Skepticism and the Novelas Ejemplares
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Cervantes, Premeditated Philosopher: Skepticism and the Novelas ejemplares Kátia B. Sherman Charlottesville, Virginia Cervantes, Premeditated Philosopher: Skepticism and the Novelas ejemplares Kátia B. Sherman Charlottesville, Virginia B.M., Oberlin College, 1992 M.M., Oberlin College, 1994 M.A., University of Virginia, 2010 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese University of Virginia May 2014 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction _________________________________________________________________ 1 Chapter One Questions of Knowledge and Identity: The Problem of the Criterion in “La gitanilla” and “La ilustre fregona”__________________________________________________21 Chapter Two Ungodly Miracle or Holy Rape: Irony and the Rule of Faith in “La fuerza de la sangre” _________________________________________________65 Chapter Three Dogs, Witches, and the Imagination: The Maker’s Knowledge Argument in “El coloquio de los perros” ______________________________________________116 Chapter Four Skepticism, Eutrapelia, and the Erring Exemplar: Cues and Questions in the “Prólogo al lector” _____________________________________________________164 Conclusion ________________________________________________________________199 Bibliography_______________________________________________________________203 1 INTRODUCTION This dissertation brings together two of the most heavily commented cultural entities of Early Modern Spain: skepticism and Miguel de Cervantes. To my knowledge, the sole published work to date that has aimed specifically at tracing and establishing this connection is Maureen Ihrie’s study of 1982, Skepticism in Cervantes, although a vast amount of criticism has addressed, in one way or another, what I see as a clear and fundamental association. While Ihrie’s focus is on exposing Cervantes’ engagement with skepticism mainly through Don Quijote and the Persiles, I have chosen to center my study on five of the Novelas ejemplares: “La gitanilla,” “La fuerza de la sangre,” “La ilustre fregona,” and the pair “El casamiento engañoso” and “El coloquio de los perros.” I intend to show that their very exemplarity is inextricably tied to the systematic involvement with skepticism displayed in their structure. By providing a juxtaposition of the conclusion of these works against the epistemic anatomy created in their development, I will argue that the Novelas ejemplares – with their often disguised immorality, their frequently covert display of unethical, unlawful, and hypocritical behavior, and their transparent and yet ambiguous simulation of harmonious conclusions – actually point to a dialogical experiment in which Christianity meets with and diverges from a variety of skeptical attitudes and arguments prominent in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As a result of this dialogue, which signals a sustained and controlled engagement with skepticism, Cervantes questions knowledge and the various means of acquiring it, challenges the delicate tenets of society’s belief systems, and exposes the uncertainties of the individual’s position within the larger conformation of things. What Ihrie pointed out in 1982, that “classical skeptical philosophy has suffered more than its fair share of misinterpretations through the years” (13), may be as applicable to 2 contemporary criticism as it may have been to those who engaged with these ideas during Cervantes’ time, such was the wealth of contributions that several generations of humanists throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, within and outside Spain, have made to further explain, adapt, and amend this philosophy. In fact, to refer to skepticism purely as a philosophy when considering peninsular Early Modernity, as Jeremy Robbins asserts, may in itself constitute a misguided assumption, for what for some was a codified set of logical challenges that aimed, through the stipulation of certain criteria of establishing knowledge, at questioning the viability of all conceived truths, for others represented a more general epistemological mentality and attitude that penetrated all aspects of life. As Robbins affirms, “Scepticism . forms a vital part of the intellectual environment in which seventeenth-century Spanish preoccupations with knowledge and perception were formed; it shaped the nature of those preoccupations, the terminology and rhetoric used to express them, and the solutions created to address them” (Arts of Perception 21). Robbins later explains the relative lack of interest of seventeenth-century authors in discerning between the Academic and Pyrrhonian varieties of skepticism: “The philosophical specifics of each position are rarely discussed, and when they are addressed, it is somewhat superficially. This fact should not conceal the importance of the challenge of scepticism, for it became a general intellectual stance, rather than a specific and nuanced philosophical position, toward knowledge” (26). A glance at the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century fictional literature of Spain, regardless of genre and whether or not restricted to the most seminal names – Cervantes, Quevedo, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca – readily validates Robbins’ position. Yet, the verifiable presence of a “general intellectual stance” does not necessarily constitute an absence of a direct engagement with specific ideas nor does it point to a reluctance to engage in a 3 systematic dialogue with particular thinkers and texts. The chapters that follow will strive to illustrate this dialogue as observed between Cervantes in his Novelas ejemplares and the philosophy of skepticism, particularly as articulated by its most notable sixteenth-century adept, Michel de Montaigne. Skeptical views and their codification into the philosophy of skepticism, according to Richard Popkin’s painstaking explanation, came about during the Hellenistic period as a response to the dogmatism of philosophers “who asserted that [they] knew some truth about the real nature of things” (xvii). Both the Academic and Pyrrhonian varieties of skepticism deny the possibility of this knowledge, the former trying to “show [that] the information we gain by means of our senses may be unreliable . and that we possess no guaranteed criterion or standard for determining which of our judgments is true or false,” while the latter, perceiving the positivist implication of this proposition and asserting that no proposition can be fully verifiable, concludes that all propositions “would not deserve the name of knowledge but only that of opinion” (xviii).1 By accepting that true, final knowledge may or may not be available to human kind, the Pyrrhonian skeptic developed an attitude, or rather a skill, in which she refrained from committing to any proposition, and hence fostered a mental behavior that accommodated a total suspension of judgment. This non-committal approach to interpreting reality, or this equipollence, in turn, led to a state of mind known as ataraxia: “quietude or unperturbedness, in which the sceptic was no longer concerned or worried about matters beyond appearances” (Popkin xix). In reminding us that skepticism “was a cure for dogmatism” (xix), Popkin inadvertently opens the way for a possible association between this thought system, this mental 1 Pyrrhonian skepticism, named after Pyrrho of Elis (c.360-275B.C.E.), has survived largely through the writings of its foremost adept, Sextus Empiricus. According to Richard Popkin, “[t]he Pyrrhonian view was little known in the west until its rediscovery in the late fifteenth century, and the Academic view was mainly known and considered in terms of Saint Augustine’s treatment of it” (xix). 4 attitude, and the thoughts and attitudes that may have led socially engaged authors like Cervantes to apply skepticism as a critical cure for the dogmatic evils of his society. Unperturbedness, nonetheless, is hardly a term one easily associates with the tensions revealed in the Novelas ejemplares. The contradictions and the questioning of realities begin already in the preliminary joining of text and method. After all, narratives, texts, words, concepts are all meant to communicate, and they do so by dogmatically asserting through the postulating nature of language. What better way could there be to elicit the reevaluation of a reader’s hermeneutics and understanding of reality than to question the validity of her very interpretative tools? Popkin is careful to establish the link between skeptical ideas and methods, and primarily those concerning Pyrrhonian skepticism, as the intellectual basis for the Protestant Reformation. He recognizes that “it may seem strange at first to read that the skeptics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted, almost unanimously, that they were sincere believers of the Christian religion” (xxi). Without going into detail about the specific links between skepticism and the Reformation, it may be useful to reestablish that the main complaint of the reformers was centered, as Popkin puts it, “in the conflict between the criteria of religious knowledge of the Church and of the rebels and reformers” (4). For Luther, religious knowledge and, moreover, religious truth, consisted in “that which conscience is compelled to believe on reading Scripture” (Popkin 5). For the Catholic authorities, on the other hand, the criteria used to establish religious knowledge resided in that “religious propositions [be]