SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue Two - Journal - Page 66
SINE QUA NON
|e Interrupted Pilgrimage
Review of Cervantes9s |e Trials Persiles and Sigismunda
Cervantes opens his onal 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 man9s name, why he was imprisoned, why he was marked for death, or
even where in the world he onds himself.
|is is not incidental confusion. It is the entire novel9s narrative architecture enacted in
its opening movement.
|e 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
humanity9s 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 deonitively more unsettling: the dioculty
of onding stable meaning when every reliable structure has become provisional.
|e 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 sacrioced before her old nurse Clelia interrupts
the scene and reveals that the
