—[82]→ —83→
On Beyond Conflict119
University of Illinois, Chicago Circle
In Mimesis Conflictiva (Madrid: Gredos, 1975), Cesáreo Bandera offers a view of fiction that allows him to bring together under a single banner (Bandera) Cervantes and Calderón, writers who incarnate, as René Girard says in his prologue to the book, «dos polos de la cultura española a los que se ha tratado siempre de diferenciar» (p. 11). The task of finding the fulcrum on which these two poles rest is a worthy one, and especially appropriate for a critic concerned, as Bandera is, with recovering the identities that our habitual insistence on difference tends to obscure.
The irony is that it is consciousness of the arbitrary nature of violence that brings the two authors together in Bandera's study. Their supposed insight into the ultimately fictional nature of violence earns Cervantes and Calderón a place of honor in Bandera's pantheon of authors who have gone beyond fiction. But whatever we are told that the two authors do with violence, it is interesting that awareness of the all-pervasive nature of conflict would provide the cornerstone of the edifice Bandera has built to house Cervantes and Calderón in harmony.
Bandera formulates the basis for his juxtaposing of Cervantes and Calderón most clearly in his reply to Ciriaco Morón Arroyo's review essay of Mimesis conflictiva: «If there is one single idea that is repeated time and again in Mimesis conflictiva, it is that the struggle, whenever it appears in the Quijote or in the Life, is an arbitrary struggle, in the sense that it only feeds upon itself, generating out of itself all the conceptual justifications that the violent participants brandish to keep —84→ it going».120 It will be the discovery of the intimate relation between fiction and violence, and of the nullification of difference that violence promotes that will make blood-brothers of Cervantes and Calderón.
The topic is a dangerous one, however, for reasons that Bandera's own theory makes clear. For in order to probe the mechanisms of conflict, Bandera must privilege the instances in the texts he is discussing in which those mechanisms are most clearly revealed. Without an understanding of what Bandera is trying to accomplish in his book, the reader might well wonder if his analyses of Cervantes and Calderón have not been distorted in the service of his theory. But before getting into the possibility that Bandera, in trying to get us past violence, has actually made of it a «piedra de escándalo,» it is necessary to look a little more closely at the way the book presents itself in general.
Bandera's thesis, as he makes clear, draws heavily from Girard's Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), and his later Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). Like Girard, Bandera is concerned with what happens when our innate desire for centeredness, for self-sufficiency, loses its attachment to a transcendent God and is displaced onto another object. We then endow that object with powers that it does not possess, experiencing at the same time a sense of increased insufficiency -exactly that which we were trying to overcome. The resultant imbalance in the values attributed to the self and to the other manifests in expressions of erotic desire and in violence. The «other», meanwhile, who is after all no better than the self, participates willy-nilly in the games of love and war that mimetic desire creates, perpetuating and frustrating the self's desire by withholding whatever is sought after, and seeking in his turn only that which is withheld.
Also like Girard, Bandera does not distinguish between the imitation of the other that Don Quixote demonstrates in his mad effort to become Amadís, and the desire for the possession of the other that Don Quixote's endlessly frustrated pursuit of Dulcinea represents. The confusion of the two displacements of self leads to some distortions when Bandera deals with Don Quixote Part I, explains why he —85→ does so little with Part II, and produces a serious misrepresentation of Rosaura in Life is a Dream.
But I am jumping ahead of my argument. I want here to establish that what primarily concerns Bandera is not the phenomenon of men and women seeking to reach past the otherness that keeps them apart -the major theme of Cervantes' last-published works- but that of men, who, entranced by their differences, cannot see themselves in one another. The insight, in itself, is not to be belittled. It is of fundamental importance, and the passion with which Bandera expresses his concerns is entirely justified. What is at stake, as he makes clear, is nothing less than our collective survival.
In a later article, Bandera's seriousness about his point is made unmistakable:121
The ethical import of Bandera's findings can be even more clearly seen in the words with which he concludes his answer in his abovementioned reply to Ciriaco Morón Arroyo.122
What Bandera is talking about, what gives such intensity to everything he writes, is nothing less than the difficult, yet quintessential task of withdrawing, individually and collectively, our projections of good and evil from the objects of this world and realizing our —86→ own responsibility for the violence our untamed, often unrecognized, feelings of envy, pride, fear, and desire create.
There is no disputing the importance of the concerns that underlie Bandera's book. What can be questioned is the medium he has chosen to communicate those concerns. The first sign that Bandera has overloaded Cervantes with a theory his texts cannot truly bear is that he has limited his analysis, especially of Don Quixote, to too narrow a band of episodes. It is not just that he focuses almost exclusively on Part I: It is that within Part I he selects only those episodes for study that reveal a) the violence that metaphysical desire provokes in its victims (Grisóstomo, Cardenio, Anselmo); b) instances of confusion when the «fiction» is interrupted (Cardenio's story to Don Quixote, Sancho's tale); and c) evidence of the chaos that erupts when words become the object of dispute (the baci-yelmo controversy). The occasional brief references to characters and episodes in Part II all serve similarly to show the ephemeral nature of the object of desire (the braying aldermen); the reciprocity between the fooler and the fooled (Sansón Carrasco, the duchess, Altisidora); and the emptiness of fiction (the books Altisidora reports having seen being tossed around at the gates of Hell).
Of course, Bandera does not claim to have covered everything. But he does suggest that the theory is capable of doing so: «Muchos cabos quedan por atar, pero esperamos haber atado aquí los suficientes para marcar el camino de una nueva aproximación a lo mejor y más significativo de nuestra literatura» (p. 34). What I would like to do in what follows is to show that Bandera's analysis of Cervantes' works and of Life is a Dream reveals instances of rivalry between men. When a woman intervenes in a role which escapes the erotic fantasies that the men have projected on her, she is either not successfully represented, or is not mentioned at all in Bandera's presentation of the episode. And when a man gives up his fascination with the obstacle that another man -a friend, a rival- represents to him, to focus instead on the woman as the object of his attention, the event passes unnoticed or is trivialized in Bandera's study.
I point this out not at all in a spirit of combativeness, but for the sake of the same concerns that have motivated Bandera's work. For what I think Cervantes' total opus suggests is that the way out of the hermeticism, illusion, rivalry, and violence of the solitary men who populate his best-known works begins with the woman: the woman not as the object of erotic desire, not as coquette, but as the most —87→ «other» of the «others» a man normally encounters, the «other» who, when he has learned to accept her as she is and not as what he thinks she is, rescues and recreates him. Where this is most thoroughly worked out in Cervantes, Bandera remains silent, or dismissive. And where men are still trapped in eroticism and violence, Bandera is most eloquent.
When woman as «other» is taken out of the picture as a part of the healing process, we are left only with the spectacle of warring men and damnable attractive, inaccessible young ladies. In this landscape, Calderón makes a fine companion to Bandera and to Bandera's Cervantes. Calderón may have seen clearly the identity of Basilio and the son whom he sends into exile in Life is a Dream, but, unlike Cervantes, he could see no way out of the continual cycle of violence such an identity promises.
Bandera says that the only way out of the cycle is to give up «fiction», and he lauds Cervantes for doing so: «Cervantes consiguió lo que no había conseguido ninguna novela de caballería: terminar, encontrar el fin. Cervantes terminó con la caballería con su propia novela» (p. 171). And yet, when it comes to discussing Calderón, he praises him precisely for the unending nature of his greatest play: «Entre la situación inicial de la comedia, en la que vemos a Basilio arreglando casamientos y manteniendo a uno encerrado en la torre para que no alborote el reino, y la escena final en que vemos a Segismundo haciendo lo mismo, no hay ninguna diferencia...» (p. 258). Clearly Bandera is attributing to Cervantes and Calderón understanding of something he has found in both men's work. It is not so clear, since the one apparently remained trapped in a world from which the other escaped, that they in fact saw the world as Bandera sees it.
From my perspective, what Bandera has singled out for commentary reveals exceedingly well a phase, perhaps the most common phase, but a phase nonetheless, of human development which Cervantes, unlike Calderón, was able to go beyond. In order to develop this point, it will be necessary to shift focus slightly, To do so, I will begin by calling on Morón Arroyo, who, in his Mimesis review, introduces, ever so tentatively, the question of the woman which I take to be so central to a full understanding of Cervantes. Speaking of Bandera's analysis of Cardenio, he asks:123
—88→If Bandera were to take up this point in his reply, which he did not, he would probably say that the women in question were not victims, but rather accomplices in the game of metaphysical desire that roped them all in. He says: «Cardenio y Luscinda juegan cada uno con respecto al otro tanto el papel del dios como el del esclavo. La conciencia de cada uno se encuentra sometida a un angustioso y desesperante vaivén» (p. 99). This results, finally, in Cardenio's madness. The point is, however, that although Bandera asserts a reciprocity of metaphysical desire, there is no evidence for it. Luscinda does not go mad. She simply continues, through all the confusions that surround her, and against Cardenio's expectations, to remain faithful to him.
In a way, Bandera does «look at the stories from the side of the women», but only inasmuch as he can drag them into his prefabricated game of metaphysical desire. He therefore infers more about Luscinda, about whom Cervantes tells us very little, than about Dorotea, who is in fact a major character in the tale. Luscinda could be seen as a participant in the see-saw of mimetic desire, since we have caught her passing notes in a chivalric book, and since she manages to drive two men crazy. But Dorotea most decidedly does not fit the picture. She is a farmer's daughter who is very poorly protected from the lustful inclinations of the Duke's son, on whose land she lives. Furthermore, she does not simply appear self-sufficient. She actually is an extremely competent person, brought up to handle equally well the skills of a man and those of a woman. Upon finding herself in a difficult position, she demonstrates that upbringing by behaving as a man when that is what is called for, and as a woman when that is appropriate. Like Luscinda, she proves amply capable of defending her honor. She was not above tossing someone over the cliff who had presumed to take advantage of her.
Most important of all, Dorotea is the agent through whom the —89→ situation that Cardenio and Fernando conceived as a love triangle is resolved. Dorotea contributes to the transformation of Cardenio by telling him the first story other than his own that he has ever been able to listen to, and she is the first person ever to appeal to Fernando's sense of true honor. Dorotea anticipates a type of character who will be much more fully developed in some of Cervantes' later works: Preciosa of La Gitanilla, Teodosia of Las dos doncellas, Leocadia of La fuerza de la sangre, and Auristela of the Persiles. What is important to understand about her is that she escapes the labels that collective wisdom has assigned to women. She is neither the untouchable, forever inaccessible coquette, nor is she a prostitute, following the pattern that Maritornes incarnates in Don Quixote Part I. In the literal «no-man's land» of the unmarried non-virgin, she is «outside the city» and can therefore operate either as a figure of damnation or of salvation. Leonela, the unmarried non-virgin of the Curioso, whom Bandera's theory has also expelled, functions as a demonic figure, but has the same all-important role as Dorotea in leading a threesome locked into mimetic desire out of the fiction they have created.
Were Bandera here with me now, I am sure he would say at this point that the happy ending that Dorotea makes possible is a contrived one, and to some extent I would agree with him. Fernando and Cardenio are not truly prepared for the transformation that is required for them to discard their socially-created projections onto women. In later stories in which the obstacles to union are overcome, both the men and women involved are forced to go through an extended period of purgation during which they learn to release the illusions that hold them captive. The purgation that they undergo -I am thinking here of Don Juan in La Gitanilla; Tomás de Avendaño in La ilustre fregona; Ricardo in El amante liberal; Recaredo in La española inglesa; the Captive in the Captive's Tale of Don Quixote Part I; and Periandro in the Persiles- is one that takes them far from the everyday conventions that are constructed to preserve their cherished illusions. Precisely outside of the city, beyond order and reason, they learn to withdraw their claims upon the woman, earning, at the same time, the right to leap over the «barrier» that held them so fascinatingly and so madly apart from their loved ones.
Juan Palomeque's inn, in which the love triangle becomes a foursome and the desperations of unrequited love yield to the banalities of marriage, may indeed be enchanted, as Bandera suggests (see his —90→ discussion on p. 136). But his consistent rejection of the resolutions Cervantes' fiction offers with increasing insistence after the publication of Don Quixote Part I finally becomes suspect. And once again, it is Morón Arroyo who cautiously peeps over the obstacle to resolution that Bandera has placed before our eyes: «If we take the complete stories [of Cardenio / Luscinda / Fernando / Dorotea], the mechanism of rivalry would account for the beginning (the initial conflict), but not for the result (peace). Do we have the right to consider these happy endings as mere literary convention? Should we not rather form a system out of the work itself that accounts for the whole story?»124 The question is especially apt, since the last of the major interpolated tales in Part I centers precisely on the achievement of harmony.
The Captive's Tale, which is situated between the Curioso and the Canon of Toledo's discussion about the possibility of an exemplary epic, seems to represent Cervantes' first sustained effort to break out of the self-enclosed, socially-conditioned fictions of his earlier male characters. It is the one story, of all the interpolated stories of Part I, that is not interrupted in the telling. It goes on for three entire chapters that contain no other extraneous material, and continues to deal with the fortunes of Zoraida and the captive on into a fourth chapter.
The Captive's Tale is clearly important, and it makes even more compelling Morón Arroyo's question. For Bandera, who gives a full chapter to the Curioso, writes only ten lines on this story, asking along the way: «¿Quién puede dudar que esta historia del cautivo no la sienta [Cervantes] como la novelización heroica de su propia vida? ¿Cuántas veces no soñaría su fertilísima imaginación alguna historia de este tipo en los amargos ocios de su cautiverio?» (pp. 136-37). Why should two tales of nearly equal length, so closely juxtaposed, receive such unequal treatment?
But Bandera does not stop there. In a brief excursion outside of Don Quixote Part I he makes a necessary tour of the Persiles, which he sees as Cervantes' attempt to «salvar de entre un mundo en ruinas, de entre esa discorde confusión primera... el amor y la amistad, un amor y una amistad liberados del mimetismo destructor de la pasión» (p. 126). In this work, in which Cervantes demonstrates the process by which that love and that friendship are in fact freed from the destructiveness of mimetic desire, Bandera persists in seeing a —91→ «cuento de hadas» in the happy ending: «Pero Cervantes sabe que ese final es puramente convencional y arbitraria en la medida en que se produce dentro de la novela» (p. 129).
Truly to understand what is going on in the Persiles, or even what is going on with the Basilio of Part II of Don Quixote who escaped the trap that Cardenio and Grisóstomo fell into in Part I, the trap prescribed by the archetypal pair Pyramus and Thisbe, we need, in fact, another model. We need a model that takes into account the possibility of understanding illusion without being caught by it. We need a model that explains why the illusion-bound protagonists need to be led outside of the city, to let go of the «reason» that illusion feeds, if they are ever going to be able to make the «itinerarium mentis ad Deum,» which is also, as Bandera explains, the «itinerarium mentis ad proximum.»125 The master of illusion can be the thief or the actor, the trickster that Maese Pedro stands for in Part II of Don Quixote, or that Pedro de Urdemalas represents, but he can also be the Christ figure, the savior.126 It all hinges on the ability (to use literary terms) of the character to remember that he is one with the author;127 of the subject in time to remember the origin and the end of his journey; or (now to use theological terms) of the individual to be in the world but not of it. Bandera sees this often enough, since one of his major points is that chaos ensues when «fiction» is confused with «reality». But he is not easily convinced when Cervantes offers instances of characters who keep the two worlds straight. Perhaps what is needed is the —92→ introduction of another literary form: the acceptance of romance, of the «cuento de hadas» as the literary expression of the very escape from fiction that Bandera hopes we will all achieve.128
But what is required to accept romance is a dethroning of the intellect, an opening up to the feeling nature that is precisely what the woman in the allegory of the Persiles, or of La Gitanilla, or of La ilustre fregona, or of La fuerza de la sangre stands for. What is required is a love that will force the intellect out of the walled city, into that which is unfamiliar. The reaction to this alternative on the part of the author will determine whether he will continue to produce grim tales of the failures of «society» and of the intellect, or will begin to produce works -of a different order, to be sure- that celebrate peace, love, and prosperity. The escape from «fiction» is as simple -and as difficult- as that.
Certainly we cannot mandate a taste for romance. It is, in any case, a dangerous form, as Bandera would be the first to point out, since it can as easily inculcate an indulgence in fantasy as lead to an understanding of the truth that lies beneath appearances. In «Cervantes' Quijote and the Critical Illusion» Bandera suggests that the Persiles and the Exemplary Novels are not popular today because Cervantes properly understood the confusion toward which we were collectively headed in our persistent attachment to illusion: «If the Quijote has rightly come to be regarded as a masterpiece, this is not due to any metaphysical and temporal qualities of the novel, but simply to the fact that it prophesied our contemporary situation, that it reads us precisely as we think we are reading it».129
While there is no doubt that he is right, what troubles me is that Bandera himself is caught, fascinated and horrified, by the very violence and unfulfilled desire that he sees as leading inevitably to catastrophe. Like John the Baptist's, his is a voice crying in the wilderness. He is proclaiming the Savior without the relief that salvation promises. Like Socrates, of whom he speaks so eloquently —93→ in the Introduction, he exposes himself to be judged on the terms by which he has made judgment. His savior is the savior of the Passion, the sacrificial lamb, and not the savior of Blake, whose exemplarity comes from the power to establish the heavenly city that he has promised to those who can learn what he came to teach.
I mention Blake because Bandera begins his book with a comparison between the vision of art that, through Blake, Northrop Frye offers in Fearful Symmetry. A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), and the vision of art that Socrates manifests in Plato's Republic. Bandera points out that Frye and Plato concur in believing that the artist dallies with divine powers. But whereas Frye (actually Blake) welcomes that mingling of the human with the divine, since it promises to lift earth-bound consciousness past its limitations, Plato (actually Socrates) sees such a conjoining only as a threat to an orderly republic. The divinities of which Plato speaks, however, are the passions, which «desplaza[n] al hombre de su centro y... por tanto, introduce[n] la confusión y la violencia...» (p. 23). Plato does not want to be led out of the city -out of the neat and well-planned world of the intellect- and he is prepared, in the republic he would establish to mirror that intellect, to expel the poets who would appeal to the passions and undermine order.
But Blake, who is reacting precisely against the apotheosis of the intellect, sees in the imagination the key to raising up mankind, to establishing the city of God on earth. In a passage that Bandera does not quote Frye says: «The harlot typifies nearly every aspect of the life of fallen man, and Jesus' forgiven harlot is the real form of whom the triumphant Whore of the Apocalypse is the analogy. By forgiveness Blake means a release of imaginative power, the creating of conditions which make it possible for a harlot to 'go and sin no more,' as opposed to the miserable futility of the Pharisaic attempt to destroy harlotry by killing harlots».130
I find this quotation particularly apt because it brings us back to the question with which this discussion began, namely where are the women in Bandera's analysis of Cervantes' work? Dorotea, whom Bandera does not discuss, is in fact Cervantes' first attempt to «forgive the harlot», that is, to create «the conditions which make it possible for a harlot to 'go and sin no more.'» In the hands of a Calderón, Dorotea would have been killed by a husband, father, or —94→ brother, as would Teodosia in La fuerza de la sangre, or Leonora in El celoso extremeño. In the world of Calderón, that Bandera so admires, the absurdity of the struggle among men may in fact be understood by the playwright, but he seems to have found no way of reaching beyond that understanding to conditions in which wife-murder would not have to exist.
It is right here, on the question of the woman, and with her, of all that does not belong to the realm of the intellect, that I think Bandera stumbles. For the violence that he rightly finds as pointless occurs all too frequently in Cervantes as well as in Calderón, because the male protagonists are incapable of seeing the real woman beneath the images of her that their confused response to the feminine evokes.131 To «forgive the harlot» is to discover the self in the other -the most absolute of all the «others», yet one which in Bandera's text remains undifferentiated: the feminine other that masculine consciousness despairs of comprehending.
This could be much longer, but I don't think it needs to be. I could include, if this were not an article for the inaugural issue of Cervantes, a long section on Rosaura, whose role in Life is a Dream has been reduced by Bandera to that of the bringer of violence and disturbance into the court. But that would be only to show that Bandera's reading of the texts in question is a consistent one, and that my reading of Bandera is equally consistent. I will resist the temptation to elaborate further, and close by pointing out that I have gone through this entire (exhausting) exercise not to disparage what I have found as a truly admirable and challenging book, but to offer an insight into the impasse it suggests that may help some of us begin to work past it. For the impasse, for all that it is a fiction, is nonetheless real, just as «silly» fears are real, just as «unreasonable» jealousy is real. I offer my own reading, however, in deep humility. For I know that even as it proposes a «solution», it perpetuates the intellectual controversy and threatens to become not a solution at all, but part of the problem. The real solution, Bandera knows it and so do I, is not here on this page, dear reader, but in our collective and respective hearts.