The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500-1900

Kimberly Anne Coles, Ralph Bauer, Zita Nunes, Carla L. Peterson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137338211
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia social

The essays of this collection explore how ideas about 'blood' in science and literature have supported, at various points in history and in various places in the circum-Atlantic world, fantasies of human embodiment and human difference that serve to naturalize existing hierarchies.

Part I

Race and Stock

1

Metamateriality and Blood Purity in Cervantes’s Alcaná de Toledo

Rachel L. Burk

One day I was in the Alcaná market in Toledo, a boy came by to sell some notebooks and old papers to a silk merchant; as I am very fond of reading, even torn papers in the streets, I was moved by my natural inclination to pick up one of the volumes the boy was selling, and I saw that it was written in characters that I knew to be Arabic. And since I recognized but could not read it, I looked around to see if some Morisco who knew Castilian, and could read it for me, was in the vicinity, and it was not very difficult to find this kind of interpreter, for even if I had sought a speaker of an older and better language I would have found him.

In short, fortune provided me with one, and when I told him what I wanted and placed the book in his hands, he opened it in the middle, read for a short while, and begun to laugh.

I asked him why he was laughing, and he replied that it was because of something written in the margin of the book as an annotation. I told him to tell me what it was, and he, still laughing, said:

“As I have said, here written in the margin is written: ‘This Dulcinea of Toboso, referred to so often in this history, they say she had the best hand for salting pork of any woman in all of La Mancha.’”

—Don Quixote 1.9¹

Early in the First Part of Don Quixote (1605), the narrator intervenes in the story of the knight’s exploits to explain that his source for the text up to this point, originally found in the archives of La Mancha, has run out. Fortuitously, he tells us, he has discovered Cide Hamete Benenjeli’s continuation of Quijote’s adventures at a stall in Toledo’s Alcaná marketplace. It is this manuscript—in a language he cannot read, with amusing marginalia, and found in a pile of junk—that forms the supposed basis for what becomes a central masterpiece of European literature.

A defining beginning to the proliferation of fictional levels that make up the complex narrative strategy of Don Quixote, the Alcaná episode sets up central metafictional premises of the work by introducing the narrator, a morisco translator, and a second manuscript from the Arab-Manchegan historian, fictional author of the novel’s supposed source texts. For all the merited study this chapter has received, critics have paid little attention to a complementary discourse to that of the work’s supposed origins: an elaborate portrayal of textual materiality that alludes to concerns about embodiment in early modern Spanish society, that is, to blood purity. The Alcaná passage creates a fiction of the material creation of the novel, the concrete pre-texts of Don Quixote, in the form of soiled papers for sale cheaply in an open-air market in the less-known Jewish neighborhood of Toledo. That is to say that not only is the novel acutely metafictional, it is also metamaterial. A hallmark of the text is its extended discussion of books and manuscripts as objects inscribed, imagined, manufactured, collected, burned, saved, spoiled, found, and sold. These include the material texts that serve as ancestors to the book in the reader’s hand. What’s fundamental to the novel’s fictional universe is not only the metafictional discussion of the printed word, but also the pervasive representation of the manuscript, including its discrete social purposes, ways of signifying, and forms of circulation.

This depiction of the materiality of the text is also one among the multiple representations of Arab-Iberian culture in the novel, one that comments on this community’s singular relationship to manuscripts and writing. The narrator’s visit to the Toledo marketplace brings to the fore Cervantes’s claims about the textual artifacts (“notebooks” and “old papers” to be sold as pulp) at the same time as it underlines the status of the novel as a translation from prohibited Arabic to imperial Castilian. The text presents its own creation as a series of exchanges—material, linguistic, economic—that associate the book as a physical object with the contemporaneous cultural politics of the moriscos, the population of formerly Muslim Iberians forcibly converted to Christianity, translated—if you will—from one belief to another. At the same time, the text persistently equates human bodies with bodies of texts. At stake in the discussion of the physical character of Don Quixote, I argue, is blood purity, the emerging system for classifying bodies by blood and belief. The “Prologue” to Part One suggests the novel itself as an imperfect, even illegitimate, textual body, the ugly stepchild of its author, while in the “Examination of the Books,” the priest and barber put Quijote’s library on trial, burning heretical books in place of heretical bodies. Seen in this light, the Alcaná passage, which represents the source of the Quixote as a messy, incomplete collection of cheap paper and illicit script, takes on further meaning. Read together, these three passages create a fictive “genealogy” of the materiality of the novel that is heterodox, an embodied text with a hidden, illegitimating past. This, too, speaks to the morisco question. Cervantes makes the ostensible pedigree of his novel as a physical object comment on larger cultural issues of embodiment related to exclusion, lineage, and race. Specifically, the metamaterial discourse addresses the ways in which morisco bodies were newly seen as distinct in substance from Old Christian bodies, thanks to doctrine of blood purity.

From its most basic formulation, the relationship between characters and the book in Don Quixote is both discursive and material; it has to do with meaning as well as with the physical form in which meaning is expressed. At the turn of the seventeenth century in Spain and Portugal, the Inquisition, charged with policing Catholic orthodoxy, had a related goal: to distinguish the bodies of multi-ethnic Iberians, to make them legible like title pages. Blood purity (Sp. limpieza de sangre; Pt. limpeza de sangue) was a discriminatory legal designation of religio-ethnic identity that classified converts to Christianity like the moriscos and their descendants as bodily impure. Through a discourse of metamateriality, which draws attention to objects that signify and emphasizes both their material existence and semantic content, Cervantes speaks to the premises of racialization that underlie the blood purity doctrine and questions the fiction that a bloodline marked bodies with hidden difference.

Critical contexts

Early modern Iberia insistently attempted to transform the conceptual and the metaphorical into concrete realities. Limpieza de sangre was the prime, but in no way singular, example of what Margaret Greer calls the period’s materializing instinct. Gil Anidjar has argued that the emergence of blood purity signaled an epistemological shift in the European understanding of community, an absolute inversion of an earlier understanding of Christendom in which the spiritual community of Christian believers was transformed into race and the body politic.² Examining how Cervantes approaches textual materiality in light of these observations, my reading of Don Quixote stands at the intersection of two seemingly disparate currents of critical investigation about early modernity, one rooted in the history of the book and the other centered on the emergence of race in Europe’s first modern empire.

In discussing the celebrated metaliterary aspect of Don Quixote, critics have called our attention to the role that the multiplicity of genres (romance, novella, picaresque) played with respect to the emergence of the novel and to the multiplication of authors (prologuist, narrator or second author, morisco translator, Arab historian) that created a satire of singular textual authority. Cervantes’s unrivaled use of metalepsis, to which I will return later, is central to the text’s metaliterary discourse.³ In the past decade Quixote scholarship has taken a turn toward materiality studies, underscoring that Cervantes does not ignore the textual artifact itself, the concrete link between the worlds of the reader and of the author. Cervantes incorporates various kinds of writing and a range of writing technologies in both the First and Second Parts, elaborating a discourse about textual materiality as a sociocultural phenomenon.⁴

Carroll B. Johnson and Juan Carlos Rodríguez address in detail the “moorishness” of the Arabic manuscript in Chapter Eight, understood previously as another part of the satire of authority.⁵ Mercedes Alcalá Galán devotes a chapter of her enlightening Escritura desatada to what she calls the “clandestine Quixote” of Cide Hamete, a concept that is vital to my reading. She brings to the fore the historical context: the persecution of moriscos in Cervantes’s lifetime and the legal status of any manuscript in Arabic in Phillip II’s Spain.⁶

The contemporary study of blood purity in Hispanism began in the last century with historians (Sicroff, Nirenberg, Kamen)⁷ who detail limpieza as a legal, social, and demographic phenomenon as it bred a complex ideological reality from its fifteenth-century beginnings. Like-minded critics of race have sought to include pureza de sangre and the Iberian Peninsula within a broader evolution of European racial ideas (Balibar and Wallerstein, Nirenberg, Anidjar).⁸ Literary critics have explored the idiosyncratic representational history of Iberian blood (Mariscal, Dopico Black, Beursterien, Greene),⁹ in particular its relationship to questions of honor and as a displaced discourse. The study of Arab-Iberian culture under Christian rule (García Arenal, Burshatin, Caro Baroja, Domínguez Ortiz and Vincent, Barletta, Dadson, Fuchs, García Arenal and Rodríguez Mediano)¹⁰ and its presence within Cervantes’s works (Graf, Johnson, Armas)¹¹ has countered the ideology of Spanish national identity, premised on religious-cum-racial “purity,” by exploring its foundational hybridity. Likewise historians have begun to productively investigate the relationship between Iberian blood purity and the development of the New World caste system.¹²

The interest in this chapter is in demonstrating how historio-cultural work on blood purity can broaden and deepen our understanding of Cervantes’s discussion of materiality in Don Quixote. In bringing together the self-conscious impulses of the novel and its engagement with textual materiality with broader cultural examination of the moriscos and the rise of racializing discourses of embodiment, Cervantes ironizes the urge to make the metaphysical physical. He uses the play of fictionality of his novel to underline that blood purity is a rhetorical rather than fleshly reality, one produced and maintained by documents, not bodies.

Scrap paper and an indiscriminate reader

In the Alcaná, the boy selling messy piles of crumbling, dog-eared papers is not a bookseller; his goods are more humble. Neither codices nor vellum manuscripts, but only “notebooks and old papers.” The vendor does not consider them objects of study, translation, and eventual publication, as indicated by their haphazard display and low market valuation. The narrator purchases them altogether for a half real, the price for an inexpensive lunch. Nonetheless, the narrator browses the junk dealer’s wares with interest. He admits to being an indiscriminate reader, a voracious consumer of the written word in every form to the point that he will read “torn papers in the street.” Indifferent to differences in the quality and authority of texts, he does not favor documents from the official archives of La Mancha over Arabic scribbled on scraps from the Alcaná. He disregards any hierarchy of materials, the way that form dictates the nobility of the content; likewise he feels no compunction to hide his appreciation for all languages, irrespective of his knowledge of them, social taboos, or legal prohibition. The narrator suffers from a min...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Race and Stock
• Part II Moral Constitution
• Part III Medicalizing the Political Body
• Further Reading
• Index