Of Poets and Barbarians: Challenging Linguistic Hierarchies in Cervantes’s Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda
Is style an ornamental feature of writing separate from the content or can it be a vehicle of political and ethical expression? This essay takes as point of departure the incipit of Miguel de Cervantes’s posthumously published epic novel, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617) to argue for a richer understanding of style. More specifically, it shows how through the use of a high epic style in the Persiles Cervantes questions central humanist tenets and assumptions about the relation of language to humanity, of individual speakers and linguistic communities, as well as the expectations of a linguistic chain of being that would unflinchingly equate clarity of speech with civilization. By focusing on the representation of barbarian speech, this essay examines the ways in which Cervantes’s work offers a more ethical alternative to classical and Renaissance epic models that would either deny speech to barbarians or limit barbarian speech to the enabling curse that will get the heroic adventures going. By making the barbarian’s words intelligible through translation and more daringly, by making that very act of translation effect a change in the very texture of the receiving language itself, barbarolalia in Persiles emerges as poetry’s twin.
Gongora and the Footprints of the Voice
Few readers of the Soledades fail to note Gongora's linking, in the poem's striking first lines, of his pilgrim's physical footsteps with the movement of verse itself: "Pasos de un peregrino son errante/ cuantos me dict6 versos dulce Musa/ en soledad confusa,/ perdidos unos, otros inspirados." Maurice Molho's extraordinary reading has illuminated the semantic density of this passage's (con)fusion of the peregrino's steps with the wandering ways of his verses (classically endowed with metricfeet) and with the labyrinthian space-time of his Soledad (Molho 1977). Now lost, now inspired-but most important of all fused together-, the physical figure of the protagonist, the physical shape of verse form and the dictates of poetic inspiration march and meander their way through the poem. For the French critic, Gongora's formal achievement is epic: "El genio de Gongora supo llevar a cabo la peligrosa empresa que consiste-aventura sin precedentes ... . -en conferir una estructura a la misma libertad, un orden al desorden, una coherencia a la incoherencia" (81, italics mine). Out of the treasure troves of his literary predecessors, that is to say, he creates a poem without precedent and without equal: the monumental silvalSoledad. 1
Unity Identity Text Self
Abstract Understanding the receptivity of literature, how one work admits many readers, begins with an analogy: unity is to text as identity is to self. Unity here means the way all a text’s features can be related through one central theme. Identity describes a person’s sameness within different behaviors as variations on one identity theme (Lichtenstein). To find unity or identity, however, the interpreter himself plays a behavioral variation on his identity theme. In interpreting, his identity re-creates itself as he shapes the text to match his characteristic defenses, fantasies, and coherences. Thus, what a poet says about fictional, political, or scientific texts expresses the same identity theme as the poems he writes. To understand reading, criticism, and any knowing or making in symbols, then, we need to let go the Cartesian craving for objectivity and accept the themes in ourselves with which we construe the world—including literary works.