The New Geography of Classic Spanish Literature

Analyzing the 'golden age' has been replaced by study of colonialism, economics, and gender

By SCOTT HELLER

Talk about the Renaissance in English-literature circles and you run the risk of sounding hopelessly old-fashioned. "Renaissance," with its high-art associations,

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has been retired among many scholars. They prefer "early modern," taking in ground-level history, culture, and nonliterary works -- texts that today are considered just as fertile as those of Shakespeare and his peers.

After years of notorious conservatism, Hispanic literary studies is finally catching up. The whole idea of a "golden age" of great Spanish writers -- Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderon -- is now under scrutiny.

Finally welcoming feminism, new historicism, gender theory, and cultural studies, professors of Spanish are asking new questions about those old eminences:

For whom were the 16th and 17th centuries a golden age?

Who suffered?

What impact did the power of the Spanish empire have on writers at home?

Their answers present an imperial Spain that was less unified, less conservative, and more diverse -- a nation in a complicated relationship with its New World colonies.

Beyond that, they are rediscovering lost writers, and reading with power and politics in mind. The new approaches were evident at December's annual conference of the Modern Language Association. Plenty of papers dealt with major Hispanic writers but discussed them with a new emphasis. In a panel on Cervantes and cultural studies, young scholars gave papers on masculinity and on ritual. A session on Calderon connected the playwright's work to a proto-feminist British drama written around the same time. A panel of comparative-literature scholars discussed Spanish texts in relation to early modern British texts, including Shakespeare.

The publishing world has taken notice, too. The University of Illinois Press has just begun a series, called Hispanisms, that will include studies of both Iberian-peninsular and Latin American

A SAMPLING OF IDEAS ON SPANISH LITERATURE Allegories of Love: Cervantes's "Persiles and Sigismunda," by Diana de Armas Wilson (Princeton University Press, 1991) Cervantes and His Postmodern Constituencies, edited by Carroll B. Johnson and Anne J. Cruz (Garland Publishing, 1999) Cervantes and the Material World, by Carroll B. Johnson (University of Illinois Press, 2001) Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, by Diana de Armas Wilson (Oxford University Press, 2000) Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain, by Anne J. Cruz (University of Toronto Press, 1999) Grotesque Purgatory: A Study of Cervantes's Don Quixote, Part II, by Henry W. Sullivan (Penn State University Press, 1996) Hispanisms and Homosexualities, edited by Sylvia Molloy and Robert McKee Irwin (Duke University Press, 1998) Ideologies of History in the Spanish Golden Age, by Anthony J. Cascardi (Penn State, 1997) Lesbianism and Homosexuality in Early Modern Spain, edited by Maria-Jose Delgado and Alain Saint-Saens (University Press of the South, 2000) Quixotic Desire: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Cervantes, edited by Diana de Armas Wilson and Ruth Anthony El Saffar (Cornell University Press, 1993)

literature. "This remedies the break that's always existed between Latin American and peninsular studies," says Anne J. Cruz, a professor of Spanish at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who edits the series. "We hope to change the view of the 16th century as an era of discovery and to see it as a time of travel, of back-and-forth between cultures."

Two new journals have been introduced in the field, the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies and the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. The latter will have a special issue on "Spanish nation formation" this spring, bringing Spain into the larger realm of postcolonial studies, which has until now been limited to Britain, France, and the United States.

"We haven't had deep discussions comparing imperial power in early modern Europe," says Alberto Moreiras, one of the executive editors of the journal. "The Spanish and Portuguese empires are undertheorized vis-a-vis the British and the French empires."

As a Latin Americanist, Mr. Moreiras, an associate professor of Romance studies and literature at Duke University, is interested in the writings produced by soldiers and missionaries as they colonized the New World. "There are hundreds of testimonials and narratives that are fascinating and underread," he says. It's unclear whether Spain's leading writers of the time knew many of those texts. But increasingly, scholars of Spanish -- and not just Latin Americanists -- are interested in finding out.

Such change has come in fits and starts. "This is the equivalent of what's happened in Shakespearean studies, but there's still a lot more work to be done," says Ms. Cruz. She and other American scholars complain that their colleagues in Spain remain resistant to social and cultural readings, preferring to work on the sort of philological studies that have fallen out of favor here.

"We still have the volumes coming out with titles like 'Approaches to Golden Age Drama,'" says Margaret Rich Greer, a professor of Romance studies at Duke. She prefers the term "early modern peninsular studies," because it avoids the "problematic ideological charge" of "golden age," a term associated with nationalism, empire, and old notions of a canon of high literature.

"Early modern," she says, better indicates the "transitional nature of the period, and the importance of reading what we now call 'literature' in conjunction with other social discourses and formations."

But Edward H. Friedman, a professor of Spanish and comparative literature at Vanderbilt University, isn't ready to give up on the golden age just yet. "I can still say 'golden age' and still critique certain theological and social norms of the period," he says.

No matter the nomenclature, opening the field to new approaches may be a necessity to scholars of Spanish literature, who find that postcolonial studies attracts more students. Latino students, for example, are drawn to Latin American literature and cultural studies, and tend to view Cervantes and other writers as tools of imperial Spain.

"There has to be a drift toward colonial topics in golden-age studies," explains Diana de Armas Wilson, a professor of English and Renaissance studies at the University of Denver. Graduate students working in the period are interested in the writing produced in the Spanish colonies in the Americas. But Ms. Wilson is among the scholars trying to circumvent an us-versus-them scenario by calling for a "transatlantic" literary study, reading Spanish texts in relation to the New World.

"Far more than criticism has acknowledged, Cervantes's novels come into being in the age of, and under the sign of, imperial Spain," she writes in Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, her new book.

Evidence of cross-cultural contact is present in Don Quixote de la Mancha. But scholars also find such evidence in Cervantes's far less well-known The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, published posthumously in 1617.

Once derided as a romance, the book has become to Spanish-literature scholars what The Tempest is for their counterparts in British literature: an ideal text for discussing colonialism. Like Don Quixote, Persiles is long, rambling, and episodic, journeying from northern Iceland to Rome. "It's multilingual, multicultural, it has a huge geographical sprawl," says Ms. Wilson.

The novel opens on a "barbaric" isle that has many of the hallmarks of a Caribbean island, she says. "There's a lot in the Persiles that points to the New World. There's linguistic hybridity, including the use of certain Caribbean words. And there's cannibalism -- cannibalism is a very New World phenomenon."

Her book finds similar clues in Don Quixote, whose title character she considers a subtle satire of the conquistador figure.

She spends a chapter reading that novel in relation to the colonial-war epic La Araucana, a narrative poem by Alonso de Ercilla about Spain's conquest of Chile. In one famous scene in Cervantes's book, inquisitors burn some of the books in Don Quixote's library but leave Ercilla's volume untouched, pronouncing it "one of the richest jewels" of Spanish poetry. "I think this shows Cervantes held the book in high esteem," Ms. Wilson says. "He wants us to engage with this epic, to learn about Spain's project of domination in Chile, which was met with great resistance."

Economics is the theme in Don Quixote that deserves more attention, argues Carroll B. Johnson, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California at Los Angeles.

In Cervantes and the Material World, he reads the novelist in relation to the shift from feudal to market capitalism, using insights gleaned from the work of European historians and anthropologists. "This work has always been available for us to incorporate into our own investigations," he writes, "but for various reasons we have been on the whole loath to do so."

At key points in the novel, Cervantes makes clear that the rules of commerce have equaled or surpassed in importance the codes of chivalry. The author underscores the tensions between personal loyalty and economic reality in chronicling the shifting relationship between Don Quixote and his loyal sidekick, Sancho Panza, Mr. Johnson argues. In the novel's second half, Sancho's push for a salary calls into question the men's personal bond, not to mention the feudal system itself, which demands reciprocal agreements between lord and vassal.

"Sancho quickly comes to realize that changing the economics of the relationship would undo its fundamental human dimension, and he decides that being with Don Quixote is more important than his economic self-interest," Mr. Johnson said at the M.L.A. conference, in a paper drawn from his book. Even so, as the novel progresses, Sancho continues to want to strike a new deal with Don Quixote. Their relationship, as well as those between other key characters, can be worked out only through an "economic synthesis," Mr. Johnson said.

A leader among Cervantes scholars, Mr. Johnson is an eminence in the field. But younger scholars, too, continue to write about Don Quixote, equipped with up-to-the-minute tools, like gender theory and queer theory, from graduate school.

At the M.L.A., William Childers, an assistant professor of Spanish at Southwestern University, in Georgetown, Tex., challenged interpretations of Cervantes that characterize him as conservative. His argument focused on the depiction of a pilgrimage in Persiles.

Some scholars have read the novel as a subtle endorsement of the Counter Reformation within the Roman Catholic Church. Antonio de Villasenor, a Spanish character who travels to far-flung countries but always returns home, marries a foreigner -- a so-called barbarian woman, whom Cervantes may have modeled on an American Indian -- and converts her to Christianity. But Mr. Childers pointed out that Quintanar, the town where Antonio ends up, was well known as home to various ethnic groups, including a large cohort of Jews hiding their faith. The most famous man in town was a Moor -- named Antonio.

Cervantes "creates an image of this town as a utopian possibility for Spain -- a place of harmonious convergence between a Christian Spaniard, an Amerindian, but also Jews and Moors," the scholar said.

In another paper, Jose R. Cartagena-Calderon, a lecturer in the Spanish department at Stanford University, took on that most cherished of Spanish traits, machismo. He compared Cervantes with Lope de Vega and concluded that the author of Don Quixote is much more willing to deconstruct, not celebrate, macho masculinity.

"Don Quixote is a book that is, among other things, about anxious masculinities in 17th-century Spain," the professor explained. "It parodies the ways in which early modern Spanish authors, like Lope de Vega, tried to imagine heroic and imperial masculinities in a time when the warrior ethos was in crisis."

Expect more such readings. According to Mr. Cartagena-Calderon, three other current Ph.D. dissertations discuss masculinity in what is rapidly becoming a different-looking "golden age."

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