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The subject of blood purity has recently been studied in Cervantes with respect to Don Quijote and La Numancia,1 but I will focus on a Cervantine work whose interpretation hinges on the meaning of blood: "La fuerza de la sangre," which explores the public acceptance of the absurd fiction of limpieza de sangre while also reflecting on the limitations and possibilities of genre.2 I draw on María Elena Martinez's characterization of the Spanish concept of blood purity and impurity as "fictions, ideological constructs based on religious and genealogical understandings of difference" (Martínez 61). As Martínez notes, in spite of their fictional nature, these "were no less effective at shaping social practices, categories of identity, and self-perceptions" (61). "La fuerza de la sangre" investigates precisely these fictions, drawing ironically on the conventions of the miracle narrative and the romance to skewer the ideology behind limpieza. The novela argues that the purity of blood can never be known, and thus any system premised on this purity is pure fiction. Rather than directly puncturing the posturing of his characters-as occurs in, for example, El retablo de las maravillas-in "La fuerza de la sangre," Cervantes approaches the problem of pure blood obliquely, taking advantage of genre conventions and the coded language of limpieza, while at the same time pointing to their fissures and inconsistencies. In other words, Cervantes asks us to dismantle the fiction of limpieza de sangre by dismantling the fiction he presents to us.3
If we consider the novela from this perspective, its unlikely events can be understood through a single glimpse of spilled blood and its miraculous credibility. This central "miracle"-at once believable and inconceivable-allows the reader of "La fuerza de la sangre" the possibility of accepting the truth of the narrative while questioning its reliability. Blood is the central sign in the novela because it allows just this ambiguity: the ideology of limpieza de sangre insists that blood can be made legible and knowable; however, as a mere bodily substance, it remains opaque, an empty signifier. This interpretive disconnect, the novela argues, is the specific province of fictions, both those that take place on the page and those that operate in readers' everyday lives, including those that underpin even the most entrenched institutions. This approach...