Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
Volume XV, Number 2, Fall 1995
In Memoriam
Ruth Anthony el
Saffar
1941-1994
THE CERVANTES SOCIETY OF AMERICA
President
JOHN J. ALLEN (1997)
Vice President
CARROLL B. JOHNSON (1997)
Secretary-Treasurer
WILLIAM H. CLAMURRO (1997)
Executive Council
| FREDERICK A. DE ARMAS | MW STEVEN HUTCHINSON |
| HOWARD MANCING | NE DOMINICK FINELLO |
| GEORGE A. SHIPLEY, JR. | PC EMILIE BERGMANN |
| EDUARDO URBINA | SE ALISON P. WEBER |
| AMY R. WILLIAMSEN | SW JUDITH A. WHITENACK |
Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
Editor: MICHAEL MCGAHA
Book Review Editor: EDWARD H. FRIEDMAN
Editor's Advisory Council
| JUAN BAUTISTA AVALLE-ARCE | EDWARD C. RILEY |
| JEAN CANAVAGGIO | ALBERTO SÁNCHEZ |
Associate Editors
| JOHN J. ALLEN | LUIS MURILLO |
| PETER DUNN | LOWRY NELSON, JR. |
| DANIEL EISENBERG | HELENA PERCAS DE PONSETI |
| ROBERT M. FLORES | GEOFFREY L. STAGG |
| EDWARD H. FRIEDMAN | BRUCE W. WARDROPPER |
| CARROLL B. JOHNSON | ALISON P. WEBER |
| FRANCISCO MÁRQUEZ VILLANUEVA |
Cervantes, official organ of the Cervantes Society of America, publishes scholarly articles in English and Spanish on Cervantes' life and works, reviews and notes of interest to cervantistas. Twice yearly. Subscription to Cervantes is a part of membership in the Cervantes Society of America, which also publishes a Newsletter. $20.00 a year for individuals, $40.00 for institutions, $30.00 for couples, and $10.00 for students. Membership is open to all persons interested in Cervantes. For membership and subscription, send check in dollars to Professor WILLIAM H. CLAMURRO, Secretary-Treasurer, The Cervantes Society of America, Dept. of Modern Languages, Denison University, Granville, Ohio 43023. Manuscripts should be sent in duplicate, together with a self-addressed envelope and return postage, to Professor MICHAEL MCGAHA, Editor, Cervantes, Department of Modern Languages, Pomona College, Claremont, California 91711-6333. The SOCIETY requires anonymous submissions, therefore the author's name should not appear on the manuscript; instead, a cover sheet with the author's name, address, and the title of the article should accompany the article. References to the author's own work should be couched in the third person. Books for review should be sent to Professor EDWARD FRIEDMAN, Book Review Editor, Cervantes, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, Ballantine Hall, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405.
Copyright © 1995 by the Cervantes Society of America.
—4→
This issue is dedicated to the memory of Ruth Anthony El Saffar, charter member of the Cervantes Society of America, Associate Editor of Cervantes from the journal's inception, and the Society's President from 1992 until her untimely death in 1994. Tributes to Professor El Saffar by John J. Allen and Diana de Armas Wilson appeared in Volume XIV, Number 2 (Fall 1994) of Cervantes, the first issue published after her death. The current issue begins with three papers presented at a session organized by the Cervantes Society in memory of Professor El Saffar at last December's MLA Convention. The session was titled «Reflections on Quixotic Desire: Psychoanalytic Readings Pro and Contra» and was chaired by Professor Diana de Armas Wilson, who co-edited the book Quixotic Desire with Professor El Saffar. We regret that we have been unable to publish the fourth paper presented at that session («The Meaning of Madness: Onomancy in El licenciado Vidriera»), because Professor María Antonia Garcés had already promised to publish it elsewhere.
—5→
Stanford University
Deviance, like beauty, seems to be in the eye of the beholder.
Beyond the reworkings of proverbial beliefs, that is at least what sociologists
of deviance would have us think. For example, in his essay «Notes on the
Sociology of Deviance» Kai Erickson defines certain forms of behavior as
normal or deviant based not upon any inherent qualities of the behavior, but
instead based upon the social audience's reaction to it (10-11). While the
general public, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, still grapples with
its feelings or assumptions regarding sexual «difference» and its
deviances, historians of sexuality and gay activists debate more precise
questions. One of those vexing issues, especially after Foucault's contentions
in his
History of Sexuality, is whether or not
homosexuality even existed as a social category prior to the nineteenth
century. A generally held position is that homosexuality -understood as a
self-conscious individual and / or group identity based on sexual orientation-
is a new social construct, one that did not come into existence until the
nineteenth century1. Nonetheless, dissenting views are held by several scholars
whose works recognize the existence of early modern homosexual subcultures.
Among these are
—6→
John Boswell's
Christianity, Social Tolerance and
Homosexuality (1980); Alan Bray's
Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982);
Guido Ruggiero's
The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in
Renaissance Venice (1985); and Joseph Cady, who specifically contends that
the Renaissance recognized both [male] homosexuality and heterosexuality as
real categories of experience. To round off the relevant scholarship for the
eighties there is James Saslow, who also affirms in this regard that:
«the lack of our modern terms 'heterosexual' and 'homosexual' did not
prevent Renaissance theorists from marking a clear division between two kinds
of love differentiated by the gender of one's chosen object»
(81).
Whether we wish to affirm or deny the existence of the
social category of homosexuality in early
modern times, there can be no empirical historical doubt that in Cervantes's
cultural sphere homosexuals existed, at times participated in what would now be
called a homosexual subculture, and were recognized as such, or at least as
sodomites2. At the same time, there is widening textual evidence, and
concomitant scholarship, to indicate that the figure of the homosexual is not
always relegated to the darker corners of Golden Age literature. Indeed, Roth
finds antecedents in medieval Hebrew poetry of Spain. Yet the types of desire
analyzed in the essays included in
Quixotic Desire, the book that inspires this
issue of
Cervantes, are often seen as unconscious and
rarely are homosexual. Nonetheless, one of
Quixotic Desire's contributors, Paul Julian
Smith, departs from Guy Hocquenghem's work and touches marginally upon the
theme of homosexual desire in his essay on the Captive's Tale from Part One of
Don Quixote. He sees the renegade as a
«marginal creature, defined by the frontier or the space between two
cultures»
(230). Smith interprets Cervantes's
description of the renegade as a pampered youth («regalado garzón») as implying
perverse sexual practices «in the Moorish manner»
(231). His conclusion regarding the Algerian episode is as
follows: «The betrayal of nation and religion are here combined with a
rejection of the compulsory heterosexuality enforced in the Christian
territories. In the pleasure dome of the Orient, even the nefarious vice may
speak, at least for a moment... homosexual desire opens out onto the Other
(cultural, religious, 'racial')»
(231).
Said reminds us of how conclusions like Smith's still fall within the parameters of latent and manifest «Orientalism» because, as he states in a very recent rereading of the original argument of his book:
| (1995: 3) | ||
It would be pertinent, therefore, to begin examining what the so-called Muslim Others of Cervantes's time thought about the West, and whether «our» side of the world occupied a privileged sphere in their consciousness. In other words, we still need to investigate from a historical literary perspective the issue of whether Muslims of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries needed the West to formulate their own identities3.
With respect to the Other and the Otherness Smith rightly brings forth, they had already been perused in Diego de Haedo's extensive three-volume treatise on the history, geography and customs of Algiers entitled Topographía e historia general de Argel (first published in 1612 in Valladolid). Haedo, himself a captive in Algiers from 1579 to 1582, explains the sociohistorical background of the Captive's Tale in great detail, providing much of the empirical evidence I mentioned before. Now, is there more room to ground assertions like Smith's historically, and, as a matter of fact, are there other texts by Cervantes that would allow us to further recognize and analyze a homosexual presence in his work? To begin answering these questions, I propose a reconsideration of several brief but profoundly significant episodes from Cervantes's two Algerian plays.
—8→ In the first
comedia,
Los tratos de Argel, two Moorish merchants
purchase two young Spanish captives, Francisco and Juan, separating them from
their parents. The perverse use for which the two brothers are destined is made
immediately obvious, since they are both advertised by the
pregonero as young and beautiful
garzones. In fact, one of the Moorish
buyers exclaims with pleasure: «enamorado me ha
/ el donaire del garzón»
(Cervantes
871-872). The term «garzón» is explained in Haedo's
treatise under the heading
luxuria. He speaks of the social being
and function of the
garzón and of the high esteem
in which the Muslims hold these young boys: «La
sodomía se tiene... por honra, porque aquel es más honrado que
sustenta más garçones y los celan más que las propias
mujeres y hijas...»
(I: 176). Haedo adds
that fathers must guard their sons carefully in order that they not fall prey
to this vice, as do most since they are actively courted by the older men. He
describes the
garzón as a type of
soldadera who accompanies the
alcayde on his travels, the Turk to
war, and the corsair on his expeditions, serving him at table and accompanying
him in bed. If we are to believe Haedo, the
garzón also apparently
fulfilled a function of attracting clientele to Algerian barber shops. The
barbers employed them in their shops to shave and wash the Turks, renegades and
Moors, concluding that «son dellos tan
continuamente festejados como si fuesen las más principales y hermosas
damas del mundo; y, en efecto, las boticas de barberos son unos públicos
burdeles»
(I: 1774).
It is obvious that the degree to which Haedo's comments reflect
the social and sexual reality of seventeenth-century Algiers is less easily
established than the extent to which they reflect a Christian fear and
rejection of what was, to them, deviant sexuality and a real threat to
Christian captives in Northern Africa. In
Los tratos, Francisco, the older of the two
brothers sold into slavery, remains firm in his goodness and his faith,
refusing to change his name to Mamí (a name as
sonoro y significativo as other Cervantine
inventions given its play on
mamar and
mamá), and abjure his religion.
Even when threatened with physical violence, the boy's response is:
«¿Para qué es mudar el nombre, /
si no ha de mudar la fe?»
(872). The
father's last advice to Francisco is to live as a good and loyal Christian,
while the mother enumerates the means by which slave boys are moved to abandon
their faith: amenazas, gustos y regalos,
—9→
palos, and
trazas
(872). It
is neither surprising nor irrelevant that, besides the
gustos y regalos, the other means are
not enticements but rather disciplinary tools and measures not very different
from those adopted by the Inquisition. Throughout
Los tratos de Argel the lustful, often
deviant, instincts of the Moors are emphasized and contrasted with the pure and
«natural» love maintained by the
Christians. For example, the lascivious couple Zahara and Yzuf are ready to
renounce the tenets of their faith in pursuing their Christian slaves Aurelio
and Silvia, and mentions of more turpid desires and acts are frequent in the
play. Aurelio affirms that «el mancebo cristiano al
torpe vicio / es dedicado desta gente perra, / do consiste su gloria y
ejercicio»
(882). Later in the play, when a
Christian slave is teased by two young Moorish boys, he exclaims that he hopes
to see Algiers burned to the ground, «pena que
justamente le es debida / a sus continos y nefandos vicios»
(887). In act three the mother's worst fears come to pass
when her younger son, Juan, reappears dressed «como
turco bizarro»
. The Turkish garb is a crucial emblem of
deviance since according to Haedo the Janizaries in Algiers commonly engaged in
sodomy, «sirviéndose de mozos cristianos
cautivos que compran para este vicio, que luego visten a la
turquesca»
(I: 76). Juan has been won over by
food, material comforts and presents, he has renounced his faith, and now
answers to the name Solimán. Francisco laments his brother's apostasy,
crying: «¡Oh tierna edad! ¡Cuán
pressto eres vencida, / siendo en esta Sodoma requestada / y con falsos regalos
combatida!»
(896)5.
At the moment of Francisco's lament Cervantes's political message becomes explicit: to a great degree the play is a warning to Spanish Christians to be more charitable and pay ransoms in order to save its young:
| (897) | ||
In the second half of the Cervantine dyptich, Los baños de Argel, two young boys are wrenched from their elderly father's arms and sold into sodomy by their own uncle, the renegade Yzuf. In this play it is the Algerian judge, or Cadí, whose lustful and deviant desires are aroused by the sight of the two beautiful young slaves. Meanwhile, the boys' father repeatedly insists that he would rather God kill his sons than allow their purity, both religious and sexual, to be sullied by the sodomitical Cadí:
|
| (228) | ||
In a parallel episode to
Los tratos, these boys also appear dressed
«a la turquesca de
ga[rzo]nes»
(231), an emphasis that is
not totally innocent in terms of the issues Cervantes is developing. But this
time the older of the two, Juanico, quickly allays his father's fears, assuring
him that Moorish finery cannot move their faith. The Cadí finally
becomes furious with Francisco's refusal to be swayed by promises, threats and
tricks to renounce his faith and give in to his master's sodomitical desires.
The boy is eventually martyred and crucified, transformed into a Christ figure
bathed in his own divine blood. The Algerian plays are emblematic of early
modern Christian Spain's views on the so-called nefarious sin of sodomy. Heresy
and sexuality are tightly interwoven in the early modern European mind and
sexual and religious deviance commonly transgress together. Golden Age authors
often made the connection between Moors and
—11→
sodomy when citing the
double epistemological error of the followers of Islam. The Arabs, it was
presumed, not only venerated a false prophet, but also violated natural law by
being incestuous and great sodomites (Carrasco 212). Many Spaniards believed
sodomy to be common practice among male Muslims, making them the
«natural» counterpart to the
stereotype of the lascivious
mora. This argument of the
sexual perversion supposedly authorized in Islam was often wielded in order to
exalt the superiority of Catholicism. For instance, it was used in this manner
in Spain by the apologists for the expulsion of the Moriscos in 16096.
But a fuller explanation would take into account the nature of
homosexuality in Islam and perhaps further illuminate Cervantes's portrait of
Algerian deviance. Remembering Edward Said's admonishments about how the
(mainly academic) West has created the East, recent studies of sexuality in
Islam by Arabists might prove meaningful in clarifying the episodes in the
plays I am discussing. Both the Algerian Bousquet (L'Ethique
sexuelle de l'islam) and the Tunisian Bouhdiba (Sexuality
in Islam) explain how in Muslim teaching, the lawfulness of sexual
pleasure was never connected with procreation, as it was by Christians. To the
contrary, the Koran teaches that the sexual function is in itself a sacred one
(Bouhdiba 14). Sexual pleasure was viewed as a precursor of the joys of
Paradise, since it is explicitly stated by the Prophet that believers will be
able to make love throughout eternity (Bousquet 48). Thus the hostility of
Judaism and Christianity towards sexuality lead to a restrictive and hostile
approach to manifestations of the sexual instinct, while the Koran is quite
open to the idea of sexual pleasure. In fact, a famous
hadith says that «Each time
that you make love, you perform a meritorious act before God»
(Daniel 63). From the tenth century on, Islamic theologians
thought that homosexuality deserved no bodily punishment since the Koran
teaches that Muslim blood can only be shed legally because of adultery,
apostasy or homicide. This attitude becomes more meaningful when we remember
that the official punishment for sodomy in Spain was burning at the stake. In a
recent essay (quoted above)
—12→
about Arab civilization and male love,
Marc Daniel explains that the true reason for this indulgent attitude in Moslem
culture is that in reality the crime or sin of homosexuality did not fit into
the mental categories of Islam. Therefore, no logical reasons existed in Islam
for forbidding it on moral grounds. In fact, whatever the theoretical
condemnation (and even
that was little emphasized) leveled against
homosexuality by the Koran, the force of events soon caused in the Arab world a
vast flowering of homosexual love under all its forms (Daniel 62-63).
Because of this fundamental divergence between Christian and Muslim perceptions of sexuality, the reality of boy love within Islam is an underlying issue which must be addressed when considering Christian notions of deviance and their literary projection upon Arabic cultures, in this case seventeenth-century Algiers. While the Cervantine Cadí is demonized for his perversions, proofs of actual and frequently practiced homosexuality abound in Islamic texts celebrating boy-love (Daniel 64). In fact, the boy-love theme is commonplace in both Arabic and Hebrew poetry written in Medieval Spain, although the latter lacks the explicit references to sexual activity contained in the former (see Roth). In this regard, López-Baralt's Un Kama Sutra español (1992) also discusses briefly the permissive nature of many Arabic erotic treatises with respect to homosexuality, and Boswell treats the boy-love theme in the medieval Christian world in his 1980 work.
Western scholars are well aware that from medieval polemics to
contemporary scholarship, Islamic societies have been characterized as
sanctioning and even promoting licentiousness and sexual deviance (Rowson 50).
This fact brings me back to my initial observation regarding cultural
positioning and the relativity of sexual deviance. The insistence upon
interpreting as perversions the sexual otherness of Islam represented in these
two plays and other literature of the Golden Age serves a powerful and
compelling political end. The episodes I have briefly discussed validate the
perception of homosexuality as the ultimate threat of Spanish Christianity in
the Algerian bagnios. There innocent Christian boys are inducted into the
degradation of Moorish sodomy, either by force or by enticement. What better
call to action to Spanish Christians and to the monarch? The imprisoned slaves
must be ransomed at all costs in order to save them from Islamic
«promiscuity» and the threat of apostasy. If they were not
ransomed, their likely fate was to abjure their faith and swell the ranks of
the many thousands of Christian apostates residing in Algiers who, according to
Haedo, held almost all the
—13→
power and wealth in the city (I:
52-55)7. The only other
possibilities for the young slaves were to be sacrificed as Christian martyrs
or to be sacrificed to Moorish lust. The ultimate symbolic value of helpless,
enslaved Christians in these texts is as an emblem of Cervantes's varying
sexual and spiritual positioning of his characters, as well as of the
historical entities on which they may have been based. Said reminds us that
«The geographic boundaries accompany the social, ethnic, and cultural
ones in expected ways. Yet often the sense in which someone feels himself to be
not-foreign is based on a very unrigorous idea of what is 'out there,' beyond
one's own territory. All kinds of suppositions, associations, and fictions
appear to crown the unfamiliar space outside one's own»
(1978:
54). Although after his five-year captivity in Algiers that land was
hardly unfamiliar space to Cervantes, he chooses to depict it as oppositional
in the most compelling and controlling socio-cultural spheres: the religious
and the sexual. By presenting the non-Christian territories across the
Mediterranean as centers of multiple deviance, Cervantes's twin Algerian plays
both serve and are served by the inevitable Orientalism of their time.
Bouhdiba, Abdelwahab. Sexuality in Islam. London: Routledge, 1985.
Bousquet, G.-H. L'éthique sexuelle de l'Islam Paris: Maisonneuve, 1966.
Bunes Ibarra, Miguel Angel de. La imagen de los musulmanes y del norte de Africa en la España de los siglos XVI y XVII. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1989.
Cady, Joseph. «Renaissance Awareness and Language for Heterosexuality: 'Love' and 'Feminine Love'». Renaissance Discourses of Desire. Ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1993. 143-158.
Carrasco, Rafael. Inquisición y represión sexual en Valencia. Historia de los sodomitas (1565-1785). Barcelona: Laertes, 1985.
Cervantes, Miguel de. Teatro completo. Ed. Florencio Sevilla Arroyo and Antonio Rey Hazas. Barcelona: Planeta, 1987.
Daniel, Marc. «Arab Civilization and Male Love». Trans. Winston Leyland. Reclaiming Sodom. Ed. Jonathan Goldberg. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Erickson, Kai. «Notes on the Sociology of Deviance». The Other Side: Perspectives on Deviance. Ed. Howard Becker. New York: The Free Press, 1964. 9-21.
Haedo, Fray Diego de. Topographía e historia general de Argel. [Valladolid: Diego Fernández de Córdoba y Oviedo, 1612.] Reedición de Ignacio Bauer y Landauer. Madrid: Sociedad de Bibliófilos Españoles, 1927. 3 vols.
Roth, Norman. «'Deal gently with the young man': Love of Boys in Medieval Hebrew Poetry of Spain». Speculum 57.1 (Spring 1982): 20-51.
—15→Rowson, Everett K. «The Categorization of Gender and Sex Irregularity in Medieval Arabic Vice Lists». Body Guards. The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity. Ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978.
Said, Edward W. «East isn't East: The Impending End of the Age of Orientalism». The Times Literary Supplement 4792 (February 3, 1995): 3-6.
Saslow, James M. «'A Veil of Ice between My Heart and the Fire': Michelangelo's Sexual Identity and Early Modern Constructs of Homosexuality». Genders 2 (Summer 1988): 77-89.
Smith, Paul Julian. «'The Captive's Tale': Race, Text, Gender». Quixotic Desire: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Cervantes. Ed. Ruth Anthony El Saffar and Diana de Armas Wilson. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. 227-235.