Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive's Tale

by Maria Antonia Garcés

Returning to Spain after fighting in the Battle of Lepanto and other Mediterranean campaigns against the Turks, the soldier Miguel de Cervantes was captured by Barbary pirates and taken captive to Algiers. The five years he spent in the Algerian bagnios or prison-houses (1575-1580) made an indelible impression on his works. From the first plays and narratives written after his release to his posthumous novel, the story of Cervantes's traumatic experience continuously speaks through his writings. Cervantes in Algiers offers a comprehensive view of his life as a slave and, particularly, of the lingering effects this traumatic experience had on his literary production.No work has documented in such vivid and illuminating detail the socio-political world of sixteenth-century Algiers, Cervantes's life in the prison-house, his four escape attempts, and the conditions of his final ransom. Garces's portrait of a sophisticated multi-ethnic culture in Algiers, moreover, is likely to open up new discussions about early modern encounters between Christians and Muslims. By bringing together evidence from many different sources, historical and literary, Garces reconstructs the relations between Christians, Muslims, and renegades in a number of Cervantes's writings.

The idea that survivors of captivity need to repeat their story in order to survive (an insight invoked from Coleridge to Primo Levi to Dori Laub) explains not only Cervantes's storytelling but also the book that theorizes it so compellingly. As a former captive herself (a hostage of Colombian guerrillas), the author reads and listens to Cervantes with another ear.

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Leanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Has any writer had as adventurous a life as Cervantes? 

First of all, he was at the legendary Battle of Lepanto. Yes, you heard me right. And there, by all accounts, he was very heroic. Hit three times by harquebus fire, he was struck twice in the chest and once in the left hand. Luckily, his armor deflected the chest wounds, but his left hand was permanently damaged during the battle. His maimed hand earned him the nickname, "El Manco de Lepanto." His heroic service that day got him several letters of commendation; one being from his "serene highness" Don Juan himself. Unfortunately, these letters were on his person when he was captured by the dreaded Barbary pirates and taken to Algiers. His new master, believing him to be a man of great value because of these letters, set his ransom to an exorbitant amount of money, thereby ensuring he stayed a captive for five years, most of which he felt hopeless for ever being ransomed!

Returning home, I wonder if he didn't struggle with trying to fit back into life there. It can be very hard coming home after an intense period abroad because things that you once thought as being "obvious" or "natural," no longer feel that way and you find yourself questioning everything. Cervantes clearly does this in a different way by basically pitting all manner of preconceived notions and narratives against each other--constantly calling into question the act of storytelling itself. Is Don Quixote mad or is the world mad? Are all those notions held by people in various times and places somehow "real" or are we all not bewitched like actors playing parts in a wondrous play? 

María Antonia Garcés is one of my intellectual heroes. And her book, Cervantes in Algiers is revelatory. Evoking Freud, she discusses the way that in some people trauma is actually bypassed in the mind: it is not experienced directly and instead is registered in the psyche as a kind of memory of the event that patients or survivors return to again and again, neurotically trying to process what happened to them. Of course, many people have traditionally processed traumatic events by revisiting them in art -- and Cervantes indeed seems to return again and again to issues of captivity and broken narratives. For what is trauma but a deep interruption? Falling through the cracks of one's own life is how I used to put it until I read María Antonia Garcés' book. For trauma is an interruption of life, like a broken thread (el roto hilo de mi historia). And Cervantes himself uses the language of tying up the broken thread in his telling tales. As a former captive of Columbian guerrillas, María Antonia Garcés is is very compelling.

This is an award-winning book for good reason. The opening chapters on the history of Algiers and the Barbary pirates is very interesting. I don't think I have ever read this history before and aftre going through her two opening chapter twice, I learned so much.

This book is very dear to me. Eye-opening on the history of the time, you will learn more than you imagine on Cervantes life. But, I would add, it is what she has to say about the life-saving grace of literature and about trauma that moved me tremendously.This is an interesting article on her work from BBC culture... and I am posting at 3Quarks Daily tomorrow on it as well http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/2016...

[Jason Furman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A scholarly book on the ways in which parts of Cervantes' work are him working through the trauma from his five years in captivity in Algiers.

What I particularly liked about the book was its in depth look at this five years of Cervantes' life along with the broader of context of captivity--including enslaved people and hostages held for ransom--in the Mediterranean struggle and mixture of Muslims (including ethnically different ones and different rules), Christians, and a few Jews as well. It then shows how he reworks this experience in several plays, the Captives Tale (an interpolated tale in Don Quixote that makes for excellent standalone reading), and a few other parts of works.

What I found interesting and novel was the comparison of this part of Cervantes literature to Holocaust literature, particularly by Primo Levi. That Cervantes went through horrors and was workin through his traumas through his writing.

What I disliked, or at least was not for me, was that it had a decent amount of Freud, Lacan, Derrida and the like. It wasn't overly heavy but it didn't add anything to me--and I'm not sure it would add much for a specialist (but I'm not competent to judge).

Finally what I wished the book addressed was whether any of this is relevant for the 90%+ of Cervantes work that does not address captivity. For Don Quixote, in particular, the book discusses the captives tale as well as the incident with the lion and Don Quixote being taken home in a cage. But it does not really relate to anything thematic, plot, character, or anything else beyond that. Does that mean the only the explicit captive bits of his work were really affected by his captivity? Or did it shape more of it? I wanted to know and this book never said.

[Jindřich Zapletal · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book comes in two parts: one is the detailed social history of the capture, captivity, and ransom of Cervantes in Algiers, the other then traces the echoes of that experience in various theater plays and novels of Cervantes, informed by modern studies of psychological trauma and Garces's own experience in Colombian captivity. This offers a holistic perspective to Cervantes's oeuvre.

I suppose a typical reader will like one of these parts better than the other. I really liked the first part with a thick texture of primary sources, independent archival research, and many interesting characters. Garces complemented the book with an English translation of de Sosa's description of Algiers; in total, a really luxurious view of both vicious and fascinating place that was Algiers of late 16th century.