The Justice of Forgiveness in La fuerza de la sangre

Abstract

The question of justice in its many ramifications runs throughout Cervantes's fiction and most emphatically in the Novelas ejemplares. In some cases, the issues seem relatively straightforward, but in many of the Novelas the problem of justice is explored in unexpected ways. The most extreme case of an unconventional and disturbing resolution of a problem of injustice is found in La fuerza de la sangre; here the recuperation of a balance and the fortunate outcome of what began as an egregious crime replaces the rigors of conventional justice with an improbable and almost miraculous forgiveness. The reunion and new beginning for Leocadia and Rodolfo, along with the redemption of the latter, offers a model in which an implicit spirit of forgiveness transcends or replaces the expectations of the kind of justice seen in revenge or in civilly sanctioned acts of punishment. While the particulars of La fuerza de la sangre are unique, the deeper concept of “forgiveness” as an agency of resolution underlies some of the other Novelas ejemplares. In this light, La fuerza de la sangre offers a critical perspective that helps make sense of those other novelas in which the issues of love, honor, transgression, and resolution also seem to depart from the norms of Spanish Golden Age literature.

Keywords:

• female agency
• forgiveness
• honor
• justice

Notes

¹In what follows I am much indebted to the studies by González Echevarría and Byrne.

²A very thorough and probing study of law, justice, and pardon in La fuerza de la sangre is given by Gómez López-Quiñones. See also Lappin.

³González Echevarría deals with La fuerza at length (178–93), and he begins by noting the sharp differences of opinion on the novela: “No story of Cervantes has been more severely criticized than ‘The Call of the Blood.”… I count myself among the admirers. I believe that ‘The Call of the Blood’ is the most perfect and modern of the Exemplary Stories, and given the competition the choice is not easy. It is a story that could have been written by a modern master like Jorge Luis Borges, but he and all the others learned their craft reading Cervantes anyway” (178).

⁴References to Don Quijote are taken from the J. J. Allen edition.

⁵See chapter XI of Part I, 169–71.

⁶It should be noted that, in one of the more amusing and unselfconscious moments in Part II, don Quijote himself endorses legal knowledge as essential to “la ciencia de la caballería andante” when he states that “el que la profesa ha de ser jurisperito y saber las leyes de la justicia distributiva y comutativa, para dar a cada uno lo que es suyo y lo que la conviene” (II, 158).

⁷Byrne discusses the legal issues suggested in El celoso extremeño (36–38) and in Rinconete y Cortadillo (96–101). González Echevarría deals at length with La fuerza de la sangre (175–93) and later with the Casamiento/Coloquio unit (201–12).

⁸As Ife and Darby note, citing articles by Elizabeth Howe and Marcia Welles, “Both Howe and Welles show how this novela [La fuerza de la sangre] is a very atypical example of the honour/vengeance theme in Spanish literature, and one in which the women break the cycle of violence endemic to honour/vengeance plots” (182, note 14).

⁹González Echevarría states that “In my view what is profoundly original and disturbing in ‘The Call of the Blood’ is how the questions of crime, punishment, and restitution escape this kind of reading [i.e., the conventional revenge plot], giving the story a modern cast in which miracles are not denied but are not tendered as explanation for how things turn out” (184). See also A. K. Forcione, whose study remains one of the most exhaustive and significant treatments of La fuerza de la sangre.

¹⁰I have dealt with this in “Madness and Narrative Form in ‘Estragos que causa el vicio.’”

¹¹See Forcione: “Modern critics have continued to voice such “classical” dissatisfaction with the tale's implausibilities, both in character and action, and have expressed the wish that Cervantes had given us more complexity in his agents” (361–62).

¹²As Leocadia gazes upon Rodolfo, she sees “tan cerca de sí al que ya quería más que a la luz de sus ojos” (II, 93)—a curious sentiment and an ambiguous phrasing with which I deal later.

¹³Gómez (205 and 211–20) deals with the contradictions and complexities of honra as both a private concern (virtue) and a public commodity. See also Lappin.

¹⁴See Lappin, 155–58, on this problem.

¹⁵As Forcione notes, “Luis is the child of Leocadia and Rodolfo and as such both the link that binds them for years after their fateful encounter and the agent of their ultimate reconciliation, the most marvelous of the various signs that authenticate the maiden's identity and ensure her restoration.” And he adds, significantly, “However, in reality, he belongs to a vast literary family of marvelous children extending in Christian culture back to the daughter of Jairus, whom Jesus raised from the dead before an astonished throng of spectators” (365–66).

¹⁶This is also, with slight variation, found in others of the Novelas ejemplares—for example, in Las dos doncellas and La ilustre fregona.

¹⁷As Gómez states, “Este hidalgo [Leocadia's father] propone una curiosa teoría de lo público y lo privado, en la que el primer ámbito queda plenamente equiparado a la justicia divina” (215). See also El Saffar (133–34).

¹⁸Lappin notes that “Leocadia, unlike Lucretia, is innocent, without any stain of suspicion. Yet she must hide what has happened to her, since the general opinion is less informed by the truth than by a topos drawn from Ovid that Augustine had used…” (158).

¹⁹Gómez notes that “En una de las secciones más lúcidas de la novela, el nonato Luis deja de ser nieto de sus no-abuelos para convertirse en sobrino. Como resultado, cesa también en su estatus de hijo de su no-madre para tornarse en primo” (217). El Saffar (130) also deals with this curious issue.

²⁰See Forcione, especially 357–58.

²¹On the question of the “agency of women” in this and others of the Novelas ejemplares, see especially El Saffar (135), Lappin (159 and 163), and Ife/Darby (186).

²²What follows immediately in this passage underscores the piety of the women and the almost sacramental tone of the action: “Estefanía, la cual en fin, como mujer y noble, en quien la compasión y misericordia suele ser tan natural como la crueldad en el hombre, apenas vio el desmayo de Leocadia cuando juntó su rostro con el suyo derramando sobre él tantas lágrimas que no fue menester esparcirle otra agua encima para que Leocadia en sí volviese” (II, 88).

²³See Forcione: “In the second half of the tale the theme of discreción is developed primarily through Rodolfo's mother, whose ingenious manipulation of the course of the action, control over all the agents involved, and theatrical construction of the climactic ‘miracle’ of Leocadia's dazzling entry… make her one of the most powerful displacements of Divine Providence and its agencies in Cervantes's secularized miracle” (386–87).

²⁴As the text in part states, “con tales y tantos encarecimientos se lo supo rogar y de tal manera les asegurar que de descubrir este robo no les podía suceder daño alguno, que ellos tuvieron por bien de confesar ser verdad…” (II, 90).

²⁵The concept of the miracle is, of course, at the heart of Forcione's exhaustive analysis of this text, and it truly seems to be the axis of the generic and thematic nature of the text.

²⁶In my previous treatment of this novela and the manner of its resolution, I have referenced the resemblance of this moment to the ending of Shakespeare's play The Winter's Tale; see Beneath the Fiction, chapter 6, especially 160–62. See also Ife/Darby, 159.

²⁷But Lappin rejects the necessity of miracle: “La fuerza de la sangre, then, is a tour de force; yet it is anything but a miracle story. It uses the concept of Providence, certainly, as its basic causational structure. Nevertheless, as in life, the action of grace must be guessed at behind the scenes…” (163).

²⁸Like so many readers, Ife and Darby find this happy resolution, and the issue of Rodolfo's character, quite problematic; Lappin, by contrast, takes a more “human” and forgiving view of Rodolfo and the story's conclusion.

²⁹In an intriguing aside, Cervantes's narrator places this action of such sudden marriage in the historical context of earlier, pre-Tridentine customs: “El [the priest] lo hizo ansí, que por haber sucedido este caso en tiempo cuando con sola la voluntad de los contrayentes, sin las diligencias y prevenciones justas y santas que ahora se usan, quedaba hecho el matrimonio, no hubo dificultad que impidiese el desposorio” (II, 94). The 24^th session of the Council of Trent (1563) dealt with the issue of marriage and the proper preliminaries to be observed. On these issues, see Lappin, 153; and on Trent's concerns with the sacrament, see O’Malley, 133–39, 224–28, and 256–57.

³⁰As mentioned earlier, and as I have pointed out in the relevant chapters of Beneath the Fiction, problems of equity and just resolutions are found in La gitanilla, La española inglesa, Las dos doncellas, and, to a lesser degree, in La señora Cornelia.

³¹Clearly, in addition to the profound study by Forcione, which underscores the centrality of miracle and the religious implications, similar perspectives are elaborated by Casalduero and El Saffar.

³²This element is implicit in the commentaries of Forcione and Casalduero, even though neither critic goes into explicit detail on this element, Forcione focusing on the miraculous and the legendary, with Casalduero fixing on the sacramental aspect of marriage and so forth.

³³Again, I have dealt with this in my previous study, Beneath the Fiction, chapter 1.

³⁴The issue of reconciliation brings up the problem of penance, both as sacrament and as practice; see O’Malley (132 and 149–54) on Trent's position on penance.

³⁵Granted, he had first gone back to his room to get a dagger, after finding his wife and Loaysa asleep in bed together; but, providentially, he had then fainted, and when he regained consciousness, his intentions had changed.

³⁶Carriazo's story is stunning for its candor; as the man states, “Ordenó la suerte que un día, yendo yo a caza por el término de su lugar, quise visitarla, y era la hora de siesta cuando llegué a su alcázar” (II, 194). Not unlike Rodolfo in La fuerza, Carriazo is aroused by the woman's beauty: “Era por extremo hermosa, y el silencio, la soledad, la ocasión, despertaron en mí un deseo más atrevido que honesto, y sin ponerme a hacer discretos discursos cerré tras mí la puerta…” (II, 194). And what ensues is forced intercourse.

³⁷See E. Vilches, New World Gold, 280–81; consider also the satires of Quevedo, especially in his Sueños. Given Spain's reliance on Genoese bankers, they were often seen as parasites and exploiters.

³⁸The escape to Italy is a motif or device that occurs also in La fuerza de la sangre; Casalduero has commented on this device, see Sentido y forma, 156–57.

³⁹I have dealt with the complexities of this story in my previous study; see Beneath the Fiction, 211–29.

⁴⁰As I have noted in Beneath the Fiction (chapter nine), the resolution of the story and the recognition of the problem of honor and justice is further dramatized by the peculiar and almost ceremonial tableau of the three fathers preparing to settle the honor dispute by means of a duel in the form of jousting, an action interrupted by the return and intervention of the two now happily reconciled couples (see 212–14).