Visor de obras.

  —105→  

Washington University

Major studies during the last two decades of Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares by El Saffar (Novel to Romance, 1974) and Forcione (Cervantes and the Humanist Vision, 1982) have heralded growing interest among Hispanists in this rich collection of short narratives, as they have turned our attention to the problems for interpretation evident in their varied content and generic diversity. In her view of the novelas as a systematic poetic study of man's quest for transcendence and faith in higher truths, El Saffar separates what for her are early, realist works -whose characters are limited by their own misdirected acts of volition- from later, idealistic narratives -whose characters' lives are defined by faith and the intervention of God in the guise of the narrator. Forcione's study, similarly, focuses upon the novelas as spiritual allegories, finding in their composition evidence of Cervantes's debt to the dialogic poetics of Renaissance humanism. In so doing, he focuses upon the discursive and rhetorical complexities that have been the subject of much recent novelas scholarship:

In the sense that the irregularities of Cervantes's «Sileni» refuse to allow their reader the comforts of a stock response and instead burden him with the obligation to cope with unsettling violations of his vocabulary of genre, the Novelas   —106→   ejemplares stand as one of the fullest literary realizations of the characteristic nonlinear discourse of the great humanist writers of the sixteenth century, who turned to dialectic, ironic, and paradoxical modes of exposition in their efforts to explore the complexities of truth, to provoke their readers' collaboration in that exploration, and to revitalize perceptions blunted by the tyranny of familiarity and appearance.

(28-29)

Other Hispanists have taken up the problems of genre and discourse in studies of individual «exemplary» narratives of Cervantes's series, and have pondered the issue of exemplarity itself¹⁴². While many modern readers admit that personal preference and post-modernist critical orientations have caused them to focus upon the «realist» novelas, works characterized by the multivalence, lack of narrative authority, and murkier exemplarity of the subsequent novel form, others have turned their attention to the idealistic tales, which appear to be structured upon the clearer formal and ideological principles of romance. Although their formulaic structure and lack of verisimilitude reveal their affinity to many other examples of romance, we find that these tales are multifaceted and ideologically ambiguous in ways quite similar to their more realistic counterparts in the Cervantine novelas¹⁴³. The presence of instability in the figurative systems of romances appearing to be Christian allegories only reinforces the cautionary posture of Cervantes's more multivocal, discordant, «down to earth» tales: readers must work to assemble meaning that is as complex and pluridimensional as is the world in which they live. Representation of the spiritual in the novelas is in many instances not dissoluble from consideration of the socially pragmatic; nor are the dictates of religion delineated separately from issues of race, nationality, gender, or class. Cervantine exemplars must model judgements -that readers are to   —107→   experience as their own critical acts- by «doing the right thing», often in contexts shaped by hierarchically intertwined discourses and conflictive systems of value¹⁴⁴.

Of the Novelas ejemplares, El amante liberal is one that has been largely overlooked by modern readers. While commentaries characterize it as a narrative of clear religious exemplarity, El amante liberal receives poor reviews for its confusing form and unnecessarily elaborate discursive style¹⁴⁵. In recent studies, however, Hart, Selig, and Díaz Migoyo have taken up the issue of the work's Byzantine composition, demonstrating the importance of its heterogeneous elements in generating that «clear» exemplarity for readers and in influencing their response. Hart's detailed analysis of the complex layers of admiratio in El amante liberal suggests that the work's difficulty represents not an artistic deficiency, but rather Cervantes's mastery of those precepts that sought to heighten his readers' pleasure in reading. Although they appear overly contrived by modern standards, the varied, often extravagant reversals of fortune that make up the plot's peripeteia strive to deleitar by adding variety. The manner in which they are narrated clearly is intended to intensify that effect. Hart's study of sample lines reveals a narrative discourse dense with cleverly executed rhetorical figures that Cervantes's educated contemporaries would have recognized and appreciated (312-13). The in medias res narrative format of the romance itself, scored by flashbacks, temporal disjunctions, interior narrative frames, repetitions, and parallels, is even more directed toward exciting the readers, for it drives them -whether irritated moderns or, we must assume, delighted contemporaries- to seek reconstruction and closure of the tale's many threads.

Selig proposes that El amante liberal is not, as we tend to view it, an overwrought tale, but more accurately a mini-Byzantine romance,   —108→   in which many of the elements typical to a full-length work are employed to articulate the basic love story. His schematic review of such constitutive ingredients includes: a nonlinear and discontinuous narrative discourse that moves the plot from confusion to restored order; protagonists whose journey catapults them across a landscape of real geographical places and encounters with coordinates that appear to be culturally and historically specific, and who are linked by a linguistic hybrid of Mediterranean languages; repeated reference to material exchange; adjective-formation that, as he hints, may reinforce the ideological slant with which the text views these coordinates; similarly, the «portraiture» of characters; and use of self-referentiality, in the stories within the story -the latter, as Selig observes, bringing us full circle back to the problematics of Byzantine plot (6869).

By concentrating in his analysis specifically upon this provocative narrative procedure, Díaz Migoyo deconstructs in his study the telling of the lover's tale to reveal in its entertaining exemplarity a curiously pluralistic message, what I would call an ideological «echo-effect» that resonates like back-talk to the hero Ricardo's own complacent words. The critic observes that in this novela, as in many others, Cervantes chooses Christian marriage as the perfect conclusion to the love story, because its sacramental nature allows it to function as a material and an allegorical signifier of the union that is simultaneously signified, effecting a neat closure of the multi-linear plot (130). He argues that the representation of this transcendent ending, however, is achieved with a peculiar procedure, for instead of positing the ideal as real, it forces us to accept a self-consciously constructed fiction that betrays its own artificiality (130-31). The most notable example, he argues, is the staging of the story's exemplary «generous love» as the act of linguistic creation on the part of the hero, Ricardo, that advances the plot. To clarify, the critic notes that the first articulation of Ricardo's love, an unliberal or covetous desire for possession of Leonisa expressed when he finds her being courted by Cornelio, has set the events of the tale into motion well before the beginning of the in medias res narrative (135-37). The novela itself opens, after Leonisa and Ricardo have been captured by Turks and separated by turbulent travels, with the lament of the captive Ricardo, who seeks to free her -a duplicate, supplementary discourse of love that appears to be characterized this time by generosity or «amor liberal». Díaz Migoyo   —109→   asserts that while the second, apparently reformed, discourse would seem to be a product of the first, selfish one, as an effect of experience, the disordered chronological juxtaposition of flashbacks and the use of multiple narrative frames obscure the origination of all references to his past in Ricardo's interested present-tense voice. As a captive, he still longs for her midway through the plot and until its end his own words to readers via the interlocutor, his confidant Mahamut, portray Ricardo as an equally desirous spectator to others' attempts to steal and possess his woman.

Although the heroine eventually agrees to feign pleasure in his company when they meet in disguise to plot their escape, she warns him that his love for her remains unrequited:

El hablarnos será fácil y a mí será grandísimo gusto el hacello, con presupuesto que jamás me has de tratar cosa que a tu declarada pretensión pertenezca, que en la hora que tal hicieres, en la misma me despediré de verte... Conténtate con que he dicho que no me dará, como solía, fastidio tu vista, porque te hago saber, Ricardo, que siempre te tuve por desabrido y arrogante, y que presumías de ti algo más de lo que debías.

(Novelas ejemplares, 173)

When the novela's wanderings are brought to closure by the deception of their captors, and their escape and return home amidst expected fanfare, Ricardo once again declares his love, this time in an ideologically correct liberalidad that appears to be motivated by generous self-abnegation («Yo sin ventura, pues quedo sin Leonisa, gusto de quedar pobre, que a quien Leonisa le falta, la vida le sobra» [186]). He grandly offers to give Leonisa along with his share of their booty to Cornelio, the man she had originally preferred, only to realize that she is not his to give another: «-Válame Dios,... no es posible que nadie pueda demostrarse liberal de lo ajeno: ¿qué jurisdicción tengo yo en Leonisa para darla a otro?» (186). Ricardo then magnanimously offers her the right to act autonomously, declaring her to be «suya», her own person (186). This declaration reverberates with irony, for her own words have clarified that she was never his to give. Yet by removing the discourse of love from the realm of exchange, the hero makes it possible for Leonisa to «do the right thing» in responding to «las obligaciones que como discreta debe de pensar que me tiene», the obligations of honor made public by Ricardo's very words of denial (186). The heroine corrects Ricardo's still presumptuous rationale, retorting: «Esto   —110→   digo por darte a entender, Ricardo, que siempre fui mía, sin estar sujeta a otro que a mis padres...». (187); she is bound only by the constraints of her lineage and class, not by the claims upon her of his «liberalidad». It is for the former -in effect, for the motive of representing her own flesh and blood honorably- that Leonisa exercises her autonomy, paradoxically, by accepting to become his: «a trueque de no mostrarme desagradecida,... ¡oh valiente Ricardo!, mi voluntad, hasta aquí recatada, perpleja y dudosa, se declara en favor tuyo» (187). As Díaz Migoyo brilliantly observes, this «acuerdo sinceramente figurado, armoniosamente contradictorio, literalmente figurado» reinscribes the story's exemplary «liberalidad», rendering a correct reading of the text's hidden anagram: «RICARDO-CORAZON-DE-LEON» (150). Cervantes's story in this novela thus closes with the double representation of «doing the right thing» on the part of both protagonists. The patent theatricality with which the lesson of conjugal love is staged appears to be in dissonance with the motives for love on the part of Ricardo and his competitors that have advanced the plot -self-interest, desire for domination of the Other, and the lust to appropriate or possess that which is of value in the Other, in Leonisa's case, her own eroticized symbolic function as a prime unit of exchange in a libidinal homosocial economy- but it is all the more so an appropriate closure to Cervantes's portrayal of Ricardo as masculine Christian exemplar. After pursuing the many threads of this highly charged story to its end, readers therefore confront an abruptly anticlimactic resolution: the desire mobilized earlier by the libidinous representation of Leonisa and the fantasies of those chasing her is rather unsuccessfully displaced onto Ricardo, who now appears somewhat ridiculously mythologized as a Christian knight within whose figure she is literally and figuratively subsumed by consummation of the marriage sacrament (188).

Díaz Migoyo's astute recovery of the chivalric subtext in El amante liberal merits careful consideration, for it signals a major drive in the ideological formulation of the novela, despite the story's structural appearance of being a Byzantine romance in miniature. Although its «idealism» and closure have led some readers to place it among the few narratives of the Cervantine series that may be seen simply as Christian romances (see my note 4), El amante liberal is indeed another example of the writer's experiments with the potential for problematizing meaning through counter-genres, this time not romance versus what we   —111→   call «novel», but in a combination of Byzantine and chivalric romance forms. In Allegories of Love, Diana de Armas Wilson traces both the characteristics and underlying tensions that distinguish these two romance forms, noting that by the late sixteenth century the Byzantine model had largely supplanted its chivalric predecessor in Spanish literature, with good reason. The chivalric romance, she explains, «generated by a merger between the cross and the stirrup», served to express the interests of the Church and of the feudal nobility, idealizing the behavior of the latter (13). In this literary tradition, marriage -an alliance between families- is one more expression of class interest; desire is focused beyond its limits, in a privileging of adultery. As Wilson points out, «the chivalric was also an enterprise whose class solidarity, by the mid-sixteenth century, was rapidly being undermined by nascent capitalism, by a value system in which the erotics of money and property had begun to displace the erotics of courtly love and holy war» (16). She speculates that renewed interest in the classical Byzantine romance stemmed from changes in Spanish society and its ideologies in the wake of the expulsion of Jews and moriscos and of its faltering attempts at capitalism, for this supplanting form is structured upon the travels of exiled and marginalized characters, and is laden with reference to commerce and exchanges (16-18). The prominent erotic longing that characterizes the Byzantine form finds resolution in the requited love of a marriage between two active subjects, which provides an egalitarian structure for closure in this less class-dictated, quasi-bourgeois narrative form.

I propose that while the exchange -based, libertine Byzantine structure and many of its oriental elements clearly dominate the plot's «literal» level in El amante liberal, they function in a very complex fashion to allegorize the latent political and religious message of western, or Christian, chivalric tradition. In effect, the fascinating multiculturalism, the eroticism, the inviting marginality and transgressiveness of the Byzantine romance constitute both admiratio and the discursive formulation of dangers requiring the punitive operations of the work's restrictive chivalric moral, which reveals itself to be religious, racist, and for us, at least, extravagantly sexist. In El amante liberal we find clear articulation through Ricardo's voice of what Said terms the «Orientalist discourse», as «a collective notion identifying 'us' Europeans against all 'those' non-Europeans» that has informed Western institutions and their ideology since the early imperialist   —112→   expansion of nations such as Spain (6-7¹⁴⁶). By rejecting the allure of difference -the oriental Moslem world, its money, the «torpe deseo» (174) of his Turkish master's wife, and ultimately the ravishing beauty of a Leonisa marketed in that world, the male exemplar Ricardo is rewarded in the narrative by a return to his own religion, homeland, and class, and by possession of her as part of his own flesh. Leonisa's own exemplification of the knightly Christian ideal of self-abnegation, in marrying him to emulate a familial and nobiliary honor that is engendered masculine in the text, confirms the hero's drive to sameness, closing the narrative on a resounding rejection of other lands, their economies, and their religion, elements that, as I will show, are represented in feminized terms¹⁴⁷. The heroine, the principal motive for the plot's development until its end, then recedes from view to bear Ricardo's heirs, her will to biological subjugation being rendered, paradoxically, in the novela's ideology as indication of her heroic -that is, manly- virtue. Ricardo's amorous territorial quest thus opens and closes upon the represented topology of the woman who is, in his own words, «para mí leona» -oxymoronic embodiment of the valiant and fiercely unyielding, as capable of self-abnegation in her decision to value marriage over desire as is the victor «liberal» himself (142).

The process through which Leonisa comes eventually to embody the Christian lesson of the tale, however, is fraught with apparent inconsistencies: for if her person symbolizes the correctness of one hierarchical system of human correspondence at the novela's end, that same body serves to represent other configurations of social and political power earlier in the narrative. The eroticism with which it is represented betrays a desire that   —113→   is, in fact, clearly more ideological than specific to her character, for Leonisa is given little voice and less agency in the narrative (her primary utterances, up to the work's end, consist ironically of deprecation of the very man whom she finally marries) and her would-be lover Ricardo expresses desire first and foremost for possession of her undifferentiated body -lifeless, if need be. (After describing the separation of their captors' ships by a storm which splintered the one in which she traveled, he recounts searching the waves for «el cuerpo de la desdichada Leonisa», lamenting «mas aún no quiso el cielo concederme el alivio que esperaba tener de ver en mis brazos el cuerpo de Leonisa, que, aunque muerto y despedazado, holgara de verle, por romper aquel imposible que mi estrella me puso de juntarme con él como mis buenos deseos merecían» [ 151-52, my emphasis].) In effect, the men of the narrative relate to each other through her desirable body, and these political tensions are rendered along a series of linked axes: religious, racial, and simultaneously engendered. While this system of attempted and thwarted exchanges is organized hierarchically around the fundamental symbol of Ricardo (Christian, European, masculine), his rivals for Leonisa vary from the same or related race and religion, figuratively engendered female (Cornelio, the Greek captives), to racial and religious others (Moslem Turks and Arabs, the Jewish merchant), equally engendered female. Until the economies that operate between them stabilize at the work's end under the latent but dominant one represented by Ricardo, Leonisa functions as the multivalent, mediating body through which their struggle for power is carried out. This novela is a striking example of the «eroticism of the body politic», both in Leonisa's variable figurative function and in the prurience with which her highly public role is scrutinized by the narrative. Although the essays of the Hunt anthology, Eroticism and the Body Politic, focus upon eighteenth-century France, the conceptual framework that links them bears consideration here. Stressing that «the very fact that political organization can be imagined as a body leaves open the potential for erotic connotations», Hunt explains that «the special role of women in the transmission of power through their reproductive capacities» guaranteed that their common body was the representational figure of choice (1-2). To clarify, she observes that this unique role is, more appropriately, «an ambivalent position in conceptions of power»: «Men could not relate to one another, politically or socially,   —114→   without their relationship to women's bodies. The social and political order cannot be reproduced without women, but women were almost always imagined as dangerous if they meddled in public -that is, political- concerns» (2). Cervantes's heroine, Leonisa, is indeed a threat to the stable conceptions of religious purity and nobiliary honor harbored by Ricardo when she is the object of heated pursuit and exchange among his rivals, the infidels; yet she also functions to confirm the principles that organize his world in her will as subject to deny them all both use of her body and the benefits of her desire. It is precisely Leonisa's lack of «meddling» in the politics that revolve around her that enables the narrative to affirm her merits as subject: she, in the end, is not a threat to the transmission of her society's power, but proves to be quite the opposite.

Readers of this novela are led to anticipate the centrality of the heroine to the captive Ricardo's quest by the intense yearning that marks his discourse from the start. For the first five pages of the in medias res plot, however, its force is revealingly displaced in a testy diatribe against the foreign economy in which, we eventually find, she at present exists, one marked by material exchanges predicated on the assignation of variable monetary values. The Turks' commercial world of influence peddling, slave trading, and sexual favors is defined, in the words of Ricardo's male companion, the crypto-Christian Mahamut, as an evil empire that cannot prevail: «todo este imperio es violento, señal que prometía no ser durable» (141). Reference to the heroine whose pursuit launched the hero's adventures in this figuratively and literally -that is, racially- «dark» territory follows, in the form of a eulogy of his homeland, the Christian Trápana, an exclusive island community whose geographical perfection is manifest in the legendary beauty of one of its own: «una doncella, digo, por quien decían todas las curiosas lenguas y afirmaban los más raros entendimientos que era la de más perfecta hermosura que tuvo la edad pasada» (142). According to the poets who laud the sum of her predictably metaphorized parts («eyes as shining suns», «pearls for teeth», «ruby lips», etc.), this physical paragon embodies the ideal harmony of Nature itself, in effect serving as an emblem of that homeland with which the narrative associates her (142).

This same woman, however, simultaneously functions in a separate economy that will drive the narrative to develop as a Byzantine romance before reaching its final, precarious return to   —115→   a properly Western, imperialistic ideology. She does not desire Ricardo, but rather Cornelio, the one inhabitant of Trápana whose attractions are foreign both to Ricardo and the values of his homeland (142). The hero's narrative brands his rival as «mancebo galán, atildado, de blandas manos y rizos cabellos, de voz meliflua y de amorosas palabras, y, finalmente, todo hecho de ámbar y de alfeñique, guarnecido de telas y adornado de brocados» (143). Cornelio has the «delicate face» that Ricardo himself in his manliness lacks and a body whose excessive adornment hints at transvestism (143). The contempt manifest in Ricardo's discourse queries the authenticity of his rival's gender as male, and the hero is smitten with a «rabia de los celos» (143). Uncontrollable jealousy, he admits, caused him to spy on their meeting in the locus amoenus of Cornelio's garden and to assault not Cornelio but Leonisa, with a verbal devaluation of the former intended to destroy her pursuit of the male beauty. In a parody of the metaphors common to Renaissance love lyrics, she is ridiculed for seeking union with a lover who has no phallic authority nor the hot humor of a male, a beautiful man whose valor resides not in him at all, but rather in the money with which his alluring disguise is made possible:

«Llégate, llégate, cruel, un poco más, y enrede to yedra a ese inútil tronco que te busca; peina o ensortija aquellos cabellos de ese tu nuevo Ganimedes, que tibiamente te solicita... ¿Piensas, quiero decir, que este mozo, altivo por su riqueza,... ha de querer, ni poder, ni saber guardar firmeza en sus amores, ni estimar to inestimable...?».

(144)

The very wealth, or monied economy, that enables Cornelio to project such a highly valorized exterior, argues the hero, is incompatible with what is of true value in love -constancy and an esteem for the transcendent rather than the physical or material assets of the beloved.

This opening scene of triangular desire serves to establish the two series of semiotic coordinates that will sustain all of the novela's developing tensions: commercial activity and money are rendered foreign, a rival force to be eradicated, and both exchange and the cultural Other are engendered in female terms; material poverty (which has, to a relative degree, handicapped Ricardo's attempts to compete directly with Cornelio [143]) and citizenship in the Christian homeland -the text's primary marker of subjectivity, through Ricardo- are, by implied contrast,   —116→   engendered masculine. When she appears to transgress the limits of her role as «lady» and desired love-object in the second series of coordinates, by actively desiring a male beauty that reflects her own, Leonisa herself gives impetus to Ricardo's conquest of those infidel economies that the narrative represents as having spiritually as well as physically enslaved her. The triangularity of the garden encounter immediately gives way to the narrative staging of a much more global, symbolic triangularity, Ricardo's struggle against a foreign menace for the freedom -or proper reconstitution- of Leonisa.

In this process, the heroine appears to mediate between desiring males, but she is the primary object -or territory- upon which the strategic operations against mutual foes are carried out. Because she is characterized with sufficient ambivalence to represent plural cultural ideologies during the narrative, she obviates the need of the Christian Ricardo ever directly confronting in combat -and hence acknowledging the true power of- his allegedly effeminate enemies. He simply skirmishes against the manifestations in her of their influence, striving to extract her from the market that has temporarily redefined her functions. Leonisa's intransitive, yet mediate function allows the triumph of his beliefs to be inscribed in the narrative from its outset despite the hero's literally subjugated, weaponless state; he need not slay a Turk, but only win back their prized booty. Her status as medium also allows the development of her character to parallel Ricardo's own struggles with the terms of desire, toward the exemplary realization of its most spiritually appropriate manifestations. The correct fulfillment of desire, we find, is none other than the essentially intransitive behavior represented by Leonisa's love for Cornelio at the outset of their peregrinations. The proper mirroring of Leonisa's disallowed (implicitly non-procreative), self-affirming desire for an effeminate male is Ricardo's substitution of lust with the neoplatonic desire only for what is valiantly «leona» in her -a reflection of himself in her honorable bearing of inheritors to their faith and caste.

Throughout the travels that buffet them about, Ricardo is confronted with the image of Leonisa both as the corporeal possession of multiple foreign rivals and as the pure ideal of his Christian fantasies, for although she is repeatedly exchanged among owners, she is never «consumed». When first captured, Leonisa, like Ricardo, is assigned by her captors a ransom value.

  —117→  

Ricardo tries to operate in their economy by offering for her exorbitant price his entire net worth, «todo cuanto valía mi hacienda» (147). His fortunes prove to be as variable as is the infidels' market, however, and negotiations are cut short when the Turks set sail to flee Christian ships, separating Ricardo from Trápana and his cash (148). In the Turkish regrouping of prisoners and booty, Leonisa is taken off by her first master, Yzuf, a Greek renegado who has deserted the Christian world for greater profit as an infidel mercenary; she appears to have perished with him in a shipwreck (147). Ten pages and «un año, tres días y cinco horas» (143) later, when the narrative flashbacks of dialogue with his faithful companion Mahamut catch up to the present, Ricardo is shocked to see her again (157). This time Leonisa is for sale by a traveling Jewish merchant to whoever bids the highest, the exalted cadí who is Mahamut's master or Ricardo's own current master, the sultan Hazán. After both men compete for the rights to her, in order, supposedly, to bestow her for favor upon the «Gran Señor», the superior to whom they owe their own authority, she becomes the transitory possession and ward of the Cadí. The rest of the plot in captivity unfolds upon the scheming of both Turks to secretly possess her body before passing it to the «Gran Señor» as virginal, the scheming of the Cadí's wife to seduce Ricardo (who enters the Cadí's service as «Mario»), and the scheming of Ricardo and Mahamut to escape this bondage with Leonisa.

Descriptions of the heroine during this period oscillate precariously between the deprecatory system of references that marks the infidels and idealizing ones that allegorize her Christian virtues. Ricardo characterizes her first captor Yzuf not only as «su nuevo amo» but also «su más nuevo amante» (150), thus implicitly questioning the firmness of her morals; when she reappears, it is in the guise of a «mora», with covered face but uncovered feet (157) and unbound hair (160), the latter expressions of sexual provocation by the standards of her own culture. The excess of pearls and gold that bedeck her do not bespeak the legitimacy of her rightful class, but rather broadcast the desire of the Jew to inflate her market value as a sex object. When they begin to meet in the Cadí's house to plot escape, the narrator continues, Leonisa counters Ricardo's guise as his master's procurer with her own as that of her mistress. She attempts to formulate a strategy with her ardent admirer first by encouraging the possibility of his lust for Halima and then by advising   —118→   that he comply with the woman's physical demands with whatever imagined interest is necessary for his successful participation -in effect envisioning the seduction of either one or the other («si a él [deseo] quisieres corresponder, aprovecharte ha más para el cuerpo que para el alma; y cuanto no quieras, es forzoso que lo finjas» 170). Neither is she ashamed to fan the flames that rage within the Moslem woman, thereby entering into the complicity of prurient interest and sexual marketing that defines non-Christians in the narrative: «Leonisa acrecentó en Halima el torpe deseo y el amor, dándole muy buenas esperanzas que Mario haría todo lo que pidiese» ( 174, my emphasis). At the same time, the narrative brings the transcendent, spiritual nature of Leonisa's allure to the readers' attention by repeated use of solar metaphors in describing her beauty: «descubrió un rostro que así deslumbró los ojos y alegró los corazones de los circunstantes, como el Sol» (157; a description duplicated on 164). In effect, the foreigners are shown to be captivated by that aspect of her beauty that defies definition in their economy -her Christian Otherness. The logic of the narrative confirms the primacy of this latter characterization of the heroine, for she survives her trials «con la entereza y verdad que podían poner en duda tantos caminos como he andado», with her literal as well as figurative virtue intact (173).

The ambivalence with which the captive Leonisa's moral status is represented up to this point is but a reflection of that larger struggle between the world of Ricardo and that of her captors. If the trials of the former are characterized by the quest for a positive moral exemplarity, the turbulent schemings of the latter, as we are fully led to expect, manifest the inverse -the negative exemplarity of immorality, in a political body whose «irrational and frenzied couplings», to borrow Brundage's apt description, have indeed disrupted the transmission of social power (152¹⁴⁸). From the micro-structure of the family to the   —119→   macro-structure of regional government the foreigners are in disorder: their equivalent of the viceroyalty is in dangerous transition and the only marriage portrayed for readers, that of the Cadí and Halima, is torn by adulterous desires on the part of both members and is without issue. This is not surprising, for the aging Turk, despite desire for the body of Leonisa («el fuego que las entrañas poco a poco le iba consumiendo» [177]), has proven with his wife incapable of more than «abrazos flojos» (166). The limp embraces -or metonymic impotence- that characterizes this Turk are, we find, symptomatic of the foreigners. Disputes by the Moslem conspirators to possess the body of the exotic Christian beauty, an act that neither they nor the wandering Jew succeed in consummating, belie the inherent inability of the Orientals to function procreatively or productively to insure the growth of their race and empire. Not surprisingly, Fetala, Ricardo's first captor, happily traded rights to Leonisa for the hero himself, four stalwart rowers, and «dos muchachos hermosísimos... (de lo cual se contentó)» (149). The narrator's pointed aside foregrounds the symbolic relationship between race and religion on the one hand, and sexual preference perceived as gender function on the other, that is carefully elaborated throughout Cervantes's novela to prepare readers for the final triumphant contrast between the «lion-hearted» Ricardo and the text's pusillanimous cultural Other.

The quest for truth in El amante liberal takes us on an erotic odyssey that charts the ideological and political differences of institutions and the people they shape, along the terrain of the engendered human body. A cautionary tale of that period in our Western cultural formation acknowledged by its own medical as well as fictive literature to be of «single-sex», Cervantes' novela takes up the issue of sovereignty in the subject Ricardo, examining its ramifications at home -in the model family he eventually attains- and on foreign horizons¹⁴⁹. The hero's search for the   —120→   truth of his own existence through the person of Leonisa and the others he encounters is represented in terms that are simultaneously spiritual, or psychological, and material, geopolitical. The novela's narrative betrays through Ricardo strong anxiety regarding both the mercenary nature of desire and the desires of Oriental mercenaries, as it examines the threat of unstable values -and the buying and selling of bodies- in the body politic. Perhaps not surprisingly, given our knowledge of seventeenth-century Spain, the coalition of threats to the subject Ricardo and to social stability -from domestic to international- is artistically engendered female, in a series of characters of both sexes.

El amante liberal's exemplarity, ultimately, appears to lie in the authoritative «male» rendering of its resolution: the hero marks his freedom from effeminate, libertine commerce and his return to anticapitalism and hence to moral high ground when with «liberalidad» he offers the heroine herself. One of the work's many ironies is the incorporation of Leonisa into the same male-engendered system, when she finally corresponds to his apparent generosity by marrying him, in effect extracting herself from the disturbing market in which she has been an object of repeated exchange. Ricardo hence finds his confirmation in the valiant, or «leonine», posture of Leonisa at the end, for she forswears any further misguided attempts to search for herself, and summons the resolve to marry the man who has relentlessly insisted upon the priority of his claims to her throughout the novela. Readers cannot help but notice, however, that this resolution in favor of social stability through the carefully staged representation in the narrative of a generous, or «liberal», affirmation   —121→   of (aristocratic) class, (European) race, and (Christian) religion -the work's exemplarity- is accomplished by the very ungenerous construction of those excluded: all women (as subjects), other religions (Moslem and Judaic), other races (Arabs, Jews, Turks, Greeks), less privileged classes, and the geography that links the heroes' tiny homeland to the rest of the world. Cervantes's narrative leads us to doubt the degree to which its heroes' portrayed exemplarity adequately defines the scope of the novela's lesson, for it resounds with the echoes of misplaced and parodied exemplarity that indeed, to borrow Forcione's own words about the discursive «irregularities» of Cervantes's novelas, «revitalize perceptions blunted by the tyranny of familiarity and appearance» (29). In reading for exemplarity, we are forced to reconsider the validity of many stereotypes. While infidels collectively are cast as the perpetrators of Trápana's sufferings, in the kidnapping of its heroes, individually they often do not fit the cultural models that we are led to expect; in fact, they betray a number of surprising virtues. Leonisa's first master, the renegade Yzuf, intends to marry rather than to enslave her (149); upon his death she is saved from the shipwreck and cared for by a band of Turks who protect her as a sister rather than enacting vile desires upon her (171); Mahamut proves to be a loyal and disinterested friend to Ricardo despite his brand as religious mercenary; and Halima loses much of her estate and nearly her life in escaping with Ricardo to become a Christian and -she mistakenly believes- marry him. Not only are we surprised to find repeated narrative evidence of «liberalidad» among peoples criticized discursively in the novela for motives of interés. Both the opening and the conclusion of the tale locate the causes of protagonists' trials in the heart of their own culture, Trápana. The qualities quickly projected onto the cultural Other, infidels from the East, are initially manifest in the island community's own leading Christians and in the end still persist among them. Leonisa's beloved Cornelio proves to be a cowardly sensualist whose love of wealth and himself come first; he flees her foreign abductors and never makes a move to pay her ransom, although his wealth far exceeds that of Ricardo. Her own parents, who have supported his suit over Ricardo's, are equally guilty of mercenary motives. The «effeminacy» with which Cornelio's un-Christian self-interest is rendered in the narrative even makes an appearance in the description of Ricardo himself during the escape. While the Turks battle to their own death aboard the   —122→   hip that carries Halima and Leonisa -the one narrative context in which the novela's hero may credibly demonstrate his chivalric valor as «hombre cabal»- he remains hidden, watching from behind a door, until the Turks kill each other (180).

We are forced by the many representations of «liberalidad» in Cervantes's El amante liberal to consider the symbolic nature of that exemplarity itself, as a signifier whose meaning is not clearly delimited. In effect, we are obliged to consider the ideological motives that constitute the cautionary allegory at work in the novela. The collision of two literary forms -the chivalric and Byzantine romance- and the worlds that they represent leave readers with the nagging impression that the issue of liberalidad is far from resolved by the return home of the protagonists and the narrative's rejection of foreign horizons. The problem of exemplarity, rather than being placed in negative relief by their sojourn among barbarous peoples, begins and ultimately still resides in Ricardo and Leonisa themselves. The tale's final, abrupt discursive shift to a chivalric register -a move to which we are immediately alerted because it is out of consonance with Cervantes's other literary works- is only superficially supported by the narrative of their behavior, for Ricardo's «liberalidad» and Leonisa's correspondence through marriage are for them, as well as for readers, enacted, consciously promoted public postures -mercenary in terms of the work's definition of economy, even as they constitute «doing the right thing»¹⁵⁰. While the discursive organization of Cervantes's lover's tale clearly upholds Christian guidelines for social order and mutual respect, its narrative thus appears simultaneously to question the constitution through liberalidad of exclusionary discourses that invert its very meaning.

  —123→  

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