SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue Two - Journal - Page 130
SINE QUA NON
The Interrupted Pilgrimage
Review of Cervantes’s The Trials Persiles and Sigismunda
Cervantes opens his final novel, completed days before his death in 1616, not with
orientation but with interruption. Near the mouth of a dungeon—more tomb than prison—
stands the barbarian Corsicurbo. A rope descends. A beautiful young man is hauled upward
in bonds to be executed. Miraculously, he escapes his executioner by sea, only to shipwreck
almost immediately. We know nothing else. Cervantes drops us into contingency. He does
not tell us the young man’s name, why he was imprisoned, why he was marked for death, or
even where in the world he finds himself.
This is not incidental confusion. It is the entire novel’s narrative architecture enacted in
its opening movement.
The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda constructs an entire narrative around fractured
teleology. Cervantes wrote the work during a period of tectonic transition. Christendom
had splintered under the Protestant Reformation. Copernican cosmology had unsettled
humanity’s place in creation. Older metaphysical certainties no longer felt secure, even as the
great rational systems of modern philosophy were just beginning to emerge. If Don Quixote
dramatizes the collision between two worldviews—idealism and realism—through its iconic
pair, Persiles dramatizes something more elusive and definitively more unsettling: the difficulty
of finding stable meaning when every reliable structure has become provisional.
The protagonists, Persiles and Sigismunda—traveling publicly as brother and sister,
Periandro and Auristella—are northern nobles (not truly brother and sister) who intend to
marry once they complete a pilgrimage to Rome. Cervantes subjects their journey to relentless
interruption, and he does so not abstractly but episode by episode. Auristella, concealed
beneath masculine appearance, is nearly sacrificed before her old nurse Clelia interrupts
the scene and reveals that the “youth” the barbarians mean to kill is “the most beautiful
woman imaginable.” Periandro, meanwhile, at one point adopts female disguise, another
reminder that movement through this world depends less on stable identity than on strategic
performance. Their pilgrimage advances through misrecognition, masking, and delay.
That logic governs the larger movement of the novel. Every apparent advance dissolves
into some new captivity, inset narrative, disguise, or performance. An escape becomes a
shipwreck. A rescue becomes slaughter. A confession breeds jealousy. Revelation is always
partial, always deferred. One of the novel’s most revealing sequences comes when a voyage
toward relative safety splinters into yet another disaster: the ship begins to break apart, the
barge and skiff are separated in darkness, and cries of “lover!” and “brother!” are flung across
the water as the lovers are divided again by accident and current. Later, even the overturned
hull of a wreck becomes a temporary chamber from which survivors emerge as if birthed into
the world a second time. The novel accumulates not through a single, steadily rising arc but
through broken mini-arcs whose repeated derailments mimic the fractured certainties of early
modernity.
Cervantes had lived this fracture: Lepanto, captivity in Algiers, financial struggle, the
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