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
Barthes, Góngora, and Non-Sense
A fragment in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes suggests that any attempt to transgress the binary prison of male and female (active and passive) tends to invert the traditional terms without disrupting their oppressive and spurious authority. Barthes proposes a neutral and utopian “third term,” or “non-sense,” that will transcend transgression itself and that he identifies with a “happy” sexuality and a “Gongorine” text. The poetics of Golden Age Spain are underwritten by implicitly gendered conceptions of the rhetorical body: ornamental style, lyric genre, and Italianate ethos are associated with the “female” text and hence made subordinate to their “higher” male equivalents. In the Soledades Góngora stresses the “female” terms, but his usage may not be transgressive: generic confusion (sexual and textual) was already widespread elsewhere. He tends, rather, to a nomadic indeterminacy that displaces author as active origin and reader as passive recipient of authoritative and authoritarian meaning.