Content area
Full Text
IN HIS PROLOGUE TO the Novelas ejemplares, Miguel de Cervantes says of the short stories in this collection first published in 1613: "Heles dado nombre de ejemplares, y si bien lo miras, no hay ninguna de quien no se pueda sacar algún ejemplo provechoso" (1: 52). Following that explicit statement, and given the difficulties in finding clear ethical or moral principles relatable to today's readers in many of the storylines, the word 'exemplary' is here perhaps best read as it was defined by Cervantes's contemporary Sebastián de Covarrubias: "el original," that is, the first, as Cervantes himself states with pride of the collected novelas: "son mías propias, no imitadas ni hurtadas; mi ingenio las engendró, y las parió mi pluma [...] yo soy el primero que he novelado en lengua castellana" (1: 52).1 In what follows, I do not seek to redeem the plot messaging of "La fuerza de la sangre" on contemporary ethical or moral terms. The list of those who have done so is long and impressive,2 but those readings have taken seriously the story's plot, imagery and symbolism, with little to no regard paid to the underground, tongue-in-cheek humor of the novela, one that can be said to take the form of a deliberate structural irony. Cervantes's use of excessive imagery and symbolism leads his reader to a state of obsessive stupor over the oddities of a plot that just does not satisfy absent a deeper meaning. Like his character Leocadia, the reader feels tweaked and faint in the face of such abundance but unlike her, that reader does not awaken suddenly aware of truths beyond his or her years. To the contrary, s/he tends to remain obsessed over the symbols and images. I propose that the awaited light of understanding might just be found in the two most enigmatic details of the plot: Leocadia's bursts of wisdom, and her inexplicable, repentine smittenness with Rodolfo. Both of those aspects of the story can be linked to philosophical imagery regarding Neoplatonic transcendence and in what follows, I will study how Cervantes creatively adapts and terrestrially re-purposes that imagery. My goal is to highlight the structural irony in his narrative exemplarity, still reading that last term to mean innovation or originality. In 1597, Francis...