From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
6.1 (1986): 51-56.
Copyright © 1986, The Cervantes Society of America
Style and Genre in Don Quijote: The Pastoral
N A DISCUSSION
of the episode of Marcela and Grisóstomo and its context,
Francisco Ayala writes very suggestively of the integration in Don Quijote
of various “espacios espirituales,” “ámbitos
imaginativos diferentes, y en principio
inconciliables.”1 Martínez-Bonati,
in the first of his penetrating series of essays in Dispositio, explores
the phenomenon further, elucidating the “carácter de la
abstracción,” or “principio de estilización”
(p. 33), that defines each of these disparate “regiones de la
imaginación.”2 He makes the following
fundamental point about the relationship between the world of Marcela and
Grisóstomo and the world of the goatherds: “Las leyes de una
estilización son incompatibles con las de la otra; hay, como dijimos,
discontinuidad entre las regiones de lo imaginario” (p. 45). Don Quijote's
problem, of course, is precisely that he believes in the continuity
of the world of his daily experience with the world represented in the books
of chivalry, while in fact these two worlds are mutually exclusive (p. 41).
These seem to me to be extremely fruitful insights,
and since both Ayala and Martínez-Bonati deal mainly with the content
and perspective of these “regiones de la imaginación,” and
only
1
Ensayos (Madrid: Aguilar, 1972), pp. 605-06.
2 Félix
Martínez-Bonati, “Cervantes y las regiones de la
imaginación,” Dispositio 2 (1977), 33.
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JOHN J. ALLEN |
Cervantes |
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incidentally with style itself, what I want to do here is the following:
1) illustrate the multiplicity of styles in
which a given core situation is expressed by Cervantes in Don
Quijote.
2) suggest that the use of many styles functions
as part of a lesson in how to read: that it functions to induce a consciousness
in the reader of style and its effects, often through extreme and abrupt
stylistic variation.
3) indicate the complementary and even more
explicit highlighting of style in another alternative stylistic context of
Don Quijote: the chivalric.
4) offer an interpretation of the broader
significance of this lesson in how to read.
Here are some samples of the various styles
with which Cervantes treats the common core situation or episode that is
potentially “pastoral”; we could call it “unrequited love
in the country.” The gamut of styles runs from the treatment of the
instinctual ‘passion’ of Rocinante through the comic narration
of Sancho, the naive rustic lyrics of Antonio, the narration of the literary
tragedy of Grisóstomo, and the stylized penance of Eugenio, all the
way to literature enacted as such, in the eclogues of Garcilaso and Camoens
which are ready for presentation in Part II, Chapter 58.
My samples are not all from the same point
or stage in the respective episodes; some are delivered by participants,
some by narrators. Neither the speaker nor the content are important for
my purposes here. I am simply asking you to attend for a moment to the sound
of the five passages, the sound of five different “regiones de la
imaginación”:
1) le vino en deseo de refocilarse con las
señoras facas, [que] debían de tener más gana de pacer
que de ál.3
2) yendo días y viniendo días,
el diablo, que todo lo añasca, hizo de manera que el amor que el pastor
tenía a la pastora se volvió en omecillo y mala voluntad; y
la causa fue, según malas lenguas, una cierta cantidad de celillos
que ella le dio, tales, que pasaban de la raya y llegaban a lo vedado. (I,
238)
3) no te quiero yo a montón,
ni te pretendo y te
sirvo
por lo de barraganía;
que más bueno
es mi designio. (I, 161)
3 Don
Quijote de la Mancha, ed. J. J. Allen (Madrid: Cátedra, 1984),
I, 190.
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Style and Genre in Don Quijote |
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4) Quiso bien, fue aborrecido; adoró,
fue desdeñado; rogó a una fiera, importunó a un
mármol, corrió tras el viento, dio voces a la soledad, sirvió
a una ingratitud, de quien alcanzó por premio ser despojos de la muerte
en la mitad de la carrera de la vida . . . (I, 176)
5) mi competidor . . . sólo
se queja de ausencia . . . . Yo sigo otro camino más
fácil, y a mi parecer el más acertado, que es decir mal de
la ligereza de las mujeres, de su inconstancia, de su doble trato, de sus
promesas muertas, de su fe rompida, y, finalmente, del poco discurso que
tienen en saber colocar sus pensamientos e intenciones que tienen. (I, 570)
Cervantes' mastery in the stylistic
characterization of these different regions of the imagination is evident
in the varieties of rhythm, of the lexicon, of the distance between the speaker
and his subject, in short in the rhetoric of even these brief excerpts. This
versatility is, I think, unparalleled, sin par. One of my selections
is verse, but the different effects of prose and verse are minimal components
of the stylistic matrix involved in each example. Only think of the abyss
that separates Don Quijote's two poems to Dulcinea.
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In Part I: |
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Así, hasta henchir un pipote, |
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aquí lloró don Quijote |
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ausencias de Dulcinea |
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del Toboso. (I, 308) |
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| In Part II: |
Así el vivir me mata, |
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que la muerte me torna a dar la vida. |
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¡Oh condición no oída |
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la que conmigo muerte y vida trata! |
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(II, 539) |
The first set of verses is funny (is meant to be funny); it is difficult
to see how the second set can be.
We don't need Cervantes to show us this kind
of disparity, of course. We know that ‘the execution of a brave man,’
for example, can be that of Sidney Carton presented by Dickens in A Tale
of Two Cities, or it can be that of Pablos' father, in the
Buscón, as recounted by Alonso Ramplón, hangman and
brother of the deceased. But Cervantes, who can do both things in the same
chapter, even in the same sentence, is particularly keenly aware of the
relationship between style and genre, and is, I think, at pains to make the
reader aware of it, as part of the lesson in how to read embodied in his
story of that classic misreader, Don Quijote.
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JOHN J. ALLEN |
Cervantes |
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Now, in this context, let us look briefly at
Cervantes' preparation for the Marcela-Grisóstomo episode. Ayala's
characterization gives us our perspective:
[Hay] una gradación muy sutil. Don Quijote va a ingresar en esta Arcadia
fingida a través de las chozas de unos cabreros, su rústica
mesa y sus groseras ceremonias. El mismo se encargará de evocar la
edad de oro con su discurso famoso. Apenas terminado, se anuncia la venida
de un “zagal muy entendido y muy enamorado,” el son de cuyo rabel
no tarda en oírse. Este zagal, Antonio, que cantará “con
buena gracia” una canción oportuna, se eleva individualizado
sobre la estatura vulgar de sus compañeros; y otro recién llegado
cabrero, Pedro, aportará la noticia de lo sucedido con los señores
y su fingida Arcadia dándonos así acceso a su peculiarísimo
terreno literario. (P. 603)
The performance of Antonio is indeed a nice
touch, but the most skillful and daring aspect of the transition, akin to
the escalation of Sancho's stylistic potential in Part II, Chapter 5, is
the transformation of the language of Pedro as he relates the events leading
up to Grisóstomo's death. Beginning in the realm of comic realism
with the series of vulgarismos that Don Quijote compulsively corrects
—cris, estil, sarna—, the gamut of Pedro's style runs in
a single page from “hételo aquí, cuando no me cato, que
remanece un día la melindrosa Marcela hecha pastora,” to:
aquí suspira un pastor, allí se queja otro; acullá se
oyen amorosas canciones, acá desesperadas endechas. Cuál hay
que pasa todas las horas de la noche sentado al pie de alguna encina o
peñasco, y allí, sin plegar los llorosos ojos, embebecido y
transportado en sus pensamientos, le halló el sol a la
mañana . . . . (I, 167)
The descent from the pastoral region of the imagination following the conclusion
of the episode is equally swift: the rejection of Rocinante by the Yanguesan
mares in Chapter 15.
My point is that this uncomfortably intimate
juxtaposition of styles is more than simply an alarde de virtuosismo
by Cervantes. He insistently and repeatedly emphasizes style from the beginning
of the book. The question of the importance of appropriate style is central
to the Prologue to Part 1, and much in the early chapters is dedicated to
establishing the extraordinary significance of stylistic variation. Two examples
from Don Quijote's very first encounter will have to suffice by way of
illustration, and since I have analyzed them before, in other contexts, I
will simply allude to them here. The first is the treatment of Don Quijote's
arrival at the inn in Chapter 2, his reception by the
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prostitutes and the innkeeper, and the meal he is served. Cervantes' use
of three key words —castellano, doncellas, and
truchuelas— enables him to demonstrate the possibility of imposing
two radically different interpretations on a single series of events, by
the association of the words with two incompatible regions of the imagination:
chivalric romance and comic realism.
The second example: when the innkeeper informs
Don Quijote in Chapter 3 that he, too, had once been a knight errant, Cervantes
demonstrates the possibility that content may actually be overwhelmed,
obliterated, by style:
él, asimesmo, en los años de su mocedad, se había dado
a aquel honroso ejercicio, . . . haciendo muchos tuertos, recuestando
muchas viudas, deshaciendo algunas doncellas y engañando algunos pupilos
. . . . (I, 100)
Don Quijote's acceptance of this mock-heroic
speech —“prometió de hacer lo que se le aconsejaba con toda
puntualidad”— is based exclusively upon its stylistic conformity
to a proper account of chivalric activity. The different styles of Cervantes'
masterpiece sometimes flow and modulate, sometimes clash; they turn opaque
or transparent; they deflate and they elevate, in intricate and always purposeful
involvement with the characters and events that they stylize.
I suggested some years ago that this last episode
demonstrates the primacy, for Don Quijote, of the esthetic over the ethical
in his initial attraction to the books of
chivalry.4 Now I would like to speculate briefly
about the relationship, in Don Quijote, of the esthetic to the
ethical.
Style is the vehicle of Martínez-Bonati's
“principio de estilización,” and style is to episode as
experience is to events. That is, style is an imitation (or a projection)
of one or another of the perceptual screens through which we all experience
life. When Wayne Booth says that “our stories criticize each other as
expressions of how life is,”5 his assumption
is that reading literature is looking at life through another's perceptual
screen. A way of writing or a way of talking expresses a way of looking at
the world.
Cervantes' exploration and exemplification
of stylistic variation is at the heart of his perspectivism, of his interest
in different ways of
4 Don
Quixote: Hero or Fool? Part II. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida,
1979), pp. 54-55.
5 The Rhetoric
of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 69.
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JOHN J. ALLEN |
Cervantes |
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looking at things. He never stops doing this, in Don Quijote. When
we are told that the protagonist, “entre compasiones y lágrimas
de los que allí se hallaron, dio su espíritu, quiero decir
que se murió” (II, 577), the italicized phrase is not there
to clarify; it is there to produce the dissonant clash of two disparate regions
of the imagination, two levels of style, two genres.
In this attempt to suggest the stylistic component
of Martínez-Bonati's elegant scheme of regions of the imagination,
I have to stop short of accepting his insistence that all of these regions
undercut one another, for reasons that I cannot go into here. Let me say
only that the adoption by Don Quijote of a style consonant with the perceptual
screen through which Cervantes' novel views events, i.e., a style consistent
with a proper experience of these events, as he sheds chivalric archaism
and, finally, shuns ‘literary’ rhetoric altogether, is the validation
of his recovery at the end. “Yo tengo juicio ya, libre y claro,”
is less convincing, less definitive, than “en los nidos de
antaño, no hay pájaros hogaño.”