Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain by Elizabeth B Davis

170 BO Reviews Davis, Elizabeth B. Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2000. xi + 244 pp. HB. ISBN 0-82621277 -8. Over forty years ago, Frank Pierce declared that no account of Golden Age literature could afford to ignore the corpus of about 200 "epics" (his definition is capacious) composed between roughly 15501700 . As he himself drily noted, La poesia epica del siglo de oro (1961) was the first attempt at a broad survey since Ticknor in the preceding century. Pierce apprehended some kind of correlation between the considerable energy spent on producing (not to say reading) canto upon canto of heroic verse and the energy invested in Spain's imperial project: "es un hecho irrecusable," he remarked, "aunque no podamos decir por que" (214). Institutional inertia and vested interests apart, there are many reasons for the continued neglect of this vast literary realm. One of them, as Pierce's own indecision makes plain, is methodological : just how do we study the connection between epic and empire? In recent decades, of course, a variety of methologies have been developed to explore the relation between culture, power, and authority, and Elizabeth Davis exploits a number of them in order to answer the question that stumped her British predecessor. In the process, she has produced an important, clearly written book that resonates with much that has been happening in recent studies on Spain's Golden Age, and European renaissance epic generally (e.g. David Quint's Epic and Empire [1993]). The introduction (1-19) sketches out the scope and the relative neglect of this material, and argues for the centrality of epic for those interested in the legitimizing myths of Spanish Empire. The five epics studied here were "a vehicle for the construction of an imagined ethnic and political identity for Spain, metonymically represented by the ascendant Castilian monarchy and its elites. [They] figured forth an unmistakable Spanish 'sense of self long before the crystallization of nineteenth-century nationalisms, and . . . they took full advantage of well-fixed epic conventions to ground this newly forged 'Spanish' identity in imperial myths that served to legitimize it" (10-11). Davis adds that this collective identity was not directly representable, but created through a process of "othering," whereby the self is defined negatively through "hauntingly repetitive" ideological strategies that pit barbarian versus non-barbarian, order versus chaos. But in spite of itself, epic discourse could never entirely eliminate internal ideological contradictions , just as the Hapsburg empire itself was "in reality, a vulnerable construct" (14). The attempt to absorb and neutralize alterity, "to paint a tidy picture of the ethnic purgation of a national space" was Resenas ca 171 never completely successful, which allows the critic to expose "the seams of the epic's dominant belief systems" (17). The five chapters that follow are devoted to works that, because of their popularity, constitute what Davis suggests was the epic canon of the age (1569-1611). Through close textual analysis, these chapters explore a process of "othering" (of Islam, women, the Amerindian, moriscos, Jews) that underpins the epic's desire to absorb alterity and conflict in a futile attempt "to forge an overriding image of Spain that appears more unassailable and undivided than Spain and her empire ever were" (1819 ). The general premise of chapter 1, "Alonso de Ercilla's Fractured Subjectivity: Internal Contradictions in La Araucana," is that, although ultimately the poem adopts a "default pro-Hapsburg" line (38), its politics cannot be understood through "an easy reduction of the poefs position" (23), since more than any other epic, La Araucana is characterized by the author's own "split subjectivity." This fractured sense of self is produced by the various discourses that are interwoven throughout the poem, often in conflict with each other. In separate sections, Davis examines the discourses of nobility (21-29), blood (3945 ), virtue (46-51), and personal advancement (51-60). The central core of the chapter shows how the deeply ambivalent representation of the Araucanian is the result of an attempt to reconcile the ideological contradictions of these discourses, and to legitimize the author's role as servant of the crown in a particularly brutal...