Devil, Converso, Duende: Anamorphosis and the View of Spain in Luis Vélez de Guevara's El diablo cojuelo

This essay examines Luis Vélez de Guevara's El diablo cojuelo through the lens of a scene that other scholars have neglected, in which the title character jumps into a writer's yawning mouth and is regurgitated. I extend previous approaches to the novel that focus on satire and perspectivism to theorize that Cojuelo's body and language exemplify and enact anamorphosis, the hidden perspective. This representational tool challenges readers to readjust their spatial, sensory, and cognitive engagement with the text and, by extension, the extrafictional world. Applying this procedure, Vélez also draws on and reorients baroque Spain's obsession with scrutiny, including experiences familiar to him such as converso heritage, court patronage, and literary academies. Using theories of vision, perspective, and demonic influence contemporary to Vélez, as well as Federico García Lorca's "Juego y teoría del duende," I posit a connection between Cojuelo and duende to investigate the role of supernatural inspiration in the creative process. Through anamorphosis, the text creates an image of Spain that is fragmented socially (in the civitas) and spatially, and the writer's ingestion and expulsion of Cojuelo is an enactment of Lorca's duende in liberating the creative force as it purges the demons haunting Vélez and the nation.