From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
18.2 (1998): 53-73.
Copyright © 1998, The Cervantes Society of America
Precious Exchanges: The Poetics of Desire, Power, and Reciprocity
in Cervantes's La gitanilla
n his fine edition of
Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares, Harry Sieber observes that “un
sistema de intercambio” (“a system of exchange”) is fundamental
to the structure of La gitanilla (“Introducción”
19). Other insightful studies by critics like Peter Dunn, Alban Forcione,
William Clamurro, Joan Resina and Robert ter Horst likewise discuss that
tale's imagery of money, commerce and wealth. One conclusion which emerges
from such studies is that the comprehensiveness of Cervantes's fictional
system in the novella, created before the advent of either
“economics” or homo economicus, is likely to baffle readers
who understand human exchange chiefly in monetary terms, or even in terms
of profit and loss.
I. Theories and Orders of Exchange
Over the past thirty years, a group of
predominantly American sociologists has followed the lead of George Homans
and Peter Blau to create a body of scholarship known as “exchange
theory.” Here the purpose is to move beyond an economic model and to
focus broadly on laws and structures which govern social interaction,
53
|
| 54 |
CHARLES D.
PRESBERG |
Cervantes |
|
found to be rooted in the continuing “exchange” of positive and
negative “sanctions,” of either a material or psychological stripe.
More recently, however, practitioners of exchange theory have tried to address
what they perceive as a weakness in previous studies: namely, the tendency
to assume a rational calculus of cost and reward in social interaction,
“even when touching on the role of desire” (Reid 22, n.3).
For our purposes here, it is also important
to bear in mind that such an emphasis on exchange in social theory is at
once contemporary and old. Indeed, by investigating social relations as a
process of exchange, recent theorists are pursuing a line of inquiry that
guides the eighth book of the Nichomachean Ethics, where Aristotle
discusses friendship as a social benefit (1155a; 207), together with three
species of “friendly relations,” or “loves,” which are
based, respectively, on principles, and aims, of utility, pleasure and virtue
(1156a-1157b; 211-16). Only the last type of “friendship,” between
what Aristotle calls “persons of virtue,” is deserving of that
name. The first two are certainly legitimate, but inferior and, by nature,
unenduring. By contrast, true friendships are not only enduring, but also
few. Though Aristotle argues that a sound ethic compels us to treat all human
beings with justice, our relations with most persons will be confined either
to exchanging goods, services and money or to exchanging various types of
pleasant companionship.
Working within a very different tradition of
social theory, which consciously incorporates both the archaic and the primitive,
Georges Bataille's Accursed Share recasts Marcel Mauss's famous essay
on gift exchange in order to formulate a comprehensive theory of the
“general economy” (Richman 2; Richardson 67-96). As in Bataille
and other social theories, “economy” is understood hereafter in
its broadest sense as a system which orders the exchange of resources toward
a desired end. But that end need not represent a “profit,”or an
advantage. Contrary to the utilitarian ethos of capitalist culture, Bataille
argues that the main drive behind all activity, and the use of all resources,
in a strictly material cosmos is toward “dépense” or
expenditure; that is, toward sacrifice, immolation, loss or, paraphrasing
Nick Land, a quasi-mystical “thirst for annihilation.” Though he
nowhere acknowledges such a debt, it seems probable that Bataille —as
an ex-seminarian and a profoundly “religious atheist” (Richardson
19; Land )— owes something to theological formulations which have prevailed
since Christian antiquity regarding the “divine economy,” synonymous
with God's plan for the redemption and ransom of humanity. More specifically,
such formulations explain how,
|
| 18.2 (1998) |
Precious Exchanges |
55 |
|
rooted in an act of perfect love, which seeks nether profit nor advantage,
the incarnation, death and resurrection of the divine Word purchase the
possibility of interaction between God and a fallen humanity: a process of
exchange involving what we may call the production, distribution and consumption
of divine “grace,” earned through the merits of Christ, in the
order of “nature” (Ott 177).
Drawing at once on old and contemporary variations
of the foregoing theories, the rest of this study is concerned to examine
Cervantes's fictional system of exchange in La gitanilla at the level
of both narration and discourse. What such a study brings to the fore is
not only how a thematic of ethical and social exchange pervades Cervantes's
work, but especially how his tale exemplifies the poetic exchange we know
as “narrative fiction.”
II. The Abuela, Juan, Gypsies and Nobles: The Economy of Utility and
Pleasure
Throughout La gitanilla, Cervantes both
thematizes and dramatizes a social economy that displays three species of
relations, based on principles of what we may call utility, pleasure and
amity. For their ethical legitimacy, utility and pleasure depend on amity.
Yet, it is important to stress that, in his fictional embodiment of social
relations, Cervantes is not simply borrowing but extrapolating from the
Aristotelian tradition, adding a critical blend of Erasmian humanism, Tridentine
theology and his own poetics of literature and culture (Forcione 93-223).
What is more, each of the three principles marks an important phase of the
narrative, and is linked to one of the tale's three main characters.
At the heart of the novella's interplay between
social relations of utility, pleasure and amity, we find the female protagonist,
who bears, until the end of the tale, the truly polyvalent name,
“Preciosa,” which means both beautiful and precious, and derives
from the Latin pretium (“price”). The narrative's first
phase extends from the start of the tale to the first encounter between Preciosa
and the young noble, whose name, we learn later, is Juan Cárcamo.
Informed chiefly by a principle of utility, this phase of the tale is associated
with the elderly gypsy woman called “la abuela.” Fittingly,
too, the setting for this phase is Madrid, see of the royal court (Forcione
208-15; Márquez Villanueva 741-68). Here we observe both Preciosa
and her mentor engage in a series of commercial transactions involving the
fair or, in the house of the lieutenant, unfair exchange of money for either
services or merchandise. The start of the tale
|
| 56 |
CHARLES D.
PRESBERG |
Cervantes |
|
stresses the utilitarianism of the abuela, who at first seems to view
Preciosa herself as a salable commodity, able to fetch a good price: “la
abuela conoció el tesoro que en la nieta tenía”
(La gitanilla 62, emphasis added). And this use of “tesoro”
is hardly metaphorical. For if the protagonist is “rica de
villancicos, de coplas, seguidillas y zarabandas,” the abuela
perceives her “granddaughter's” talents as “felicísimos
atractivos e incentivos para acrentar su caudal [de la abuela]” (62,
emphasis added). Further, the narrator's choice of diction may strike us
as less informative than suggestive, when he describes why the
“adoptive” grandmother decides to take Preciosa to the capital
city:
Crióse Preciosa en diversas partes de Castilla, y a los quince años
de su edad, su abuela putativa la volvió a la Corte y a su
antiguo rancho, [. . .] pensando en la Corte vender su
mercadería, donde todo se compra y todo se vende.” (63, emphasis
added)
A brief, second phase of the tale foregrounds
the quest for pleasure in social exchange. It starts with the speech in which
Juan claims to be “rendido a la discreción y belleza de
Preciosa” (83), and closes when the protagonist and her adoptive
abuela visit the suitor's home in order to verify his claim of both
wealth and nobility. His request for “two words” with the protagonist
and the abuela discloses what he seeks, and what he assumes his listeners
will seek, from the exchange he proposes: “Por vida vuestra, amiga,
que hagáis placer que vos y Preciosa me oyáis aquí
aparte dos palabras, que serán de vuestro
provecho” (83, emphasis added). In particular, he makes what
he thinks a generous offer to “levantar a mi grandeza la humildad de
Preciosa, haciéndola mi igual y mi esposa” (84). Such
“grandeza” clearly refers to the material and social goods of his
money, estate and noble rank. In seeking the pleasure of the protagonist's
beauty and, secondarily, her companionship and “discreción,”
Juan assumes that only a utilitarian interest in his person —or, more
exactly, his social persona— would move her to accept his proposal.
Hence his closing remarks: “Cien escudos traigo aquí en oro para
daros en arra y señal de lo que pienso daros; porque no ha de negar
la hacienda el que da el alma” (84).
As shown in Juan's discourse, an ethos of pleasure
often works in tandem with an ethos of utility in matters of social interaction
and exchange. Indeed, his offer of marriage, as well as his status and money,
number him among the “noblest” members of an urban audience that
is shown willing to part with exorbitant amounts of cash
|
| 18.2 (1998) |
Precious Exchanges |
57 |
|
in exchange for the pleasure of beholding one of the gypsy girl's performances.
Juan, like his father, is generous in his treatment of the gypsies. Yet it
is also clear, especially from his proneness to jealousy, that he aims to
purchase Preciosa as though she were property. Further, the shortcomings
of his status as a “rendido” find textual reinforcement in his
surname, Cárcamo, which suggests “cara de camote,” with
the latter term denoting infatuation. The “camo” of Cárcamo
may likewise allude to the utilitarian, pleasure-centered quality of his
marriage proposal, since it recalls the word “camón,” which
denotes a pricey, oversize bed.
Nonetheless, an important dimension of Cervantes's
portrait of social intercourse in La gitanilla lies in his showing
how the habitual interaction among individual characters occurs, in large
measure, as a function of social structures, or social fictions. Put another
way, the tendency of, say, the abuela and Juan to base their social
behavior on an ethos of either pleasure or utility may be a product of individual
psychology; but such behavior is at least to a comparable degree a product
of their cultural environment. If the novella represents the urban society
of Madrid in thrall to the principle of utility —“donde todo se
compra y todo se vende”— it also represents the gypsy rancho
as a society in which pleasure is the ultimate principle and a debased, male
pleasure is the ultimate law.
The utilitarian ethos of urban society is nowhere
more evident than in the moment after Juan kills an insolent soldier, who
affronts Juan's honor by slapping the young gypsy-noble in the face. The
soldier, it turns out, is a nephew of the local mayor, who agrees to drop
all action against the youth in exchange for a promissory note of “mil
ducados” (133). As a product of urban society, Juan is shown to be cut
from the same cloth as other members of his class, and in particular from
that of his father, don Francisco, who successfully negotiates a position
as corregidor by the end of the tale. This character seems unable to understand
his son's decision to wed the protagonist, whose former name and persona
are exchanged for those of Constanza de Azevedo, except in terms of utility
and, to a lesser degree, pleasure:
[S]upo don Francisco de Cárcamo ser su hijo el gitano y ser la Preciosa
la gitanilla que él había visto, cuya hermosura
disculpó con él la liviandad de su
hijo . . . ; y más porque vio cuán
bien estaba el casarse con hija de tan gran caballero y tan rico como
era don Fernando de Azevedo. (134, emphasis added)
|
| 58 |
CHARLES D.
PRESBERG |
Cervantes |
|
Whether we enlist the categories of exchange
theorists or those of Aristotle, both social theories are predicated upon
the pursuit of what the Greeks called “eudaimonia,” sometimes
rendered as “happiness,” in Spanish as
“felicidad,” but which may also be rendered as
“blessedness.” In any event, a lesser form of
“eudaimonia” is the pleasure of contentment and diversion
(in Spanish, “alegría”); likewise, a lesser form
of friendship is a “friendly relation” based on the pleasure of
camaraderie or companionship (Aristotle 1156a-b; 211-12). Both these lesser
forms of “friendly relations” mark the social intercourse that
occurs within the gypsy rancho. For instance, one need only recall
what seem to be the daily contests “de pelota, de esgrima, de correr,
de saltar, de tirar la barra y de otros ejercicios de fuerza, maña
y ligereza” (117) to realize that Cervantes's gypsies are willing to
throw a party at the slightest provocation. What is more, diversion is shown
to be their primary mode of social behavior. As to the nature and
less-than-virtuous basis of their “friendly relations,” Juan states
that he prefers to remain alone when he steals (“hurtar por sí
solo”); and yet, in response : “Procuraron los gitanos disuadirle
deste propósito, diciéndole que le podrían suceder ocasiones
donde fuese necesaria la compañía, así para acometer
como para defenderse” (107, emphasis added).
A demonic, rather than eudemonic feature of
the gypsies' social structure consists of their relegating women, by law,
to the status of sexual chattle. In the words of the gypsy elder: “Pocas
cosas tenemos que no sean comunes a todos, excepto la mujer o la
amiga” (101, emphasis added). And further: “nosotros somos los
jueces y los verdugos de nuestras esposas y amigas; con la misma facilidad
las matamos y las enterramos por las montañas y desiertos como si
fueran animales nocivos” (101). The women are useful, as
“amigas,” to the extent that they provide men with “friendly
relations” based on animal pleasure. Moreover, an example of
dramatic irony, the elder's final statement about the rancho's juridical
structure reveals that it leads to something other than “blessedness”
or “felicidad”: “Con estas y con otras leyes y estatutos nos
conservamos y vivimos alegres” (101, emphasis added).
At first, it seems puzzling that the social
behavior of the abuela, a gypsy, should be governed largely by the
urban-like principle of utility, in much the same way as the behavior of
a caballero, Juan, should be governed by the gypsy-like principle
of pleasure. Yet, besides their underscoring how an ethos of pleasure goes
hand in hand with an ethos of utility, these characters reflect the interaction
between their respective societies. At times, those societies seem to be
|
| 18.2 (1998) |
Precious Exchanges |
59 |
|
at peace. Their exchanges then involve positive sanctions: the pleasure of
gypsy entertainment for the utility of urban cash. The structure of
“positive” relations obtaining between the two societies leads
Juan to offer Preciosa an increase of status and wealth in exchange for marriage,
even as it leads the abuela to offer the atractivos of her
“granddaughter” to the predominantly male audience of Madrid in
exchange for money.
Most often, however, the city and the
rancho are in a state of tension, analogous to war. When Preciosa
demands that Juan live as a gypsy for two years before he can marry her,
she informs him that this will entail “entrar a ser soldado de
nuestra milicia” (86, emphasis added). As a norm, exchanges between
the two societies involve both the psychological threat and physical reality
of negative sanctions: the city's infliction of corporal and capital punishment
and the gypsies' infliction of theft. In his portrait of the ambivalent relations
between city and rancho, Cervantes lets the reader infer the roots
of corruption in both societies, as well as the corrupting influence of each
society on the other. Even so, it would prove difficult to hold that Cervantes's
two societies are corrupt in either the same manner or to the same degree.
To be sure, when they are arrested for stealing,
the gypsies' only means of avoiding punishment is to bribe an official with
the goods they steal. As she explains to both Preciosa and Juan, the
abuela is an expert in the practice of exchange who has learned to
combine the fine art of bribery with an eye for value and knowledge of the
money market:
Tres veces por tres delitos diferentes me he visto casi puesta en el asno
para ser azotada, y de la una me libró un jarro de plata, y de la
otra una sarta de perlas, y de la otra cuarenta reales de a ocho que había
trocado por cuartos, dando veinte reales más por el cambio.
(88, emphasis added)
That officials should accept bribes at all
—and the abuela indicates that they do so often— is surely
a sign of the city's corruption. But it seems even more sinister for an official
to accept goods that he knows to be stolen from his fellow citizens. For
such a practice amounts to his stealing those goods himself, but without
having to suffer either danger or risk. Furthermore, that practice can only
encourage the gypsies to continue stealing, which in turn encourages officials
to continue taking bribes. More important, and more explicit, urban society's
treatment of the gypsies reveals a lack of charity and an abundance of bigotry.
The abuela observes both the charity
|
| 60 |
CHARLES D.
PRESBERG |
Cervantes |
|
and the personal and legal “values” underlying the behavior of
urban officials, whom she prefers to call “ministros de la muerte”:
Más precian pelarnos y desollarnos a nosotras [las gitanas]
que a un salteador de caminos; jamás, por más rotas
y desastradas que nos vean, nos tienen por pobres; que dicen que somos
como los jubones de los gabachos de Belmonte: rotos y grasientos, y llenos
de doblones. (89, emphasis added)
In confirmation of the abuela's remarks,
the officials of Murcia decide to arrest all the gypsies after Juana
Carducha falsely accuses Juan, alias Andrés the gypsy, of stealing
her valuables. Clearly, the impulse behind this action is the bigoted view,
shared by the story's narrator, that all gypsies are alike; that all gypsies
steal; and that the only good gypsy is a gypsy in jail or on the gallows.
Nonetheless, as put forth in the novella, there
is little reason to believe that removing corrupt officials and the threat
of punishment would remove the counterthreat of gypsy theft. According to
the gypsy elder, members of the rancho pride themselves on living
off the land; on being at one with nature and free from the material and
psychological encumbrances of civilization. Stealing, for them, is less a
means of survival than a form of diversion and a source of mildly sadistic
pleasure. What is more, in the gypsy society, charity is not only suppressed,
but virtually forbidden by law and custom, or what the narrator calls, in
seeming paraphrase of the gypsies, “sus estatutos y ordenanzas, que
prohibían la entrada a la caridad en sus pechos” (107). To varying
degrees, Cervantes's societies seem to partake of what emerges as a Satanic
economy, in accord with Christianity's understanding of the devil's plan
for humanity's perdition —a plan that apes the divine economy, and in
which discord supplants grace. Implicit in the negative portrayal of social
interaction that seeks utility and pleasure at the expense of amity and charity
is the famed tolerance of Cervantes's discourse, which consistently represents
the radical equality, or the infinite “value,” of all human beings:
male or female, gypsy or non-gypsy. Yet it also represents a discourse which
consistently refuses either to preach or to assert the moral equivalence
of all discursive and ethical systems, all human action, and all social
structures. In the words of Peter Dunn: “No hay que preferir la Naturaleza
caída al mundo civilizado por el arte” (95). Hence, in La
gitanilla, the city's social relations are shown to be fraught with
hypocrisy, the tribute that a vitiated society pays to amity, charity
and virtue. Lacking hypocrisy, the gypsy society is shown to be guilty, not
only of vice, but also of withholding payment.
|
| 18.2 (1998) |
Precious Exchanges |
61 |
|
Yet, in a reversal of expectations, it is the
gypsies themselves who, despite the officially demonic laws of their
rancho, show greater charity in practice than the inhabitants
of urban society.1 Fittingly enough, Juan
himself recognizes this fact, in the teeth of conventional expectations and
“appearances,” when, acting as a spokesman for his gypsy
“fellows,” he assures Clemente that they will provide him with
lodging and nurse him back to health: “aunque somos gitanos, no lo
parecemos en la caridad” (108, emphasis
added)2. In short, the gypsies are often morally
above, just as the members of urban society are below, what their laws officially
preach.
III. Gypsy Nobles, Noble Gypsies and Preciosa: The Economy and Poetics of
Amity
Preciosa represents the main, though largely
hidden, agent of the narrative's last phase, which begins when Juan arrives
at the rancho to fulfill the condiciones that the protagonist
set for their courtship, and when he foresakes his former name and status
in exchange for those of Andrés Caballero, the gypsy. What the
aristocratic youth has yet to understand, at this point in our tale, is that
his becoming, with the possibility of remaining, a gypsy also signals the
“condition” for his attaining nobility of what Aristotle would
call a “virtuous” sort. This nobility, which his beloved already
possesses, both complements and demotes his “noble” blood, and
his legal rank in society. Thus, his process of spiritual change, conditioned
by his change of rank and costume, parallels the attainment of purely juridical
nobility by the protagonist, who appears in what conventional wisdom perceives
as the lowly guise of a “little gypsy girl.”
Though it remains private, off-stage, and
out-of-frame, the transformative courtship of our “gypsy” lovers
allows us to observe how an ethos of amity comes to purify rather than replace
exchanges of utility and pleasure —a case of how personal, artistic
and divine grace are able to change, by perfecting, nature (Forcione 157-84;
Dunn 95). But such purification represents a gain, rather than a loss, for
the other two types of social intercourse. The protagonist, whom the narrator
finds desenvuelta —or more than a tad suggestive,
1 Important
discussions of the demonic milieu of the gypsy rancho include those
by Dunn (94-96), Forcione (189-92) and Casalduero (71-74).
2 Expressing
a similar view, Clamurro asserts that the “‘demonic’ quality
of this world [as perceived by Forcione], its harshness and seeming immorality,
seems significantly attenuated by the Preciosa's régime of personal
values” (58).
|
| 62 |
CHARLES D.
PRESBERG |
Cervantes |
|
perhaps even seductive, in the way she performs her dances and songs, especially
in the house of the lieutenant— looks upon her own virginity as a valuable
article (prenda) which she longs to invest, within the context of
a nuptial economy, in order to yield nothing less than a bonanza of erotic
pleasure and, likewise, profit in the form of offspring: “emplearla
en ferias que felices ganancias prometen” (86, emphasis
added). In other words, she shares none of the narrator's prudery, and therefore
none of what may be the prurience which his prudery strives to conceal. Her
refusal to indulge the inhabitants of the lieutenant's household with another
performance without proper payment, or to return to his home, likewise indicates
that Preciosa has no aversion to money. From the enlightened vantage of the
reader, the esterilidad which the narrator attributes to the lieutenant
and his wife is, of course, no less monetary than biological and spiritual
(79). The unfolding purification of the love and “friendly relations”
between Preciosa and Juan, splendidly analyzed in Alban Forcione's study
of the novella, is surely no allegory, as that critic points out. Rather,
it puts forth a unique analogy of a continuing process of social interaction,
open to both perversion and improvement; a process that is driven by desire
and that engages relations of power.
It seems plausible to argue that, in Cervantes's
work, the reality of power is dramatized in a way that accords with its two
Latin equivalents, as both “power to,” potentia, and
“power over,” potestas. These two forms of power are inseparable
yet distinct. Though the terms are often interchangeable, depending on context
—like almost every term, name and image in Cervantes's tale— the
first term, potentia, akin to its contemporary English derivatives
“potential” and “potentiality,” and the preferred term
of Spain's Neo-Scholastics in metaphysical and theological matters, evokes
the array of abilities that human beings possess as a result of their nature,
their talents, and their acquired knowledge, habits and skills.
Potestas, which Cobarruvias likens to “poderío” in
his definition of “poder” (875), properly signifies the possibility
of action, a variation of potentia, but considered in reference to
the place one holds with respect to other members of the same social
configuration. It involves the ability, not the necessity, to coerce other
persons by means of what exchange theorists call negative sanctions. Hence,
the measure of one's freedom, a central theme of Cervantes's novella and
the whole of his discourse, consists of the greater or lesser hindrance,
by potestas, to the enactment of one's potentia , through the
use of one's libre albedrío, or free will.
|
| 18.2 (1998) |
Precious Exchanges |
63 |
|
As the drive behind all social exchange in
La gitanilla, desire displays a twofold appeal: first, to
self-preservation, autonomy, conservation and gain, akin to what Bataille
calls “homogeneity”; next, to surrender, communion, expenditure
and loss, akin to what the same author calls “heterogeneity”
(Richardson 91-94; Richman 40-60, 61). Rather than an allegory, the friendship
and love that progressively unfold between Juan and Preciosa provide a
particular instance of how an ethos of amity comes to purify the
“lesser” types of “friendly relations,” and so to unite
a maximum of freedom to a maximum of power, in both senses. Further, an ethos
of amity is what permits the joining of the protagonists' private drama to
the general and divine economies, and to do so in a paradoxical fashion that
reconciles the seemingly contrary impulses of desire toward self-expansion
and self-loss (see Clamurro 55-60).
Throughout the novella, Cervantes's imagery
and onomastic play links Preciosa to material objects of value, especially
to precious jewels, as many critics have observed. But, as Peter Dunn explains
in his enlightening study, her gypsy name, actions and circumstance also
recall two successive parables in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew's gospel:
1) the treasure hidden the field; and 2) the pearl of great
price (96), most commonly expressed in Spanish as “la perla preciosa”
or “la margarita preciosa.” Hence the auto sacramental by
Lope de Vega, La margarita preciosa, in which Christ assumes a jointly
eschatological and commercial role as “mercader de la
gloria.”3 It is pertinent to remember
that both parables concern nothing less momentous than “the kingdom
of heaven.” Such biblical imagery therefore associates Preciosa with
infinite longing and with the promise of salvation itself: “the universal
redemption of man and history” (Forcione 223). Furthermore, in Cervantes's
work, as in Christian mythopeia, the process of salvation occurs within
a framework of nuptials, through the mediation of the Word: the marriage
between heaven and earth; God and soul; Christ and Church; and the union
of self and other, in the Mystical Body. Through such “marriages,”
the divine economy both joins and continues to sanctify its human
counterparts.
It is hardly incidental that, during their
courtship, the chief medium of exchange between Preciosa and Juan should
be, not
3 It is
worth recalling that Pedro Calderón de la Barca also wrote an auto
entitled La margarita preciosa, in collaboration with Juan de Zavaleta
and Jerónimo Cáncer, thus illustrating the degree to which
the expression was a religious commonplace in seventeenth-century Spain.
|
| 64 |
CHARLES D.
PRESBERG |
Cervantes |
|
money, but what the narrator calls razones. Further, in both the mode
and medium of their exchange, it soon becomes clear that Juan and Preciosa
enjoy an equal share of potentia and potestas. Hence, they
contradict the prevailing ethos of their contemporary societies, in which
maleness, wealth and noble birth —that is, just the opposite of everything
that Preciosa, as a gypsy, embodies— entitle one to dominate the symbols
of discourse, which codify and determine all other forms of social behavior
and social exchange, including the distribution of persons in marriage.
Yet the narrator relates almost nothing of
what Juan and Preciosa tell each other in their intimate conversations. Indeed,
his report about the content of their verbal exchanges is reducible to the
statement: “They spoke.” Not so about the effect of those exchanges.
For, more than lexical words, razones are perhaps better understood
as enunciations in discourse which unfold, in time, to reveal the state of
the sender's mind and heart: potentially, human analogues of the Word, or
the Christian deity's perfect act of self-expression. The narrator's use
of imperfects and progressives underscores the exchange of razones
as a process, whereby an ethos of amity forges an enduring bond, not
only of erotic love, but especially of friendship between “persons of
virtue”: “Pasaba Andrés con Preciosa honestos, discretos
y enamorados coloquios, y ella poco a poco se iba enamorando de la
discreción y buen trato de su amante, y él, del mismo modo,
si pudiera crecer su amor, fuera creciendo” (107-8, emphasis
added). In the case of the two lovers, that process also yields to mutual
happiness, which may move beyond an exchange of razones: “Desta
manera [. . .] iba[n] los amantes gozosos con sólo
mirarse” (108).
Although, in both a physical and cultural sense,
our protagonists are obliged to spend what ter Horst calls “une saison
en enfer,” the real setting for their exchanges of amity, which yield
a friendship of virtue and conjugal love, is a locus that oversteps, without
leaving, the geographic and legal boundaries of both the urban and gypsy
societies. Preciosa is a kidnapped child —legally, in urban society,
something like a stolen article— of noble birth who thinks herself a
gypsy. Yet, saying more than she knows, our protagonist asserts that her
spiritual “condiciones rompen leyes,” and that she answers
to a higher authority than that of an authoritarian license, or the abuse
of potestas in any society, whether gypsy or “civilized”:
“no me rijo por la bárbara e insolente licencia
que estos mis parientes se han tomado” (104, emphasis added).
In similar fashion, Juan freely relinquishes
his present, and potentially his future, status, name and estate —all
in exchange for the
|
| 18.2 (1998) |
Precious Exchanges |
65 |
|
possibility of marrying a gypsy. Thus he agrees, in word alone, to
form part of the gypsy militia; yet in practice he refuses to steal, and
thus rejects the very basis of the gypsy society's self-definition and perverse
camaraderie. More important, Juan knows and repeats almost beyond enduring
that no man can “preciarse de caballero” if he willingly
tells an untruth. Yet, in order to pursue an ethos of amity, involving a
love that blends romantic attraction and virtuous friendship, he must lie
to his father —to his domestic representative of a society, and a family,
governed by an ethos and discourse of utility. He misspends the verbal capital
which secures his familial status and his social rank, thus ceasing to
“preciarse de caballero,” or to overestimate the value of his juridical
nobility. The structures of both societies (in part the products,
in part the producers, of discourse) put him in the position of having to
abuse razones if he is to use them properly, to tell a lie if he is
to live the truth. Later, it is his upbringing as a member of the nobility
—or was it his noble blood?— that leads him to commit murder. And
because of the ethos which structures his society, Juan's recovery of social
status requires, not strict justice, but a warped species of forgiveness,
which takes the forms of utilitarian clemency from his father and of purchased
clemency, from a city official, by means of a legal note.
The use and misuse of both oral and written
discourse is surely pivotal to all the novella's exchanges. In that fictional
world, razones often aim at concealing rather than revealing the mind
and ethos of the sender. Consider, for instance, Juan Carducha's lie, rooted
in lust, and Clemente's poems, enfolding gold coins for Preciosa (intended
as pre-payment for what, exactly?). In the work which opens Cervantes's
collection of tales —“exemplary” models of how persons both
fashion and read their tales and life-tales— we discover a figuration
of how discourse involves the deployment of razones in artful attempts
to order the unfolding of one's own life, and to influence the lives of others,
for better or worse. Whether we focus on the utility principle of the
abuela, the pleasure principle of Juan (begging Freud's pardon), the
amity principle of Preciosa, or the principles which inform the behavior
of supernumerary characters, what we confront in each case is a social ethos
that entails a strategy of narrative emplotment, differing in the extent
of its controlling, alluring or amicable aims. Similarly, the social structures
governing interaction within and between the two societies stand, in the
main, as coercive framing devices, on the analogy of generic forms, which
arrange potestas in a perverse fashion. Hence, they work to curtail
or misdirect the potentia and the twofold desire of their subjects.
|
| 66 |
CHARLES D.
PRESBERG |
Cervantes |
|
As the largely hidden agent of amity, working
from her own and Juan's place apart, Preciosa nurtures in both the
abuela and her suitor a willingness, not only to give, but to give
up the plots which reduced her to the status of a character or inferior player,
as well as their possessions and even their persons, in exchange for a salvific
life-narrative of superior ethical and aesthetic value. Forsaking a calculus
of cost and reward, the abuela freely commits, after much pondering,
what is potentially an act of physical annihilation in the service of charity,
love and friendship, in order to effect an exchange that transforms her
listeners' sadness into joy:
Y al cabo de toda esta suspensión y imaginación, dijo:
—Espérenme vuesas mercedes, señores míos, un poco,
que yo haré que estos llantos se conviertan en risa, aunque a mí
me cueste la vida. (126, emphasis added)
In a similar link between exchange, annihilation
and conversion, Juan expresses his urgent request to marry Preciosa, just
when he believes the authorities are going to put him to death:
“¿cómo no me desposan primero? Y si me han de
desposar, por cierto que es muy malo el tálamo que me
espera” (131, emphasis added). So, as against his former mode of plotting
the “friendly relations” between his beloved and himself, based
on a principle of pleasure, he is eager to wear the “shackles”
of matrimony (“desposar”), and to exchange a marriage bed
(“tálamo”) for a nuptial altar (“tálamo”),
upon which he is the victim to be slain. Both Juan and the abuela
unknowingly repeat the example of Preciosa, whose Christ-like offer of surrender
occurs before that of the other two characters. As she says, referring to
Juan: “El no tiene culpa; pero si la tiene, déseme a mí
la pena” (126). Moreover, when events lead her to exchange her gypsy
for her aristocratic persona, she also hands over authorial control of her
life-narrative to the norms, and flaws, of the prevailing culture, represented
in the person, and actions, of her father.
If it is true that he welcomes his child in
a spirit of love and benevolence, it is also true that this author-character
abuses his power as corregidor, by lying to Juan about his own daughter.
He does so, not only for the purpose of testing the youth, but also for the
pleasure of watching him quake out of fear for his life. Further, he also
discloses a utility- and pleasure-based inclination to view his daughter
as property. After his wife encourages him to “give her” to Juan
in marriage, “dársela por esposa,” he balks:
“Gocémosla algún tiempo; que en casándola,
no será nuestra, sino de su marido” (129, 130;
emphasis added). Yet, when he does consent to the marriage,
|
| 18.2 (1998) |
Precious Exchanges |
67 |
|
the father, too, must relinquish authorial control, in submitting, by means
of the wedding banns, to the nuptial and salvific narrative of “Mother
Church.” Hence, as dramatized in the protagonists, the abuela
and the main character's father, the fictional world of La gitanilla
makes power, in its fullest sense, the result of submission, surrender
and service to others and, even more drastically, the absolute Other, in
an act of total self-expenditure.
In her hidden accomplishments as an agent of
amity and charity in fallen societies —or as a treasure in the field—
Preciosa therefore does her part to reflect Christianity's nuptial emplotment
of salvation, in which, as mother and bride of Christ, the Church spiritually
bears and nurtures her children for beatitude. She thus induces Juan to frame
his life-narrative after the model of the divine bridegroom, whose spousal
duties entail the surrender of his life, or the death of one's
“aristocratic” (royal) self in exchange for the life and elevation
of others to “noble” status. Besides the portrait of Juan in prison,
where he is pilloried and in shackles, other images of crucifixion link him
to Christ's passion. Like other caballeros in the tale, Juan is proud
to point the cross-shaped insignia of knighthood, symbolic of commitments
both religious and secular, which he wears over his heart (Forcione 195-6).
The imagery involving cruces also occurs in the novella's frequent
reference to the tail-side of coins (“cruces”) and to payment,
or exchange, in money, service or merchandise (“hacer la cruz”).
The second half of Juan's gypsy pseudonym, Andrés Caballero, recalls
the chivalric imagery, and is complemented by its first half, since pious
legend holds that St. Andrew was the only apostle to be crucified in the
manner of Jesus. Andrew's brother, Peter, was crucified face down. In yet
another expenditure, and exchange, of onomastic capital, Juan's surname as
a caballero is reminiscent of “carcaj,” which is a baldric
used to hold a crucifix in religious processions.
In miniature, the authorial agency of Preciosa,
a product of the authorial agency of Cervantes, reflects the role of the
feminine principle in both narrative and nuptial economies which are wider
in scope. In her two performances before a large, urban public, the protagonist
celebrates in poetry, dance and song the glories of the queen,
Margarita de Austria, “en el valor y en el nombre rica
y admirable joya,” and of St. Anne, “árbol
preciosísimo” (67; 64, emphasis added; Forcione 208-9).
The first woman is, of course, the national emblem: both a
“Margarita” and “preciosa.” The second woman is the mother
of Mary, the new Eve, who is in turn the mother of a new, grace-filled humanity
because mother of the Christian Messiah. In a
|
| 68 |
CHARLES D.
PRESBERG |
Cervantes |
|
startling chain of images, Preciosa describes St. Anne as “casa de moneda,
do se forjó el cuño que dio a Dios la forma que como hombre
tuvo” (65). From the poem, and from a commonplace, economy-oriented
line of biblical and theological discourse concerning humankind's redemption
from sin, it follows that, as St. Anne is the mint and Mary the stamp, so
Christ is the coin which overpays the price of humanity's
debt to the deity, through an extravagant, non-rational expenditure of what
Christian discourse calls his precious body and precious blood.
The performance of these poems provokes the most clamorous applause of any
in the novella, and also elicits a child-like request to “do it
again.” And so she does, responding to the underlying cause of such
pleas. For both performances quicken, please and frustrate the
“heterogeneous,” erotic yearning of her audience to form part of
a collective “I,” a cosmic dance (Dunn 97), a divine body, spent
in willing sacrifice, and a divine utterance, with Preciosa in the role as
mediator.
The imagery and onomastics of the novella also
establish a crucial link between Preciosa and Poetry (Forcione 215-22), which
Clemente describes as “una joya preciosísima” and
“una bellísima doncella, casta, honesta, discreta” (91,
emphasis added). As demonstrated by the poets in the fictional world who
continually offer the gift of telling and re-telling the
“extraño caso” about “la gitanilla” —a clear
allusion, though in a different genre, to the tale-as-gift we have before
us— both poetry and this narrative poem belong to an intermediate locus
which recalls that of our protagonists during their courtship. More specifically,
Preciosa “embodies” poetry in general, the poems she performs,
the poems which others recite about her, the narrator's “historical”
account of both her courtship and social transformation, and the fictional
tale, La gitanilla, by the empirical author, Miguel de Cervantes.
As a form of ocio or leisurely exchange of razones in discourse,
both poetry and this tale about poetry —of which Preciosa is at once
protagonist and emblem— seek to animate desire from within a system
of artistic exchange, which operates between what Cervantes's Prologue puts
forth as a sacred economy proper to “los templos” and a utilitarian
economy of “negocio” (“Prólogo” 52). As
represented in both the protagonist and her tale, poetry and its exchanges
thus provide the aesthetic distance and the social connection required to
renew or re-order our loyalties and longings. Both within and through Cervantes's
novella, the production, distribution and consumption of verbal artworks
operate, after the manner of “grace,” as an exchange of gifts,
within a system of social exchange that is animated by personal and collective
|
| 18.2 (1998) |
Precious Exchanges |
69 |
|
desire —a “general economy” in which self-transformation is
wedded to surrender; autonomy and freedom, to communion; and redemption and
reward, to expenditure and loss.
As a complement to a poetics of reciprocal
desire, and mutual surrender, the novella sets forth a poetics of reciprocal
power at its most self-conscious level of both narration and discourse. Sieber
is surely right to point out that readers of La gitanilla are likely
to be curious and confused by a love story that begins as a tale about thieves
(“Introducción,” 18). But this false start is, at bottom,
the mistake of a narrator who, like his mistake, is the product of artistic
design.
Sharing the prejudices and utilitarian principles
of his social environment, Cervantes's narrator assumes that to write about
gypsies is to write about thieves. He even uses terminology of Scholastic
metaphysics to liken stealing, in gypsies, to an essential attribute: “la
gana del hurtar y el hurtar son en ellos como ac[c]identes
inseparables” (61, emphasis added; Flynn 29-31). Since the data
of his story fail to bear this out, his first word is a disclaimer for his
entire narrative: “Parece.” Thus, too, the last paragraph of his
narrative, unable to frame its own story, begins: “Olvidábaseme
de decir . . . .” He asumes, further, that the chastity
of Preciosa and Juan's aversion to stealing must have their source in the
nobility of their blood, even as he is forced to describe the corruption
of aristocratic society. And, finally, he both assumes and repeats, time
and again, the popular acclaims of the gypsy girl's “hermosura.”
As Camamis notes, in a reading that interprets La gitanilla as an
exercise in neo-pagan secularism, and sidesteps Cervantes's tendency both
to Christianize and de-mythologize classical imagery, Preciosa's green eyes
and the dimple in the middle of her chin, as well as other, non-physical
traits, are reminiscent of Boticelli's portrait of Venus, the archetype of
both humanity and feminine beauty (203-4). But we also learn, from the little
that the narrator seems to know about her physical features, that the protagonist
has a white birthmark under her left breast “ya grande, que con el tiempo
se había dilatado” (128), and a fleshy membrane that joins two
toes on her right foot. At the close of our tale, it is these traits which
identify her, not as an archetype, but as an individual, and as a uniquely
Cervantine refashioning of Venus. In short, a simulated child of his time
and society, the narrator writes within a conceptual framework that can encompass
only the most typical, or exemplary, “facts” of his narrative.
Hence, through his narrator, Cervantes provides
something like a wavering voice for the cultural fiction which grants superior
value to the “stamp”, or the “inseparable accidents,”
of nobility and
|
| 70 |
CHARLES D.
PRESBERG |
Cervantes |
|
maleness. It is a fiction which seeks to reduce the value of, say, gypsies
and women to that of utility and pleasure, lessens or precludes the potential
for amity in our “friendly relations,” and frames both the emplotment
and reading of human behavior to yield a coercive, if incoherent, narrative
of social life. But Cervantes also supplies, through the inadequacies of
his narrator, a self-conscious circumstance of poetic exchange between author
and reader, in which both enjoy a type of potestas that is equal in
degree, yet different in kind.
Owing to their power over the tale,
readers are both free and, in a sense, obliged to invest the protagonist,
and all she represents, with their own understanding of ethical and aesthetic
value. Not that such an enterprise is lacking in risk. The text is fraught
with come-hither ploys to dichotomous thinking, like the ethos which guides
the “work” of the narrator —inducements to frame and evaluate
this tale, a complex hybrid of both romance and picaresque, as either one
or the other. For example, we may sense an urge to decide, once and for all,
whether the protagonists move from a site of arcadian frolic and innocence,
among the gypsies, to a site of hypocrisy, graft and urban corruption. Or
we may sense a pull to interpret the moral of our “exemplary”
story as one of deliverance from the demonic to the salvific; from base to
noble blood; from poverty to wealth; from chaos to order; from
“putative” to legitimate parents; from gypsy inferno —rife
with incest, murder and torture— to civilized utopia and familial hearth.
In either of these extreme interpretations, we shall have “forgotten”
something, in a futile effort to halt the dialectic of poetic and critical
exchange, of which our novella is, indeed, a prime example. For Cervantes's
tale nowhere indicates that the couple lived happily ever after, but only
that they lived, in a fallen yet redeemable world of males and females, gypsies,
commoners, clerics and nobles, and that people continued to tell and re-tell
the story of their “strange” courtship. The exemplarity of our
non-coercive tale aims less at producing a definitive reading than at proposing
its own act of fiction and, so, poetry and narrative in general, as a chance
to re-negotiate our standards of evaluation, whether ethical or aesthetic.
In Preciosa's many spectators, and in the narrator
of her tale, we observe how methods of both producing and consuming discourse
will vary according to the purity, or prurience, of their source. What is
more, the novella suggests that the offerings of poetry, narrative and reading,
are apt to expose defects in their contributors on the analogy of swelling
birth-marks and webbed feet. But the novella also suggests, through its tale's
simulations of poetic performance,
|
| 18.2 (1998) |
Precious Exchanges |
71 |
|
that the place of poetry in the order of social exchange grants us both the
means and opportunity to pay our debts of solidarity and communion —to
retain the privilege, yet ease the poverty, of our noble-humble rank as
individuals. In the gift of its tale and its readings, the novella
exemplifies how our most valuable exchanges are powerful deeds of
amity and surrender that, moved by a yearning for the gain of self-loss,
we transact in verbal coin.
| UNIVERSITY OF
MISSOURI-COLUMBIA |
Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics. Tr. Terrence Irwin. Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1985.
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share. Tr. Robert Hurley. New York:
Zone, 1988.
Blau, Peter. Exchange and Power in Social Life. New York: Wiley, 1964.
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, Jerónimo Cancer and Juan de Zavaleta.
La margarita preciosa. In Comedias de don Pedro Calderón
de la Barca. Ed. Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch. Biblioteca de Autores
Españoles 14. Madrid: M. Rivandeyra, 1858. 517-36.
Camamis, George. “Cervantes and Boticelli's Primavera.”
Cervantes 8 (1988): 183-223.
Casalduero, Joaquín. Sentido y forma de las “Novelas
ejemplares.” Madrid: Gredos, 1969.
Cervantes, Miguel de. La gitanilla. In Novelas ejemplares.
Ed. Harry Sieber. 2 vols. 1613. Madrid: Cátedra, 1985. 1: 59-134.
——. “Prólogo.” Novelas ejemplares. 1:50-53.
Clamurro, William. “Value and Identity in La gitanilla.”
Journal of Hispanic Philology 14 (1989): 43-60.
Cobarruvias, Sebastián de. Tesoro de la lengua castellana o
española. 1611. Madrid: Ediciones Turner, 1979.
Dunn, Peter. “Novelas ejemplares.” Suma Cervantina.
Ed. J. B. Avalle-Arce and E. C. Riley. London: Tamesis, 1973. 81-118.
Flynn, Gerard. “La gitanilla: Accidents and Occasions.”
Hispanic Journal 11 (1990): 29-44.
Forcione, Alban. Cervantes and the Humanist Vision: A Study of Four Exemplary
Novels. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982.
Homans, George. Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms. New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1961.
72
|
| 18.2 (1998) |
Precious Exchanges |
73 |
|
Land, Nick. The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Batailles and Virulent
Nihilism (an Essay in Atheistic Religion). New York: Routledge, 1992.
Márquez Villanueva, Francisco. “La buenaventura de Preciosa.”
Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 24 (1986): 741-68.
Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic
Societies. Tr. I. Cunnison. New York: Norton, 1967.
Ott, Ludwig. Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma. Rockford, IL: Tan, 1974.
Reid, Ian. “What is a Textual Exchange?” Journal of the Australian
Universities Language and Literature Association 74 (1990): 10-24.
Resina, Joan. “Laissez faire y reflexividad erótica en La
gitanilla.” MLN 106 (1991): 257-78.
Richardson, Michael. Georges Bataille. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Richman, Michele. Reading Georges Bataille. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1982.
Sieber, Harry. “Introducción: La gitanilla.” Novelas
ejemplares. By Miguel de Cervantes. Ed. Harry Sieber. 2 vols. 1613. Madrid:
Cátedra, 1985. 1: 18-22.
ter Horst, Robert. “Une saison en
enfer: La gitanilla.” Cervantes
5 (1985): 87-127.
Vega Carpio, Lope de. La margarita preciosa. In Obras de Lope de
Vega: autos y coloquios. Ed. Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo. Biblioteca
de Autores Españoles 7. Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1963. 155-67.