—66→
Smith College
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| Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Viaje del Parnaso 4.1-3) | ||
Readers of Francisco de Quevedo's El buscón will already be familiar with the scatological aspects of the Spanish Baroque's disillusioned portrayal of society57. In it poor Pablos is baptized with excrement and then traipses across a «Golden Age» Spain devoid of honor, before finally being expelled from Seville toward what we are told will be a fruitless quest for redemption in the New World. Thus the Spanish collectivity performs a kind of «cultural bowel movement» in which it evacuates its moral filth, the upstart, or the class of greedy conversos, which the author has compressed into the figure of Pablos, a pluralized and diminutive Paul -the archetypal converso. Through El buscón's narrative and moral trajectories, Quevedo draws a geographical pattern whereby the anal margins of a national identity are —67→ opposed to the ideal, and in such a way that the paranoid Catholic Peninsula can now consider itself «cleansed» via the «passing» of Pablos.
Given the key political and moral role that excrement also plays in Don Quixote (fig. 1), I would argue that Quevedo's text is but one example of a topos in Golden Age literature that structures Spanish subjectivity and morality -a kind of ontological graph which fuses the philosophical and the political to the geographical and the intestinal. Cervantes's «Al túmulo del rey Felipe II en Sevilla» (1598), because it so similarly deconstructs the national identity of Spain, is in my view foundational to understanding the significance of the scatological topologies at work in both Don Quixote and El buscón. It is an earlier version of Quevedo's technique, but one at the opposite end of the social spectrum and one with apparently opposite political and moral intentions. The poem befouls a king, not a pícaro, and it seeks to assert what Quevedo would supposedly purge. In general terms we can understand this kind of topology as a deconstruction of the coetaneous heroic images of Spain as the «head of Europe». Regardless of their differences -and I think the fashionable demonization of Quevedo's literary brutality is as facile as Nabokov's ingenuous disgust with Cervantes- the anal narratives of Quevedo and Cervantes are surely both antithetical to the kind of bodily rendering of Europe found in Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia Universalis (fig. 2). The key difference is perhaps that while Quevedo thinks that Spain's salvation necessitates a purgative purification of the ideal, Cervantes recognizes that the ideal is always already impure and thus finds salvation within excremental existence.
Pinpointing the immediate source of Cervantes's technique is admittedly difficult. A list of candidates for the body/cosmos urtext that employ scatology as Christian morality would certainly have to begin with Dante's Inferno. Erasmus's Moriae encomium (fig. 3) and his boldly pacifistic scatological adage Scarabeus aquilam quaerit would immediately follow. Considering Phillip II's personal collection of art, we might also want to consider the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and El Greco (fig. 4). But the case could also be made for a more diffuse intertextuality within the popular realm58. We cannot forget the portrayal of cowardice in the Poema de mío Cid nor certain images on Medieval churches or in the margins of —68→ Medieval manuscripts (fig. 5). Put simply, scatology is a fundamental phenomenon of the Western canon -from Virgil's Georgics to the contemporary novels of Joyce and Goytisolo- that manipulates an everyday bodily concern of human beings. And in a number of these cases, «the metaphysical end in mind» (pardon the pun) is that of collapsing the difference between the Self and the Other59. My goal here is to axialize and analyze a particular case: I will show how «Al túmulo del rey» performs this particular poetics of the body in conjunction with 1) a cartographic allegory of the Peninsula, 2) a self-containing critique of imperial Catholicism, and 3) a commentary on the historical events of Philip II's death.
Proscriptive Prescriptions:
Adrienne Laskier Martín begins her recent study of Cervantes's burlesque sonnets with a review of the Italian origins of the genre.
—69→
Fig. 1. Gustave Doré's nineteenth-century illustration of Don Quixote 2.17:
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This is a key emblematic moment in Cervantes's oeuvre that foregrounds the national nature of the Cervantes's reformist scatology. The protagonist, an Erasmian caricature of imperialist aggression who is also the ingenuous victim of the ideology of the novelas de caballerías, is transfixed between his frustration with the «imperial behind» and his affinity for the Erasmian Caballero del Verde Gabán. It is the exact same structure of the sonnet that is the subject of his essay.
—70→
Fig. 2. Map of Europe from Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia Universalis (1544)
—71→
Fig. 3. One of Hans Holbein the Younger's sketches of «Folly» (c. 1515). Given the secret double nature of so many of Erasmus's tracts (the oximoronic irony of enchirindion being both a «handbook» and a «sword» for the Christian soldier, for example), and given Erasmus's explicit play with the name Moriae as both «More» and «Mary», we should understand the second term of Moriae encomium as an anagram for meconium. This makes humanism into a Mariae meconium, a kind of trans-European, and even transgendering, scatological dissemination of Erasmus's self-debasing and self-castrating philosophia Christi -the ultimate material or organic origin of which is, of course, Mary.
Cecco, the «first true master» of the form, was often the subject of his own verse, and many have read his poems as autobiographical artifacts. But Martín flatly dismisses such approaches: «Burlesque and satire are built upon deformed caricature and exageration; to assume that their images faithfully reflect true reality or authorial 'sincerity' would be critically naive»
(11).
Fig. 4. El Greco's Sueño de Felipe II (c. 1580). Note how the body of the king is transfixed between sacred and diabolical sphincters.
—73→
Fig. 5. Christ the «real man» with flatulence in the margins of a Medieval manuscript? (Camille illus. 22)
Nevertheless, Cervantes's «Al túmulo del rey» problematizes Martín's proscriptive model of reading60. First and foremost, any effort to disengage the text from «true reality» runs up against the fact that the sonnet takes the spectacle of the royal burial as both its text and its context -i. e., it participates in the very history that it relates. More than a poem, it is a self-critical exhibition. Citing the testimony of Francisco de Ariño, a contemporary witness to the bureaucratically protracted events surrounding the king's death, critics have agreed that Cervantes himself performed the sonnet in front of Philip II's tomb (Vranich, Martín). According to Ariño, someone with some very «sincere» satire performed the poem, which the chronicler duly recorded: «Estando yo en la Santa Iglesia, entró un poeta fanfarrón y dijo una otava sobre la grandeza del túmulo»
(cited by Vranich 103). Though critics are quick to point out that Ariño understandably mistook the burlesque sonnet with its extra
—74→
estrambote 'tail' for an octave, and that the poeta fanfarrón was none other than Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, we should consider the possibility that Ariño was in on an elaborate, perhaps even a formal and traditional, mockery of the dead king61. A cynical attitude on the part of Cervantes's audience with respect to the catafalque's gross ostentation and the ridiculous clerical debates that surrounded the formalities of the king's funeral would seem a necessary prerequisite to the poet's performance. Thus Ariño's description of the verses as an octave, if not referring to the epic genre, then certainly suggesting its more stately mode, could secretly acknowledge the poet's sarcastic yet ritualistic attack on Philip II. As Martín herself has demonstrated, the supplemental and parodic form of the burlesque sonnet was standardized long before the Spanish Baroque. We are left, then, with a quixotic episode in which fact and fiction conflate. History here seems almost contrived at the service of Cervantes's career: the epic and the heroic are burlesqued in a social commentary. Could Ariño have been so naive?62
But whether or not we choose to believe that Ariño was aware of the poet's disrespect, he has provided us with the autobiographical keys to the sonnet's irony. Cervantes's «disguise» indicates that he was true to the genre's self-critical prescriptions, and I would further contend that he arranged the piece in such a way as to incorporate himself into its satirical structure. By playing the part of the poeta fanfarrón, Cervantes underscores and endorses the ironic comments of the sonnet's characters who are snubbing the superstructure of Catholic royalty, and most especially those of the more cynical character who has the last word -the valentón. But neither can we ignore the fact that Cervantes was always proud of his status as a soldado who fought Philip II's war against the Turk at Lepanto twenty-five years earlier63. The course of his career can be seen as a moral overcoming of a previous blindness, a constant and stereotypically Catholic effort to contain the sins of the self: the «anxiety of idealism», or, in the scatological spirit of this essay, we might prefer the label «Catholic anality». The poem offers testimony of this personal dilemma, for it would seem that the author, at one time or another —75→ in his career, had a vested interest in each of the personae of the text, from Philip II and the soldado on down to the valentón and the poeta fanfarrón -i. e., he is at each phase of the poem/performance both the victim as well as the agent of its satire. And as readers trapped between the perspective of an apologist for Philip II and that of the irreverent valentón, we are left to negotiate simultaneously the poem's sarcasm and its sincerity.
This critical ambiguity, literally built into the poem and its history, has endured the centuries. Today the problem of interpreting the irony of this sonnet is in yet another sense more difficult than what we might face in other Golden Age texts. For before we rush to unveil the poem's apparent disrespect, we have to contend with Cervantes's own desire that the poem be taken most seriously:
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| (Viaje del Parnaso 4.37-9)64 | ||
This statement, taken out of context and combined with the canonical status of Spain's «greatest author», has led numerous readers to some rather unfortunate conclusions steeped in the literal acceptance of their hero's wishes. Vranich testifies to this more recent delusion:
Yo he oído recitar este soneto con toda la solemnidad que se emplearía al leer «Miré los muros de la patria mía» de Quevedo, y hasta tan profundo conocedor de Cervantes como Francisco Rodríguez Marín calificó la alabanza del túmulo «tan sincera como extremada», y la de Sevilla -«Roma triunfante en ánimo y riqueza»- «tan acabada como breve». |
| (97) | ||
Another critic, Francisco Ayala, seems equally overwhelmed by the poem's sincerity: «Tras su lectura, uno se siente invadido de melancolía. Podemos quizá fijar el matiz de esa melancolía atribuyéndole las notas de profunda y solemne»
(661).
Martín rightly shares Vranich's disdain for these misreadings by the solemn camp. The hyperbole of phrases like «¡Voto a Dios!», «¡Por Jesucristo vivo!», and «Apostaré...», along with the poem's blasphemous performance, can combine to make Ayala's heartfelt reception difficult to swallow. Martín is understandably at pains to unveil the poem as the supreme example of the Golden Age burlesque sonnet, and so for her it must stand as yet another example of brilliant Cervantine irony. But a pause is in order. Has she not in some sense reduced that irony to self-righteous humor and mere linguistic play? Does not the experience of melancholy or sarcasm depend on one's relative interest in Spanish hegemony? Without completely dispelling her endeavor, I think it appropriate to reassess the notes of sincerity in «Al túmulo del rey» previously perceived by Rodríguez Marín, Ayala, and possibly even the eyewitness Ariño. Such a «self-critical-response» reading helps us to understand the interdependent dialogical and evangelical aspects of the sonnet as together composing an evaluation of Spanish Subjectivity that is both a sorrowful lament and a vicious satire -i. e., a tragicomedy in miniature. For «es mancilla / que esto no dure un siglo»
may refer quite literally to the apparent rise and fall of the Spanish empire between 1492 and 1588, which is here put finally to rest with Philip II in 1598. Laughing at the epic failure of one's people cannot be accomplished with self-removed ease.
We can sort through this puzzle by taking Cervantes's biography and the political and moral intentions of some of his other texts into consideration. The result of such an approach will be an hermeneutic paradigm structured on a vacillation between the sincere and the sarcastic. Much more than a literary device, this ontological splitting reveals a portrait, even a confession, of ideological anxiety. In my understanding, «Al túmulo del rey» is a mediating text between the more subtle irenic dissidence of La Numancia and the outright sarcasm and irreverence of Don Quixote. In it we can find a kind of microcosm of the range of intentions and tonalities in both the «first novel» and the earlier play. As Cervantes himself recognized in Viaje del Parnaso, the poem is a condensed summary of his entire career. So we will focus on the self-critical quality of Cervantine texts, which always seem to put Spanish hegemony on trial in some manner, and quite often autobiographically. We cannot grasp the true nature of Cervantine burlesque until we see how it interacts with its epic context, thereby making manifest a conscious politico-poetic self-containment. «Al túmulo del rey», if only by its performance, exhibits the dilemmas of self-judgment, the same self-judgment that has led so many critics to consider the
—77→
autobiographical possibilities of Don Quixote. What is and/or was «bad» in Cervantes himself is what he abhors about the society that surrounds him, a society that has grown acritical and overzealous in its ideals just as they have been thrown into crisis by a series of historic failures. In this way, his once hegemonic Erasmism now serves up a radically self-reflexive critique, a dialectical interior Christianity deployed to combat its static misuse as a formal ideology. Like all of his texts, the sonnet concerns the dying struggle to maintain the enlightening essence of Christianity in the emerging modern world, and this is why he calls it the «honra principal de mis escritos»
, as if to lead by the example of his own shame65.
The Contrary Lies:
We find the first layer of this bivalent judgment in the sonnet's burlesque of the hollow ostentation of Philip II's funeral. Cervantes sarcastically laments the growing materialism of his era: «me espanta esta grandeza»
, «diera un doblón por describilla»
, «Cada pieza vale más que un millón»
, and the irreverent «Apostaré...»
We sense the Cervantine platitude of ironic and anxious dismay at the commodification of classical values. At its core, the burlesque sonnet of which Cervantes was so proud is a condemnation of the way in which Spanish material pride has overcome, fragmented, and destroyed its more «valuable»
moral and social pride.
This is especially pertinent to the case of Seville, the paradoxically bankrupt conduit for Spain's importation of New World metals and artifacts. Geographically we are already setting up the poem's scatological intentions. As in Quevedo, Seville's recent Atlantic role with respect to Spanish imperialism is a decidedly anal betrayal of the Mediterranean ideals of the plateau66 I am suggesting that we allow that the Spanish thinkers of the sixteenth and —78→ seventeenth centuries had their own version of our «dialectical hindsight». The self-containing double frustration of Cervantes's sonnet especially indicates that the author was meditating much as Fernand Braudel would some 400 years later. In the following quote, note in particular Braudel's metaphors for the perspectives of Marxist historicism. They are, like much of Cervantes's work, the skeptical regard of the traditional personification of nationality, the emphasis on the liberating encounter between human consciousness and so-called cosmic destiny, and the detached and materialistic reduction of politics to the level of mere theatrical performance:
In the 1580s the might of Spain turned towards the Atlantic. It was out there, whether conscious or not of the dangers involved, that the empire of Philip II had to concentrate its forces and fight for its threatened existence. A powerful swing of the pendulum carried it towards its transatlantic destiny. When I became interested in this hidden balance of forces, the physics of Spanish policy, preferring research in this direction to labeling the responsibilities of a Philip II or a Don John of Austria, and when I came to think moreover that these statesmen were, despite their illusions, more acted upon than actors, I was already beginning to move outside of the traditional bounds of diplomatic history. |
| (19) | ||
We can think of the sonnet as centering on the Sevillian problem in the following way: the contrast between the church and the «ship of state». The galleon has replaced the cathedral in the contest for the city's soul. The structure of the church has always been that of an inverted Noah's ark, but in this case it harbors Spanish power rather than universal spiritual salvation. And so, as Philip II's Armada falls, likewise do the tenets of what Jürgen Habermas would call «positivistic» religion67. The overbearing significance of the catafalque —79→ erases the difference between the ark and a warship, and the vituperative reaction to church ceremony (voto can also be a blasphemous expletive) underscores the funeral and its accompanying Eucharist as an ideological apparatus based on fear and power rather than on true Christian morality. The performance of the poem and the audience's consumption of it function like a kind of «anti-Eucharist». In the burlesque mode, the church is turned upside down and inside out, so that it is understood for what it should truly represent in reformist Erasmian terms -a critique, one that paradoxically allows the church to shed its institutionalized nonsense and become an ark again. The catafalque must be reversed and exposed as a hollow wooden structure, adorned only on its exterior with the foreign and primitive wealth that was imported in the hulls of Spanish galleons. Hence, given the nautical connotations of the verb calar («to strike sail» as well as «to lower the nets»), we should consider the valentón's concluding words and actions mutinous, a properly Christian rebellion. It would even seem that Cervantes is here trying to catch (and save) his former Lepanto self in his own moral nets, as if fishing through the national excrement for the only thing that can count -the moral intentions of the morally deleterious imperial enterprise. It is a salvage operation, an attempt to renew an ecumenical idealism by forcing it to learn from its previous mistakes.
Given the fetishization of structure implied both by the sonnet form in general and by this particular sonnet with its enigmatic estrambote and its angry commentary on political and ecclesiastical hierarchies, I would contend that the maritime suggestiveness of the poem (Seville as the gateway to the Atlantic, Philip II's demise as that of the Armada, and especially the verb calar) foregrounds the tradition of «fishing» as Christian evangelism. Cervantes is here alluding to the arching ceilings of Seville's cathedral as a Christian «network» (figs. 6 and 7). As the king's body decays, it lies in the horizontal plane of the structure and faces its ceiling. Similarly, the trajectory of the sonnet traces the problem of his spiritual ascendence into heaven, as if through the web-like material structure around him that will inevitably retain his corporal remains. It is an architectural journey through the experience of death in sixteenth-century Spain. Politically, this allows the poet to attack exterior Christianity by pointing out its vacuous interior. The truth of the matter lies in the irony, and this is why the religiously affirmational «Es cierto»
gives way through enjambment to the linguistic irreverence of «lo que dice voacé, seor soldado»
. In another instance of this technique, instead of leaving his body and going on to the beyond, Philip II «hoy ha
—80→
dejado / el cielo»
instead of la tierra in order to take pleasure in this world's material wealth rather than the spiritual comfort of the beyond. The humor here is quite serious and designed for those in the know. While at first we are tempted to find the soldado's praise ironic and the valentón's response ignorant of his irony, it is subsequently just as plausible that they are subversive accomplices. After all, the ruffian's aggression does not result in a fight; to the contrary, «no hubo nada»
. Instead, their humor is mutually covert, something like the fish drawn by early Christians in the streets of Imperial Rome. But if we are readers sincere in our allegiance to Philip II, then we are outsiders and we can never understand the dissenting discourse being carried on right under our noses.
Fig. 6. Exterior view of Seville Cathedral showing raised Latin Cross on roof (Falcón Márquez lám. I)
—81→
Fig. 7. Francesco di Giorgio's fifteenth-century groundplan of a church corresponding to the proportions of the human body (Von Simson illus. 7)
But just as both of these characters comprehend their marginal status with respect to royal ostentatiousness, Cervantes allows that they are equally aware of their unavoidable complicity. As Spanish critics of Spanishness they are trapped; «quien dijere lo contrario, miente»
applies to them as well. We can read the phrase as if the valentón were giving the ironic soldado a self-conscious wink, the conservative reaction to one's own critique. Americans might
—82→
understand this self-containment in terms of the traditional response to the «Viet Nam syndrome»
that clings to the idea that only in such a great country can such radical dissent be possible. Pride and shame are not mutually exclusive conditions of patriotism. I think the comparison between the Spanish veteran of Lepanto and the Vietnam veteran is appropriate for a number of reasons. Chief among them would be the ex-imperial servant's tendency to take on the identity of the rebellious margins on the home front. Just as the disillusioned Viet Nam veteran fashions himself after the counter-culture hippie who so often protested the war, Cervantes now plays the part of the irreverent ruffian.
For «lit-crits» who prefer French post-structuralism to American history, we can also see how Cervantine Erasmism anticipates Foucault's vision of the inherent capacity of Power to bring about its own deconstruction. The leader's body is now paradoxically the site of ideological decay. The sonnet becomes a dutiful protest against Philip II's desiccation/defecation of the ideals of the Erasmian prince:
The prince who has been instructed in the teachings of Christ and in protecting wisdom will consider nothing dearer (or rather, nothing dear at all) than the prosperity of his people, whom he ought to love and care for as king and member of one body. All his plans, all his efforts, all his interests will be turned to the one aim of ruling over the province entrusted to him in such a manner that when Christ makes the final reckoning he will win approval and leave a very honorable memory of himself among all his fellow men. |
| (The Education of a Christian Prince 244) | ||
The sonnet testifies that the «King of the Counter-Reformation» naturally had difficulties fulfilling his role. I suggest that Cervantes's «honra principal de mis escritos»
refers to his poem about his prince as an «excretion»
of false honor (honra): the escritor 'writer' as excretor 'shitter'. Note that this thematic scatology also makes use of the material contrast between ink and the page: the very act of writing and printing is already an ideological excretion.
Hence we must understand that even Cervantes cannot be excluded from his satire. As his performance of the poem indicates, he well understood that he too was guilty of embodying non-Christian values. The expression «diera un doblón por describilla»
is particularly telling of Cervantes's quest for national literary status and the monetary success that could conceivably accompany such dynastic service. Moreover, as a soldier at Lepanto, Cervantes was certainly
—83→
guilty of the less-than-Christian violence of Spanish military hegemony. Despite the more noble ideals of that earlier phase of Spanish imperialism, Cervantes has come to understand that he was once made a puppet of Christianity's darker side. He therefore unveils this «other» Christianity as an ideological apparatus of the Spanish state. Never granted passage to America and recently jailed in the wake of the Armada, Cervantes now has every reason to lash out at the falseness of Philip II's ceremony by characterizing his final voyage as a national bowel movement. But again, in so doing, he cannot avoid denigrating his prior complicity (both as author and soldier) in the imperial agenda. In this way he avoids becoming a simplistic anti-Catholic critic of a crisis of Catholicism.
As a commissary officer for the Armada, Cervantes was twice excommunicated for the supposed incompetence of his collection efforts (Canavaggio 145-7). Perhaps, like the poem's braggart, he did not realize the depth of the «lie» of his nationalistic endeavors until long after the military disaster. But now, in front of his king's outlandish tomb, he is faced with the dishearteningly wasteful results of what must have already been an uncomfortable job. In other words, the funeral is his as well; or better still, it is the symbol of his and his culture's transformation: beginning at the tomb of King Philip II, the logos or «account» of the Spanish Subject, which we find both in the poem as well as its performance, passes down to a soldier and then to a valentón until we are left with only the parting snickers of a poeta fanfarrón. And all of these are denigrated derivatives of the original ideological symbol of Spanish superiority found in the enormous catafalque. The poem forces us to witness the freethinking commissary officer becoming a subversive author. In the event of the sonnet's performance, the «hero of Lepanto» is also a self-conscious poet who must remain split between the Spanish king and his most disloyal commentators. Similarly, within the poem, the seor soldado attempts to mediate the dialogue between the church ceremony and the valentón. Hence the double nature of the sonnet's sincerity as well as the way in which the poem decays linguistically, ideologically, and even economically from being al túmulo del rey to nada68.
—84→ As I have already indicated, then, an important key to this autobiographical desengaño is the poem's Erasmian morality. Behind the more overt critiques of materialism and power, we find the Erasmian ideals of a reformed Christianity that would return to what the humanists felt were the essentially communal values of the early followers. «Cada pieza vale más que un millón»
also refers to the relative value of human souls that the hierarchy of the Spanish state -no longer the Christian World Empire- has thrown into disequilibrium, or even to the souls it has literally «spent» in the process of sustaining itself. Philip II's epic ceremony crushes this more basic economy of Christianity by suggesting that the value of a fellow human being cannot compare to that of the Spanish royal.
The antithetical status of the burlesque mode exposes this imperial hypocrisy. Seville has fallen short of the idealism previously invested in Spain's «manifest destiny» to disseminate Christianity throughout a barbaric world. Between verses 7 and 8, and hence at the very hinge of the traditional sonnet, instead of Amor, we have yet another case of Roma. Imperialism has conquered Christian idealism, which presently positions itself opposite the Spanish state. Erasmism now functions like the latent antithetical seed of Amor within Roma at the interpersonal level of Spain's more knowing citizenry. These are the disillusioned and the recently disadvantaged, Erasmians and others perhaps nostalgic for Carlos V's confident cosmopolitan atmosphere and yet just as wary of its potential for fanatical bloodshed. Could a more perfect hero for Spanish dissent be chosen than Erasmus? Just as the Low Countries are being oppressed by the hypocritical Christian state, Cervantes undertakes a literary career based in part on a Dutchman's interpretation of Christianity. Erasmus is appropriated to critique Spanish Imperialism, and in the process Cervantes enacts that other kind of cultural imperialism in the recognition of an irenic spiritual brotherhood. Indeed, depending on which side of the razor sharp edge between Roma and Amor one falls, one's experience can be either triumphantly celestial or what the British would call «bloody hell». If Erasmian humanism is anything, it is this sort of irascible aesthetic dissent: a reforming «irenic irony» that is meant to enforce an awareness of the absurdity of the difference between the Self and the Other.
—85→Scatological Dissident Catholicism:
Cervantistas
(and especially the many disciples of Américo Castro and Marcel Bataillon) have long suggested that the new consciousness's flight from religious positivity does not only lead toward Luther and the land of German philosophers. Erasmus stands as the chief example that even before Luther, Catholics were themselves eroding the positivity of Orthodoxy. But I would hold that not only was Cervantes an Erasmian, he was a disillusioned Erasmian, if you will, a post-Erasmian. Now entering a more radical period of his career, part of him even seems willing to attack the remaining positivity of his own ideological hero. This is most certainly the attitude of the valentón at the conclusion of «Al túmulo del rey». The sonnet's supplemental (read «baroque» or «comedic») and descriptive estrambote is an antitheological vulgarity, a narrative as well as bodily «ending». Key here is the word encontinente. The literal and more common reading takes the word as an adverb, but even in that case, its meaning «immediately» derives from «lacking restraint» -i. e., acting in a manner that is precisely «not continent», or, we might say, «a sudden letting go». The word's root also has serious political implications due to its affiliation with the ancient tradition of educating princes which here, as in Erasmus, is radically inverted by Cervantes: «Continente bueno es cosa que face al home seer noble et apuesto»
(Alfonso X, fol. 83v). Hence the word is charged with Erasmian potential against Philip II, the king who lacked Christian restraint and perhaps inevitably betrayed the ideals and sacrifices of his precursors. The defensive Truth has become the offensive Lie; what was once the Christian passion for world peace has surrendered to an uncontrollable Spanish passion for world domination. Given Cervantes's play on Rome and Seville, the word encontinente can also have a geographical significance. Since Cervantes's Spain had mapped and exploited a new continent through Seville, the poet's word choice could deride the royal appropriation of the Americas. Or we might imagine a critique of the Hapsburgs' failed attempts to unite the European continent, subdue North African piracy, and restrain the insular Protestantism of England. In relation to Europe, Africa, and even the New World, Spain has always found itself an «intercontinent» with its desires and identities divided among them. In any case, the antithetical values of the soldado and the valentón are no longer contiguous with those represented by their leader. Recalling Cervantes's excommunication in the service of
—86→
Philip II, encontinente acts like a sarcastic comment on the effects of that official policy, expressing his blasphemous disdain at being cast out from the religious body of the Church and the political body of the State. Note that this is in perfect keeping with the poem's body theme as a pre-formulation of Habermas's definition of the period's problem of «re-formed» Subjectivity: the communal body of the spiritual king (Christ) has been devoured and denigrated by a material king (Philip II), and his self-centered subjects (a growing number of them excomulgados and expulsados) are now left to swirl the drain at the end of the Mediterranean Renaissance.
But I claim that Cervantes is pushing the potential of encontinente a bit further. The sonnet form is, after all, and especially in its baroque burlesque rendering, one of the more dense sites of Western philosophical discourse. And here, in the estrambote of the form, such density is figuratively and literally intensified and then released. There are some etymological considerations. Continente, for example, is a noun by the middle of the thirteenth century and an adjective by the fifteenth (Cuervo 2.468-70)69. In the context of a marginado lampooning Philip II, the word encontinente must be allowed the full range of its poetic possibilities, and this includes its status as an adjective or noun derivative of incontinencia -«que no se puede contener»
. Whether this evinces the Golden Age penchant for neologism and cultismo semántico -perhaps a reference to the Latin incontinentia- or whether it is simply the covert convention of poetry in general, it seems clear that Cervantes intends a physiological connotation to complement the political and the emotional70.
The case for encontinente's nominative and adjective potential depends heavily on the questions of spelling and of pronunciation. But given the period's well documented orthographic and phonetic instability, encontinente can quite easily be «reformed» exactly as it was likely «performed» as incontinente71. The sonnet's decaying teleology of Christianity is then complemented by the etymological events of the sixteenth century that accompanied the political or the theological -i. e., the word (e->)incontinente is in itself an emblem of scatological eschatology, or, if one prefers, of secularly dialogic freedom from theological restraint. And recalling that «calar» evokes —87→ a complex net imagery in relation to the sonnet's soteriological mode, we can both see and hear that e is meant to release something as it gives way to i and then nada in the poem's final breaths. Note that this occurs only if we «catch» its irony, for here coming into aesthetic knowledge is tantamount to a humanistic conversion, to a glorifying grounding and pagan «christening» of the Savior in one's fellow Adán72.
But the crowning and admittedly more solidly historical detail in a scatological reading of «Al túmulo del rey» would have to be Philip II's notorious diarrhea. Not only did the monarch suffer intense attacks of diarrhea when faced with a sudden crisis (Walsh 195), but his deathbed experience was an incontinent nightmare:
According to all eyewitnesses, the worst torment of all was the diarrhea that developed about halfway into this final illness. Because the pain caused by being touched or moved was too great for Philip to bear, «it seemed best not to clean the ordure that he produced, and not even to change the linens, so many times the bed remained fouled, creating an awful stench». Eventually a hole was cut into the mattress to help relieve this problem, but it was only a partial remedy. Philip continued to waste away, wallowing in his own filth, tormented by the smell and the degradation of it all. |
| (Eire 272) | ||
In what now becomes an aesthetic record of Philip's death, the poem's conflations of a lack of moral and bodily restraint and its opening exclamation («¡Voto a Dios, que me espanta esta grandeza») can only suggest an irreverent bodily function in its strange conclusion; again, the trajectory of the sonnet is the oral passing to the anal.
—88→ In addition to such thematic, lexigraphical, and historical evidence, we are faced with two key structural facts about this sonnet that imply a scatological conclusion: 1) the supplemental estrambote is a very real metrical -i. e., audible- variation, which 2) occurs in precisely the hind portion of the burlesque sonnet (recall Cecco's sonétto caudato-literally «tailed sonnet»). It would even appear that within the estrambote, the brisk words «caló el chapeo»
have a certain scatological musicality (peo=flatus via an even more vulgar elision than that found previously in seor). Given the recuperation of the phallus that follows («requirió la espada»
), the valentón would seem to be «finishing his business»
, first urinating and then defecating over the impotent leader/corpse of San Quintín and the Armada. That is, Philip II, the previous source of power, has now become a shameful piece of excrement, deserving only of the empty flattery of flatulence (¡fanfarronería!). Perhaps history should have Cervantes read this last part of the sonnet with his back to the catafalque (cf. fig. 1)73.
Martín has claimed that the character's mirada al soslayo is indicative of his ruffian status (111), but I would add that since the entire poem is a kind of «anti-Eucharist» that denigrates clerical ceremony, this sidelong glance is meant to punctuate the valentón's emotional and physical incontinence. It is both the wry glance of Cervantine humor that seeks to include the interlocutor (both the soldado and the reader) in the author's irreverence, as well as an embarrassing confession of the author's former lack of Christian manners. Positivistic religion and its ideological appropriation by the state are thereby given their final snub. The non-theological evacuation of the body is already the farcical theme of the funeral that the men are scoffing, and just as there is no cielo, no ánima, and no triunfo for Philip II, there can be nothing but a burlesque «passing of wind» as its commentary, and this precisely in the descriptive (as in opposite the dialogical) portion of the poem that is broken off from its main body/voice. The epic ideals, once and somehow still those of Cervantes, are now obscene in retrospect; the heroic warrior is, and —89→ perhaps always was, never anything but an inflated and incontinent valentón, and what was once «positive» is now nada74.
Yet is it not true that both the sonnet and the catafalque are indeed wonders? The tomb was described as the octava maravilla del mundo, but is there really nothing to be gained from it all as the sonnet seems to conclude? For Martín, this is most certainly not the case: «And if there is any doubt regarding Cervantes's accomplishments as a poet, it is quickly dispelled by these memorable verses»
(102). But no doubt Cervantes would have it so only if we understand that his verses are meant to dispel the «positive» accomplishments of his culture's empire and make room for the negative dialectics of Erasmism. We can only grasp the poem as a gem if we see it as an Erasmian diamond in the dunghill. The wondrous catafalque opposes the irenic concerns of secular humanism, but precisely because of
—90→
this, it is the most appropriate locus for a more secret or «other» kind of Eucharist to be conducted in a poem that will outlast its obscene subject. And note that it is only through an inspection of the decaying estrambote of the poem that we can understand the irony of what preceded it. Diera un doblón now sounds like a truly «double» donation from the
poet's pockets
(diarrea). And re-reading verses 7 and 8 («¡oh, gran Sevilla!, / Roma triunfante en ánimo y riqueza!»
), if we can undo the exclamatory praise as the poem itself ultimately does, then we can sense a pungent enjambment: the post-Erasmian fart in Seville is indeed an a-Roma triunfante to the marginalized Spanish soul75.
We are now very near the essentially atheistic and pagan potential of a kind of Erasmian meta-Christianity that paradoxically grounds all religious superstructure76. In order for Christ's pacific dissemination to be accomplished, «He» must be understood as the earthly and material «he». For Death to have truly meaningful effects on social action, it must be absolute; there can be no «Jesucristo vivo»
, -i. e., the theological must become the secularly existential. With one eye still cast al soslayo on the inherent ideals of Christianity, the reformist moves away from the ornamentation of Christianity's more positivistic displays, departing the official Church forever and trying to make the Cathedral's «interior» heaven precisely «outside». The importance of Death for humanism's ideals can be understood as far greater than even the octava maravilla del mundo, since it is the foundational motivation for humane sentiment and action. The Eucharist can then be taken in its metaphorical sense, since in its ritualistic sense it is but a farce, just a physical action with very real gastronomical effects. Through incontinence, bread and wine become the excrement and urine of humans, and this is the only way that they can ever be the real body and blood of Christ. But in this light, all of the sarcastic commentary of the poem turns quite serious. Catholic scatology is much more than humor or simple rebellion; it is a sincere and humbling look at an ideology's capacity to produce excrement in the name of its noble ideals, and hence its need to remain on guard against itself as if in a state of constant reform. If
—91→
we can grasp the poem's irony -i. e., if the poem has the desired effect-, then we will still detect the dissonant scent of humanist idealism. For example, «por gozar este sitio, hoy ha dejado / el cielo, de que goza eternamente»
is a classic stoical anticipation of the Feuerbachian/Marxian disdain for the opiate effects of an ultra-worldly religion that tends to impede the progress of humanism. Positivistic concerns must be shed once and for all if the utopian pleasures of the cielo are ever to be realized in the here and now77.
Comparative Ideological Supplement:
To label the likes of Erasmus and Cervantes «anti-divine» is no doubt asking for a polemic with certain Renaissance scholars78. In conclusion, I would like to elaborate briefly the difference between a religious ethics based on a relative avoidance of the «beyond mystique» and that of an alternate, potentially nihilistic atheism. I would argue that the often inaccessible Jacques Derrida, in his essay «Donner la mort» (1992), has recently taken an Erasmian turn when he rejects the sacred as foundational to religion: «What is a religion? Religion presumes access to the responsibility of a free self. It thus implies breaking with this type of secrecy (for it is not of course the only one), that associated with sacred mystery»
(2); and again, «Religion is responsibility or it is nothing at all. [...] In the authentic
—92→
sense of the word, religion comes into being the moment that the experience of responsibility extracts itself from that form of secrecy called demonic mystery»
(2-3). The fact that Derrida begins his essay on the paradoxical «gift of death» with an analysis of the ideas of the Czech philosopher Jan Patoato, who died of a brain hemorrhage after a police interrogation in 1977, suggests that the Marxist critique of deconstruction's «aesthetic gamery» has had an effect on its supposed high priest. One notes a desire for, if not an acknowledgment of, responsibility in the philosophical enterprise, a discomfort with what Terry Eagleton has labeled «the doctrinal obsession with 'undecidability'»
(146). Indeed, Cervantes's politics help us to combine the aesthetic concerns of Derrida with the Marxist concerns of Eagleton.
I claim that what one finds in Erasmian and Cervantine disdain for religious formality is precisely this appeal for social responsibility and hence a rejection of the
Religion, with its potential for self-righteous aggression, and a call for a
religion
based on transnational humanity rather than the fetishization of spiritual transcendence. Scatology is a structuring principle of this logic that forces a bodily responsibility into the theological politics of the day. But here I would reject the radical one-dimensional application of Bakhtin to Cervantes, for Al túmulo's critique of the monarch is, by the sheer force of history, a reformer's soteriological service rather than an anarchist's or an atheist's flat rebellion. Furthermore, it would seem next to impossible to claim a radicality for these elite aesthetics; the institution of Christ (most especially in its Western Pauline version) insists on being only the reforming memory of such radicality. The self-inflicted lashings of Cervantes's poem are Catholic and we should not forget Philip II's final acts of charity from the midst of the awful stench of both his deathbed and his tyranny. Perhaps Alban K. Forcione had this more passive version of the reformer's aesthetic politics in mind when he summarized Cervantes's humanism thusly: «The word is wrested from its familiar context, charged with the energy of an individual voice, and metamorphosed from the withering flatus vocis of conventional discourse into a revitalized mediator between two human lives»
(213). Although we have done much here to fill in the details of Forcione's «mediating» discourse, in the process we have also foregrounded ideological anxiety and even anger. We have discovered that the «humanist vision» can get quite red and even take obscene pleasure in the death of the «king».
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