From La Galatea Through the Quijotes: the Historicization of the Pastoral in Cervantes
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
FROM LA GALATEA THROUGH THE QUIJOTES: THE HISTORICIZATION OF THE PASTORAL IN CERVANTES by Paula Ann Kellar BS, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 1969 MA, Kutztown University, 1980 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 1999 FROM LA GALATEA THROUGH THE QUIJOTES: THE HISTORICIZATION OF THE PASTORAL IN CERVANTES Paula Ann Kellar, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 1999 Cervantes ends La Galatea (1585) promising a sequel, a promise he repeats several times during his literary career. Yet no sequel was produced or apparently contemplated, suggesting that Cervantes intended his promise as a way of teasing the readers. This dissertation argues that Quijote I and II (1605, 1615) should be considered as the missing sequel to La Galatea. Its hypothesis is that at the core of the pastoral mode of La Galatea is a situation of impossible love - the Elicio, Galatea story - with its internal drama of love versus arranged marriage, unresolved in the text of La Galatea. This situation, with other stories, dramatic situations, even characters of La Galatea, are revisited in the two Quijotes, forming in retrospect a kind of narrative trilogy. Chapter 1 focuses on La Galatea, showing the historization and subversion of the model of the Renaissance pastoral novel inherited from Montemayor, introducing tensions and problems that cannot be contained within the model and narrative conventions of pastoral. Chapter 2 considers the little-known “Entremés de los Romances”, showing it as an interim work between La Galatea and the Quijotes; Cervantes reworks the open-ended situations of La Galatea and begins to suggest the properly “chivalric” inventions in the ii Quijotes. Chapter 3 displays pastoral elements in Quijote I showing how famous episodes involve explicit reworkings of elements from La Galatea, passed through the prism of Cervantes’ ironic mobilization of the genre of the chivalric novel. Chapter 4 discusses Quijote II, developing the idea that as the evolving pastoral “mutates” from La Galatea through Quijote I, that is, becomes subject to historical time and change, the narrative form that becomes more evident - and explicit in Quijote II - is the bildungsroman. The “pastoral” identity and story of Elicio in La Galatea, and the “chivalric” identity of don Quijote in the Quijotes are narrative tools, modes, subservient to representing the “becoming” or process of self-discovery of Alonso Quijano (and of the aristocracy he symbolizes ironically), a process of adaptation to modernity. Where earlier critics stressed the passage from romance to novel in Cervantes, this dissertation tracks the passage from pastoral to bildungsroman. iii PREFACE I wish to thank Professors John Beverley, Gerald Martin and Stephanie Mihalic for their insight, advice and technical assistance in the preparation of this work. I am grateful for the help and encouragement of Lucy J. Felix, Richard (I), Richard (II) and Katharine Kellar, and Catherine Lopresti, my proof-readers, for their objectivity, their infinite patience and unquestioned moral support. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page PREFACE...........................................................................................................................iv I. INTRODUCTION........................................................................................1 II. La Galatea: The First Deviation From Montemayor’s Model....................20 III. “El Entremés de Los Romances”: The Interim Continuation.......................72 IV. Quijote I: The First Pastoral Extension....................................................116 V. Quijote II: The Further Pastoral Adaptations...........................................185 VI. CONCLUSION.........................................................................................260 BIBLIOGRAPHY.............................................................................................................272 v INTRODUCTION “Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.” Jorge Luis Borges The convention of the pastoral novel begged an extension, and so, at the end of La Galatea, Cervantes suggests such a project based on the activities of selected characters whose “histories” he had prematurely interrupted, and had left hanging by design: “En fin deste amoroso cuento y historia, con los sucessos de Galercio, Lenio y Gelasia, Arsindo, Maurisa, Grisaldo, Artandro y Rosaura, Marsilo y Belisa, con otras cosas sucedidas a los pastores hasta aquí nombrados, en la segunda parte de esta historia se prometen...”1 A central issue which has plagued Cervantists has been Cervantes’ apparent lack of any attempt to keep his word. As is well-known, Cervantes repeats the promise three more times during the course of his literary career, at the end of chapter VI, Quijote I and in the Prologues of both 1Miguel de Cervantes, La Galatea, ed. J.B. Avalle-Arce (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1987) 496. 1 2 Quijote II and Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. However, are the promises merely Cervantes’ attempts to tease the reader in the same way as the invention of Cide Hamete Benengeli in Quijote I?2 Nevertheless, even if the promises are a Cervantine manipulation, they are still related to La Galatea on two levels: the promises imply a continued contract with the reader to remember and to return to the original tale. Then their repetition demonstrates a need on Cervantes’ part to return himself to an unresolved conflict which may be seen as an obsession. The process of the resolution of the conflict evolves from La Galatea to the Quijotes, where I sense it finally concludes in Quijote II. It may legitimately asked then, what is the relationship of Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda to this problem? The last novel may share some of the basic elements and tensions involved in this conflict. If, as I argue, Cervantes brings the problem he sets up in La Galatea to a conclusion in Quijote II, then literally Persiles lies beyond this problem and its novelistic trajectory. The convention of the pastoral which promises an extension invites other authors to continue the work, hopefully in the spirit of the original composition, as del Río notes having occurred in the case of La Diana and its most important sequel, La Diana enamorada. Perhaps Cervantes was just following convention; but perhaps it is much more than convention. This thesis has its genesis in my sense that in some way the Quijotes provide continuations to La 2In The Romantic Approach to Don Quijote, Anthony Close deals with how Cervantes was read differently from the 17th century than in the 19th century. Close suggests ways in which Cervantes plays both with his contemporary readers’ expectations, and with his implied contracts between author and readers. Anthony Close, The Romantic Approach to Don Quijote: a critical history of the romantic tradition in Quijote criticism (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 3 Galatea, and that one of the threads to follow was Cervantes’ identification of the stories he intended to continue. In a way, it seemed as if Cervantes were more interested in the story of La Galatea, in the themes, characters and specific episodes, than in the pastoral as such. At the core of this tale is the impossible love between Elicio and Galatea, complicated by Galatea’s pledge of marriage to a Portuguese stranger which subverts the pastoral. Specifically, this nuclear tale of “impossible love” drives the main plot and the various subplots of the novel. It posits, and at least partially resolves the related situations. It is the wealth of episodic material implicit in the central tale which I sense seems so attractive to Cervantes; the theme of impossible love permits the exclusion and adaptation of collateral issues such as the love triangle and unrequited love, social inequality, marriage for love versus arranged marriages, insincerity, betrayal, kidnaping and suicide in the name of love and even murder as a crime of passion. Could it be, then, that what critics have noticed routinely as a formal promise, a contract between Cervantes and his reading public, was considered by the author a more informal commitment to continue the project begun in La Galatea, and adapted to fit the literary mood of the moment? My idea began to evolve into an hypothesis. Were the Quijotes attempts to pursue, then conclude, the open-ended plots of La Galatea? In such a case, each time Cervantes finished a work, reality must have shown him that the original project, was in some way unfinished or inadequate; this circumstance compelled him to resume the threads of the original in yet another kind of novel. In Quijote I, during the scrutiny of the Quijano library, Cervantes mentions his own novel in a way that implies intent, and indeed movement in the direction of continuing the 4 story of La Galatea: “...Su libro (La Galatea) tiene algo de buena invención; propone algo, y no concluye nada; es menester esperar la segunda parte que promete...”3 J.A Tamayo observes, “Toda La Galatea que poseemos no es sino el prólogo de lo que hubiera sido la historia novelada de Elicio y Galatea.”4 It is at the end of the sixth chapter that the continuation of La Galatea is proposed. Henry Sullivan recognizes similar Cervantine manipulations between Quijote I and its sequel. He reasons, “A key passage for this reading of Part II (Quijote II) is the significantly placed chapter VIII. There is a symmetry