From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
18.2 (1998): 26-52.
Copyright © 1998, The Cervantes Society of America
Masochisma versus Machismo or: Camila's Re-writing
of Gender Assignations in Cervantes's Tale of Foolish
Curiosity
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A system of values is never a homogeneous code of abstract
principles obeyed by all the participants in a given culture and able to
be extracted from an informant with the aid of a set of hypothetical questions,
but a collection of concepts which are related to one another and applied
differently by the different status-groups defined by age, sex, class,
occupation, etc., in the different social . . . contexts in which
they find their meanings. |
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| (Julian Pitt-Rivers, “Honour and Shame,” 39). |
26
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Masochisma versus Machismo |
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ervantes's El Curioso
Impertinente (El curioso)1 has
been called “the only ‘monoglot’ story in the
Quixote,” one that both follows “the strict law of Aristotelian
verisimilitude” (Martínez-Bonati 281, 62) and constitutes a
commentary on the theme of wrongdoing and its consequences, supposedly the
thrust of the novel itself (Castro 121). El curioso is a simple story
consisting of a husband's desire to test his wife and the tragic consequences
that ensue. Anselmo, a young and apparently happy newly-wed, is obsessed
with testing the chastity of his faithful wife Camila and insists that his
best friend Lotario stage the seduction scene. The plan backfires. Camila
and Lotario fall in love and Anselmo dies of a broken heart when he is made
aware of the adultery. Camila is immured in a convent, takes the veil, and
dies after Lotario is killed in battle.
Anselmo's test positions woman as a man's erotic
prop. It is a frequently used topos in antiquity (Murillo, n.15; Wilson 1987:
16-18). Its prototype is probably to be found in Herodotus, History,
Book One, where king Candaules shows his beloved queen naked to his bodyguard
in order to prove that he possesses “the fairest woman in the whole
world” (Herodotus, 3). Angered by this, the queen has Gyges kill her
husband and makes him king instead.2 The modern
version in the Orlando Furioso (to which an allusion is explicitly
made in El curioso ), seems even closer to Cervantes's use of the
topos. Ariosto gives the reader two contrasting examples. The first is that
of the once-happy husband who recounts how, induced by a sorceress, he tests
his wife's fidelity and consequently loses her. He explains to Rinaldo that,
not content with the positive results of the first test, he tries again in
the guise of a rich lover, this time offering her “bright jewels.”
He succeeds: “She with my wishes, said, she would comply, / If sure
to be unseen of watchful eye” (XLIII: 38). As in Herodotus's
History, the woman in the Orlando Furioso, once made aware
of the trick, repudiates her husband. The second example in the Orlando
Furioso presents a magic cup that spills when a deceived lover attempts
to drink from it. The happy lover Rinaldo,
1 I use
El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha, ed. Luis Andrés
Murillo. Unless otherwise noted, all further references to La novela del
curioso impertinente, cited as El curioso in the text, will
be from this edition and parenthetically documented by page numbers.
“Murillo” refers to the editor's notes.
2 Herodotus's
story has been increasingly associated with El curioso, even, at times,
as its archetype. See D. Wilson,
“Passing the Love of Women,”
for a history of this association (14-15 and n. 15). See P. Arriola, “Varia
fortuna de la historia del rey Candaules y El Curioso Impertinente,
33-49.
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Cervantes |
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unlike the shamed husband, refuses to test his beloved's fidelity and refrains
from drinking. Rinaldo reprimands the foolish husband of the first example
by focusing on the weakness of human nature in such cases: “Meseems
that thou in tempting her didst fail / More than herself, that was so quickly
caught. / I know not, had she tempted thee as much, / If thou, thyself, hadst
better stood the touch” (Orlando Furioso XLIII: 49).
A story as linear as this, however, once
appropriated by Cervantes, becomes a site of conflicting codes, not unlike
those operating in Spain toward the end of the 1560s. The connection between
text and practical life is pertinent. As is well known, a once-tolerant Spain
with its acceptance of the multicultural heritage of Judaism and Islam, of
conversos and moriscos, and with scant experience of heresy,
suffers a shock in 1558 when practicing Lutherans are discovered and burned
in Valladolid and Seville. A national fear of difference and increased pressure
towards homogeneity prompts inscription of the other in discourses that
legitimize extreme measures.
Some pressure towards homogeneity had already
existed in Spain since the time of the Reyes Católicos. The language
of the monarch and his court had become Spanish. In Catalonia and Valencia
Castilian was widely used by men of letters and served effectively for political
expansion; the humanist Antonio de Nebrija, in the prologue to the Castilian
grammar he dedicated to her, reminded Queen Isabella that language was always
the instrument of empire. Toward the end of the sixteenth-century, however,
the quest for a homogeneity based on religious orthodoxy and on racial purity
gains momentum as religious orthodoxy is imposed through a list of heretical
practices with which the Inquisition tests its victims, through the Index
of forbidden books issued in 1545, 1551 and rigidly imposed in 1558 and 1559,
and through the tenets demanded by the Council of Trent in 1563. The pragmatics
of 1558-1559 add to these
restrictions.3
It is primarily the quest for and the statutes
on racial purity that become a means of homogenizing
Spain.4 Already in 1449, a special
3 In 1568,
for the subjects of Aragon, the 1559 pragmatics that had been applied to
all of Spain are implemented. To this a prohibition is added safeguarding
Aragonese citizens from French influence. Philip II legislates that “[f]or
the preservation of the Catholic faith we prohibit any French subjects of
whatever condition (i.e. including priests) from teaching children
in any subject in the principalities and counties” (cited in Lynch I,
215: emphasis mine).
4 For a comprehensive
discussion of the statutes on purity of blood and their effects, see Henry
Kamen, “A Crisis of Conscience in Golden Age Spain” in Crisis
and Change in Early Modern Spain, 1-22.
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ordinance known as the Sentencia-Estatuto had been passed declaring “that
no converso of Jewish descent may have or hold any office or benefice in
the said city of Toledo, or in its territory and jurisdiction” (Kamen
1985, 25). In the sixteenth- and seventeenth -centuries, however, the fact
of being a converso could be socially damaging, to be a judaizer was
fatal. The two best known examples are of course Fray Luis de León
who was slandered and incarcerated from 1572-1576 as a suspected judaizer,
and Juan Luis Vives. In 1520 Vives's father was arrested as a judaizer and
burnt alive in 1524. In 1528 his mother, who had died eighteen years earlier
in 1510, suffered a similar fate. She was disinterred and her bones burnt
(Kamen 1985, 98). In 1556, Philip II could justify these extreme measures
by declaring that “all the heresies in Germany, France, and Spain have
been sown by descendants of Jews” (cited in Elliott 1963, 214-215).
In 1567 the last vestige of Spain's multicultural
heritage was to disappear. In the only territory left with a sizable minority,
Granada, an edict was proclaimed requiring moriscos to learn Spanish
within three years. The edict made both the practice of their religion and
the use of their language a crime. “The intention behind these measures
was to denationalize the moriscos,” John Lynch points out, to “make
them Spanish Catholics” (I, 227: emphasis mine). The quest for
homogeneity, then, permeated the Spanish experience in the sixteenth
century.5 The perceived existence of
“enemies” within and without its borders helped to create a national
paranoia that resuscitated the old warrior ethos of the Reconquista and its
single-minded goal of unifying Spain, glorified sameness, and celebrated
“manly” bonding. The concomitant subjection of the other was simply
accepted as the necessary means of establishing Spanish
identity.6
5 Constant
warfare exacerbated religious and racial tensions. Philip II's entire reign
was given to fighting the “enemies” of Spain —first in the
Mediterranean and the Netherlands, and in the 1590s in three fronts at
once— the Netherlands, England, and France. Adding to the racial and
religious tensions were the great plague of 1596-1602 and the economic realities
of Philip II's imperial ventures. Established as an imperial power, Spain
was nevertheless exploited by its own imperial system which drained the country
economically (Hamilton), and by a dependency that frustrated hopes of escaping
from a cycle of poverty. As is well known, the wealth from the Indies that
flooded the underdeveloped colonial markets of Andalusia and northern Castile
never succeeded in moving Spain from its position of dependence on foreign
markets (Kamen 1993, 41-50).
6 Anne Norton,
Jurij Lotman and others point to the efficacy of cultural / racial antinomies
in producing what Benedict Anderson has called an “imagined community”
or nation. For Norton, a nation invents itself precisely
[p. 30] in terms of what it rejects and deviancy
myths become essential in the construction of what it wants to signify. They
provide it with a “counter-identity” (53-54). Lotman et al
explain how inseparably linked the notion “culture” is with its
opposition “non-culture,” that it is to these discursive
representations in the constructedness of a country's texts that we must
look for “a condensed program of the [society's] whole
culture” (1975, 57-58; 74: emphasis mine). See also Jean Starobinski
who shows that the sacralizing of a term, “civilized” in this instance,
means the necessary demonizing of its antonym —the non-civilized: “Un
terme chargé de sacré démonise son antonyme.” Le
remède dans le mal. Critique et légitimation de l'artifice
à l'age des Lumières, 33.6.
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Cervantes |
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Spain's imposition of racial and religious
hegemony, however, was always incomplete. As Raymond Williams has emphasized,
hegemony is never total. It is continually being “renewed, recreated,
defended . . . resisted, limited, challenged” (Williams 1977,
112-113). In Spain, alternative traditions always existed in practice and
even “on occasion managed to prevail against the predominant view”
(Kamen 1993, 20). Concern about the presence of Jews, for example, intensified
as Portuguese merchants, descendants of those who had been expelled in 1492,
entered Spain in large numbers after the annexation of Portugal in 1580.
The effort to force the moriscos into submission was a failure
(Lynch I, 224-233), and religious orthodoxy proved to be just as difficult
to implement. Ecclesiastics bemoaned the lack of religious “purity”
among Christians. Referring to the old Christians of the Alpujarras, for
example, they discovered that even those who had “not a drop of impure
blood in their veins . . . hardly retain[ed] a few vestiges of
the Christian religion” (Lynch I, 230-231). Traces of these contemporary
resistances find their way into El curioso. At times they are explicit.
The difficult coexistence of Christians and Moors, for example, is the basis
of Lotario's complaint to Anselmo that no one can convince the Moors
of the truths of the Catholic faith (405). More often, the traces are intangible
but pervasive. The isolation of the means of discursive production in El
curioso, discloses these conflicting discourses. In spite of its
apparently tight geometric structure, the inserted tale is not constituted
as a monoglot story but as a composite of divergent voices and narrative
strategies ever resisting, altering, renewing, perpetuating and destabilizing
the master narrative.
As Don Quijote sleeps and the characters
are at leisure in Juan Palomeque's inn, an abandoned valise is brought in
by the innkeeper. A strategic location is immediately produced for misreading.
The consequent blurring of fiction and history sets the stage for the priest's
dismissive judgement of El curioso because of its distance
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from truth categories. The priest finds and rejects, as fictional lies, two
chivalric romances; praises a third book, the contemporary account of the
war exploits of the Gran Capitán Gonzalo Fernández de
Córdoba; and decides to read the eight-page manuscript of El
curioso which has also been abandoned in the
valise.7 The gap created by the innkeeper's
introduction of the valise becomes a pre-text for the discussion of the truth
value of texts, in general, and the subsequent dismissal of the inserted
tale, in particular. It does not meet the necessary criteria of the
celibate village priest who, ignorant of the topos's diverse uses in antiquity,
criticizes its separation from truth categories: it lacks verisimilitude,
he claims, for no husband would so test his wife (chapter 35). In Part II:
3, El curioso is again dismissed. This time it is because the contemporary
reading public considers it de trop, a tale that has nothing to do
with the novel of Don Quijote. The Arabic narrator Cide Hamete also
admits defensively that, despite its apparent irrelevance, and bored with
the main story, he inserted it as a digression (chapter 44). Modern
critics have been no less dismissive in their
judgement.8
El curioso's reception history, however,
is more diverse than this negative criticism would suggest. If translation
is any indication, it seems to have been highly regarded by its
seventeenth-century readers. A mere three years after El curioso is
published in the Don Quijote, in July 1608, it is translated into
French as a separate story by Nicolas Baudoin; three years later, in 1611,
Fletcher's The Coxcomb is based on a man “too curious for his
own good,” Nathaniel Field adapts it for his Pardon for the Ladies
(Canavaggio, 242, 246), in 1671 Aphra Behn bases her subplot for The Amorous
Prince, or The Curious Husband on it as do Sotherne in The
Disappointment in 1684 and Crowne in The Married Beau, or The Curious
Impertinent in 1694. It is in 1703, as a result of Nicholas Rowe's dramatic
reenactment of El curioso in The Fair Penitent that the
conventional association of the name Lotario with that of Don Juan as seducer
or rake occurs (Ayala 287).9 Few of the inserted
tales in the Don Quijote, then, have elicited such strong and contrary
reactions.
7 We learn
in I.47, however, that another manuscript has been found in the valise, namely,
the account of two pícaros, “Rinconete and Cortadillo,”
which is one of Cervantes's exemplary tales, and which, we are told, “may
belong to the same author of El curioso.”
8 For a
representative summary of the recurrent critical contempt El curioso has
elicited from translators and commentators, see D. Wilson, esp. 9-14.
9 For a bibliography
of translations and adaptations of El curioso in Spain and France
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Sister Marie
[p. 32] Thomas, F.S.E., “Extraneous Episodes
in Don Quijote, “ Hispania XXXVI (1953), 309. See also
Paul M. Arriola, “Varia fortuna.”
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Cervantes |
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It has become a truism that discourse is the
agency through which a subject is produced and the cultural order maintained,
and in El curioso, agency does seem occupied by an omniscient narrator
who transmits dominant cultural codes whereby gender and class relations
determine who enjoys the privileges of the symbolic order. The narrator's
transcendental signified, however, is contested throughout by the heterogeneity
of the tale's narrative strategies and connotative slippages (Derrida 278-80;
Barthes 62).10 Of the nine narrative strategies
that emplot the story, and upon which this essay focuses,
“monoglossia” can be predicated of only three. These are: the
narrator's prospective and retrospective strategies, namely, the idyllic
discourse with which El curioso begins and the mini-tragedy with which
it ends, and, in a more ambiguous manner, Lotario's compilation of moral
axioms.11 Six of the nine narrative
strategies, on the other hand, become sites of contestation and negotiation,
providing resistant subtexts that retard its resolution, keep its meanings
in flux, and suspend closure.
The first narrative strategy consists of the
narrator's “once-upon-a-time-there-was” mode of the fairy / folk
genre. Though set in a stylized Florence, a very Spanish tale centers on
the proverbial relationship of two orphan friends / brothers whose necessary
trial / ordeal is postulated in order to emphasize their virtue and loyalty
to each other. The initial idyll suggests a context of stability, of a social
order postulated on male bonding and its natural consequence —the
subordination of the other. In this harmonious ambience characters are easily
defined. One friend, Anselmo, is described as a lover, “más inclinado
a los pasatiempos amorosos,” the other, Lotario, a pursuer
10 In
Derrida, terms like “center” or “origin” give way to
“a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental
signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The
absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and play of
signification infinitely” (280). I use connotation here in Barthes's
sense. Denotation pretends to close a text, “to represent
the collective innocence of language,” and privileges one meaning
as authoritative. Connotation, instead, contests authoritative meaning
and constitutes “the way into the polysemy” of the text (9, 8:
emphasis his).
11 Even in Lotario's
compilation, however, Cervantes's narrative strategy cannot be taken at face
value. There are hidden innuendoes in the exchange between the two men, as
we shall see, and it taxes the reader's credulity to hear the speech uttered
by someone whose subsequent actions belie the principles of chastity, honor,
and friendship it espouses so eloquently.
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“al cual llevaban tras sí los [pasatiempos] de la caza”
(399)]. The results are predictable. As initially positioned, Anselmo the
lover decides to marry the wealthy, noble, and of course “beautiful”
Camila, and Lotario the hunter searches for Anselmo's mate and arranges the
match. In the absence of a father figure, it is of Lotario that Anselmo asks
approval for his proposed marriage to Camila. It is he who “concluyó
el negocio,” who reaps Camila's deep gratitude for the marriage (400),
and who sets himself up as permanent counsellor in the marital relationship
(401).
Beginning with the title, then, La novela
del curioso impertinente, the text sets up a high degree of what Michael
Riffaterre has called “previsibility.” Through connotative slippages,
however, meanings become problematized and subject positions realigned. More
than a commentary on the theme of wrongdoing and its consequences (Castro
121), El curioso becomes a means of disclosing the fragility of male
bonding as Anselmo's perverse scenario debases everyone. It positions Lotario
as a john. The latter's love of the chase, extended metaphorically, now inscribes
him as the pursuer of his friend's wife. It positions Anselmo as a pimp.
Three times in the text, Anselmo is actively involved as procurer. He
deliberately absents himself for a week in order to facilitate Lotario's
seduction of Camila (416-420); he provides Lotario with the necessary money
and jewels to implement the seduction (412, 414-415); and he twice offers
to write amorous poems, in Lotario's name, to Camila in order to break down
her resistance (413, 421). The perverse scenario positions Camila as a whore
who can be bought. Camila's tactical negotiations “between scenes of
power,” however, will ultimately realign these
relationships.12 I use tactical in this context
within Michel de Certeau's distinction between “strategies” and
“tactics.” “Strategies” de Certeau associates with the
postulation of power and power relationships, “tactics” with its
absence. Although tactics are the “art of the weak,” he reminds
us that they “gain validity in relation to the pertinence they lend
to time —to the circumstances which the precise instant of an intervention
transforms into a favorable situation . . .” (38).
As we shall see, Camila intervenes at a precise moment in order
to transform the text's power structure, thereby witnessing to the effects
that “inattention to the communicative aspect of a supposedly powerless
figure,” can occasion. It is Camila
12 Nancy
Miller uses the phrase in her discussion of what constitutes feminist difference
in “Getting Personal,” 117.
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Cervantes |
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whose intervention will ultimately “bring[s] about the redistribution
of power in [the text's] formerly stable power
relations.”13
The second narrative strategy initiates the
connotative slippages that disclose the real disorder that lies beneath the
simulated order of the narrator's idyll. It consists of an overt fantasy
that embeds a covert and perverse scenario. The conscious product of Anselmo's
unconscious compulsion, the fantasy disrupts the initial semblance of order
while providing the shaping force of El curioso's narrative (Brooks
13).14 The world of the two men had
been initially described as a closed homogeneous idyll: “andaban tan
a una sus voluntades que no había concertado reloj que así
lo anduviese” (399). No rivalry or secrets mars their friendship. Once
sexual difference is introduced with Camila's active participation in the
text, however, the fragility of the narrator's pristine idyll is highlighted
and so is Anselmo's need to retrieve primordial harmony. Camila becomes a
mere pawn. Her duty as “obedient” wife is to submit to her husband
at all costs and Lotario as “loyal” friend is to
“safeguard” his friend's honor above all.
A desperate tension ensues between Anselmo's
covert need to reexperience his initial reassuring sense of fusion with
Lotario,15 to resist the process of individuation
/ separation from him,16 and Lotario's insistence
on boundaries, that is, on the societal, religious, and cultural codes that
prescribe the friends' necessary separation and proscribe Anselmo's perverse
fantasy. A distraught Anselmo admits that his obsession to prove his wife's
chastity (or unchastity?) constitutes a desire so strange and peculiar that
he equates it to “la enfermedad que suelen tener algunas mujeres, que
13 I
appropriate here Sandra Cypess's description of how power relations work
in Rosario Castellanos's Balún Canán in her “
Balún Canán: A Model Demonstration of Discourse as
Power,” 10.
14 In The
Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes that “ the core of
our being consisting of unconscious wishful impulses, remains inaccessible
to the understanding . . . of the preconscious” (V. 603);
and Lacan explains: “Something becomes an object in desire when it
takes the place of what by its very nature remains concealed from the
subject” (“Desire and the Interpretation,” 28: emphasis
mine).
15 The narrator
tells us that if Anselmo had known “que el casarse había de ser
parte para no comunicalle como solía, que jamás lo hubiera
hecho” (400).
16 Throughout
his work, but especially in Seminar XI, in Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psycho-Analysis (204ff), Lacan appropriates Aristophanes's myth of primordial
wholeness (Plato, The Symposium) to posit separation and fragmentation
as the originary lack, and the need to recover primordial wholeness as the
psyche's unceasing quest.
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se les antoja comer tierra, yeso, carbón y otras cosas peores, aun
asquerosas para mirarse cuanto más para comerse” (411-412). An
astonished Lotario initially rejects participation in an experiment he
acknowledges dishonors Anselmo, Camila, and himself, but eventually acquiesces
to Anselmo's literal “stage-setting of desire” (Laplanche and Pontalis
28).
An Oedipal triadic scenario ensues uncovering
the deceptive façade behind the dyadic idyll El curioso founds
on male bonding. Anselmo does not position himself as the passive and helpless
child / outsider who is excluded in the erotic performance between two loved
ones.17 Instead, as producer and director
of a composite scenario of secrets and deviousness, he is in charge whatever
the outcome. Should Camila falter, Anselmo still wins: Camila's treachery
ensures her repudiation by both men and, consequently, the renewal of the
bonding Anselmo and Lotario once enjoyed and which Anselmo sorely misses.
Anselmo's dishonor remains a secret for his chaste and loyal friend Lotario
would never implement the seduction: “que si de ti es vencida Camila,
no ha de llegar el vencimiento a todo trance y rigor” (403). He would
not disclose it: “mi injuria quedará escondida en la virtud de
tu silencio” (404). Anselmo even derives a kind of masochistic pleasure
should the outcome be negative. As he admits, “y cuando esto suceda
al revés de lo que pienso, con el gusto de ver que acerté
en mi opinión, llevaré sin pena la que de razón
podrá causarme mi tan costosa experiencia” (403: emphasis mine).
Should Camila not falter, Anselmo's joy is
immeasurable. The outcome and the process of the experiment will have already
proved to be highly pleasurable. As producer / director / voyeur of the seduction
scenes he has staged between Camila and Lotario, Anselmo
17 Brooks
points out that “unconscious desire has its own history, its version
of an unsatisfactory past and what would give it satisfaction, a history
unavailable to the conscious subject but persistently repeating its thrust
and drive in present symbolic formations” (278). I would add that
connotative slippages problematize the text in a two-fold manner here. Cervantes
demythologizes the social construct of masculinity by “feminizing”
Anselmo in the Oedipal scenario (not without perpetuating, however, the
“natural” coupling of women with hysteria): “has de considerar
que yo padezco ahora la enfermedad que suelen tener algunas mujeres,
que se les antoja comer tierra, yeso, carbón y otras cosas peores,
aun asquerosas para mirarse, cuanto más para comerse” [(411-412:
emphasis mine); see Murillo, n. 22]. He also liberates an implicit homoerotic
discourse between the two men which destabilizes El curioso's explicit
heterosexual matrix, and continues to subject to doubt facile signifying
positions.
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has been vicariously titillated.18 As Lotario's
alter ego, he has actively participated in the pleasure of viewing
Camila's and Lotario's scenes of
seduction.19 The text itself highlights the
interchangeableness of the two friends in contexts suffused with erotic
connotations. When Anselmo absents himself to facilitate Lotario's seduction
of Camila, for example, he tells Camila “que tuviese cuidado de tratale
como a su mesma persona” (416: emphasis mine). And Lotario, in
his response to Camila's question (after they have committed adultery) as
to whether Lotario knows who Anselmo is, identifies with Anselmo in the equivocal
answer: “A ti te conozco y tengo en la misma posesión que
él te tiene” (433: emphasis
mine).20 Whatever the outcome of the
experiment, then, Anselmo returns to the pristine bonding he once enjoyed
with Lotario. Should Camila fail, the two friends have each other. If Camila
emerges victorious, the pristine idyll of male bonding is still Anselmo's
to enjoy. He no longer need test his wife since her unassailable chastity
has desexualized the triadic relationship: Anselmo will have obliterated
difference, eluded the painful process of individuation / separation from
Lotario, bypassed the Oedipal conflict by retaining both Lotario's friendship
and Camila's love, and obviated the responsibility of decision making. Consistent
with every child's wish and every adult's unconscious fantasy, Anselmo can
therefore return to a “never never state” in which, as Louise J.
Kaplan has pointed out, “there are no real or significant differences
between infantile sexuality and adult sexuality”
(128).21
18 Francisco
Ayala and I concur on Anselmo's vicarious titillation in the seduction scenes
between Lotario and Camila —albeit for different reasons. For me Anselmo
is titillated as spectator and actor of Camila's erotic involvement
with Lotario. For Ayala, whose premise is that a dormant homosexual desire
effects the tension between the two friends, the seduction scenes, are motivated
by Anselmo's need to experience “satisfacción vicaria a través
de su mujer . . . para los turbios deseos que hasta entonces
había mantenido larvados o, mejor dicho, sublimados en las formas
nobles de la camaradería” (304).
19 For Anselmo
as participant / voyeur: Anselmo watches Camila and Lotario through the keyhole
of the door (415); and Lotario promises to fulfill his seduction plans as
promised if “he [Anselmo] watched carefully” (415).
20 The double
entendre consists of the connotative meaning of posesión
as both “possession” and “reputation.”
21 I differ
in this respect from Benito A. Brancaforte's premise that Anselmo's proposed
experiment “camouflages the unconscious desire to destroy her
[Camila]” (49), and that it displaces “Anselmo's unconscious revulsion
toward her” (51). Instead, I posit that it is difference that
Anselmo wants to obliterate, not the person of Camila, in his attempt
to return to pristine wholeness.
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The third narrative strategy in El curioso
consists of Lotario's response to Anselmo. His argument is, by contrast
with Anselmo's obsessive strategy, inscribed in a reasoned Renaissance treatise
of always already verities from high and low culture: honor codes, biblical
and theological postulates, intertextual caveats from Herodotus's History
and from Tansillo and Ariosto, Aristotelian truisms and popular maxims
on woman's imperfection. Aware that Anselmo's proposal dishonors everyone
—Anselmo's wife, Anselmo, and Lotario himself— Lotario nevertheless
agrees to participate claiming that it would be less dishonorable for Anselmo
if his best friend, and not another, participated in the experiment (412).
Despite the insistence on eternal verities and moral axioms in Lotario's
treatise, connotative slippages nevertheless make his meanings ambiguous.
Positioned as “pursuer” by Anselmo himself, Lotario seems to respond
to the subliminal message in Anselmo's covert challenge, even as he repudiates
the latter's request. The test, Anselmo has assured him, requires that Camila
see herself “requerida y solicitada, y de quien tenga valor para poner
en ella sus deseos” (403). If someone else tests Camila, then, that
someone has a valor Lotario lacks, consequently making Lotario “de
menos valer.”22
It is important to put this challenge in context.
It is in Alfonso X's Siete Partidas that the concept of valer
más and its opposite valer menos are explained.
The words mean to have “greater” or “lesser worth,”
and as Caro Baroja explains, may be translated as “prestige,”
“esteem,” and as “disgrace,” or “disesteem”
(88). Disgrace could result from such acts as showing cowardice or breaking
one's word. The concepts find literary expression in the novels of chivalry
where courage and effort are essential characteristics of the knight, but
were principles still very much in vogue in the century in which Cervantes
writes as a letter from the “tyrant Aguirre” to a friar representing
Philip II shows. In open rebellion against his king, Lope de Aguirre writes
that “after faith in God, the man who is no better than another
has no worth” (Caro Baroja 94-95: emphasis mine). The subliminal challenge
of Anselmo, namely, that Lotario has less worth if another man shows more
valor in testing Camila's chastity, does not
22 On
the literal level, Anselmo of course is flattering Lotario as the person
most worthy to seduce Camila. On the subliminal level, and within the context
of an honor-code society, Lotario's failure would demonstrate his lack of
virility, that he is “de menos valer.”
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remain unaddressed. In his response to Anselmo, Lotario throws down the gauntlet
and reminds him that if innocent Danaës (read: Camilas) exist in the
world, so do “golden showers” of Zeuses (read: Lotarios): “que
si hay Dánaes en el mundo / hay pluvias de oro también”
(409).23
In the fourth strategy, the actual implementation
of Anselmo's scenario, the actors initially play out the roles in which Anselmo
has cast them. The men move. They speak to each other. Camila, on the other
hand, is moved and spoken by them. The discursive formations that contain
Camila are not of course peculiar to her. They constitute traces of the hegemony
of early modern society. Obedience constituted the very foundation of the
social order. Obedience to God and to his Church: in the Spiritual Exercises,
Ignatius of Loyola advocates the concept of “blind obedience”
to his followers. To arrive at complete certainty,” he assures them,
“this is the mental attitude we should maintain: I will believe that
the white object I see is black if that should be the decision of the
hierarchical church.” [“siquid quod oculis nostris apparet album,
nigrum illa esse diffinierit, debemus itidem quod nigrum sit,
pronunciare”]. “Obedience to God and the king follows obedience
to the Church. As Philip II makes clear, it is “the same thing”:
“You are engaged in God's service and in mine,” he explains to
one of his commanders in 1573, “which is the same thing” (Parker
267). Philip implements this notion from the beginning of his reign in 1555
when he informs his ministers that “[I]f it be my pleasure,
23 I
posit the same slippages here as I did in note 22 between the literal and
subliminal levels in the interchange. Although overtly warning Anselmo of
the danger of the experiment, Lotario is covertly responding to Anselmo's
bait. Girard (44-52) and Bandera (chapters 4 and 8) focus on the rivalry
they see implicit in the challenge posited by Anselmo's request.
Morón-Arroyo, following Freud, sees their relationship as a rivalry
that actually requires a ménage-à-trois for its satisfaction
(323). Brancaforte suggests the opposite, namely, that the “sharing
of the testing” forges the homoerotic bond that already exists between
the two men (54). It is interesting to note that, one of the earliest allusions
to Herodotus's Candaules in Spain (the acknowledged prototype of El curioso)
is to be found in Las Coplas de Mingo Revulgo. Glossed by Fernando
del Pulgar, the line “Candaulo . . . ándase tras los
zagales” is interpreted by Pulgar as “[el] rey anda tras los
mozos,” thereby suggesting that for the Middle Ages Candaules may have
symbolized homosexuality (Arriola 40-41). Francisco Ayala, like Brancaforte,
suggests homosexual motives in Anselmo's challenge to Lotario and also attributes
to Candaules, Anselmo's supposed prototype, “un deseo sexualmente
perverso” (304). Without dismissing the merits of any of these suggestions,
and averring the homoerotic discourse liberated in the text, I am emphasizing,
instead, the fragility of the bonding between the two men which the introduction
of sexual difference highlights.
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I shall annul, without the cortes, the laws made in the cortes; I shall legislate
by edicts and I shall abolish laws by edicts” (cited in Lynch 207).
The trope of gender, then, cannot be understood
apart from these cultural realities. The connection between social order
and control naturalized discursive formations that “taught very clearly
that women should be safely enveloped in a convent or marriage, obedient,
chaste, and modestly accepting their place in the social hierarchy”
(Perry 1978, 204-206).24 Women who chose
to remain unmarried and entered the convent were subordinated in obedience
to their confessors. Married women had to obey their husbands. Even prostitutes
were subjected to the “padres” in the brothel (Perry 1985, 144-145).
Religious and philosophical treatises reinforced the control. The writings
of Juan de la Cerda and of Luis Vives set up feminine models for imitation
that emphasized chastity, obedience, and silence. Vives even advocated that,
like his own mother, a virtuous woman should be steadfast. As example of
this steadfastness he proposed the Spartan mothers who “con sus propias
manos dieron muerte a sus hijos cobardes” (cited in Bergmann 131). Female
representations of the period popularized this control of women in the symbols
of the Virgin, the Painted Prostitute, and the Penitent Magdalen. For nuns
and married women, the Virgin was set up as the model of chastity and obedience.
The Painted Prostitute served two purposes. She provided a necessary symbol
of men's “normal” sexual aberrations from chastity. She concomitantly
warned women of what “deviance” from socially-sanctioned behavior
could mean. The figure of the repentent prostitute, Mary Magdalen, like the
Painted Prostitute, was a symbol of the degradation to which disobedience
and license reduced women but, unlike the prostitute, the Magdalen signified
the humility, abjection, and self-sacrifice that could also “redeem”
them (Perry 1972, 204-207).
It is not at all surprising, then, to hear
Anselmo assure Lotario that “Camila no tenía otro gusto ni otra
voluntad que la que él quería que tuviese” (400), “que
no tenía más que hacer que bajar la cabeza y obedecelle”
(417). Inscribed in obedience, Camila simply mirrors Anselmo's desire. Positioned
as spectacle in Anselmo's and
24 José
Deleito y Piñuela comments on the shock travellers experienced at
the way Spanish women were treated: “Los maridos que quieren que sus
mujeres vivan bien, se hacen tan absolutos que las tratan casi como esclavas,
temerosos de que una honesta libertad las emancipe de las leyes del pudor,
poco conocidas y mal observadas en el bello sexo” (cited in Anne Cruz
218, n 12).
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Lotario's hom(m)o-sexual narrative, her participation in the men's performance
is doomed from its inception.25 Just as nothing
but good can come to Anselmo from his experiment, so nothing but blame can
accrue from Camila's performance in Anselmo's scenario. If Camila relents
and is seduced by Lotario, she is a whore, the very position the scenario
is testing. She consequently loses everything —husband, honor, and possibly
her life.26 If she resists and is chaste,
she becomes an irresistible sexual object whose resistance the men must overcome.
Camila's resistance prompts Lotario to value “cuan digna era de ser
amada” (417), and to fetishise “parte por parte, sus estremos de
bondad y de hermosura” (417)].27 Camila's
resistance maximizes Anselmo's efforts at her seduction: “Hasta aquí
ha resistido Camila a las palabras,” he pleads with Lotario, “es
menester ver cómo resiste a las obras”
(414).28
The fourth strategy, the “stage-setting
of [Anselmo's] desire,” had begun with the actors playing the roles
fixed by Anselmo. After the adultery, and at the moment when a deluded Anselmo
believes he has finally achieved the desexualized
ménage-à-trois his scenario has inscribed, all
positionalities become irrevocably altered. The once-loyal Lotario becomes
a “traidor amigo” performing the seduction scenes “sin mirar
a otra cosa que aquella a que su gusto le inclinaba” (421, 418), his
formerly chaste wife an adulteress thoroughly enjoying the deviousness and
excitement of her illicit affair with Lotario, and Anselmo the erstwhile
producer-director of the
25 I
use hom(m)o-sexuality in Luce Irigaray's sense. “Reigning everywhere,
although prohibited in practice,” Irigaray explains,
“hom(m)o-sexuality is played out through the bodies of women, matter,
or sign, and heterosexuality has been up to now just an alibi for the smooth
workings of man's relations with himself, of relations among men”
(172: emphasis mine).
26 See Honour
and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society. Ed. J. G. Peristiany,
esp. 29, 42-47, 70-71.
27 Both Anselmo
and Lotario position Camila as exhibitionist. The narrator reiterates Lotario's
voyeuristic fascination with her: “mirábala Lotario” (417)],
“el contento que le llevaba a mirar a Camila” (417), “el gusto
que hallaba en mirarla” (417). For woman as erotic prop, see Mulvey
and Kaplan.
28 Anselmo,
“alegre sobremanera” (419)], receives Camila's letter informing
him of Lotario's sexual overtures (299). It is important to note that at
the moment Anselmo believes Lotario's lie (after the adultery) that she is
indeed chaste, and is convinced that Camila has resisted seduction, he
nevertheless insists that Lotario intensify his efforts to seduce her:
“contentísimo quedó Anselmo de las razones de Lotario,
y así se las creyó como si fueran dichas por algún
oráculo. Pero, con todo eso, le rogó que no dejase la empresa,
aunque no fuese más de por curiosidad y entretenimiento”
(401: emphasis mine).
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charade, converted into “el hombre más sabrosamente engañado
que pudo haber en el mundo” (437), now moved and spoken in the lovers'
counter-scenario. In a real sense Anselmo achieves exactly that to which
he had aspired. Tony Tanner's discussion of the effects of adultery in
Madame Bovary, is especially relevant in this instance. Adultery dilutes
opposites, Tanner explains, and so “the triumph of adultery [lies] in
the destruction of difference” (367). By adulterating defined erotic
relations in El curioso among Anselmo / Lotario / Camila, as well
as hierarchical differences in class between Leonela and Camila (the mistress
is now on the same level as the maid and moreover dependent on her), Anselmo's
perverse strategy has de facto obliterated difference.
Three times in El curioso Cervantes
postulates a semblance of order only to destabilize it. The first instance
occurs in the initial narrative strategy, the dyadic idyll founded on the
bonding of the two friends. The idyllic harmony of their friendship had produced
a textual stasis that became destabilized by inner and outer factors
—Anselmo's obsessive compulsion and his manipulation of Lotario's
friendship, and the discursive formations of an honor-code society which
inscribed the friends in competitive positions of comparative worth. The
second and third instances occur after the adultery has been consummated
and the triadic bonding of Anselmo / Camila / Lotario has effected another
kind of harmony. In the text's fifth and seventh narrative strategies, violent
eruptions disturb the stasis effected by the blissful
ménage-à-trois of the adulterous lovers and the deceived
husband.
The fifth strategy, the double plot of the
affair of Camila's maid Leonela and her lover, consists of a reworking of
Plautus's and Terence's decorous version of middle-class comedy, the comedia
de capa y espada. Like its Roman model, it too thrives on amorous
intrigue, on concealments, deceptions, mistaken identity, disguises. Beneath
its light-hearted veneer, however, the comedia de capa y espada is
nevertheless based on its society's discursive formations: the men must uphold
the honor code and women must remain chaste. If masculine honor is threatened,
violence breaks out. Cervantes capitalizes on these generic conventions.
The transgression in the double plot converts the harmonious
ménage-à-trois of the adulterous couple and Anselmo
into something akin to a Calderonian honor play as a jealous Lotario betrays
Camila to Anselmo. Lotario mistakenly identifies the man he sees
“embozarse y encubrirse con cuidado y recato” (426) (in typical
comedia de capa y espada fashion), as Camila's rather
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than Leonela's lover. In a jealous rage, he betrays Camila and warns Anselmo
that something is amiss.
The comedia de capa y espada thereby
effects a genuine eruption in the text as it jeopardizes the honor of all
three characters —Anselmo, Camila, and Lotario, and realigns class and
power relationships in the text. The adulterous Camila and her cunning maid
Leonela are repositioned. By begging “Leonela no dijese nada de su
hecho” (425), Camila binds herself in a blackmail dependency on the
maid that parallels that of Lotario vis-à-vis Anselmo. The lover Lotario
and his mistress are also repositioned as Lotario again switches allegiances.
Initially in collusion with Anselmo against Camila, then in collusion with
Camila against Anselmo, he is once again in collusion with Anselmo against
Camila. The comedia de capa y espada serves a threefold function
in El curioso: it realigns positions, creates spaces for new relationships
to emerge, and provides the impetus for the sixth narrative strategy, Camila's
abrogation of power. As producer, director, and actor, Camila will reenact
a Tale of Cuckoldry, a literal performance of gender, that serves
as companion piece to Anselmo's perverse scenario.
Throughout El curioso, and before Camila's
parodic performance, an omniscient narrator had transmitted as normal cultural
codes whereby gender determined the privileges of the symbolic order and
therefore the relations of power in the text: Anselmo's strategy had contained
Camila in a plot that mirrored his desire for perfection, and Lotario
had tried to contain her in a plot that mirrored his fear for her
loyalty. The sixth narrative strategy, Camila's counter-scenario, however,
changes everything. She preempts the position of the speaking subjects, Anselmo
and Lotario, and literally makes a difference in Nancy K. Miller's sense
of feminist difference as constituting a movement between central and marginal
positions in the “negotiations between scenes of power” (117).
Camila takes the conservative agenda that the narrator had postulated as
normal and stands it on its head. In Camila's rewriting of the time-honored
conventions of the Boccaccian Tale of Cuckoldry,
“masochisma matches machismo,” to use Robert Stoller's
felicitous expression. She calls attention to the ideological underpinnings
of the constructions that have contained her and provides “strategies
of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions” (Butler,
147: emphasis mine). Faced with the threat of retribution, the wily Camila
employs a tactic that transforms into a favorable situation what could have
been, for her, a tragedy (de Certeau 38).
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Camila's brilliant performance of masochisma
repeats masculinist representations of woman as abnegated, self-sacrificing,
and chaste. For the benefit of her husband, she adopts the persona of
the chaste Lucretia. “Leonela amiga,” she cries histrionically,
“¿No sería mejor que antes que llegase a poner en
ejecución lo que no quiero que sepas, . . . que tomases
la daga de Anselmo, que te he pedido, y pasases con ella este infame pecho
mío?” (429), and of a woman willing to kill in order to safeguard
her husband's honor. The awed spectators of her performance (Lotario, Leonela),
identify her subsequent personae (again for her husband's benefit)
as those of a “perseguida Penélope” (430), a long-suffering
“segunda Porcia” (435), and “la flor de la honestidad del
mundo” (430). Produced by the same constructs as Camila, the recognizable
repertoire of ideological references she performs convinces Anselmo.
Camila's quick-thinking, by contemporary standards
(and perhaps even for a woman), would have been perceived as discreet and
prudent. After all, it was well known that in The Prince, Machiavelli
had praised the man discriminating enough to know when to be “the
lion,” and when to be “the fox” (chapter
18).29 Philibert de Vienne (1547), addressing
himself to the ingenuity necessary in those at court, had also reiterated
why the ability “to change and transform” oneself was considered
an admirable quality: “This facility . . . is not therefore
to be blamed which makes men according to the pleasure of others, to change
and transform himself. For in so doing he shall be accounted wise, win honor,
and be free of reprehension everywhere: which Proteus knew very well,
to whom his diverse Metamorphosis and oft transfiguration was very
commodious” (Greenblatt 164: emphasis his). Speculation as to what reception
of El curioso's sixth strategy might have been among contemporaries
is not as important, however, as is the textual effect of what the narrator
calls Camila's “estraño embuste y fealdad” (434), and what
Lotario (and the reader) see instead as “sagacidad, prudencia y mucha
discreción” (434).
Camila's performance succeeds in altering the
very rules that have previously governed her signification. What one critic
has said of the “wiles” attributed to Shakespeare's Cleopatra is
equally pertinent to Camila. She too provides a much-needed subtext —
the contestual and dissenting hint “of another discourse, one which
. . . [is
29 For
Machiavellian virtù and its alliance to prudence, see Garver,
Machiavelli and the History of Prudence.
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meant] to disturb the 'truth' of the patriarchal order” (Evans,
165).30 Camila has deftly usurped the cultural
formations that had perpetuated the two friends' discourse of male domination
and simply reinscribed them within her narrative of resistance. Her performance,
and its reception, demonstrate how directly power and knowledge imply one
another (Foucault, 27-8), and how easily gender assignations can be redeployed.
For the third time in El curioso, after
Camila's convincing performance, a delusive harmony again permeates the text
as the cuckolded husband's deception is now complete (441). As he has done
in the first and in the fifth strategies, in this seventh strategy also,
Cervantes interrupts the stasis. The récit, the inserted tale
of El curioso impertinente is violently interrupted by the main narrative,
the histoire of Don Quijote. The histoire, in fact,
becomes the récit (Neuschäfer 607) as a sleep-walking
Don Quijote slashes the Giant / wineskins in chapter
35.31 The incident is patterned generically,
as Menéndez Pidal pointed out long ago, on the last chapter of Book
II of Apuleius's Golden Ass where Lucius, imitating a giant killer,
perforates three wineskins (Murillo 439n). Translated into Spanish
by Diego de Cortégana, The Golden Ass was published in Spain
in 1525. This strategy serves as a humorous dilatory space and is functional.
Since the episode of the comedia de capa y espada and Lotario's subsequent
betrayal of Camila, El curioso had begun to take on some of the
seriousness of Spanish honor plays. The humorous eruption of the main narrative
into the novel's inserted tale provides a needed comic relief, keeping the
tenor and the meaning of the tale in a state of perpetual flux. Erotic
double entendres are made to serve the same purpose. The bawdy reference
of the Innkeeper's wife to her husband's “tail” in this incident
is as clever in its double meaning as was Lotario's assurance to Camila in
the sixth strategy that he “knows” her (Rodríguez Marín
8, 107). Both strategies serve as disruptive and farcical counterplots to
the fears aroused in the characters and the readers (within and without El
curioso) by Anselmo's suspicion of Camila's infidelity.
30 In
her discussion of perversion, Kaplan posits that such perverse gender types
as Camila here performs are “intimately related to the social and economic
structures of our westernized industrial societies” (523). It is, after
all, a culturally-constructed desire that has produced Anselmo's scenario
in the first place, one that, unlike Rinaldo's caveat in the Orlando Furioso
on the weakness of human nature, tests chastity exclusively in women.
31 See Genette,
“Discours du récit,” in Figures III.
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In the midst of the humorous dilatory space,
the narrator nevertheless attempts to reimpose dominance and resorts to the
rigid codes of conventional tragedy in order to punish the
transgressors.32 In this, the eighth
strategy, the curiosity of Anselmo is seen as his hamartia. A painful
meeting with a Florentine messenger constitutes his anagnorisis, and
the peripeteia, the tragic events by which the world of this once-happy
character has been turned upside down, are explicitly made to serve as
catharsis: “Volvió Fortuna su rueda, y salió a
plaza la maldad con tanto artificio hasta allí cubierta,” the
narrator explains to the reader, “y a Anselmo le costó la vida
su impertinente curiosidad” (437).
Cervantes, however, once again destabilizes
generic affiliations and reading keys, continuing to make it impossible to
classify El curioso's location, tenor, or meaning. The
ninth and final strategy, emplotted side by side with the tragedy inscribed
in the eighth strategy, subordinates to radical doubt the narrator's most
powerful position, that is, that some curiosities are deadly foolish, that
adultery is wrong, and that both transgressions must be punished.
Admittedly, the curious husband and the adulterous
couple all die at the end of the story. But the reader remains unconvinced
that El curioso constitutes a commentary on the theme of wrongdoing
and its consequences (Castro 121). The reason is that the contradictory
genre and tone of self-immolating romance, juxtaposed to the morality and
seriousness of the tragic genre, contest the narrator's dominant position.
The ninth strategy, which calls for the modern label of melodrama, operates
in registers that are not compatible with the narratorial positions taken.
A dizzying array of five pulp-fictional topoi riddles the tale
with contradictions, undermines the possibility of tragic closure, and
emplots El curioso generically in the clichés of conventional
romance: intrigue and the threat of disclosure as Leonela the maid
promises to tell Anselmo an important secret: “yo te diré cosas
de más importancia de las que puedes imaginar” (442); nightly
escapades as Camila, the damsel in distress, collects her jewels and
money and flees from her enraged and dishonored husband to her lover;
coincidence as Camila is saved by her protecting lover and sequestered
in a nunnery in which Lotario's sister happens to be prioress; sorrowful
farewells as the lovers can no longer be together, for
32 For
a more extensive discussion of tragedy in Don Quijote, see Jehenson,
“The Dorotea-Fernando / Lucinda-Cardenio Episode in Don Quijote:
A Postmodernist Play.”
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Camila's husband is bent on avenging his honor; finally, the most romantic
of all topoi, namely, the myth of the “great love
lost.” Camila is represented at the end as pining away in a nunnery,
but not because of guilt (as Leonora in Cervantes's El celoso extremeño
had done), nor because her husband has died of a broken heart, but, instead,
because of “el ausente amigo” (446). Lotario has fled to join a
fighting force acknowledged as the best in the world , that of the Gran
Capitán Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba (Murillo 446, n.23).
When Lotario is finally killed, it is not in an ordinary battle, but in the
triumphant battle of Cerignola at which the Gran Capitán defeated
the Marquis de Lautrec in 1503. The reader is consequently brought back
full-circle to the site of El curioso's discovery, to the historical
exploits of the Gran Capitán in chapter 32, and to the discussion
of truth categories initiated by the priest and in which the reading
originated.
The end of El curioso, then, is made
to constitute the very “stuff” of romance. It elides the elements
necessary to make it either a tragedy or a morality
tale.33 The reason is two-fold. The
“traidor” Lotario (the narrator's label), dies as a hero and Camila,
despite her brilliant tactics, remains an object of exchange between the
two men. Unlike the women in Herodotus's History and in Ariosto's
Orlando Furioso, Camila never learns (as they do) of her husband's
and of her lover's scheming. She is unaware of the seduction scenes contrived
in order to test her, and never learns of her lover's complicit part in them.
Even more seriously, the text admits Lotario's betrayal of Anselmo and consequent
remorse, but erases the gravity of Lotario's much more serious betrayal of
Camila.34
It seems appropriate to focus once again on
the connection between text and practical life, and on the serious consequences
of Lotario's suggestion of Camila's infidelity to Anselmo. In discussing
the concepts of honor and shame in Spain and other Mediterranean societies,
Julian Pitt-Rivers has shown how gender-marked the relationships of power
are. Honor “delegates the virtue expressed in
33
Neuschäfer, however, differs from this position and ascribes a didactic
function to the “exemplary novel” (his description) of El curioso
. He suggests that the comic nature of the main narrative necessitates
Cervantes's introduction of such “tragic exempla” as this
story into Don Quijote, for “la visión realista
y cómica de la acción principal es . . . demasiado
unilateral, [y] hay que completarla con otra más seria e incluso
trágica, y . . . esto se logra precisamente gracias a las
historias intercalades” (608, 614-615).
34 After Camila's
successful performance, Lotario is genuinely saddened “porque se le
representaba a la memoria cuán engañado estaba su amigo, y
cuán injustamente él le agraviaba” (436).
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sexual purity to the females,” Pitt-Rivers explains, “and the duty
of defending female virtue to the males” (45). A man's honor, then,
is in the sexual purity of women. But women are weak vessels. In the words
of Lotario himself, women have insufficient “virtud y fuerza natural”
to withstand temptation (409). And so a man's honor is in precarious hands.
However light a woman's indiscretion —be it an innocent but clandestine
letter to a former lover, her inability to restrain an unwelcome suitor in
his amorous attentions, or even her forcible rape— these acts bring
dishonor to the men in her family. Consequently, if social order is to be
maintained, a system of values as fragile as that of the honor code demands
swift retribution when impugned. The ultimate vindication is physical violence
(Pitt-Rivers 29). It is a recourse only too familiar to readers of
Calderón's wife-murder plays and a means of social control of women
in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Spain.
Ancient law had permitted the deceived husband
to execute his wife and her lover, and Spanish law condoned such public
executions. Two cases in point: in 1565, a crowd assembled in Seville in
order to see an innkeeper repeatedly stab his adulterous wife and her lover
(Perry 1980, 140). In 1624, a wife pleaded publicly with her husband that
her life and that of her lover be spared. The husband relented after an hour.
“The public spectacle of the begging woman and angry husband,”
Perry points out, “had been enough to reestablish his honor and her
subordinate position” (1980, 142). More often, however, public knowledge
of the deceived husband's dishonor was assiduously avoided. In the
already-fragile Mediterranean code of honor, disimulo was crucial.
The crux of Calderón's play, A secreto agravio, secreta venganza,
the concept of disimulo centers on the dilemma of how “to cleanse
honor without publicizing dishonor” (Pitt-Rivers 27). The dilemma is
resolved once again by executing the adulterous wife —but in
secret. This insidious expedient Lotario now proffers Anselmo.
Having mistaken Leonela's lover as Camila's, and “muriendo
por vengarse de Camila “(426), Lotario actually pronounces her death
sentence. “Y si fuera la maldad que se puede temer,” he knowingly
whispers to Anselmo, “antes que esperar, con silencio, sagacidad
y discreción podrás ser el verdugo de tu agravio”
(427: emphasis mine).
It simply strains readerly credulity, then,
to take the description of Camila's tragic loss of Lotario seriously or to
see how the lovers' “wickedness” is punished as the narrator avers.
Neither Lotario nor Anselmo is depicted as a tragic hero who has fallen from
nobility to ruin; Lotario's actions are no more worthy than are Anselmo's;
and
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Camila never repents of the adultery. Lotario's triumphant death and Camila's
sublime renunciation of the world (and of life after Lotario dies), in fact,
are perceived as obvious clichés of the conventional romance. As Elizabeth
Cowie reminds us in her discussion of film conventions, renunciation and
/ or death are crucial to romance because they ensure the adulterous lovers'
allegiance to an “‘absolute love’, to their ‘grand
passion’ which, in being unattainable, is also unsullied by the banality
of marriage” (89).35
El curioso has invited active reception.
Walter Benjamin has reminded us that any grasp of history can never constitute
an “eternal image of the past,” that the historical fabric is never
homogeneous but interwoven, constituting a “time filled by the presence
of the now” (262, 261). Paul Ricoeur too has emphasized that, like the
historical text, the literary text is always in use, always appropriated
in the reading process. The text's deployment of the topoi of melodrama,
then, is ultimately more convincing to the twentieth-century reader than
is the narrator's dominant moral code, and the clichés of romance
that emplot El curioso, provide a more recognizable repertoire of
ideological references than do the postulates of an honor-code society. The
heterogeneity of the narrative strategies inscribed into El curioso's
formal operations, and the connotative slippages that have destabilized its
generic boundaries, have defied its reification into a finished product.
But the text ends, and its end serves as sober
reinforcement of Raymond Williams's reminder that even alternative forms
are tied to the hegemonic, “that the dominant culture . . .
at once produces and limits its own forms of counter-culture” (1977,
114). Despite all her oppositional initiatives Camila nevertheless remains
the product of her cultural formations. Neither Virgin nor Penitent Magdalen,
she has ceased to be chaste and she has refused to repent. The text inscribes
her in a third masculinist representation —that of the whore or Painted
Prostitute Anselmo had initially produced in his scenario— and for eternity.
The cemetery is the only space a “deviant” Camila can be made to
occupy outside of the text.
35 Although
Bandera's thrust differs from mine, we concur on the fact that Anselmo's
script succeeds in making “a grand passion” out of Lotario's and
Camila's adultery, “una fascinante historia de amor imposible”
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