Sounds of Fury: The Aural Poetics of the Voice and Imperial Violence in Cervantes’ Mediterranean

Abstract

Focusing on his ‘Epístola a Mateo Vázquez’, this article studies how Cervantes captured through multiple poetic resources the soundscape of Mediterranean captivity and war. The epistle establishes a series of sonic archetypes that appear with striking persistence in the author’s later literary output, which signals not only the potential presence of trauma but also a nascent critique of heavy artillery. By privileging the auditory, this analysis demonstrates how Cervantes’ lyric voice summons the sonic resonances of fury as both martial and poetic power, compelling readers to contemplate the trans-Mediterranean violence that the Lepanto veteran and captive writer experienced firsthand.

Keywords:

• Miguel de Cervantes / ‘Epístola a Mateo Vázquez’ / sound studies / voice / furor poeticus / captivity / war / violence / trauma / Battle of Lepanto

Notes

1 Pompeo Arnolfini, ‘Lucens Carmen Ioanni Austriaco Victori Dicatum’ (‘A Shining Song for the Victor, John of Austria’) (1572), in The Battle of Lepanto, ed. & trans. Elizabeth R. Wright, Sarah Spence & Andrew Lemons (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 2014), 176–93 (pp. 190–91).

2 On the concept of furor in Cervantes’ writing, see Felipe Valencia, ‘Furor, industria y límites de la palabra poética en La Numancia de Cervantes’, Criticón, 126 (2016), 97–110; and Georges Güntert, ‘Arte y furor en La Numancia’, in Actas del VIII Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas: 22–27 agosto 1983, ed. A. David Kossoff et al., 2 vols (Madrid: Istmo, 1986), I, 671–83.

3 The scope of the present essay does not allow for a sustained examination or precise definition of these complex terms and concepts, some of which correspond with what René Wellek and Austin Warren, in a now classic yet contested study, called ‘orchestration’. See René Wellek & Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (London: Jonathan Cape, 1949), 159–76.

4 Foundational texts include: R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1993); Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999); and, more recently, Niall Atkinson, The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban Life (University Park: The Pennsylvania State U. P., 2016).

5 On the Mediterranean in early modern Spanish poetry, see the special issue of Calíope. Journal of the Society for Renaissance & Baroque Hispanic Poetry, 19:1 (2014), Mare Nostrum? Navigating Mediterranean Crosscurrents in Spanish Poetry, ed. Elizabeth B. Davis & Elizabeth R. Wright.

6 See José Luis Gonzalo Sánchez-Molero, La ‘Epístola a Mateo Vázquez’: historia de una polémica literaria en torno a Cervantes (Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, 2010), which traces in detail the intriguing, circuitous history of the epistle.

7 This would not be the last time that Mateo Vázquez would figure in Cervantes’ writing, as the character of Larsileo in La Galatea is widely believed to be the courtier’s alter ego.

8 Miguel de Cervantes, ‘Epístola a Mateo Vázquez’, in Poesías, ed., con intro., de Adrián J. Sáez (Madrid: Cátedra, 2016), 221–30 (p. 231, ll. 1–6). Further references are to this edition, and page and line numbers will be denoted parenthetically within the main body of the article.

9 Garcilaso de la Vega, Obra poética y textos en prosa, ed., con intro., de Bienvenido Morros (Barcelona: Crítica, 2007), 311, ll. 31–33. The sixth line of both Garcilaso’s ‘Égloga III’ and Cervantes’ ‘Epístola a Mateo Vázquez’ also share very similar language: ‘que por otro camino me desvía’ (Garcilaso, Obra poética, ed. Morros, 309, l. 6) and ‘por estraños caminos desviado’ (Cervantes, ‘Epístola’, 231, l. 6).

10 Miguel de Cervantes, La Galatea, ed., con intro., de Francisco López Estrada & María Teresa López García-Berdoy, 3^rd ed. (Madrid: Cátedra, 2006 [1^st ed. 1995]), 563, ll. 1–4.

11 Juan José Pastor Comín, Cervantes: música y poesía. El hecho musical en el pensamiento lírico cervantino (Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2007), 177–78.

12 Diodorus of Sicily, Diodorus of Sicily in Twelve Volumes, trans. C. H. Oldfather, 12 vols (London: William Heinemann/Cambridge. MA: Harvard U. P., 1967), II, Books II (continued), 35–IV, 58, 273–75.

13 Note, for example, the following lines: ‘mi lengua balbuciente y casi muda / pienso mover en la real presencia, / de adulación y de mentir desnuda’ (‘Epístola', 229, ll. 199–201).

14 Claudio Guillén, ‘Notes Toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter’, in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard U. P., 1986), 70–101 (p. 81).

15 Still useful for understanding orality in Cervantes’ writing is Margit Frenk, Entre la voz y el silencio: la lectura en tiempos de Cervantes (Mexico D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Ecónomica, 2005 [1^st ed. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, 1997]).

16 Guillén, ‘Notes Toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter’, 77.

17 Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London: Routledge, 1981), 158.

18 Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’ (1972), in Image, Music, Text, essays selected & trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 179–89. In an illuminating close reading of the opening sentence of Cervantes’ Persiles y Sigismunda, Sonia Velázquez unearths pointed political implications for this distinction of the voice as speech versus phonic substance. See Sonia Velázquez, ‘Of Poets and Barbarians: Challenging Linguistic Hierarchies in Cervantes’s Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda’, Revista Hispánica Moderna, 67:2 (2014), 205–21.

19 See Carroll C. Pratt, ‘The Spatial Character of High and Low Tones’, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 13:3 (1930), 278–85. For more general examples, consult: Music and Emotion: Theory and Research, ed. Patrik N. Juslin & John A. Sloboda (New York/Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2001); The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology, ed. Susan Hallam, Ian Cross & Michael H. Thaut (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2016 [1^st ed. 2009]).

20 Leo Cabranes-Grant, ‘Poesía y performática: Bakhtin y la “Epístola a Mateo Vázquez” ’, eHumanista: Journal of Iberian Studies, 28 (2014), 620–27; available at <https://www.ehumanista.ucsb.edu/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.edu.span.d7_eh/files/sitefiles/ehumanista/volume28/ehum28.cabranes.pdf> (accessed 27 September 2022).

21 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, dir. Francisco Rico, con la colaboración de Joaquín Forradellas, estudio preliminar de Fernando Lázaro Carreter, 2 vols (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, Círculo de Lectores, 2004), I, 40 & 508. Further references are to this edition; volume and page numbers will be denoted parenthetically within the main body of the article.

22 I elaborate on this proposition in Paul Michael Johnson, ‘Captive Listeners: Antonio de Sosa’s Topographia As Acoustic Ethnography of Early Modern Algiers’, in Soundscapes of the Early Modern Iberian Empires, ed. Víctor Sierra Matute (Routledge, forthcoming). See also Sherry Velasco’s insightful analysis of the aural registers of Spanish captivity narratives: ‘From Spain to Algiers: Morisco/Muslim Sounds in the Western Mediterranean’, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 18:3 (2018), 96–128.

23 ‘Entre muy grandes bienes que consigo / el amistad perfeta nos concede / es aqueste descuido suelto y puro, / lejos de la curiosa pesadumbre; / y así, d’aquesta libertad gozando’ (Garcilaso, Obra poética, ed. Morros, 194, ll. 8–12).

24 It is true that a few metrical errors arise in the ‘Epístola’, which critics at times seized upon to discredit the thesis that it was of Cervantine authorship, but which are likely merely the product of the circumstances under which the letter was written.

25 This affirmation is at odds with the extravagantly imagined dramatization by Francisco Navarro y Ledesma of the hypothetical moment that Vázquez raises the issue of Cervantes’ epistle with Philip II and the sovereign asks his secretary whether the letter is written in verse. ‘En verso está, señor—contesta Mateo Vázquez poniéndose colorado, al comprender que acaba de incurrir en una ligera necedad—. El rey nada dice; pero devuelve el papel a Mateo Vázquez con una mano desdeñosa. ¿Cuándo—piensan el rey y el secretario, aquél un poco molesto y éste un poco mohíno— cuándo se ha visto que se trate en verso de asuntos hondos y graves de la nación? ¿Hay paciencia que sufra el atrevimiento de tanto y tanto loco proyectista, y a ello añada la audacia y sinrazón de los poetas?’ (quoted in Gonzalo Sánchez-Molero, La ‘Epístola a Mateo Vázquez’: historia de una polémica, 234). Such speculative fiction attests to the fascination that the nineteenth-century discovery of the ‘Epístola’ held for a time in the Spanish cultural imagination, long before the benefit of the more thorough historical data that accompanied the news of its rediscovery earlier this century.

26 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. & intro. Barbara K. Lewalski (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 10.

27 Juan José Pastor Comín, Música y poesía; and Loco, trovador y cortesano: bases materiales de la expresión musical en Cervantes (Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2009).

28 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, ed. & intro. Frank Whigham & Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell U. P., 2007), 98.

29 Still valuable in this regard are: Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols (New York: Harper & Row, 1972–73 [1^st French ed. 1949]), II, 1088–105; John Francis Guilmartin, Jr, Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the 16^th Century (London: Conway Maritime Press, 2003 [1^st ed. 1974]), 235–68; and Andrew C. Hess, ‘The Battle of Lepanto and Its Place in Mediterranean History’, Past & Present, 57:1 (1972), 53–73.

30 ‘Not until Loos in 1916 would this rate of slaughter be surpassed,’ from Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World (New York: Random House, 2008), 276.

31 Crowley, Empires of the Sea, 256.

32 Braudel, Mediterranean World, trans. Reynolds, II, 1102.

33 Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1996 [1^st ed. 1988]), 87–88.

34 ‘Carta de D. García de Toledo á D. Juan de Austria: Poyo (Poggio), 13 de setiembre de 1571’, in Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España, ed. Martín Fernández Navarrete, Miguel Salvá & Pedro Sainz de Baranda, 111 vols (Madrid: Imprenta de la Viuda de Calero, 1842–1883), III (1843), 21–26 (p. 25). I have modernized the orthography in this citation.

35 Quoted in Crowley, Empires of the Sea, 269.

36 Giovanni Antonio Taglietti, ‘Ecloga Nautica (seu Christianorum et Turcarum navale certamen)’ (‘Nautical Eclogue, or The Naval Contest of the Christians and Turks’), in The Battle of Lepanto, ed. & trans. Wright, Spence & Lemons, 118–45 (pp. 130–31). The translation, and that of other citations from this collection, is by the editors.

37 Guglielmo Moizio, ‘De Victoria Christianae Classis Carmen’ (‘Song on the Victory of the Christian Fleet’), in The Battle of Lepanto, ed. & trans. Wright, Spence & Lemons, 226–87 (pp. 240–41).

38 Juan Rufo, La Austríada (Madrid: Alonso Gómez, 1584), XVII, 296.

39 The most complete collections of sixteenth-century treatments of Lepanto are, in Spanish: José López de Toro, Los poetas de Lepanto (Madrid: Instituto Histórico de Marina, 1950); and, in Latin (with English translations), see the aforementioned The Battle of Lepanto, ed. & trans. Wright, Spence & Lemons.

40 J. Martin Daughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq (Oxford/New York: Oxford U. P., 2015), 4.

41 Though correctly ascribing it onomatopoeic origins, Sebastián de Covarrubias errs in claiming that estruendo derives from the Latin strepitus, when in reality it originates in the Latin tonitrus. See Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, ed. Ignacio Arellano & Rafael Zafra (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2006), 856.

42 Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, ed. Arellano & Zafra, 936–37.

43 Luis Alfonso de Carvallo, Cisne de Apolo, de las excelencias, y dignidad y todo lo que al Arte Poética y versificatoria pertenece. Los métodos y estylos que en sus obras deue seguir el Poeta. El decoro y adorno de figuras que deuen tener, y todo lo más a la Poesía tocante, significado por el Cisne, ynsignia preclara de los Poetas (Medina del Campo: Juan Godínez de Millis, 1602), 207; spelling modified.

44 Marsilio Ficino, Opera Omnia (1576), ed. Paul Oskar Kristeller, 2 vols (Torino: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1962), II, 1282.

45 That Cervantes borrowed other language from the ‘Epístola’—including parallels with parts of Viaje del Parnaso and a passage that appears almost verbatim in El trato de Argel—makes this thesis even more plausible.

46 Miguel de Cervantes, Viaje del Parnaso, in Poesías, ed. Sáez, 263–408 (VI, 364, ll. 286–94). Further references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the main text.

47 On the alarido, Covarrubias asserts that ‘por la figura onomatopeya le pusieron este nombre, y en particular dieron ocasión a él los alárabes, que cuando entran en la batalla, dan voces y repiten este término lalalá, para mostrar ánimo y hacerle perder a los enemigos’; and on the pífaro: ‘Instrumento músico de boca, que se tañe juntamente con el atambor de guerra, suena con soplo, sin meterle en la boca, que al sonido de cerca hace pif para formar con aquel soplo el sonido en el pífaro, y de allí, por onomatopeya, tomó el nombre’ (Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, ed. Arellano & Zafra, 78 & 1362).

48 One can easily imagine that Cervantes’ play La batalla naval, now lost, would also have inherited such sounds from Lepanto.

49 Miguel de Cervantes, Novelas ejemplares, ed. Jorge García López, 2^nd ed. (Barcelona: Crítica, 2010 [1^st ed. 2005]), 563. Further references are to this edition, and page numbers will be denoted parenthetically within the main body of the article.

50 Miguel de Cervantes, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, ed., con intro., de Carlos Romero Muñoz, 5^th ed. (Madrid: Cátedra, 2004 [1^st ed. 1997]), II, 12, 359; my emphasis. Further references are to this edition, and page numbers will be denoted parenthetically within the main body of the article.

51 These ‘lelilíes’, which reappear throughout Cervantes’ writing, represent the well-known Muslim battle cry based on the shahada. Covarrubias associates the sound with the alarido, as noted above, and Pastor Comín finds in the ‘lelilíes' a potential musical reminiscence of Cervantes’ captivity (Loco, trovador y cortesano, 98–103).

52 Paul Michael Johnson, Affective Geographies: Cervantes, Emotion, and the Literary Mediterranean (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2020), 49.

53 Cervantes, La Galatea, ed. López Estrada & López García-Berdoy, 492–93; my emphasis.

54 María Antonia Garcés, Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive’s Tale (Nashville: Vanderbilt U. P., 2002), 237.

55 Garcés, Cervantes in Algiers, 238. Jesús David Jerez-Gómez has also discovered evidence of profound trauma and disillusion with war in the Viaje del Parnaso; see his ‘Naumaquia mediterránea y parodia en el Viaje del Parnaso’, in Cervantes y el Mediterráneo/Cervantes and the Mediterranean, ed. Steven Hutchinson & Antonio Cortijo Ocaña, eHumanista/Cervantes, 2 (2013), 227–44 (pp. 238–39); available at <https://www.ehumanista.ucsb.edu/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.edu.span.d7_eh/files/sitefiles/cervantes/volume2/ehumcerv2.Jerez.pdf> (accessed 4 January 2023).

56 ‘With respect to sounds, therefore, we are in a position of passivity. [ … ] Hearing consigns us to the world and its contingency’ (Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, ed. & trans. Paul A. Kottman [Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2005 (1^st Italian ed. 2003)], 37).

57 ‘[D]etestabile telum, / letiferum telum’; ‘Igne oculos violat, sonitu aures’; ‘si bellicus ingruat horror, / detestata mihi, si fundat fistula glandes [ … ] Antra obscura petam; fugiam trans flumina praeceps, / trans montem oppositum, lati trans aequora ponti, / fistula dira meas ne bombis vulneret aures’ (Moizio, ‘De victoria Christianae Classis Carmen’, 266–67).

58 Dionisio Daza Chacón, Práctica, y teórica de cirvgía en romance, y en latín. Primera, y segunda parte (Madrid: Lucas Antonio de Bedmar y Valdivia, 1678), 256–57.

59 In his book on Cervantes’ representations of war, Stephen Rupp asserts that the author ‘responds with internal constancy to the uncertain conditions of military service in his time’ (Stephen Rupp, Heroic Forms: Cervantes and the Literature of War [Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2014], 10).

60 Gonzalo Sánchez-Molero advances a few intriguing and well-founded possibilities in La ‘Epístola a Mateo Vázquez’: historia de una polémica, 233–58. See also Patricia Marín Cepeda, Cervantes y la corte de Felipe II: escritores en el entorno de Ascanio Colonna (1560–1608) (Madrid: Polifemo, 2015).

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.