A talk by Professor Shifra Armon
Entre Nos series sponsored by the Spanish and Portuguese Studies Department
Wednesday November 9
3 pm
Dauer 240A
–When you resorted to force, … you didn’t know where you were going. If you got deeper and deeper, there was just no limit except … the limitations of force itself.*
In this paper my objective is to map transformations of military techné into tropes of entertainment in Cervantes’ La destrucción de la Numancia (c. 1582). Cervantes’s La Numancia dramatizes the consequences of the Roman general Scipio’s decision in 131 BCE to conquer an iron-age encampment of Celtiberan insurgents, not by the sword, but by the spade. Cervantes’ (and his contemporaries’) fascination with siege-works comes to the fore not only in the famous “Captive’s Tale” episode of Don Quijote, which details the successful Ottoman naval assault on the Spanish-held Tunisian fortress of La Goleta in 1574, but also in La Numancia, penned shortly after Cervantes returned from captivity in Algiers.
During Cervantes’ lifetime, fortification innovations—visible to us at the Castillo de San Marcos in Saint Augustine–produced a shift away from offensive combat and toward defensive military strategies. La Numancia exposed audiences to the novel materiality and gruesome consequences of protracted siege warfare, promising to beguile them with “the pleasure of the siege.”
*General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jan 12, 1955. In Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 23. Cited in James Hillman A Terrible Love of War (NY: Penguin, 2004), 55.