In the Prologue to the Novelas ejemplares, Cervantes famously offered an astonishing guarantee of the high moral tone of the collection: he would rather cut off the one remaining hand with which he wrote them than publish stories which could drive a reader to evil thoughts or desires. Despite these protestations, Cervantes makes frequent use of plots which have their origin in acts of rape or abduction, and the Novelas ejemplares are notable for the amount of sexual violence they contain. Even so, La fuerza de la sangre (The Power of Blood) is exceptional in several ways: the opening rape scene is startlingly graphic; the rapist is shockingly brutal, callous and lacking in remorse; and the extraordinary dénouement poses some of the greatest interpretative challenges of any story in the collection.

In fact, there is nothing inherently contradictory in writing a story about a sex crime and using it to deliver a moral message. The conventional ‘exemplarity’ of the novelas is hardly ever manifested in the use of positive models to be imitated, and is more often found in negative examples to be avoided. But Cervantes’s brand of exemplarity goes well beyond the conventional, and is most often realized through the way he presents examples, or ‘working models’, of human behaviour which raise issues that are rarely cut and dried and require the reader’s active engagement to make sense of them. Rather than using fiction to teach, still less to preach, Cervantes's aim is to provoke. Readers of La fuerza de la sangre will find much to admire in its subtle artifice and invention, but their reading will not be complete unless they also find themselves mystified and outraged by what is going on in the story.

Cervantes

The clue to what makes Cervantes's fiction mysterious and provocative can be found in the gaps between what is conventional in his work and what is not. Some features of his work are so characteristic that they appear to be non-negotiable: that a suppressed truth must inevitably come to light, for example, or that a state of order, once disturbed, must be restored. But the pursuit of the ‘happy ending’ can be misleading if we are not responsive to the ways in which the plot architecture can be contradicted by narrative details which jag and jar.