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4. The Pan European Land of Cockaigne
- Vanderbilt University Press
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49 4 The Pan European Land of Cockaigne Like Don Quixote, Sancho Panza is also the cultural product of his age.The legend of Prester John’s inexhaustible wealth, probably enhanced by descriptions of the Earthly Paradise which Saint Jerome had translated as an hortus voluptatis and an hortus deliciarum, was ripe, then, for yet another appropriation. It would provide an imaginary means of decentering the cultural gaze onto other idealized sites of abundance and leisure. But before going on to demonstrate the effects of such decentering, we would like to provide an interesting example of how cultural crossovers can be arbitrarily legitimized. The transcription below sheds some light on how a concept like Cockaigne, accessible in folklore, could become a popular counterpart to Don Quixote’s classical Golden Age. In a document cited by Alain Milhou, a Spanish peasant fromToledo in May 1534 recounts the tale of the huge quantities of gold amassed by the Spaniards in the “ransom” of the Peruvian Inca Atahualpa. This is how the peasant transcribes the event: While I was at the village blacksmith’s with some friends discussing the news of Peru and of all these amounts of gold and silver that were brought back from there, one of them said that this was the country where Our Lord Jesus Christ had lived, since the grass where he walked had changed into gold and silver and this was why there was so much of it to be found. (quoted in Milhou 151) In such a way, one of the blackest instances of Spanish betrayal in the New World becomes elided, even “Christianized,” in the popular 50 The Utopian Nexus in Don Quixote mind. Similarly, the concept of Cockaigne will be subject to cultural crossovers and adapted “for a variety of purposes . . . ridiculing existing institutions, alleviating fears . . . providing moral instruction” (Pleij 326). The trajectory of Cockaigne’s discursive formations provides interesting illustrations of how specific practices become new cultural productions. The Cockaigne myth had fed the cultural imagination everywhere. As a theme of popular folklore, it was known under different names in different milieux: Cockaigne, Pomona, Jauja (Xauxa). Gorman Beauchamp reminds us of how pervasive and constant the myth remains to our own day: The French, English, Italians, Spanish, Portugese [sic] and Dutch all have some variant of the word . . . denominating this mythic land where the pleasure-principle operates unobstructed by reality: the Germans have their Schlaraffia and Pfannkuckenberg (Pancake Hill) and Bauernhimmel (Peasants ’ Heaven); the Swedes their Lattingersland (Land of Loafers) and the Irish their Mag-Mell (Plain of Pleasure). In our own day Hobo’s Heaven and the Big Rock Candy Mountain recapitulate all the motifs . . . For while the names and locales . . . may vary, the content does not: it remains remarkably constant from culture to culture and throughout the centuries. (358) In early centuries, so magical a site could take imaginative shape in Sir John Mandeville’s marvellous adventures in exotic lands; in the biblically promised Judeo-Christian New Jerusalem where all restlessness would one day be assuaged; in a Muslim paradise of gustatory and sensual pleasures; or, as in Spain, in the eponymous Peruvian “tierra de Xauxa.” Traces of it can be found among such varied ideological and literary forms as Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies, W. B. Yeats’s The Happy Townland, or in the popular versions of contemporary American folk-song traditions. For Herbert Marcuse, in Eros and Civilization , such magical sites function as a challenge to the reality principle with which we are faced in everyday living (Whitebook 4); for A. L. . The Spanish destroyed the great temples of the Aztecs and Incas, and forbade the practice of their religious rituals “and, above all, the Aztecs’ massive human sacrifices. And they carried out a massive human sacrifice of their own, deliberately killing and subjugating native peoples and inadvertently using the microbes they carried to depopulate the new lands” (Grafton 132). [3.144.113.30] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 17:41 GMT) The Pan European Land of Cockaigne 51 Morton, their function is compensatory and their impact associated with the actual economic reality from which they emerge. Morton calls Cockaigne the “people’s utopia.” Without disputing these psychological and/or economic arguments, one of our foci lies in exploring how myths like Cockaigne and Don Quixote’s Golden Age, apparently different because of the positionality of the two protagonists, nevertheless betray the “circularity” of their reciprocal influence. Regardless of the varied ideological uses to which we will see...