From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
8 special issue (1988): 17-28.
Copyright © 1988, The Cervantes Society of America
La Galatea and Cervantes' “Tercia
Realidad”
for WFK
HE NEED FOR
particular care when referring to questions of genre in literature
is nowhere more evident than in the works of Cervantes. If genre results
from a conscious imitation of earlier literature, then it may be easily confused
with convention in the sixteenth century, because the desire to copy or imitate
was even then still inevitably bound to literary tradition and was not merely
a matter of choice. Cervantes aggravates the problem by repeatedly calling
attention to it, since he wrote literature, wrote about it and about writing
it all at once. As the prologue to Don Quijote shows, the issue of
what one was obliged to include in one's writing due to dictates of style
and what one chose to “borrow” out of admiration for one's
predecessors, as well as one's right to do so, was highly problematic in
Cervantes' time.1 “Imitation” was
proper commonplace
1 The
narrator of the “Prólogo” laments that his will be unlike
“otros libros, aunque sean fabulosos y profanos, tan llenos de sentencias
de Aristóteles, de Platón y de toda la caterva de filósofos,
que admiran a los leyentes y tienen a sus autores por hombres leídos,
eruditos y elocuentes” (Don Quijote, ed. Martín de Riquer,
2 vols. [Barcelona: Editorial Juventud, 1974] I, 20). The fact that this
need to include “toda la caterva de filósofos” is material
for satire indicates that in 1605 the appropriateness of proving one's erudition
through copying others' was waning. Nevertheless, “borrowing” from
classical and contemporary sources alike was practiced [p.
18] with great zeal by some, like Lope de Vega and Fray Antonio de
Guevara. See Francisco Márquez-Villanueva, “Fray Antonio de Guevara
o la ascética novelada” in Espiritualidad y literatura en
el siglo XVI (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1968), pp. 15-66.
17
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and “plagiarism” just beginning to
exist;2 the modern concept of originality
in literature emerged only slowly from the depths of what we consider to
be slavish attention to the classics and the esteem for them which held that
good ideas were worthy of outright
repetition.3
In the case of La Galatea, it is clear
that Montemayor's La Diana served as Cervantes' basic model, although
he was certainly influenced by earlier imitators of Montemayor as well. Thus,
La Galatea is traditionally included in the list of fictional works
referred to as pastoral romances or pastoral novels, originally inspired
by La Diana (and which, in this study, will be referred to as pastoral
books).4 At
2 The
practice of not identifying one's sources, regardless of the extent upon
which they were drawn, was still common in the sixteenth century, perhaps
a lingering influence from the communal attitude about literature theoretically
held by the long-time guardians of the written word in the Christian world,
the religious orders. This copying was not limited to small sections of text
or to the pilferage of classical works: Montemayor, for example, translated
entirely from St. John Climacus' Scala coeli for the second half of
his “Diálogo spiritual,” from Lourenço de Caceres
for his “Trabajos de los reyes,” and included poems by other poets
in “his” Cancioneros, without any reference to what he was
doing.
3 As books became
marketable items that responded to popular demand (versus their being
repositories of irrefutable wisdom), the business of copying was less related
to philosophical or artistic admiration and became more a matter of attempting
to take material advantage of another's success. The “Prólogo”
to the second part of Don Quijote attests to this: “Dile [al
autor de la primera continuación] que de la amenaza que me hace, que
me ha de quitar la ganancia con su libro, no se me da un ardite” (II,
538). Cervantes' poverty, which distinguished him from theretofore typical
gentlemen writers, leads one to wonder if this testy response to Avellaneda
only superficially masks a genuine concern about the market value of his
own continuation of Don Quijote, then the second to be published.
However, Avellaneda was merely repeating history in trying to make a genre
out of Cervantes' creation, as had been done with Amadís de
Gaula, Celestina, Lazarillo, La Diana, etc.
4 Critics vary
in their preference for “pastoral novel” or “pastoral
romance” to describe that category of books which can correctly only
be called “libros de pastores,” the words used by those who wrote
and read them. Although return to the original terminology properly eliminates
the anachronistic conflict between romance and novel implied by our modern
words, it poses a problem in English, for reference to “shepherds'
books” [p. 19] includes a blatant sex marker
that detracts attention from the innovative role of women in this type of
fiction. A prudent alternative seems to be “pastoral books,” which,
aside from being a closer representation of “libros de pastores”
than pastoral romance or novel, avoids implying the existence of the novel
before its time and resists transfer of the English category of romance into
a language which does not have a corresponding term. The use of
“books” to talk about volumes consisting of “libros,”
as does La Galatea, is an accurate but awkward translation, since
“libros” in this context means “chapters” but are referred
to as Book I, Book II, etc. For the problem of novel, romance, and terminology,
see Bruce Wardropper's “Don Quixote: Story or History?”
In Modern Philology 63 (1965), 1-11, and Alban K. Forcione's
Cervantes, Aristotle and the “Persiles” (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1970).
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some point, however, the differences between the imitated and the imitating
outweigh their similarities and a progression is thereby made into another
type of art, occurring at the text in which invention overcomes imitation.
Cervantes, author of Don Quijote, is a prime example of a writer who
outsmarted his precursors yet also depended heavily on their accomplishments
and the conventions they respected.5 Don
Quijote, however, is not his only work that resists conventional categories;
attempting to slip La Galatea tidily into criteria for pastoral books
is like trying to squeeze the glass slipper meant for Cinderella onto the
unwieldy foot of her least elegant stepsister.
The structure of La Galatea consists
of varied plots that are developed with an unusual amount of physical and
emotional activity for Spanish pastoral fiction of Cervantes' time. Perhaps,
then, this is not a case of the glass slipper at all; perhaps Cervantes'
pastoral book is no more pastoral than Don Quijote is chivalric. What
follows is an attempt to reconcile La Galatea to literary history
by considering the ways in which Cervantes depended on and superseded the
code of the “libros de pastores” to make La Galatea more
than what it should have been.
In Book VI, Elicio describes the Valle de los
Cipreses to Timbrio in these terms:
5 Cervantes
was never one to mask his awareness of theoretical problems. Indeed, the
self-conscious declarations and doubts included in the prologues to all of
his prose works make clear his mindfulness of literary rules and categories.
The prologue to La Galatea, for example, indicates a keen awareness
of what he was supposed to be writing, at the same time that it contains
clever reference to his failure to comply. See my “The Poetics of Pastoral:
Prologue to the Galatea,” in Cervantes and the Pastoral
(Cleveland: Cleveland State University, 1986), pp. 169-84.
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Aquí se ve en cualquiera sazón del año andar la
risueña primavera con la hermosa Venus en hábito subcinto y
amoroso, y Céfiro que la acompaña, con la madre Flora delante,
esparciendo a manos llenas varias y odoríferas flores. Y la industria
de sus moradores ha hecho tanto, que la naturaleza, encorporada con el arte,
es hecha artífice y connatural del arte, y de entrambas a dos se ha
hecho una tercia naturaleza, a la cual no sabré dar
nombre.6
This passage serves as a paradigm through which the structure of La
Galatea may be interpreted. Cervantes' pastoral book consists of repeated
conflict between the archetypal realm of the poetic in which pastoral literature
functions, on one hand, and human life as it is experienced, in historical
rather than poetic terms, on the other.7 Like
the environment described by Elicio, the theoretically perfect pastoral world
is adjusted through the author's industria to conform to humanity's
own nature and imperfections in La Galatea. Put in
6 Quotations
from the text of La Galatea are from the edition of Juan Bautista
Avalle-Arce (2 vols. [Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1961]), in this case II, 170.
I would like to thank Alan Trueblood for calling my attention to Edward W.
Tayler's Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1964), in which the dynamic balance between Nature and
Art is studied as the essence of Renaissance pastoral. In his introduction,
Tayler points out the same interdependence between the two that Elicio recognizes
in his own environment: “Pastoral is by definition implicitly concerned
with the discrepancies that may be observed between rural and urban, country
and courtly, simple and complex, natural and artificial” (5). Anthony
Cascardi considers the role of nature in relation to the problem of genre
in his “Genre Definition and Multiplicity
in Don Quijote” (Cervantes 6
[1986], 39-49.
7 Poetry and
history are here used in the neo-Aristotelian context in which they were
understood in Cervantes' day. Wardropper (“Don Quixote: Story
or History”) defines poetry and history in a manner appropriate for
this study, as categories of imitation, wherein poetry deals with universality
and history with particularity. Poetry was held in higher esteem for its
superior philosophical and moral content, for it ultimately presents the
world as it should be. History, however, represents the world as it presents
itself to human senses. In his constant use of the word “history”
to refer to Don Quijote (which is really not history), Cervantes blurs
the distinction between traditional neo-Aristotelian categories, all the
while apparently swearing allegiance to the same. Likewise, when he loudly
refers to La Galatea as eclogues (I, 5), he means it is a specific
type of poetry, the kind based on an idealized vision of the lives of shepherds
and shepherdesses. His insistence that La Galatea is poetry is merely
an earlier, reversed version of the claim for historicity in Don
Quijote, because La Galatea is full of decidedly unpoetic
elements.
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neo-Aristotelian terms, this means that Cervantes attempts to acknowledge
history through a poetic text by sometimes presenting reality better than
it really is, and other times reminding us of just how unpoetic it can be.
Thus a tension is produced between the realm of what should be and that of
what is, a tension that is scrupulously maintained throughout the La
Galatea. Whether the poetry / history conflict was sustained to prove
something or was left standing because the book was left unfinished is a
moot point, but the fact remains that the struggle was unresolved by Cervantes.
Here we are with a work to which, as Elicio says, “no sabemos dar
nombre.”
The kinetic manner in which the
“poetic” plot of La Galatea is played against
“historical” interpolations is a common foundation for critical
approaches to the book and offers a method to categorize what looks like
the text's simple polarity.8 Book I opens
with Elicio wistfully contemplating his unrequited love for Galatea in true
pastoral form, and he is shortly thereafter joined by Erastro the rustic.
Their amoebean song is interrupted by the dramatic entrance of Lisandro “el
pastor homicida.” After witnessing nothing less than a murder, Elicio
returns (with the reader) to his hut for his nocturnal contemplations,
“para soltar la rienda a sus amorosas imaginaciones” (I, 30). Pastoral
poetry, interrupted by violent aggression, is followed by recovery of the
idyllic mode; thus the zig-zag of La Galatea begins, and so it continues
right to the end.
Professor Avalle-Arce identifies this juxtaposition
as “un curioso movimento pendular” (NPE 243) and continues
to say: “La intención del autor, puesta al servicio de la
concordancia, tratará de crear una nueva ars oppositorum cuya
mecánica estará determinada por la concepción de una
meta-realidad literaria en la que estos opuestos podrán existir lado
a lado, sin cancelación mutua.” By evoking a situation and then
its opposite, he says, Cervantes forges a new type of literary character,
“poseedor de una autarquía de existencia imposible dentro de
las rígidas relaciones que predicaba la pastoril anterior”
(NPE 246).
8 See
Avalle-Arce's fundamental study of La Galatea, “Cervantes,”
in La novela pastoril española (2nd ed. [Madrid: Ediciones
Istmo, 1974]), pp. 229-64 (cited henceforth as NPE). James Stamm developed
Avalle-Arce's basic thesis of the text's polarity, pointing out the exaggerated
extremes of the poetic and historical elements. See his excellent
article “La Galatea y el concepto de género: un
acercamiento,” in Cervantes: su obra y su mundo (Actas del I
Congreso Internacional sobre Cervantes. [Madrid: EDI-6, 1981] pp. 337-43).
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This autarchy was made possible by the characters' ability to change and
by depiction of that change as a believable consequence of their personalities
and circumstances. This same innovation was made at the expense of the poetic
intentions of the author.
As the six books of La Galatea proceed,
the action swings back and forth between idealistic, pastoral segments directed
toward contemplative ends and novelistic, historical segments which provide
the physical action that the pastoral segments should
not.9 However, this in itself was nothing
new; Montemayor made ample use of interpolations to accomplish the same
variation, albeit on a smaller scale than Cervantes. The distinguishing mark
of La Galatea is a two-fold complication of the pendular movement
described by Avalle-Arce. First, in spite of the swing of the plots from
one pole to another, the characters do not remain within the sphere of one
realm or the other. That is, since they are not controlled by the dictates
of any constant philosophical or literary ideology, they cannot be consistently
linked with either the ideal or the actual; they display rather the conflict
between the two within each individual. Combined with the pendular motion
described, this allows the characters to grow through change over the course
of time, freeing them from the restrictions of representing anything except
what they are: human lovers whose lives are torn between what they wish would
happen and what happens.10
What is described within the locus amoenus
(also metaphorically referred to as Arcadia), is essentially atemporal, although
related to temporal events; nothing is supposed to “happen.” Therefore,
the
9 What
it is that makes the pastoral mode work has puzzled critics for years, and
none agree on every detail. In this study, reference to the “pastoral
myth” or the nature of pastoral in general refers to characteristics
which typify all pastoral literature: shepherds and shepherdesses as
representative anecdotes of the human experience; contemplative versus active
values, meaning description of emotions and of the sentimental consequences
of action, not action itself; focus on the past, usually in an idealized
and melancholic fashion; use of a limited natural setting, also idealized,
which is described with affection and is physically and psychically removed
from urban life. In pastoral books of sixteenth-century Spain, attention
should be called to the multiple rather than single or double plots, none
of which completely dominates the others. For the theoretical questions in
the same context, see my “Prologue to Pastoral.”
10 Avalle-Arce
says of the characters in La Galatea: “El concepto de amor
. . . está tan hondamente enclavado en lo íntimo
de la personalidad del pastor que no se puede hablar más de teorías
sino de sufriente e ilógica humanidad” (NPE, p. 240).
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ability to change necessitates a mode beyond the confines of the pastoral
because the characters' presence in Arcadia is dependent upon the supposition
that pastoral situations, love in particular, may be described and described
again but they may not be acted on. The mode is one of thinking and feeling,
not doing. In order to use the pastoral device and allow his characters
to develop beyond types across the narration, the narrator resorts to
interpolations and other less traditionally pastoral devices.
Lisandro rushes in on the scene of the
“deleitoso prado,” kills Carino, begs pardon of Elicio and Erastro
for his bizarre behavior in equally bizarre elevated language, and runs off
to the mountain.11 That courtesy-ridden parlance
of his prepares us for his next appearance in the narration, for when we
hear from him again, he has assimilated the pastoral bearing appropriate
to the environment in which he appears. Thus we find him alone in the bushes,
lamenting his cruel fortune and recalling his past happiness in the light
of his present state; in short, exercising the behavior proper to an exemplary
literary shepherd, remembering what he has done. Appropriately, the narrator
now refers to him not as “el pastor homicida” (I, 29; 32), but
as “el pastor del bosque” (I, 35; 36). What Cervantes has allowed
us to see is Lisandro as a historical character committing a violent act
and Lisandro as a literary shepherd. Unlike most of his pastoral
predecessors, he does not appear with his shepherd's disguise in place, he
puts it on right before our eyes. This is rather like watching Superman become
Clark Kent; we observe both sides of his personality, the one that acts and
the one that contemplates activity. Lisandro is not bound to the sphere of
action into which he carries the narration with his brutal entrance. Although
he was the cause of the initial shift in events from pastoral quietude to
violence, immediately thereafter he is also responsible for helping to
reestablish the contemplative pastoral mode designed for recollection, as
Elicio lends him a sympathetic ear.
Thus the regular pattern of the blocks of plot,
which is disconcerting
11 Lenio
kills Carino, disappears, then suddenly reappears to explain himself, saying:
“Perdonadme, comedidos pastores, si yo no lo he sido en haber hecho
en vuestra presencia lo que habéis visto, porque la justa y mortal
ira que contra ese traidor tenía concebida, no me dio lugar a más
moderados discursos” (I:29). Stamm perceptively suggests that Cervantes
is having some fun with pastoral convention in this passage (“El concepto
del género,” pp. 340).
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for its extremes and regularity, is also disarming for the fact that the
characters do not rest comfortably within one “block” or another,
but jump into the pastoral scene and out, as the text swings between poetry
and history.12 The way in which La
Galatea is structured makes it possible to predict at any given moment
whether what happens next will be poetic / contemplative or historical /
active, because the swing from one to the other is constant. For example,
when Silerio's Byzantine tale is suddenly interrupted, one expects that
interruption to be of a pastoral nature in order to keep all the talk about
duels, Moors, and honor from smothering the affective, more fragile, side
of the text. Thus it is the rejected Mireno who is heard at a distance, lamenting
the impending marriage of his shepherdess to someone else (I,
177).13 Immediately thereafter, Silerio resumes
his narration, which ends with a recounting of his entrance into the poetic
realm of the pastoral, his attempts at resolving his problems through action
having proved unsuccessful.
The second important characteristic of the
poetry / history pendulum is the notable balance maintained throughout La
Galatea between characters who serve a contemplative function, and therefore
fit with relative ease into the pastoral locus, and those who infringe
on the idyllic scene, bringing everyday problems with them. In pastoral
literature, the first plane of the narration, the one on which the characters
speak and move, is reserved for recollection and limited activity. By imposing
action on that first narrative plane, Cervantes' so-called shepherds and
shepherdesses destroy the pastoral ideal, which allows for remembrance of
past events but not witnessing them, and which also assumes things can be
better than they are but stops at that assumption. The characters who pull
action onto the contemplative scene bring the locus amoenus alive
by confronting poetic and philosophical ideologies with their own experience,
12 Jorge
Urrutia parcels sections of narration in Cervantes' works into blocks of
plot, which he then divides into two types, basic and modifying. See “La
técnica de la narración en Cervantes,” in Cervantes:
su obra y su mundo (Actas del I Congreso Internacional sobre Cervantes
[Madrid: EDI-6, 1981], pp. 93-101).
13 Of course,
beyond the variation of poetic and historical sections of the text, there
may be further relationships between narrations and materials used to interrupt
them. Here, for example, Mireno's situation previews what will happen to
Silerio, since Timbrio, not he, will marry Nísida, as Daranio weds
Silveria, not Mireno.
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thereby suggesting that in the context of human life, the one does not
“really” occur without recourse to the other.
Cervantes maintains a tenacious grip on poetic
idealism at the same time as he confronts that idealism with a reality decidedly
less than ideal. There must have been something about the conflict between
the two he felt was essential, because in La Galatea, the characters
line up like two teams in a competition that the author was determined to
have come out a tie. The diachronic alternation between poetry and history
is complemented by synchronic switches designed to keep the “teams”
even, even as there are “players” changing sides. Thus, when Lauso
falls “out” of love, Lenio falls “in,” and they replace
each other in their respective halves of the fictional whole, maintaining
the tension between lovers and
non-lovers.14 Teolinda's story gets progressively
sadder as Timbrio's moves toward a happy resolution. As Galatea decides to
step off her conventional literary pedestal, give up her role as Diana, and
reach out to Elicio for help, Gelasia is introduced to take her place as
the perfect, inaccessible literary shepherdess. Across the span of all six
books, it is apparent that as Galatea and Elicio are increasingly motivated
away from their static existence as perfect shepherds and move into the
problematic realm of actuality, Silerio, Timbrio, Nísida, and Blanca
are allowed to witness the resolution of their “real” problems,
which permits them to rise out of the realm of the particular into that of
poetic harmony. In essence, as the pendulum swings between the poles of poetry
and history, it seems to pick up a character for transport every time it
leaves one on a given side.
There are, then, three characteristics to consider
regarding the structure of La Galatea. First is the pendular movement
which dictates that to every poetic act there will correspond a historic
one.15 Second, characters are not bound to
either poetic or historical
14
Avalle-Arce rightly observes that one type of character or event seems to
provoke the appearance of its opposite (NPE, p. 243). Also, as either
character or situation changes, its opposite does likewise.
15 The balance
between poetic segments and historical ones functions on various levels of
the narration, even within certain single elements of the text. For example,
the “Canto de Calíope” is in itself a traditional part of
a pastoral book, typically being a long laudatory poem. Calíope, however,
sings not of dead heroes or beautiful women but of live poets, whose profession
relates less to the content or supposed purpose of the narration than to
the act of writing it.
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roles; they are not tied to one end of the pendulum's swing or the other.
Rather they are free to develop from poetic characters into characters of
a more active nature, or vice versa, or not to change at all. Third, a balance
is maintained among those characters who drift from one realm into the other,
so that at any given moment in the text neither poetry nor history is abandoned
or assimilated one by the other. To continue with the metaphor of the pendulum,
it seems that it swings within a circle which is itself always rotating in
symmetry.
Within the first plane of the narration there
is also a new and highly significant relationship between physical action
and the lack of it. The interpolations telling of past events, the debate
between Lenio and Damón in Book IV, the “Canto de
Calíope,” and the games at the Arroyo de las Palmas take place
while the characters are seated, but virtually everything else happens while
they are standing or walking from one place to another, including the lesson
on love that Elicio delivers to Erastro in Book III. This is most unlike
Montemayor's shepherds, who go along a single route accumulating one another
like a snowball rolling down a hill; they are all headed in the same direction
and they follow a route together with frequent physical and intellectual
pauses, singing and talking along the way. Their whole experience is essentially
passive, and their willingness to physically halt their activities as they
sympathize with each other is proportionate to the importance placed on what
they say and feel. The shepherds in La Galatea, however, are not directed
unanimously as a group toward any collective end; they rather move endlessly
and at random around the confines of the pastoral environment, as if testing
its limits. This conflict between movement and stillness is symbolic of the
two poles between which the entire text moves: history, the pole of things
happening, and poetry, the recollection and evaluation of what happens. The
author's decision to portray this alternation of stillness and movement perhaps
represents his anxiety to incorporate his characters' feelings into their
actions, yet he cannot seem to integrate the two extremes of thinking and
doing, and never settles them into a comfortable middle ground.
If the characters of the Diana annoy
the modern reader for their endless talking and naïve passivity, those
of La Galatea are no less irksome for their psychotic extremes of
emoting and doing. From the vantage point of the modern reader, we want these
people to be real. It is worth considering that they are actually on the
verge of
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“being real” in La Galatea, and that it was precisely because
Cervantes experimented in pastoral that he was sensitized to the importance
of individual feelings, compared to the sweeping dictates of society, time,
or fortune, in literary representation of the human experience. Although
it does seem that he was aware of the limits of pastoral narration as defined
by his precursors, it also appears that he could not abide by them. The
characters depicted by Cervantes in La Galatea are not traditional
literary shepherds; they, like Cervantes himself, are drawn toward the pastoral
mode, if never faithful to it. What is being born on the banks of the Tagus
in 1585 is the modern fictional character (that entity we so hope to find
in old books), the one whose life's story is that of the poetic ideal within,
coping with historical reality without.
In writing La Galatea, then, Cervantes
relied upon his precursors to overcome them, in much the same fashion as
he did with Don Quijote. The text, bulging at the seams as it does,
has outgrown the glass slipper to make use of a structure more true to life.
The fact that Cervantes repeatedly mentioned his desire to finish La
Galatea is perhaps more significant than the likelihood that he never
did. By not returning to Arcadia, Cervantes did not turn his back on those
pastoral values. Instead, he integrated them into the world beyond the
locus through the nature of his characters. What could be more significant
than the conviction that the pastoral ethos, which exalts the striving human
spirit and represents the assumption that things could be better than they
are, does not exist in an isolated idyllic spot but resides within the human
spirit itself?
By writing La Galatea, Cervantes discovered
that representation of the life experience is not true without adequate
consideration of the world we live in (emotions, philosophies, desires,
illusions —all the stuff of pastoral), as well as the world we live
with, the one we can touch with our senses. His repeated mention of
La Galatea and the pastoral episodes that appear in his later works
imply recognition that while the values exalted by pastoral are indeed basic
to the human condition, representing those values in an artificial environment
is not. With Cervantes, Arcadia has become a means to an end, not an end
in itself. By forcing pastoral spirituality out of Arcadia, he constructs
a literature that is more true to the whole life experience than either Arcadia
itself or the physical world unruffled by the fulfilled and frustrated strivings
of the human spirit.
There is probably not a single central character
in Cervantes'
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works who does not carry the mark of Arcadia within his or her personality.
They are a new breed of literary beings, possessing a spiritual side to their
personalities as individual as their life experiences; they act on their
desires in history rather than limit themselves to expressing those desires
in a poetic context. La Galatea marks the gestation period of the
fictional characters later born of Cervantes' genius. We read the text with
our modern and rather unimaginative prejudice which assumes that literature
is a carbon copy of life. Cervantes' pastoral romance forces us to witness
the birth of that prejudice and, like most births, it is a painful process.
Although it is true that La Galatea consists of a tension “que
no se resuelve y no tiene
dirección,”16 we might reconsider
the criticism. After all, born of that tension are Cervantes' other works,
and those of countless others, in which the extremes of La Galatea
are tempered, but never resolved. For there is no resolution between the
conflict of the spirit and the world, in life or in literature that faithfully
represents it. La Galatea portrays the conflict. What follows, the
compromise.
16 Dora
Issacharoff, “Imágenes manieristas en La Galatea de
Cervantes,” in Cervantes: su obra y su mundo (Actas del I Congreso
Internacional sobre Cervantes [Madrid: EDI-6, 1981], p. 330). Critics typically
point to this lack of resolution as the major fault of La Galatea:
see Ruth El Saffar's essay “La Galatea: The Integrity of the
Unintegrated Text,” also in Cervantes: su obra y su mundo, pp.
345-53. Undoubtedly the most appropriate critic to cite is the one who described
La Galatea saying: “Tiene algo de buena invención; propone
algo, y no concluye nada” (Don Quijote I, 75).
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Prepared with
the help of Myrna Douglas |
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