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Between Picaresque and Historical Novel: Questions of Identity, Social Criticism and Persecution in 1492: Vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón de Castilla by Homero Aridjis

2023; Routledge; Volume: 100; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14753820.2023.2218161

1478-3428

Andrea Hepworth,

Early Modern Spanish Literature

AbstractThis article analyses Mexican poet Homero Aridjis' 1985 novel 1492: Vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón de Castilla, set in Spain between 1391 and 1492 during a time of increased persecution and the subsequent expulsion of the Sephardic Jews, narrated by the converso Juan Cabezón. It examines questions of identity, Otherness and social criticism through the lens of the 'poética comprometida de la picaresca' and highlights the continued contemporary significance of these topics in the twenty-first century.Key Words:: Cultural Identity1492 Expulsion of Sephardic JewsHistorical novelHomero AridjisMedieval SpainMexicoOthernessPicaresque Notes1 Homero Aridjis, 1492: Vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón de Castilla (México D.F.: Siglo XXI Editores, 1985), 196. Further references are to this edition and will be given in parentheses in the main text.2 The terms 'Sephardic Jews', or 'Sephardim' in this article refer to descendants of Jews who lived on the Iberian Peninsula before the 1492 expulsion.3 See 'UNHCR: Global Displacement Hits Another Record, Capping Decade-Long Rising Trend', UNHCR.org, 16 June 2022, n.p., (accessed 27 September 2022).4 Barbara Fuchs, Knowing Fictions: Picaresque Reading in the Early Modern Hispanic World (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 138.5 Homero Aridjis, 'Autorretrato a los ochenta años', Letras Libres, 6 April 2020, n.p.; available online at (accessed 14 September 2022).6 Antonio Rey Hazas, 'Poética comprometida de la novela picaresca', Nuevo Hispanismo, 1 (1982), 55–76.7 Homero Aridjis, Memorias del nuevo mundo (México D.F.: Editorial Diana, 1988). Further references are to this edition and will be given in parentheses in the main text.8 In over thirty-five years, few scholars have analysed these novels in depth. In addition to the critical sources discussed below, further noteworthy contributions on 1492 are: Susana Beatriz Cella, 'Una heterología por plenitud. Acerca de El Entenado de Juan José Saer y 1492 Vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón de Castilla de Homero Aridjis', Literatura Mexicana, 2:2 (1991), 455–61; Lanin A. Gyurko, 'Persecution and Deliverance in Aridjis' 1492: Vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón de Castilla', in Studies in Honor of Denah Lida, ed. Mary G. Berg & Lanin A. Gyurko (Potomac: Scripta Humanistica, 2005), 351–65; Magdalena Perkowska, Historias híbridas: la nueva novela histórica latinoamericana (1985–2000) ante las teorías posmodernas de la historia (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2008), especially Chapter 2; and Susana Zanetti, '¿Y ahora qué será de nosotros sin los bárbaros? Lectura de "1492" de Homero Aridjis', in Columbus zwischen zwei Welten: Historische und literarische Wertungen aus fünf Jahrhunderten, ed. Titus Heydenreich (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 1992), 945–58. Focused on Memorias is Dolores Liamas, 'Magia y realismo en la novela histórica', in La nueva novela histórica hispanoamericana, ed. Hubertus Hermans & Maarten Steenmeijer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991), 41–48; and critical work analysing both novels includes: Victoria E. Campos, 'Twentieth-Century Debates on Mexican History and the Juan Cabezón Novels of Homero Aridjis', Doctoral dissertation (Princeton University, 1996); and sections in Carolina Pizarro Cortés, Nuevos cronistas de Indias: historia y liberación en la narrativa latinoamericana contemporánea (Santiago de Chile: Univ. de Santiago de Chile, 2015).9 María Coira, La serpiente y el nopal: historia y ficción en la novelística mexicana de los 80 (Mérida: El Otro el Mismo, 2009), 257.10 For expedience I will mostly use the term 'Spain' when referring to Juan Cabezón's travels throughout the Iberian Peninsula, despite—as is common knowledge—'Spain', not existing as such in the fifteenth century.11 It has been argued that Aridjis' El señor de los últimos días: visiones del año mil (Barcelona: Edhasa, 1994)—set in the year 1000 in a Spain divided between Christian kingdoms in the North and Arab rule in the South amid apocalyptic predictions about the end of time—forms a trilogy with 1492 and Memorias. See Juan Manuel Lacalle, 'Del otro lado de la hoguera: una mirada crítica de la Inquisición a partir de 1492. Vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón de Castilla, de Homero Aridjis', in Magia, brujería, Inquisición, ed. Antonio Huertas Morales, Storyca. Monografías de Aula Medieval, 10 (2019), 47–63 (pp. 49–50); Giuseppe Bellini, I tempi dell'Apocalisse. L'opera di Homero Aridjis (Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 1994), 34–35. Other scholars discuss the influence of some of Aridjis' poems on the novels. Ilan Stavans suggests that his 1990 poem 'Sefarad, 1492' is 'an aleph of sorts, whose images are augmented […] in the novel' (Ilan Stavans, 'Introduction', in Homero Aridjis, 1492: The Life and Times of Juan Cabezón of Castile, trans. Betty Ferber, with an intro. by Ilan Stavans [Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2003], 1–10 [p. 10]). Other poems such as 'Quemar las naves' and 'La matanza en el templo mayor' (both 1975) are discussed as precursors to Memorias in Aníbal Salazar Anglada, 'Juan Cabezón en tierras de América. Memorias del Nuevo Mundo de Homero Aridjis: génesis, antecedentes, proyecciones', Nuevas de Indias. Anuario del CEAC, 4 (2019), 112–62 (pp. 128–29).12 Contrary to Castro's position that Spanish culture was formed by the meeting of the three religions, Sánchez Albornoz opposed the notion of a formative influence of Jewish and Muslim culture on Spanish identity. Inversely, he contended that Spanish identity was rooted in the cultural institutions of Roman and Visigothic civilization. See Américo Castro, España en su historia: cristianos, moros y judíos (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1948); and Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, España: un enigma histórico, 2 vols (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1957). It should be noted that the use of convivencia in this article does not imply an idealized intercultural, always peaceful, harmony of coexistence of the three religions from the eighth to the fifteenth century but is rather understood as a period of negotiated tolerance with complex cultural interaction and exchange between religious, social and cultural practices of Muslims, Jews and Christians.13 José María Pérez Fernández, 'Picaresque', Oxford Bibliographies Online, 25 November 2014, n.p., (accessed 27 September 2022).14 Juan Antonio Garrido Ardila, 'Origins and Definition of the Picaresque Genre', in The Picaresque Novel in Western Literature: From the Sixteenth Century to the Neopicaresque, ed. Juan Antonio Garrido Ardila (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2015), 1–23 (p. 2).15 For an informed discussion of the main critical debates, see Juan Antonio Garrido Ardila, El género picaresco en la crítica literaria (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2008). Seminal studies on the picaresque also include Claudio Guillén, Literature As System: Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 2015); Fernando Lázaro Carreter, 'Para una revisión del concepto "novela picaresca" ', in Actas del Tercer Congreso Internacional de Hispanistas, ed. Carlos H. Magis (México D.F.: El Colegio de México, 1970), 27–45; Francisco Rico Manrique, La novela picaresca y el punto de vista (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1970); José Antonio Maravall, La literatura picaresca desde la historia social (siglos XVI y XVII) (Madrid: Taurus, 1986); Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, El concepto de género y la literatura picaresca (Santiago de Compostela: Univ. de Santiago de Compostela, 1992); Maurice Molho, Introducción al pensamiento picaresco, trad. Augusto Gálvez-Cañero y Pidal (Madrid: Anaya, 1972 [1st French ed. 1968]); Ulrich Wicks, 'The Nature of Picaresque Narrative: A Modal Approach', PMLA, 89:2 (1974), 240–49; and Anne J. Cruz, Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1999).16 Guillén, Literature As System, 71; Shelley Godsland, 'The Neopicaresque: The Picaresque Myth in the Twentieth-Century Novel', in The Picaresque Novel in Western Literature, ed. Garrido Ardila, 247–67; Juan Antonio Garrido Ardila, 'Introduction: Transnational Picaresque', in Transnational Picaresque, ed. Juan Antonio Garrido Ardila, Philological Quarterly, 89:1 (2010), 1–11 (pp. 1–2); Timothy G. Compton, Mexican Picaresque Narratives: Periquillo and Kin (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 1997), 12.17 See Molho, Introducción al pensamiento picaresco, trad. Gálvez-Cañero y Pidal, 20–30; Cruz, Discourses of Poverty, 123–25; Guillén, Literature As System, 72–73. The first picaresque with a pícara as protagonist was La pícara Justina (1605) by Francisco López de Úbeda.18 Fernando Lázaro Carreter, 'Lazarillo de Tormes' en la picaresca (Barcelona: Ariel, 1972), 204–05.19 Michel Cavillac, 'El Guzmán de Alfarache ¿Una "novela picaresca"?', Bulletin Hispanique, 106:1 (2004), 161–84 (p. 161).20 Rey Hazas, 'Poética comprometida de la novela picaresca', 57–58.21 Alexander A. Parker, Los pícaros en la literatura: la novela picaresca en España y Europa (1599–1753), trad. Rodolfo Arévalo Mackry (Madrid: Gredos, 1971 [1st English ed. 1967]), 65.22 Garrido Ardila, 'Origins and Definition of the Picaresque Genre', 2.23 James T. Monroe, 'Preliminary Study', in Abu al-Tahir Muhammad Ibn Yusuf al-Tamimi al-Saraqusti, Ibn al-Astarkuwi [Al-Saraqusti], Al-Maqamat Al-Luzumiyah, trans. with a preliminary study by James T. Monroe (Amsterdam: Brill, 2002), 65. For a comprehensive discussion on critical debates on the similarities—and/or lack thereof—of the maqāmāt and the picaresque, see Jareer Abu-Haidar, ' "Maqāmāt" Literature and the Picaresque Novel', Journal of Arabic Literature, 5 (1974), 1–10.24 Monique Dascha Inciarte, 'The Arabic Precursors of the Spanish Picaresque', in Approaches to Teaching 'Lazarillo de Tormes' and the Picaresque Tradition, ed. Anne J. Cruz (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2008), 28–35 (pp. 28–31). For a concise overview on the origins of maqāmāt and their arrival on the Iberian Pensinsula, see Monroe, 'Preliminary Study', in Al-Saraqusti, Al-Maqamat, trans Monroe, 2–17.25 Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (London: Yale U. P., 2014), 159–61.26 Nathan Peterson, 'Picaresque Necessity: Episodic Narrative and Causality in the Long Eighteenth Century', Doctoral dissertation (Rutgers University, 2016), 22.27 Kimberle S. López, Latin American Novels of the Conquest: Reinventing the New World (Columbia/London: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2002), 138–74; Victoria E. Campos, 'Toward a New History: Twentieth-Century Debates in Mexico on Narrating the National Past', in A Twice-Told Tale: Reinventing the Encounter in Iberian/Iberian American Literature and Film, ed. Santiago Juan-Navarro & Theodore Robert Young (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2001), 47–66 (pp. 59–64); and Jane Mushabac, 'Homero Aridjis's Picaresque Novel: A Mexican Non-Jew Writes About Spain's Expulsion of the Jews', Midstream, 54:1 (2006), 33–34 (p. 34).28 Yael Halevi-Wise, 'The Life and Times of the Picaro-Converso from Spain to Latin America', in Sephardism: Spanish Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination, ed. Yael Halevi-Wise (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2012), 143–67 (p. 143).29 Seymour Menton, Latin America's New Historical Novel (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2010), 156.30 Laurence Pagacz, Edenes subvertidos: la obra en prosa de Homero Aridjis (México D.F.: Bonilla Artigas, 2018), 27–31.31 Guillén, Literature As System, 80.32 Jens Elze, Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 6.33 Anon., La vida del Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades, ed. & prólogo de Francisco Abad Nebot (Madrid: Edaf, 2006), 47.34 Marcel Bataillon, Pícaros y picaresca: 'La pícara Justina' (Madrid: Taurus, 1969), 198. Alemán, the author of Guzmán de Alfarache, was a converso; it has long been speculated that the anonymous author of Lazarillo was as well. See Rey Hazas, 'Poética comprometida de la novela picaresca', 57; and Américo Castro, Hacia Cervantes (Madrid: Taurus, 1967), 143–66.35 Fuchs, Knowing Fictions, 1.36 Guillén, Literature As System, 83.37 Pagacz, Edenes subvertidos, 34.38 Rey Hazas, 'Poética comprometida de la novela picaresca', 72.39 Francisco Plata, 'Homero Aridjis', Hispamérica. Revista de Literatura, 104 (2006), 83–92 (p. 87).40 Garrido Ardila, 'Introduction: Transnational Picaresque', 2.41 López, Latin American Novels of the Conquest, 139.42 Menton, Latin America's New Historical Novel, 156.43 Campos, 'Twentieth-Century Debates on Mexican History', 63.44 Homero Aridjis, 'Sefarad, 1492', in his Ojos de otro mirar. Poesía 1960–2001 (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002), 612–17 (p. 613).45 Speculation on Cervantes' converso ancestry and traces of converso and Jewish themes discernible in Don Quixote have been circulating for a while. For a comprehensive discussion of this topic, see Santiago Trancón Pérez, Huellas judías y leonesas en el 'Quijote': redescubrir a Cervantes (Sevilla: Punto Rojo, 2014), 13–27.46 Jeffrey Gorsky, Exiles in Sepharad: The Jewish Millennium in Spain (Lincoln, NE: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2015), 278–79.47 Ricardo Córdoba, 'Culture and Marks of Identity among the Social Outcasts and Criminals of Late Medieval Spain', in Identity in the Middle Ages: Approaches from Southwestern Europe, ed. Flocel Sabaté (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2021), 261–72 (p. 261).48 Guillén, Literature As System, 83.49 Córdoba, 'Culture and Marks of Identity', 262.50 Córdoba, 'Culture and Marks of Identity', 269 & 262.51 Castro, España en su historia, 93.52 Ilan Stavans, 'Introduction: Unity and Dispersion', in The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature, ed. Ilan Stavans (New York: Schocken, 2010), 1–22 (pp. 4–5).53 Stavans, 'Introduction: Unity and Dispersion', 8.54 Stavans, 'Introduction: Unity and Dispersion', 8.55 David Graizbord, 'A Crisis of Judeoconverso Identity and Its Echoes, 1391 to the Present', in Religious Changes and Cultural Transformations in the Early Modern Western Sephardic Communities, ed. Yosef Kaplan (Amsterdam: Brill, 2019), 3–21 (p. 6; original emphasis).56 Rey Hazas, 'Poética comprometida de la novela picaresca', 71–72.57 Joseph Pérez, The Spanish Inquisition (London: Yale U. P., 2005), 104–05.58 Juan Antonio Llorente, Histoire critique de l'Inquisition d'Espagne, trad. Alexis Pellier, 7 vols (Paris/Strasbourg: Treuttel and Würtz, 1817–1818), IV, 252.59 Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 193.60 Between 1609 and 1614, an estimated 300,000 moriscos were expelled from Spain (Kamen, Spanish Inquisition, 227).61 Henry Kamen, Inquisition and Society in Spain in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1985), 12–13.62 The Inquisition was established in 1570 in Peru, a year later in Mexico, and was only abolished in Spain in 1834.63 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London/New York: Routledge, 1988), 110.64 Henry Kamen, A Concise History of Spain (London: Thames, 1973), 57.65 Sergio Della Pergola, 'Oriental Jewry Today—Demographic Table and Analysis', Pe'amim. Studies in Oriental Jewry, 93 (2002), 149–56 (pp. 152–53).66 Yael Halevi-Wise, 'Through the Prism of Sepharad', in Sephardism, ed. Halevi-Wise, 1–32 (pp. 1–3).67 Lanin A. Gyurko, 'Twentieth-Century Fiction', in Mexican Literature: A History, ed. David William Foster (Austin: Univ. of Texas, 2012), 243–304 (pp. 243–46).68 Dalia Kandiyoti, 'Sephardism in Latina Literature', in Sephardism, ed. Halevi-Wise, 235–55 (pp. 248–49).69 His father's story is narrated in Homero Aridjis, Esmirna en llamas (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2013). The novel is mainly set during the 1922 burning of Smyrna and is composed of memories, authentic documents and voices of survivors—a very similar structure to 1492—and also foregrounds atrocities against the Other: in this case the Christian Ottoman Greek (and Armenian) genocide of the 1920s.70 Plata, 'Homero Aridjis', 90–91.71 During his research, Aridjis discovered that the scope of the novel needed to encompass medieval Spain to unravel the key cultural and historical aspects behind the Conquest, hence 1492 and Memorias were conceived. See Thomas Stauder, 'Un coloquio con Homero Aridjis', in La luz que queda en el aire: estudios internacionales en torno a Homero Aridjis, ed. Thomas Stauder (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2005), 60–64 (p. 64).72 In addition to previously discussed scholars, both Gyurko, 'Persecution and Deliverance', and Cella, 'Una heterología por plenitud' classify 1492 as a historical novel.73 Menton, Latin America's New Historical Novel, 27.74 Rebecca Overmyer-Velázquez, 'The Anti-Quincentenary Campaign in Guerrero, Mexico: Indigenous Identity and the Dismantling of the Myth of the Revolution', in Race and Ethnicity in a Global Context, ed. Jaye Cee Whitehead & Greggor Mattson, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 46 (2002), 79–112 (pp. 79–80).75 Menton, Latin America's New Historical Novel, 28.76 Alejo Carpentier, El arpa y la sombra (Madrid: Akal, 1979). Noteworthy also are Abel Posse, Los perros del paraíso (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1983); Manuel Gutiérrez Sousa, El rey de la quimera (Madrid: Carrasco, 1990); Alejandro Paternáin, Crónica del descubrimiento (Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 1992); and Augusto Roa Bastos, Vigilia del Almirante (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1992), among others.77 See Herminio Martínez, Las puertas del mundo (una autobiografía hipócrita del Almirante) (México D.F.: Editorial Diana, 1992). A new edition of Memorias—with support from the Sociedad Estatal Quinto Centenario—was published in 1991 to coincide with the quincentennial.78 See Carlos Fuentes, Cristóbal Nonato (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987); and also his Terra nostra (México D.F.: Editorial Joaquín Moritz, 1975).79 Homero Aridis et al., 'Mesa redonda: papel del escritor en América Latina', Mundo Nuevo, 5 (1966), 25–35 (p. 29).80 Salazar Anglada, 'Juan Cabezón en tierras de América', 113.81 Carlos Fuentes, Ceremonias del alba (México D.F.: Siglo XXI Editores, 1991).82 Fuentes, Ceremonias, 7.83 Mariana Mas Minetti, 'A Victory for the Truth about Mexico's "Dirty War" ', Open Society Justice Initiative, 8 February 2017, n.p., (accessed 30 September 2022).84 Octavio Paz, Posdata (México D.F.: Siglo XXI Editores, 1970), 38.85 Francisco Javier Ordiz, 'Historia, apocalipsis y distopía en la narrativa de Homero Aridjis', Hipertexto, 12 (2010), 3–14 (p. 3).86 Poems written during that time include Octavio Paz, 'México: Olimpiada de 1968', La Cultura en México, 352 (1969), 3; José Emilio Pacheco, 'Lectura de los "cantares mexicanos" ', La Cultura en México, 352 (1969), 6; and Rosario Castellanos, 'Memorial de Tlatelolco' (1968) (printed in her Poesía no eres tú [México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1975], 23–24). Prose includes Paz, Posdata; and a testimonial account published by Elena Poniatowska, La noche de Tlatelolco (México D.F.: Biblioteca Era, 1971), among others.87 Ronald J. Friis, José Emilio Pacheco and the Poets of the Shadows (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 2001), 28–29.88 Pacheco, 'Lectura de los "cantares mexicanos" ', 6.89 Castellanos, Poesía no eres tú, 24.90 Stauder, 'Un coloquio con Homero Aridjis', 63.91 José Faur, In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity (New York: SUNY Press, 1992), 8.92 Halevi-Wise, 'The Life and Times of the Picaro-Converso', 151.93 Renate Lachmann, 'Cultural Memory and the Role of Literature', European Review, 12:2 (2004), 165–78 (p. 165).94 Lachmann, 'Cultural Memory', 172 & 167.* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.