Canines in Cervantes and Velázquez

An Animal Studies Reading of Early Modern Spain

John Beusterien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409457138
• eBook ISBN: 9781317169956
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The study of the creation of canine breeds in early modern Europe, especially Spain, illustrates the different constructs against which notions of human identity were forged. This book is the first comprehensive history of early modern Spanish dogs and it evaluates how two of Spain's most celebrated and canonical cultural figures of this period, the artist Diego Velázquez and the author Miguel de Cervantes, radically question humankind's sixteenth-century anthropocentric self-fashioning. In general, this study illuminates how Animal Studies can offer new perspectives to understanding Hispanism, giving readers a fresh approach to the historical, literary and artistic complexity of early modern Spain.

Chapter 1
The Hidden Dog

Canes, when part of buildings, are either wooden or stone heads upon which long beams are placed to mount the floor…And they call all of these canes because they are typically carved into the shape of the heads of dogs. These dogs are also called atlantes because they are like the figure of Atlas who is painted holding up the heavens; and in this way the canes provide the structural support for the building. (my trans.)

Canes, en los edificios, son unas cabezas, o de maderos o de piedra, que suelen sobre ellos sentar unas vigas largas, y armar los suelos sobre ellas…Y llamáronse todos éstos canes porque ordinariamente están labrados en ellos unas cabezas de perros. A estos canes llaman atlantes por la semejanza que tienen con Atlas cuando le pintan sustentar el cielo; y así los canes parecen sustentar el edificio. (281)

—Sebastián de Covarrubias

Cary Wolfe has argued that scholars must question the human that undertakes pluralization with respect to animal and human others in order to end the anthropocentric base of the “more-or-less animal” argument in which “humanity” is the end of thinking about the other. In formulating this argument, Wolfe follows Jacques Derrida who proposes the need to think a different other, an “other” other, that is not based on an animal–human differential. This “other” other is, at its root, non-oppositional and infinitely differentiated—not reduced to the “inside,” that is the general human subject versus the “outside,” that is, the non-subject that is animal. A fuller articulation of this new other (“significant” or “other” other) that follows the Wolfe, Haraway, and Derrida Animal Studies model will help to foster critical approaches that focus on a non-oppositional other no longer bound to identity formation based on region, race, nation and gender.

I will carry out the work of further delineating this Animal Studies other in the following three chapters in this book. In turn, in this first chapter, I set the stage for the last three chapters by elucidating the inside-outside anthropocentric model of the other in the work of Américo Castro and Tzvetan Todorov, two thinkers who had an important impact on twentieth-century Hispanism. An analysis of the omitted or “hidden” dog in the work of Castro and Todorov aids in revealing how the work of each participates in an inside-outside anthropocentric model. This chapter sets the terrain for the last three chapters of the book and also for future scholarship on Animal Studies in Hispanism in the sense that critics, after the historicization of the othering and ennobling signs of the animal, will more easily recognize and discard unquestioned anthropocentric assumptions in their scholarship. That historicization will aid scholars of the early modern period to cast off a definition of humanity that depends on identity formation based on an anthropocentric model of the outside versus the inside.1

Américo Castro was one of the most influential scholars in the twentieth-century because he emptied out the essentialist character of the Spanish national identity category (Cruz 84). As Castro writes, the word “Spaniard” (español) was not a term from time immemorial, but acquired significant currency for the first time in the sixteenth century when it appeared in the title of books beginning in 1520. At the time of the conquest, the conquerors did not principally conceive of themselves as Spaniards, but first as vassals of the king, as Christians, and members of smaller regions. (The primary language at the time of the conquest was not conceived as español, but as castellano and for that reason castellano not español is still preferred as the term used in many parts of America.) (43). Américo Castro explains that “Spaniard” did not originate in the Spanish lexicon from the inside (the Iberian Peninsula) since the Spanish had no national, political, or linguistic reason for considering themselves Spaniards (españoles). Instead, an outside region imposed the word on the Peninsula—the extra-Peninsular neighbor, Provençe, used the word “Spaniard” (espagnol) to describe its neighbor to the south.

An Animal Studies approach considers the Castro method—the historicization of the human category of “Spaniard”—but it also takes into account the history of the animal and the way in which early modern Europe employs an anthropocentrizing gesture when it conceives Spain from the outside. In Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity, Brad Epps and Luis Fernández Cifuentes edit a collection of essays that propose “another take” on Spain “to represent a diversity of positions” (20), including cultural studies, postcolonial studies, new historicism, women’s studies, ideology critique, and trans-Atlantic studies. As an epigraph for the collection of essays, Epps and Cifuentes choose a quote from Américo Castro that reflects how Castro struggled with the meaning of Hispanism—“Spain,” the “Spaniard,” and things Hispanic—as a cultural colony of the foreigner because they have been an interpellation by those from the outside.

The miscellany of approaches in the Epps and Cifuentes volume are intended to offer twentieth-first-century Hispanism fecund approaches to colonization, globalization and identity, breaking from the history of the field that once traumatically recognized itself as a construction by the outsider. But in their consideration of the future of Hispanism, Cifuentes and Epps do not consider Animal Studies, an especially needed approach given the Castro quote in the epigraph about the “outside.” Castro rightly pointed out the genesis of the identity category “Spaniard” (español) as largely an outside imposition, but he did not consider how much the animal, specifically, the Spanish dog played a role in the interpellation of español. “Spaniard” (espagnol in Provençe) was not just a designation from the outside (those from Provençe) on a human group on the inside (the Spaniards), but espagnol also meant “Spanish dog” in Provençe. Therefore, the Provençe word espagnol meaning dog and human moved south to become the word español. The region outside of Spain ennobled itself through the othering of Spain by making the espagnol not just the human Iberian inhabitant, but also the sign of the animal.2

The nationality assigned to dog breeds often reveals significant information about cultural history. The creation of the German shepherd in the 1920s is an example of a canine dog design connected with nationalism and racial identity since it was crafted at the service of Nazi ideologies (Skabelund, “Breeding”).3 The case of the Chihuahua is symptomatic of how the foreigner is absorbed into the domestic space of self in the formation of national identity. When H. Raynor of El Paso, Texas recorded the first Chihuahua with the American Kennel Committee on July 18, 1903, the animal could have been called a “California,” “Texas,” or “Arizona” dog (names used by many in the late nineteenth century for the tiny canine), but the name of the bordering Mexican state of Chihuahua was chosen (Fernandez 4).4 The state of Chihuahua—versus California, Texas and Arizona—of course is a state in Mexico, not in the U.S. Despite its connection with the state of a foreign nation, the Chihuahua dog was introduced inside the intimacy of the space of the US home. Attesting to the popularity of the dog in the US household, ownership of the Chihuahua became so popular that it resulted in a canine glut in California animal shelters, resulting in the “Great Chihuahua Airlift of 2010” in which private individuals and organizations flew the surplus Chihuahuas to New York (Metzger). Closely associated with what many Americans call their “own” and part of the affective space of the home, the Chihuahua is also sometimes an icon for food and fashion such as in the case of Taco Bell’s Chihuahua and Paris Hilton posing with her Chihuahuas.

Most canine enthusiasts consider the development of the spaniel design to be largely a nineteenth-century British invention in which the dog is especially associated with England.5 Likewise, the connection between breeds and nationality is generally considered to arise in nineteenth-century England such as the appearance of a series of cartoon caricatures in which one finds the no-nonsense bulldog, associated with iconic English virtues of courage and tenacity, contrasting the French as small prancing poodles (Johns 136).6 But the nationality assigned to the early modern European dog breed, the spaniel, in the sixteenth century already reveals how dogs connected with nationality, a significant ellipsis in Castro’s analysis of the origin of español. A study of the spaniel more fully elucidates Europe’s perception about Spain, the nature of the formation of proto-nationalism, and about the construction of gender in early modern Europe. Just as those who own a Chihuahua do not consciously animalize or make a pet out of the northern Mexican state that borders Texas and New Mexico, so the sixteenth-century Europeans, especially the English, who owned spaniels, did not literally see themselves as converting the Spanish into little lapdogs. Nonetheless, similar to the coining of the Chihuahua’s name as a North American dog, so the evolution of the spaniel into an English dog forms part of a cultural turn in which things Hispanic and Spanish constitute a pet-keeping practice that symbolically provide the pet owner cultural caché. Just as many in North America love the Chihuahua dog, having named the outsider its own, so England loved its small spaniels. Both the Chihuahua and the spaniel’s small size and invented names connect with the gendered and national deployments of the dog, attesting to the appropriation of the canine in shaping national identity and gender roles.

Paralleling the case of the Spanish dog, the nationality assigned to horse breeds reveals socio-cultural fears and desires in early modern England. Just like the Spanish dog, the Spanish horse in England was portrayed as the cleverest of its kind and the English home became the “natural” haven for the Spanish breed. England had domesticated the Spanish horse as its own, taking the sign of the purebred quality of the Spanish horse and turned it into an ennobling sign. By owning a Spanish horse breed, the early modern English performed an act of domestication of a feared imperial power that materially confined the animal, the horse, and symbolically confined the Spanish as part of the English landscape and home.7 Through the material and symbolic sign, the English could at once indirectly praise the Spanish (the Spanish horse was considered the most intelligent of all horses), but also assimilate the Spanish as a part of an English national character since the Spanish horse was controlled and owned by the English.8

Castro’s spaniel oversight is crucial because it forgets that early modern Europe also included the sign of the Spanish dog with the human in a discourse of othering and ennobling process constitutive of the human. A region outside of Spain ennobled itself through the othering of Spain by making the espagnol both the human Iberian inhabitant and the sign of the animal. As an interesting precedent to Cervantes’ dog dialogue, in 1537 Bonaventure des Périers wrote a dialogue between two dogs. One of the dogs discusses different breeds and he mentions that he has a friend that is a spaniel. He uses the word espagnol (79). Thirteenth-century French iconography and literature had favored a dog called the brachet that sat at the back of its master’s horse, pointed to the game, and retrieved it. But in the fourteenth century the spaniel (espagnol) replaced the brachet as the favored hunting breed (Bugnion).9 The term espagnol could be defined in two ways: either as “Spaniard” or “Spanish dog” in which the word “dog” is understood, but elided. In The Book of the Hunt (Livre de chasse, 1387), Count Gaston Phébus, writing in Provençal, described the espagnol as a dog that worked by quartering in front of the hunter, and then flushed rabbits for the hound or game for the falcon. He also described how the espagnol retrieved ducks and geese from the water. He writes that this type of dog has the name espagnol because it comes from Spain (Miramon 208).

Significantly, the coining of the name of the Spanish dog occurs just as the late medieval Europeans increasingly adopted the sign of the dog as an ennobling sign. In the earliest medieval hunting manuals, hunting birds are ennobled (Albertus Magnus lists ten types of noble falcons and ten types of common ones), but the ennoblement of different types of dogs increasingly took place in the fifteenth century most especially with the emergence of the spaniel breed (Miramon). This ennoblement tied the sign of the animal to national identity and othering. In the case of the espagnol (“Spaniard” and “Spanish dog”) the hunter ennobled himself by owning the Spanish dog, but also uses the spaniel to lambast the Spanish character. Indeed, even as he uses them as hunting dogs, Phébus also disparages the canine version of the espagnol in his The Book of the Hunt because it is no different from the human Spaniard. He links national character to race when he writes that the Spaniard, both the dog and human, are brawlers and howlers and their bad nature derives from their bad “generation” (Miramon 208).

“Cocker spaniel” entered the Spanish language as a loan word from English in the twentieth century (Wessem), but the spaniel was never a Spanish breed in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. The word espagnol, however, was common in medieval dialects of French, and in early English. Just as the Provençal word espagnol moved south into medieval Spanish and became the word español, so it also had moved to the north and became the English word spaniel (the epenthetic “e” from French and Spanish is simply dropped in English). Just like the doubly semantic French word espagnol, “spaniel” in early English did not just refer to a dog, but also meant “Spanish” (as an adjective) and “Spaniard” (as a noun) (Oxford English Dictionary). Writers as early as Chaucer, drawing from classical tradition that debased the small dog, wrote about “spaniels.” The licentious Wife of Bath “coveteth every man that she may see; / for as a spaniel she will on him leap” (Chaucer).

In an act of anthropocentric ennobling, the English owned the Spanish by owning the dog, building a specifically English national and masculine character. In the early modern period, the spaniel would be confirmed as a distinctly British animal, whose “deep” origins were located in Spain. The English dog scholar John Caius (1570) comments that the origin of the meaning of spaniel takes root in the fact that it came from Spain: “these kinde of Dogges came originally and first of all out of Spaine” (15). Compiling a massive history of animals, Edward Topsell (1607) helped to create the attitude found for the centuries to come that the spaniel may indeed come from Spain, but that it properly belongs to England. Topsell writes the spaniel is “naturally” bred in England: “Spaine, Hispania, the country from whence (the spaniels) came, not that England wanteth such kind of dogs (for they are naturally bred and ingendred in this country), but because they bear the general...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Hidden Dog
• 2 A Cervantine Animal Exemplum: Animal Studies and “The Dialogue of the Dogs”
• 3 When the Dog is a Book: A Post-Human Ethics in Cervantes
• 4 As Death Approaches: The Dog in Las meninas
• Afterword: Amores perros
• Appendix: The Animal in Identity Categories
• Works Cited
• Index