Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Hamartia in Cervantes' La Numancia

2004; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

2165-7599

Jane Tar,

Early Modern Spanish Literature

DURING the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sieges were endemic to the chaotic socio-political and religious upheavals taking place in Western and Eastern Europe. Indeed, the physical reality of the siege, coupled with its topos in classical and medieval works, served to stimulate a substantial and diverse body of literature on the subject. Furthermore, while the siege underscored individual methods of appropriating prior literary models, it also reflected a contemporary consciousness preoccupied with civic or national trials. In France, Montaigne devoted several of his earlier essays to the ethics and tactics involved in siege warfare. And in Spain, the nation that all too frequently took on the role of Imperial besieger, victorious sieges were reworked for the stage. Among these may be found Lope de Vega's El asalto de Mastrique and Calderon de la Barca's El sitio de Breda. Yet of all the siege plays produced in the Golden Age, the one which records a Spanish defeat is most well-known. The reference is, of course, to Cervantes' tragic drama, La Numancia. Based on the collective suicide of the Celtiberian city while under siege by the Romans in 133 B.C., the event is historically remote. As such it could support a philosophical freedom that otherwise may not have been allowed in a play based wholly on current events. As scholars have demonstrated, La Numancia may be read either as a paean to Spain's imperial policy or as an implicit critique of it (Johnson 75-90; King 200-221). In my analysis, I intend to examine how the drama is further complicated by Cervantes' treatment of hamartia (i.e. error of judgment). Following the dialogical nature of the political critique mentioned above, I will further argue that Cervantes suggests a double hamartia, committed by both Scipio, the antagonist, and the Numantine governing body. But it may be difficult to show that Numancia suffers a fall through some hamartia, if one prefers to sustain a strongly implied moral reading of the play in which Numancia's impeccability or their right to wage a just war would be at stake. Instead, I will rely on the Aristotelian sense of the term that, according to John Jones, must exclude any strong implication of moral fault or shortcoming (15). Hence, it can be posited that the double hamartia evidenced in La Numancia adds tension to the play, in that the errors emphasize, not a moral side effect, but rather the complicity of practical lived experience and the mutability of the human situation. For despite the Golden Age theoretical treatises that translated hamartia as pecado in the moral sense, Cervantes, like many other Spanish playwrights, did not necessarily limit his creativity or his philosophy to those literary prescriptions he might have come across. In the sixteenth year of the siege of Numancia, a watershed is reached from which a decisive drama unfolds. Amidst the death and decadence of the Roman side, a great leader appears--Scipio Africanus, whose epithet was acquired at the expense of Carthage. Scipio has been ordered to contain and re-subjugate a rebellious populace. From the Roman camp arise exhortations to virtue, discipline and fortitude, while within the city walls of Numancia an inarticulate fear is nascent, suppressed by only the dire need of hope in such a time. The impending catastrophe recalls a crisis already experienced. An economic yoke, expressed metaphorically by a Numantine ambassador, constituted the city's first crisis. In a parley with Scipio he explains: Pusieron tan gran yugo a nuestros cuellos,/que forzados salimos del. (v. 247-248). Yet Numancia's escape from one kind of yoke has resulted in only another--their city under military siege. Until Scipio's appearance, Numancia had been able to stave off repeated attacks. But the tide has changed with his arrival. Although Numancia's rhetoric indicates that they are in as strong position as Rome at this point, a critique of their rhetoric would suggest otherwise. …