Cervantes after the material turn: river gods, lakes of blood, and other personified bodies of water in Numancia

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a new materialist reading of Cervantes’s Numancia (c. 1585) that reassesses the role of personified bodies of water like the Duero as early modern naturecultures. Personifications of bodies of water were ubiquitous in the political iconography of the early modern period due to their capacity to tether political order to idealized visions of a land’s natural order. In its ability to bridge the divide between nature and culture, personifications like the river god Duero constitute an early modern iteration of the new materialist notion of natureculture. The Duero, however, is just one personified body of water among many in Numancia. The imperial terraforming of Numancia’s land and people into a lake of blood at the end of Act Four represents a liquid counterpoint to the river god Duero and his idealized account of imperial history in Act One. I propose here that the two bodies of water that bookend Numancia must be understood in relation to each other as doubles that reveal, in the case of the lake of blood, what the Duero obfuscates. What surfaces at the confluence of the bodies of water that flood Numancia is Cervantes’s critical appraisal of the river god Duero as a beguiling but misleading figure that distorts nature and history in the service of empire. One can conclude that in Numancia Cervantes is thinking of human bodies as porous entities that take on liquid forms imbued with subjectivity and history in ways that speak to the new materialist insights of contemporary theory.