Cervantes Died 400 Years Ago Today. How Trauma Shaped His Greatest Works. [View all]

[HuckleB]

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160421-when-cervantes-was-captured-by-pirates

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In 1575, after fighting in military campaigns against the Turks in the Mediterranean, the Spaniard was captured by Barbary pirates and taken to Algiers. There, he was kept as a slave for five years. When he was freed – with a ransom raised by Trinitarian friars attached to the convent he was to be buried beneath – he had become the man who would write one of the greatest novels in history.

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Garcés’s 2005 book Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive’s Tale explores the idea that survivors of traumatic events have an urge to repeat their stories. She describes how Cervantes told and retold his own account of enslavement: in plays, poetry and novellas including The English Spanish Girl and The Liberal Lover, as well as what Garcés calls “Cervantes’s most important autobiographical narrative” – the tale told by a captive in Part 1 of Don Quixote.

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The retelling is not just a compulsion; it might also help trauma survivors to heal. In an interview, the writer Primo Levi, who survived the concentration camp at Auschwitz, said: “I told my story to everyone and anyone, at the drop of a hat, from the plant manager to the yard-man... just like the Ancient Mariner”. According to Garcés, “Telling the story time and time again may have therapeutic effects; each time you repeat, you change something, as Freud noted. In the case of Cervantes, I think this led to introspection and to an interest in the workings of madness. Two of his great works deal with madmen: Don Quixote and The Glass Graduate.”

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Arguably, the writer’s enslavement not only broadened his vision – it broadened the scope of the novel in general. For Garcés, Don Quixote signals “the birth of a new era through its incorporation of marginal and culturally ambiguous groups”. They include the Moriscos (former Muslims who converted or were coerced into converting to Christianity), pícaros (rogues who live by their wits), and renegades “that people its literary universe”. This was a direct result of his enslavement. “His experience as a captive in the bagnios [slave-houses] of Algiers, his personal relations with Muslims and renegades, his encounter with different cultures and religions in this multicultural city that welcomed corsairs from every part of the world offered him the possibility of examining these issues from a unique perspective.”

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A fantastic read on so many levels!