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Imperial Incentives and Individual Allegiances in Juan Antonio Correa's La pérdida y restauración de Bahía de Todos los Santos

2015; Routledge; Volume: 93; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14753820.2014.985090

1478-3428

Matthew Stroud,

Political theory and Gramsci

AbstractJuan Antonio Correa's La pérdida y restauración de Bahía de Todos los Santos, written primarily to celebrate the successful recapture in 1625 of an important American colony from the Dutch and their allies, invites an investigation into why and how human beings can be motivated to support people and institutions that not only do not directly benefit them but may in fact operate in ways that are unfavourable to their own lives and causes. Informed by the political writings of Antonio Gramsci and Paulo Freire and the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, this study explores the various reasons why the Portuguese, the Brazilian colonists, and even the voiceless ‘negros’ would choose to fight in support of the Spanish Empire, while, on the other hand, French and English, both Catholics and Protestants, would opt to aid the Dutch. By including two love triangles as subplots within the main action that dramatizes the loss and recovery of the Bahia, Brazil, Correa has produced not only an entertaining play but an insightful study into the ways that empires operate, employing direct military force as well as various personal incentives and societal inducements, in order to motivate the populations they have subjugated into acceptance of their subservient role and even into lending active support to the political powers that govern and control them.Keywords: Juan Antonio CorreaLa pérdida y restauración de Bahía de Todos los Santoscomediaempirecolonial historyJacques LacanPaulo FreireAntonio Gramsci Notes1 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. & trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg & Antonio Callari, 2 vols (New York: Columbia U. P., 1992–96), II, 240.2 For a more detailed account of the loss and retaking of Bahia, as well as insight into the importance of the victory to the prestige of Felipe IV and the union of Spain and Portugal, see Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, ‘Observaciones preliminaries: III—El Brasil restituido’, in Obras de Lope de Vega, ed. & estudio preliminar de Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, 33 vols (Madrid: [reprint] Atlas, 1963–1972), XXVIII (1970), BAE 233, 24–32.3 It is the complexity of this multi-layered plot structure, which provides greater insight into the interplay of various competing incentives and motivations, that inspired this study of Correa's play in preference to Lope's, which, while much better known, reads much more like a straightforward news report combined with a degree of pro-monarchy pageantry.4 António Henrique R. de Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal, Volume 1: From Lusitania to Empire (New York: Columbia U. P., 1972), 323; Anna Klobucka, The Portuguese Nun: Formation of a National Myth (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 2000), 70.5 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. Buttigieg & Callari, II, 179–80.6 See, by way of example, I, 707 and II, 444, in Juan Antonio Correa, La pérdida y restauración de la Bahía de Todos los Santos, ed. & intro. de J. Carlos Lisboa, in Uma peça desconhecida sôbre os holandeses na Bahia (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Nacional do Livro, 1961), 6–70. All references are to this edition and are given in the text, in the form of Act number, followed by the line number.7 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. Buttigieg & Callari, II, 91.8 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos, with a Foreword by Richard Shaull (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 51.9 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. Buttigieg & Callari, II, 184.10 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Bergman Ramos, 49.11 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Bergman Ramos, 150.12 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Bergman Ramos, 134.13 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Bergman Ramos, 47.14 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. Buttigieg & Callari, II, 21.15 The silence and invisibility of the ‘negros’ in the play seem to be a clear example of Freire's ‘ “culture of silence” of the dispossessed’, as it is described by Richard Shaull (see his ‘Foreword’, in Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans Bergman Ramos, 10). In a very real way, this lack of noticeable presence appears to support, in racial terms, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's famous dictum, ‘The subaltern cannot speak’ (‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams & Laura Chrisman [New York: Columbia U. P., 1994], 104; see also Bruce R. Burningham, Tilting Cervantes: Baroque Reflections on Postmodern Culture [Nashville: Vanderbilt U. P., 2008], 15). Frustrating as it may appear to be, this presentation of the ‘other’ is, perhaps, a more enlightened one than what Lope offers us in El Brasil restituido (Obras de Lope de Vega, ed. Menéndez Pelayo, XXVIII, 257–96), a play that selects both traitorous conversos and capricious indigenous peoples for condemnation (see especially 260a–62b, 267a–68a, 291a, 295b).16 For specific references to those aspects of the symbolic noted here, see Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 11, 24, 26–27, 42, 43, 60–61, 64–68, 80–82, 106, 124–27, 140–44, 148, 150, 155–58, 164–67, 172–73, 193–99, 232–34, 263–65, 281–82, 284–91, 296, 302–24; and Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953–54, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988), 69, 83–87, 102, 134, 140–42, 146, 155–57, 166, 171, 179, 185–86, 194, 217, 221, 222–23, 228, 242, 255, 262–65, 271–72, 276–77. For an overview of the symbolic register in the context of a study of the comedia, see Matthew D. Stroud, The Play in the Mirror: Lacanian Perspectives on Spanish Baroque Theater (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 1996), 31–39, 49–50, 57–59, 63, 65–71, 107–09, 113–15, 126–29, 138, 181, 185–88, 215–29.17 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. Buttigieg & Callari, I, 153. Freire likewise discusses the political and economic ‘myths’ necessary to the successful subjugation of one people by another: that ‘the oppressive order is a “free society”’ marked by equality among people who are ‘free to work where they wish’ and that anyone willing to work hard can attain success as an entrepreneur; that this society of equals includes industrious ‘dominant elites’ who, by virtue of their ‘charity and generosity’ work to ‘promote the advancement’ of the lazy, dishonest, and naturally inferior people who, in gratitude, ‘should accept the words of the elites and be conformed to them’; and that ‘rebellion is a sin against God’ (Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Bergman Ramos, 135–36).18 Juan R. Lodares, ‘Languages, Catholicism, and Power in the Hispanic Empire (1500–1770)’, trans. Gerardo Garza & Kenya C. Dworkin y Méndez, in Spanish and Empire, ed. Nelsy Echávez-Solano & Kenya C. Dworkin y Méndez (Nashville: Vanderbilt U. P., 2007), 3–9, 12–19.19 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Bergman Ramos, 31.20 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Bergman Ramos, 49.21 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Bergman Ramos, 30. Further on in the work, Freire reports that during a takeover of an estate by armed peasants, no peasant was willing to stand guard over their former overlord. He ascribes this timidity to ‘guilt feelings’ or to an assimilative process by which the oppressed perceived that ‘the boss was “inside” them’ (50–51).22 See Paul Bloom, ‘The Moral Life of Babies,’ New York Times Magazine, 9 May 2010, p. MM44, (accessed 2 October 2012).23 While specific members of the Iberian alliance are indeed described as Portuguese (Diego de Mendoza, Francisco de Mora, Manuel de Meneses and María and Daphne, the two women who play important roles in the amorous subplots) or Italian (the Marqués de Torrecuso, the sergeant-major), those without a clearly identified national identity are assumed to be Spanish.24 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Bergman Ramos, 144.25 B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 28.26 The military command structure makes even more evident and effective Freire's assertions that ‘[b]y means of manipulation, the dominant elites try to conform the masses to their objectives’, and that ‘[m]anipulation, like the conquest whose objectives it serves, attempts to anesthetize the people so they will not think’ (Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Bergman Ramos, 144, 146).27 For specific references to those aspects of the imaginary noted here, see Lacan, Écrits, trans. Sheridan, 2, 4–7, 10, 15, 17–18, 20–21, 23, 45, 70, 80, 134, 137–39, 191–98, 233, 296, 302–24; Lacan, The Seminar I, ed. Miller, 52–53, 62–63, 68–69, 76–80, 86, 102, 109, 115–16, 122–26, 137, 139–42, 146–49, 153, 167, 169–72, 176–77, 194, 217, 222–23, 271, 276–77, 281–82. For an overview of the imaginary register in the context of a study of the Comedia, see Stroud, The Play in the Mirror, 28–31, 37–39, 49–50, 57–59, 65–71, 107–09, 113–15, 128–29, 185–88, 215–19.28 See René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 1977), 145; see also Lacan, Seminar I, ed. Miller, 147, 170, 176–77; Stroud, The Play in the Mirror, 29–30.29 Burningham, Tilting Cervantes, 10. Burningham primarily focuses here on historical plays that recount the precarious and often uncertain future of the Spanish state during the Reconquista. Such plays remind their audiences[…] that there was a time when the nation was very much under siege, when there still existed the very real threat of complete cultural dissolution at the hands of an enemy who very much wanted to destroy everything the nation valued and stood for. (Burningham, Tilting Cervantes, 30)More contemporaneous threats, such as those posed by competing nations (England, France, The Netherlands) and religions (Protestantism, Islam), served as potent motivations for the disparate components of the empire to rally to the cause of its defence.30 Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 45–47.31 Although this term per se is not mentioned in Correa's play, its currency is made clear by the title of the book by Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses, Primera parte de la historia de d. Felipe el IIII, Rey de las Españas (Lisboa: Pedro Craesbeeck, 1631).32 The Portuguese King Sebastião died in his attempt to conquer Morocco in 1578, was succeeded by his great-uncle, Cardinal Henry, who died two years later having produced no heir and having failed to establish a Council of Regency to appoint a successor. The closest living relative with a claim to the throne was the Habsburg king of Spain, Felipe II.33 Lisa Voigt, Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2009), 209.34 Carlos Ziller Camenietzki & Gianriccardo Grassia Pastore, ‘1625, Fire and Ink: The Battle of Salvador in Accounts of the War’, trans. Eoin O'Neill, Topoi: Revista de História, 2 (2006), n.p., (accessed 2 October 2012). For the original version in Portuguese, titled ‘1625, o Fogo e a Tinta: a batalha de Salvador nos relatos de guerra’, see Topoi: Revista de História, 6:11 (2005), 261–88 (pp. 262, 281–82).35 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. Buttigieg & Callari, II, 237, 239.36 This conflicted idea of the strength and failure of Portugal in its relationship with Spain and the Habsburg monarchy perhaps hints at tensions between the two Iberian powers and foreshadows the Portuguese rebellion against Felipe IV in 1640 in which Portugal re-established its independence, thus depriving Spain of the coveted colony of Brazil for good.37 The House of Orange, created only in the sixteenth century, was considered to be of significantly less stature than the Bourbons or the Stuarts. As it turned out, the Dutch Stadhouder, Maurits van Oranje, died on 23 April 1625, just eight days before Bahia was reclaimed by the Iberian alliance.38 One irony is that if Spain had been able to defeat the Dutch in their struggle for independence and put down the Portuguese rebellion of 1640, Bahia would never have been lost to Spain and the battle would have been reduced to an internal fight over which Spanish dependency would administer it.39 Interestingly, despite such words of rejection, Daphne goes on to say that she might give him what he wants if he were Catholic and he married her (II, 905–07), which indicates that for Daphne, at least at some level, love matters less than her honour and allegiance to her faith, which are paramount.40 A similar opinion was expressed earlier in the play when Coprani told Faro that one should not kill the vanquished; ‘antes es mayor grandeza / dexar que con vida salga’ (II, 424–25). These attitudes reveal that class, too, is definitely an influence here. Those who are elites have more in common with the elites in other societies than they do with the subordinate populations in their own society. In military terms, this can mean that in a conflict officers, especially, respect and feel a special kinship with the officers on the opposing side, offering them the honour and courtesy seen to be due to their rank and nobility, even when to accord such privileged treatment to their opponents seems to run counter to the overall military mission concerned and the wishes of those on their own side of lower rank.41 See Lisboa, Uma peça desconhecida, ‘Introdução’, xiv, xx.