Sancho Panza and the Islas Inútiles: A Tortuous Fable of Power

• Laguna, Ana María. ^[1]
  1. [1] Rutgers University–Camden

     Rutgers University–Camden

     City of Camden, Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, ISSN-e 0277-6995, Vol. 41, Nº. 2, 2021, págs. 107-131
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • If, as Julia D'Onofrio and Adrián Sáez have shown, emblematic representations of the eagle dropping the turtle had become a customary and cautionary illustration of social and political transgressors in the 1500s and 1600s (see figures 1 and 2), by the turn of the century-as I explore in the last section of this essay-the turtle symbol had started to produce other political parables and maxims, like the festina lente, which revered the galápago as the essence of a thoughtful and effective authority. The Barataría episode not only parodies Machiavelli's or Giovanni Botero's advocation of ruthless authority, but also draws attention to their polar opposite, genres like the avisos de príncipes that sought to educate a prince or ruler by stirring him towards the Christian, "virtuous" exercise of authority (Cascardi 1:35-37). Critics like Angelo Di Salvo, Susan Byrne, Anthony Cascardi, and Horacio Chiong Rivero have seen in Quixote's advice to Sancho (and in Sancho's improbable execution of that advice) an endorsement of the moral attributes expected from that Christian, princely ideal.4 Diana de Armas Wilson has issued a word of caution against the purely Peninsular terms of these political, ethical, and allegorical considerations, which in her view leave aside the penetrating and parodic transatlantic elements of Cervantes's story. The symbolic edifice of chivalry is clearly central to Sancho's experience as a governor, not only because his monetary aspirations resonate with those of the conquistadors, but also because-as de Armas Wilson, Raúl Porras Barrenchea, and Leonard Irving have argued-his appointment as a governor responds to the political structure that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continued to reward crude feats of conquest with the distribution of spoils (territories).5 This important realization allows us to wonder not only about "the practical implications of a political system in which a battle-hardened soldier like Cortés would end up as governor over his conquered subjects" (Gilbert-Santamaría 17), but also Cervantes's view of such a system.