Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive's Tale

Notes

261 Notes Abbreviations: AGS Archivo General de Simancas BAE Biblioteca de autores españoles CODOIN Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España, 112 vols (Madrid: 1842-90). SE The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1974). EI-2 Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd edition (1960-) SIHM Sources inédites de l’histoire du Maroc Introduction 1. Antonio de Sosa’s great work, Topographia, e historia general de Argel, was edited and published thirty years later by Fray Diego de Haedo, a nephew of the bishop by the same name, to whom Sosa had given his manuscript after being released from slavery in 1581. See chapter 2 for information on Sosa and his friendship with Cervantes. 2. Emanuel d’Aranda, Relation de la captivité & liberté du sieur d’Aranda, jadis esclave à Alger [. . .] (Bruxelles: Chez Jean Mommart, 1662), recently reedited as Les Captifs d’Alger, ed. Latifa Z’Rari (Paris: Editions Jean Paul Rocher, 1997), 23. This popular work had six new editions, as well as various English and Flemish translations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 3. Risa Rodi, “An Interview with Primo Levi,” Partisan Review 3 (1987): 355–66; the citation is from 366. 4. Álvaro Mutis, Diario de Lecumberri (México: Alfaguara, 1997), 10–11. 5. Geoffrey Hartman, “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies,” New Literary History 26 (1995): 537–63. 6. Juan Goytisolo, Crónicas sarracinas (Barcelona: Ibérica, 1982), 60–61; see also Diana de Armas Wilson’s pioneering book, Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Wilson rightly argues that “the cross-cultural contacts that Columbus inaugurated in the Indies–exploration, conquest , and colonization–resonate throughout Cervantes’s two long novels, Don Quijote (1605, 1615) and Persiles (1617)” (3). If Cervantes’s great novels were indeed 262 NOTES TO PAGES 5–14 stimulated by the geographical excitement of an unfamiliar new world, the five years he spent as a captive in multicultural Algiers, where twenty-two languages were spoken, according to Flemish captive Emanuel d’Aranda, must have opened Cervantes’s spirit to new visions, new languages, and new worlds, long before he attempted to leave for the Indies. 7. The reinvigorated interest in trauma fueled by the cycle of violence in the Balkans and other tragic events in the United States have led to the creation of trauma study centers in various universities, such as the International Trauma Studies Program at New York University, the first to combine academic research on trauma with mental health programs developed in wartime. Similarly, Florida State University now offers a Ph.D. in systemic traumatology, which studies effective methods of assessment and treatment of interpersonal relationships following traumatic events. These programs join other efforts, like the monthly trauma studies workshop for professionals, scholars, and survivors sponsored by the University of Illinois at Chicago and the program that Yale University has established for Holocaust studies. More trauma centers have recently opened across the country, offering help to the survivors and families affected by the disasters of New York City and Washington, DC. 8. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. JacquesAllain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 41. See also Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1966), especially 159–61. 9. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 10. María Antonia Garcés, letter to Octavio Paz, 28 October 1983, El laberinto de la soledad, Edición conmemorativa: 50 Aniversario, ed. Enrico Mario Santí, 2 vols. (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000), II: 54–59. 11. This, of course, refers to slips of the tongue, blunders, or parapraxis, as well as to the workings of the repetition-compulsion that reveal the sway of the unconscious on the subject. 12. Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), especially 94–95, 102–3, and 109–13. The citation is from page 94. 13. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and The Truce, trans Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1987). La tregua [The Truce] has also been translated as The Reawakening. 14. Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992) 57–74. The quotation comes from page 69. 15. Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Shocken...