, 190 Salt, Jennifer, 123, 148n1, 155n30, 156n31 Salt, Waldo, xxiii, 123–­25, 128, 138–­48, 148n1, 154n29, 155n30, 156nn31–­34, 156n36 Sancho Panza, xxiii, 47n10, 56, 60, 65–­67, 70, 82, 110, 208, 241; in ducal palace, 31, 44, 128; and Dulcinea, 36; in film adaptations, 127–­32, 134, 138, 140, 143–­45, 152n15, 155n30; and food, 170, 172, 173, 180, 182–­83, 190–­ 91, 195–­96; and objective reality, 55, 63, 233–­35 San Francisco, 139, 187, 197 sanity, 33, 44, 138–­39 sardines, 170, 182, 183. See also fish The Satanic Verses (Rushdie), 239 satire, xix, xxiv, 124–­25, 132, 134, 138, 147–­ 48, 154n26, 155n30, 173, 211–­12, 215 Schlesinger, John, 140, 155n30, 156n32 scholasticism, 26, 28, 47n15 school shootings, 216, 218–­19 science, 34, 154n26, 155n30, 205 screenplays, 123, 129–­30, 136, 140–­41, 143, 146, 148n1, 151n14, 152n17, 155n29, 156n32 sculpture, 10, 72, 210 Scythians, 65–­66 seafood, 182, 187. See also fish secularism, 26, 28, 41, 45, 45n1, 46n4, 233 seduction, 109, 111–­13, 115, 120n8 self-­creation, 32, 40–­43. See also self-­fashioning self-­fashioning, 32, 35, 41, 43. See also self-­creation self-­knowledge, 42 semantics, xxi, 54, 71, 87, 112 Index  261

semen, 58, 64–­65. See also genitalia; penis; testicles sensuality, 15, 58, 61 Seville, 10–­11, 65, 73n25, 128, 182–­83, 194–­97, 199n13 sexuality, xxi, 65, 86, 97, 101n7, 113, 115, 117–­18, 120n8, 148n2; and abstinence, 52, 55; and anthropomorphized genitalia, 57, 60; and desire, 44, 156n33; and food, 66–­67; homo-­, 62, 111; and innuendo, 51, 54, 56, 60, 63–­64, 72n12; and intercourse, 55–­56, 62, 67, 73n21; and Islam, 58–­59, 72n14, 73n24; and medicine, 58, 71. See also dysfunction, sexual; potency, sexual Shakespeare, William, xxii, 117–­19, 119n1, 136 shepherds, 30, 58, 65–­66, 84, 92–­94, 97, 137 Shilliday, Susan, 140, 155n29 shooting (filming), 126, 130 shrimp, 176. See also fish; seafood Sidney, Philip, xxi–­x xii, 81–­92, 94–­100, 100n2, 100n4, 101nn7–­8, 102n13 Sigismunda. See Auristela singularity, 30, 35, 38, 43, 226 Snapchat, 227, 232 social media, xvii, 243 society, xvii, 116–­17; Arcadia, 94, 96; contemporary, xx, 97, 135, 138, 242; early modern, xx, 82, 97; market, 203–­4, 207, 216–­17; Western, 230–­31 sodomy, 51, 61. See also intercourse; sexuality: and intercourse solitude, 40, 43, 90, 207, 219 Southerne, Thomas, 107, 116–­19 Soviet Union, 138, 154n25, 157n38 262 Index

Spain, xiv, 20n6, 110, 151n14, 167, 180–­83, 184, 185, 190, 194–­96; and Americas, 169, 173–­74, 186–­87; and Catholicism, 210; Counter-­Reformation, 10, 204, 212–­13, 215; early modern, xxii, xxiv, 11, 51, 59, 71, 142, 198n1, 205, 226; fascist, 208–­9; influence of, in England, 119n1; post-­Franco, 127, 178; and Spanish Empire, 125, 208; and Spanish Republic, 125, 149n4; and theology, 37, 46nn2–­3. See also Iberia Spanish language, xiii, 107, 151n14 speech (compared to writing), 227, 230, 243 sperm, 56, 58, 64–­65, 70, 74n27 Spitzer, Leo, 25–­27, 32, 44, 46n2, 73n17, 236 squid, 190. See also seafood stew, 170, 174 stories, 5–­6, 35, 85–­87, 89, 101n8, 206 storytelling, 59, 87, 89 string theory, 232–­33 Suárez, Francisco, 37, 46n3 subjectivity, xx–­x xi, xxiv–­x xv, 32, 37, 48n17, 96, 111, 113–­14, 116, 146 suicide, 95, 112, 114 sweet potatoes, 175 Taberna de Haro (restaurant), 178, 182–­ 83, 183, 192, 199n12 tamales, 177 Tampa (Florida), 175–­76, 176 tangerines, 182 tapas, 175, 178, 183, 186, 192–­98, 199n8, 199n13 technology, xv, xvii, xix, 176, 207, 226, 228, 232, 242

television, xxiv, 127, 129, 131–­32, 139, 146, 154n26, 180, 218 terrorism, 219–­20 testicles (including slang terms), 56–­58, 61, 66–­67. See also genitalia; penis; pubic hair texting, 227 theater, 108–­10, 112, 117, 130, 132, 134, 149n7, 204, 208 theatricality, xxv, 108, 118–­19, 212, 214–­ 15, 221n3 theology, 28–­29, 34, 37, 46n3, 96, 229 Thomas Aquinas, 28, 46n5 tomatoes, 174, 198n5 Toro Bravo (restaurant), 186, 196, 199n13 torrijas, 177 tortilla española, 174, 178 totality, 229, 233, 237, 243 Touch of Evil (Welles), 126, 150n8 transcendence, 28–­29, 46n2, 208 translation, xxii, 51, 71, 73n17, 73n20, 84, 107, 120n9, 170, 242; and cinema, 132, 141–­42, 151n14 trauma, 34, 134, 143, 156n33 trigo (wheat), 170 Trump, Donald, 210–­11, 217, 220 truth, 20n10, 48n17, 86; and Catholicism, 4, 9; and epistemology, 203, 206, 211, 235; poetic, 130–­31, 133; postmodern, xvi; and theology, 34–­ 35, 38, 47n15 turkey, 198n4. See also chicken Turks, 51, 58, 209 tweet (Twitter), 227–­28 typographic culture, 226–­29, 231, 242–­44

Unamuno, Miguel de, xxiii The Underground City (Humes), 134, 146, 152n17 United States, 146, 148, 157n38, 220, 226, 228, 231; cinema, xxii, xxvi, 123–­25, 139, 143, 148, 152n19; and Hispanism, xiii, xv–­xvi, xviii–­xix; society, 167, 175, 178, 182, 187, 204, 216, 217, 220; travelers to Spain from, 183, 184, 185, 199n8 universities and colleges, xiii, xxv, 178, 203, 207 unpredictability, 31, 33–­34, 41, 112 utopia, 209 Ut pictura poesis (Horace), 3 vagina, 60, 62. See also genitalia; vulva vegetables, 174 Venus, 15, 20n8, 67 viandas rústicas, 170 Vignali, Antonio, 56–­57, 59, 67, 70, 72n8, 72n16 virtue, 31, 34, 37–­40, 42, 45, 86, 88, 91, 94, 111, 117, 209 vomit, 56, 66 voyeurism, 107, 112 vulva (including slang terms), 56–­59, 62, 72nn13–­14. See also genitalia; pubic hair; vagina The Wachowskis, 216 Washington dc, 142, 183, 187, 188, 198 Washington Square Park, 135, 137, 152n18 Wasserman, Dale, xxiii, 144, 147, 156n37 Welles, Orson, xxiii, 123–­34, 138, 141, 143, 145–­48, 148n1, 150nn8–­12, 151nn13–­14, 152n15 Index  263

Western culture, 56, 62, 73n24, 73n26, 226, 229–­31, 233 white America, 219–­20 Wikipedia, 241–­42 William of Ockham. See Ockham, William of windmills, 131, 143–­45, 181, 181, 212, 236 wine, 170, 178, 181–­83, 186, 192–­94, 196, 199n9, 199nn11–­13 women, xvi, 13, 17, 20n10, 102n13; and agency, 96–­97, 101n9, 116; and freedom, 88, 96; and friendship, xxi–­x xii, 83, 85–­86, 88–­89, 96–­99,

264 Index

101nn8–­9; and marriage, 99, 101n9, 112, 114–­16, 118; and misogyny, 217–­ 18; and sexuality, 57–­58, 61–­62, 64, 67, 72n14, 73n16, 73n21 wordplay, 55, 58 World War I, 124 World War II, 124–­25, 134 World Wide Web, xiv–­xv, 227 writing (compared to speech), 4, 13, 227–­30, 237, 241, 243 Zaragoza, 225, 239–­41 Žižek, Slavoj, 215, 220–­22

In the New Hispanisms series

Millennial Cervantes: New Currents in Cervantes Studies Edited by Bruce R. Burningham Talking Books with Mario Vargas Llosa: A Retrospective Edited by Raquel Chang-­ Rodríguez and Carlos Ribosó Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz By Sarah Finley Hercules and the King of Portugal: Icons of Masculinity and Nation in Calderón’s Spain By Dian Fox Paradoxes of Stasis: Literature, Politics, and Thought in Francoist Spain By Tatjana Gajić

The Image of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Spain Edited by Eduardo Olid Guerrero and Esther Fernández Caught between the Lines: Captives, Frontiers, and National Identity in Argentine Literature and Art By Carlos Riobó The Supernatural Sublime: The Wondrous Ineffability of the Everyday in Films from Mexico and Spain By Raúl Rodríguez-­Hernández and Claudia Schaefer Geographies of Urban Female Labor and Nationhood in Spanish Culture, 1880–­1975 By Mar Soria

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