From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
8 special issue (1988): 29-42.
Copyright © 1988, The Cervantes Society of America
La Galatea: Structural Unity and the Pastoral
Convention
N The
Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance, Harry Levin remarks that Cervantes
“. . . unsuccessfully experimented with pastoral in his first
printed work, the long-drawn-out yet unfinished
Galatea.”1 Apparently sharing
this view, other Cervantists have given La Galatea less attention
and less praise than Cervantes' other
works.2 Among other deficiencies, La
Galatea is commonly faulted for lacking unity of theme and action. The
many interpolated stories, frequent interruptions in the narrative, the ending
itself, which leaves undecided the fates of the main characters, and the
repeated intrusions of violence, which disrupt the tranquility of the
1 Harry
Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (Bloomington:
Indiana Univ. Press, 1969), p. 140.
2 For example:
Ruth Saffar, in her article “La Galatea: The Integrity of the
Unintegrated Text,” refers to the “failure” of La Galatea
and terms it Cervantes' “least fortunate literary effort,”
Dipositio 3 (1978), 337. Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce uses the word
“fracaso,” though he adds that for any other writer La Galatea
would have been a major accomplishment, La novela pastoril
española, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Istmo, 1974), p. 262. Manuel
Durán finds the only “redeeming grace” in La Galatea
to be its style, “the melody of its words,” which one need not
understand Spanish to appreciate, in Cervantes (Boston: Twayne, 1974),
p. 84. Jennifer Lowe, “The Cuestión de Amor and the Structure
of Cervantes' Galatea,” BHS 43 (1966), 108, states that
while the book is not a “complete failure, . . . it would be wrong to
claim that the Galatea is an outstanding book which clearly bears
the stamp of Cervantes.” William Atkinson, “Cervantes, El Pinciano,
and the Novelas ejemplares,” HR, 16 (1948), 192, terms
La Galatea a “technical failure.” In her book, Novel
to Romance: A Study [p. 30] of Cervantes's
“Novelas ejemplares,” Ruth El Saffar explains La Galatea's
“weaknesses” as “the product of inexperience” (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974), p. xi. On this basis she eliminates it
from consideration in her theory of the development of Cervantes' art. Javier
Herrero sets aside La Galatea as irrelevant to his analysis of the
pastoral episodes in the Quixote, in his article, “Arcadia's
Inferno: Cervantes' Attack on Pastoral,” BHS 55 (1978), 298 n.
29
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pastoral setting, all contribute to an apparent
dissonance.3 Given the importance of
consonancia to Cervantes' theory of fiction, as outlined by E. C.
Riley and others,4 the assumption that in
La Galatea Cervantes
3 The
notion of La Galatea as an artistic failure ultimately implies that
it lacks unity. The two most serious attempts to discover unity in the work
are Lowe's study, “The Cuestión de Amor . . . ,”
and Kenneth P. Allen, “Cervantes' Galatea and the discorso
intorno al comporre dei romanzi of Girladi Cinthio,” RHM
39 (1976-77), 53-68. Lowe shows that all the stories represent “cuestiones
de amor,” and that some of the interruptions in the narrative serve
to interweave stories that show different facets of the same basic
“cuestiones.” Allen shows that the stories are also arranged according
to four specific “lover's complaints,” “Muerte,”
“desdén,” “ausencia,” and
“celos,” motifs which are repeated in the same order in
the eclogues at Daranio's wedding near the center of the work. The actions
of the characters vary, but the subject, in the form of these four
quejas, remains constant. He also observes two other sources of unity
recognized by neo-Aristotelian theorists: the title character, Galatea, is
a source of inspiration for the other characters' actions, and there are
various “linking techniques” which serve to connect episodes. While
these studies suggest a logical scheme behind the arrangement of the episodes,
they do not reveal any overall unity. Allen does not dispel Lowe's conclusion
that “there is no one dominant theme or aim” which provides a unifying
force for the various parts of the work. Avalle-Arce, in particular, takes
issue with the episodes of violence. In his view they constitute a
“realismo exagerado” which is incompatible with pastoral and ultimately
destroys the work's harmony, in La novela pastoril española,
pp. 130, 230-31, & 247. A similar opinion is offered by Francisco López
Estrada, in “La influencia italiana en La Galatea de
Cervantes,” CL 4 (1952), 168. The dissonance between two different
visions of the world, exemplified in the contrast between pastoral tranquility
and violent action, contributes to Enrique Moreno Baez's conclusion that
La Galatea lacks a coherent ideological framework, in “Perfil
ideológico de Cervantes,” in Suma cervantina, ed. Juan
Bautista Avalle-Arce, and E. C. Riley (London: Tamesis, 1973), pp. 236-39.
4 E. C. Riley,
Cervantes's Theory of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962),
pp. 19-21, and 116-31; also Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and
the “Persiles” (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), p.
94 n. While the focus of attention has been on Cervantes' theory as found
in later works, La Galatea does contain echoes of well-known Renaissance
ideas of harmony and proportion. For example, the perfection of the human
body: “Muéstrase la una parte de la belleza corporal en cuerpos
vivos de varones y de hembras, y ésta consiste en que todas las partes
del cuerpo sean de por sí buenas, y que [p.
31] todas juntas hagan un todo perfecto y formen un cuerpo proporcionado
de miembros y suavidad de colores” (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, La
Galatea, ed. Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, 2nd ed., Clásicos Castellanos
[Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1968], II, 44. All references will be to Avalle's
edition).
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failed to reconcile pastoral with his goals for fiction might seem justified.
I wish to suggest instead that La Galatea possesses both unity and
harmony and that, to a considerable degree, it is consistent with Cervantes'
goals for fiction in later years.5
Cervantes himself never apologized for La
Galatea. Even late in his career, in the Viaje del Parnaso, his
use of the term “hermosa” to describe his first prose work implies
that he still saw it to have proportion, harmony, and
unity.6 According to Riley, for Cervantes,
the beauty and harmony of poetry derive from the poetic truth it contains.
Other aspects of his poetic theory, including his ideas on verisimilitude,
and on variety and unity, depend on and elaborate his
principle.7 In a fair evaluation of La
Galatea, we must set aside the goal of verisimilitude, which became important
to Cervantes only after 1585.8 A general
Cervantine criterion for unity, however, can be applied. In “Fielding
and the Structure of Don Quixote,” Alexander Parker shows the
primacy of theme over action in the structure of Don Quixote I and
II.9 Parker also extends this principle to
other contemporary works: “The best Spanish novelists of the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries —Alemán . . . Quevedo
. . . Cervantes— are not interested in
5 The
only Cervantist who to my knowledge has defended the consonancia of
La Galatea is Joaquín Casalduero, who discovers coherence in
a poetic “fluir tumultoso” in contrasts between light and darkness
and the juxtaposition of antithetical details and events. He maintains that
Cervantes does accomplish the goal of variety in unity by forming “de
contrarios igual tela,” as echoed in Damón's sonnet in book V
of La Galatea. However, Casalduero approaches La Galatea as
an example of the influence of the Baroque esthetic on Cervantes' art. Instead
of identifying a truly unifying principle, he points to what he considers
to be Cervantes' destruction of Renaissance symmetry. Cf. “La
Galatea,” in Suma cervantina, pp. 27-46.
6 “Yo
corté con mi ingenio aquel vestido / con que al mundo la hermosa
Galatea / salió para librarse del olvido” (Miguel de Cervantes
Saavedra, Obras completas, ed. Angel Valbuena Prat, 17th ed. (Madrid:
Aguilar, 1970), I, 90.
7 Riley, pp.
20 & 84.
8 For the influence
of López Pinciano and other neo-Aristotelian theorists on Cervantes'
ideas about fiction after La Galatea, see Riley, pp. 10-13; Forcione,
pp. 102 n, 339-41; and Atkinson, p. 193.
9 Alexander A.
Parker, “Fielding and the Structure of Don Quixote,”
BHS 33 (1956), 1-16.
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the rules of epic structure [i.e., singleness of action]; they are, however,
interested in the question of moral responsibility, in . . . the
deliberate choices made by the wills of individual human beings, and
. . . the influences that men exercise on each other.”
Consequently, “They devise a novelistic structure in which causality
connects . . . human actions to human motives,” and where
“. . . the separate details of their plots are all intimately
connected, either as causes or effects, with the progressive development
of moral character
. . .”10 For the structure
of La Galatea, we must look past the variety of the separate actions
to its unifying theme, which, as Parker would have us suspect, is the development
of exemplary moral character.
As a separate but equally important assumption,
we must credit Cervantes with a reasoned intention for the violent actions
that challenge the tranquility of the pastoral setting. Lisandro's brutal
stabbing of Carino, Artandro's abduction of Rosaura, the background of passion,
violence, adventure, and warfare provided by the interpolated stories, and,
at the end of the book, Elicio's decision to use force if necessary to prevent
Galatea's father from obliging her to marry against her will are types of
action which seem more appropriate to heroic than to pastoral fiction. The
consonancia of the work will appear disrupted, however, only if we
insist on seeing the artistic potential of pastoral literature as simply
the representation of a theme or an attitude. Studies by Leo Marx, Raymond
Williams, Hallet Smith, William Empson, and others identify the potential
of pastoral as a form for literary expression in the contrast it inevitably
evokes between two ways of life, one seen as contemplative, passive, and
representative of an ideal innocence and happiness, the other as active,
heroic, and associated with the harsh, “real”
world.11 In comparison to other Spanish
Renaissance pastorals, in La Galatea this contrast is extreme. Garcilaso
and Montemayor, for example, achieve an effect more like
10 Parker,
“Fielding and the Structure of Don Quixote,” pp. 15-16.
Parker has shown the same principle to hold in the comedia, in The
approach to the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age (London: The Hispanic
and Luso-Brazilian Councils, 1957), pp. 8 ff.
11 Leo Marx,
The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
(1964; rpt. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 3-33; Raymond Williams,
The City and the Country (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), pp.
1-34. Hallett D. Smith, Chapter One, “Pastoral poetry,” in
Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meaning, and Expression
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1952), pp.1-63, especially 9-12. The contrast,
revealed in William Empson's observation that pastoral, though
“about” shepherds, is not “by” them or
[p. 33] “for” them, is implicit throughout
his book, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935; rpt. New York: New Directions,
1974). See also, Frank Kermode, English Pastoral Poetry (1952; rpt.
New York: Norton, 1972), pp. 11-44; Peter V. Marinelli, Pastoral,
The Critical Idiom 15 (London: Methuen, 1971).
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the mixture of sadness and tranquility in Virgil's
Eclogues.12 Yet these poets still
exploit the contrast between the idyllic setting and their shepherds' laments
for a lover's death or for unrequited
love.13 In La Galatea, Cervantes
employs such standard contrasts to the pastoral world as muerte,
desdén, celos, and ausencia. Wealth
and politics also intrude. Silveria chooses Daranio over Mireno for his money,
and Galatea's marriage has been arranged by a figure of royal
authority.14 With the episodes of violence,
Cervantes merely accentuates the contrast by moving challenges from the outside
“real world” into a much sharper contrast with the pastoral one.
In doing this, he dramatically poses the question of the relative value of
the two worlds.
For Renaissance writers, this pastoral design,
which is implicit in the figure of the literary shepherd who is both rustic
and poet, evoked the traditional contrast of Art and Nature. It did not,
however, presuppose a philosophical preference. In Montemayor's Diana,
the pastoral ideal posed in “naturalist” terms gives the dominant
role to passionate love and fortune (Nature) with no heed paid to reason
or free will (Art). But, in Gil Polo's Diana enamorada, against the
background of post-Tridentine concern for orthodox truth in literature, the
genre takes a new direction. There, although the ultimate preference still
seems to be for the contemplative life, reason and free will are central
themes.15 In La Galatea, Cervantes
carries these
12 In
his article, “Et in Arcadia Ego,” Erwin Panofsky points to the
theme of death and the “elegiac feeling” of nostalgia and melancholy
in Moschus, Bion, and Virgin. Virgil's special contribution, according to
Panofsky, is the resolution of “dissonance” between real “human
suffering” and super-humanly perfect surroundings” into a
“vespertinal mixture of sadness and tranquility,” in Philosophy
and History, Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. Raymond Klibansky
and H. J. Patton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), pp. 295-320; rpt. in
Pastoral and Romance, ed. Eleanor Terry, Lincoln Englewood Cliffs,
N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1969), pp. 29-30. See also Robert Coleman, ed.,
Eclogues, by Publius Vergilius Maro (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press,
197), pp. 28-35; Paul Alpers, “The Eclogue Tradition and the Nature
of Pastoral,” CE 34 (1972), 354-59, and Marx, pp. 19-23.
13 See for example,
Alexander A. Parker, “Theme and Imagery in Garcilaso's First Eclogue,”
BSS 25 (1948), 22-27.
14 The wedding
has been arranged by “el rabadán mayor de todos los aperos,”
or, according to Avalle, “el rey” (Galatea, II, 131, n.).
15 A.
Solé-Leris, “The Theory of Love in the Two Dianas: A
Contrast,” [p. 34] BHS 36 (1959),
65-79. It might be argued, moreover, that in addition to emphasis on reason
and free will, the Diana enamorada does not categorically favor the
contemplative life. In the ending, Diana sets out in search of Sireno. R.
G. Keightly terms this a “resolution through action” in his study
“Narrative Perspectives in Spanish Pastoral Fiction,” AUMLA
44 (1975), 213.
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themes even farther. Nature, the world of experience, is such that even man's
natural reason does not always discern truth. The support of revealed truth,
education, religion, and faith is therefore
necessary.16 In addition, emphasis on free
will opens the way for heroic action. At the Fuente de las Pizarras, the
courtier Darinto concedes to Elicio that for shepherds and courtiers alike,
“es una guerra nuestra vida sobre la tierra” (II, 34). This echo
of Job vii. 1, “Militia est vita hominis super terram,” the same
reference with which Erasmus opens his Enchiridion Militis Christiani,
evokes the familiar image of the spiritual life of the Christian as heroic
enterprise. This and other reminders of the Fall place the world of La
Galatea outside of the prelapsarian paradise, and they make it clear
that to rise from this fallen state, in addition to nature, man needs reason
and virtuous action.17
In this context, Elicio's choice for action
at the end of the story emerges as the thematic climax of La Galatea.
Hallett Smith describes a convention of Renaissance heroic poetry, modeled
after the legend of Hercules at the crossroads, in which the hero is confronted
with a symbolic “fork in the road.” According to Smith, the hero's
choice, which symbolized the choice between virtue and vice, usually conveyed
the main allegorical meaning of the poem; notably, Tasso, Spenser and other
writers of epic poems put the crossroads in pastoral oases in the form of
the alternative between action and
contemplation.18 Except for the fact that
the protagonist is a shepherd instead of a knight, one could describe La
Galatea as a heroic romance which consists entirely of a long pastoral
sojourn. This is not to say, however, that Cervantes ascribes less value
to the contemplative life. As the characters'
16 While
this contrasts with the “escapist” pastoral ideal found in Montemayor,
it is much closer to the mainstream of sixteenth-century religious thought
in Spain both before and after the Counter Reformation. See Otis H. Green,
Spain and the Western Tradition, III (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1965), 228-49.
17 For example,
only moments later, Lauso's song, sung by Damón, praises pastoral
life over life in the court only to conclude that it is but a
“pequeña sombra” of the original glory it recalls. It is
the “humana suerte” that time quickly converts all worldly pleasures
into “mortal disgusto”; by implication pastoral otium is
included (II, 35-40).
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experiences in La Galatea show, action uniformed by contemplation
is as unreliable as Nature without Art. The vision can only be realized through
the proper combination of both. Elicio's choice to abandon the traditional
passive stance of the literary shepherd represents the reconciliation of
the pastoral and the heroic, the contemplative and the active ways of life.
This union of opposites, which corresponds spiritually to the Christian idea
of world harmony and esthetically to the artistic principle of combining
variety and unity, is the central theme of La Galatea.
The thematic unity of La Galatea depends
on the fact that the vision of happiness and the formula for its attainment
are expressed throughout the work in terms of analogous polarities. Art and
Nature, action and contemplation, reason and experience, arms and letters,
pastoral and heroic, at various points combine to produce different reflections
of beauty, harmony, truth. In Book VI, Elicio describes the pastoral landscape.
Land and river “sweetly embrace” and “intertwine,” water
and heavens join in a harmonious mutual reflection, which increases the beauty
of each and which suggests the presence of God. Most important, the inhabitants,
with their gardens, orchards, and waterwheels combine Art with Nature to
produce a beauty which exceeds Elicio's power to describe. He compares the
setting to the “Campos Elíseos, . . . si en alguna
parte de la tierra . . . tienen asiento” (II, 170-71), yet
instead of a symbolic reevocation of the original Garden, the landscape in
La Galatea is a new creation, a “tercia naturaleza,” that
aspires to that original perfection. Nature and Art are equally indispensable
components, but the key to the perfection the shepherds attain is their
industria, their active application of Art to
Nature.19
Elicio closes his description by pointing to
Galatea, who not only for Elicio, but for all the shepherds, is a symbol
of beauty and goodness, an inspiration to love and virtuous action. According
to the wise
18 Smith,
pp. 293-301.
19 The passage
reads: “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” (II, 170). My interpretation agrees with Casalduero's, p.
44. The opposite view, that Cervantes gives Nature the active role, is held,
for example, by Avalle-Arce, La novela pastoril, p. 243, and Alban
Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the “Persiles,” p. 221.
Both stress Nature's role as “artífice” but overlook Cervantes'
greater emphasis on the “industria” of the inhabitants. This reading
is inconsistent with the rest of the thematic context.
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shepherd, Tirsi, Galatea's reserve in her treatment of Elicio is not cruelty,
but “discrecion,” since, “de su discrecion nace conocerse,
y de conocerse estimarse, y de estimarse no querer perderse
. . .” (I, 116). In Christian terms, self-knowledge is the
pathway to virtue and thus to victory in the spiritual
battle.20 Galatea's application of
discreción to her original nature results in a state of inner
perfection analogous to the tercia naturaleza of the ideal
landscape.
Nature yields to and combines with Art also
in the theory of love. True love in La Galatea begins with the
neo-Platonic attraction to beauty, but guided by reason and revealed truth
(“nuestra verdadera ley”), it looks beyond beauty to the transcendent
Christian love of the good.21 As Christian
caritas, this love encompasses “todas las
virtudes.”22 It is also an active, even
heroic, endeavor. The opening poem of La Galatea, sung by Elicio himself
to the martial beat of octavas reales, treats true love as a militant
quest. Other songs, such as Elicio's “Por lo imposible peleo,”
echo this tone. The shepherd Lenio complains that love causes torment and
despair, but Tirsi insists that nothing of worth may be had in this life
without “fatiga y trabajo” (II, 64). He claims, in fact, that love
is the most difficult of all quests, since it consists of uniting two wills,
two minds, and two souls into one (II, 65-66). As a combination of Nature
with the governance of Reason, love reflects the ideal of happiness. As a
source of virtue and as an inspiration to action, it shows the way for its
attainment. In the first sense, as a topic or subject, it is one facet of
the central theme. In the second sense, which implies the process of man's
perfection, love is the primary theme of all the actions of La Galatea.
20 The
theme is a commonplace in Renaissance literature. It is the subject of section
i, 3, of Erasmus' Handbook for the Militant Christian. It also appears
in Juan Luis Vives, Fray Luis de Granada, and others; cf. Green, III, 240-41,
21 Francisco
López Estrada identifies parallel passages and concepts taken from
Pietro Bembo, Mario Equicola, and León Hebreo in La
“Galatea” de Cervantes, (Tenerife: Univ. de la Laguna de Tenerife,
1948), pp. 89-95, and 110-14. See also his article, “La influencia italiana
. . . ,” 162-66. Otis Green stresses the “completely
Christian” quality of Cervantes' neo-Platonism in La Galatea,
in Spain and the Western Tradition, I (1963), 185-94. Cf. Elicio's
remark to Erastro: “esta es la última y mayor perfección
que en el amor divino se encierra, y en el humano también, cuando
no se quiere más de por ser bueno lo que se ama” (I, 201), and
Avalle's comment on the passage, p. xxii.
22 Tirsi
specifically lists “templanza,” “fortaleza,”
“justicia,” and “prudencia” (II, 62). Faith and hope,
the two remaining virtues, figure constantly in the shepherds' songs about
love.
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As the central theme in which Art and Nature,
action and contemplation, and reason and experience converge, love is analogous
to beauty and goodness. It is also analogous to poetry and truth. At the
obsequies for the dead shepherd Meliso, Calliope, the muse of epic poetry,
emerges from the flames of the shepherds' fire to inspire their endeavors
as poets. Although pastoral life and poetry are generally identified with
the contemplative life, Calliope's message to the shepherds, her
Canto, and even her appearance stress the relationship of poetry to
action. The branch of “verde y pacífica oliva” in her left
hand is balanced by one of “vencedora palma” in her right (II,
186). Her laurel wreath, symbol of fame, is the reward for poets and soldiers
alike. Her Canto, a list in octavas reales of contemporary
Spanish poets, resembles the reviews of heroes common in Renaissance epics.
The first poets named, in fact, are also
soldiers.23 This convergence of action and
poetry, arms and letters, points to the heart of the work's
unity.24
Riley describes Cervantes' idea of artistic
creation in terms of the classical and Renaissance formula of natura,
studium, and exercitatio. For Cervantes, poetry requires both
“natural ability” and a formal knowledge of the art tempered with
good judgment. It also requires a great deal of “intellectual effort”
to overcome the difficulties inherent in the creative
process.25 In this respect, the creation
of poetry compares to the life of the Christian. Both should aspire to reflect
the same ideal of divine perfection. Both require the same balance of reason
and experience, action and contemplation, and both are themselves acts of
free will.26 The theme of life as a work
of art and the
23 Cf.
Avalle's notes, Galatea, II, 190-98.
24 Leslie Deutsch
Johnson rightly asserts that in the Canto de Calíope Cervantes
vitalizes “the old theme of arms and letters” and that this points
to the shepherds' decision to use force at the end of the story, in “Three
Who Made a Revolution: Cervantes, Galatea and Caliope,” Hispano
57 (1976), 31-32.
25 Riley, pp.
67-70.
26 Both are,
in fact, different expressions of the aspiration to regain Paradise. The
concept is conventional in the Renaissance; E. M. W. Tilliard notes, for
example: “More fundamental than any Aristotelian belief that poetry
was more instructive than history or philosophy was the neo-Platonic doctrine
that poetry was man's effort to rise above his fallen self and to reach out
towards perfection.” . . . “The perfection is
at once that of the Platonic Good and of the Garden of Eden
. . . .” Cf. The Elizabethan World Picture (New
York: Macmillan, 1944), p. 21.
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exemplary quality of poetry stem from this parallel, and it is basic to the
design of La Galatea. As poets, the shepherds strive to realize the
ideal through contemplation. As lovers and characters in their own stories,
they attempt to realize it in action.
The unity of action in La Galatea stems
from the fact that all of the characters' stories (all of which are
quejas or cuestiones de amor) represent attempts to convert
the vision into reality. They are joined in one sense because they all
incorporate the pastoral sojourn at the same point in their plots. Each character
arrives in the pastoral foreground in a similar state of mental turmoil and
remains until his or her problem is in some way resolved. Most important,
as the other characters narrate their problems and search for solutions,
the central characters, Elicio and Galatea, are passive observers. From their
perspective, these stories provide a series of exempla equivalent
to observed experience (Nature). Together with Elicio and Galatea's knowledge
of true love and their discreción (Art), this experience is
arranged to move them gradually from their passive stance as shepherds to
the choice for action. Three points from which this trajectory may be observed
are: Daranio's wedding at the end of Book III; the debate on Love at the
Fuente de las Pizarras in Book IV; and the crisis in Book V when Elicio learns
that Galatea's father has arranged her marriage to a stranger.
Events up to and including Daranio's wedding
show the negative results of wrong choices made by lovers. Lisandro's murder
of Carino and the tale he recounts to Elicio and Erastro reveal the tragic
consequences of actions motivated by hatred and jealousy between friends.
Teolinda's story told to Galatea and Florisa shows both the difficulty of
avoiding love and the consequences of choosing a lover who permits appearances
to deceive him and ignite his jealousy. In Books II and III, Elicio observes
the courtier Silerio, and the suffering shepherd, Mireno, two more examples
of despair. Silerio has fallen in love with his best friend's girl, Nísida,
who he also believes is now dead. Mireno consumes himself in “rabia”
and “dolor” because his beloved shepherdess Silveria has decided
to marry Daranio for his money.
The wedding of Daranio and Silveria, at the
center of the work, sums up the themes of the previous action and prefigures
the predicament Elicio will face. During the wedding, shepherds sing songs
lamenting muerte, desdén, ausencia, and
celos. The wise shepherd, Damón, awards the prize for the greatest
suffering to celos, the only affliction that increases rather than
diminishes with time. Although the stories of Lisandro, Teolinda, and Silerio
do involve death, disdain, and absence, respectively, jealousy is in fact
the underlying theme of all the
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stories in the first half of La Galatea. It is what Mireno suffers
and what Silerio is fleeing from. As the opposite of true love, its end result
is despair. Mireno's pledge to go off to a foreign land and pine away his
life singing pastoral laments identifies the passive attitude of the traditional
literary shepherd with his jealousy and
despair.27 He is last seen sinking deeper
into his misery and finally disappears altogether from the action.
At the Fuente de las Pizarras in Book IV, Tirsi's
long description of love helps explain the errors of the characters in the
first three books and clarifies the formula for the attainment of happiness.
What remains to be resolved, as theory is set to practice, is the proper
timing for action. Cervantes focuses this question in the climax of La
Galatea, when Elicio learns of Galatea's approaching marriage. Elicio's
friend Erastro urges him to follow a course identical to Mireno's. The wise
shepherd Damón urges him to declare his love to Galatea and offer
to free her from her father's abuse of authority. Three simultaneous events
confirm the wisdom of Damon's advice: Galatea reveals she is opposed to her
father's plan, Rosaura is forcefully abducted by one of her suitors, Artandro,
and the story of Silerio and Timbrio ends happily.
Galatea's opposition to the marriage her father
has arranged means that it would lack the union of two wills essential to
true love as described by Tirsi.28 This abuse
of parental authority legitimizes Elicio and Galatea's option to act. The
forceful abduction of Rosaura by Artandro, which both Elicio and Galatea
witness, shows that timeliness is crucial to the success of action. Rosaura's
fickleness, her indecision, and her arrogance in promising to marry two suitors
and then playing
27 Avalle
identifies the Bodas de Camacho in Don Quixote II as a realistic version
of this episode (La novela pastoril, pp. 257-58). Compared to Basilio's
action in Don Quixote, the error of Mireno's choice is especially
clear. The two situations are identical, but Basilio counters adverse fortune
with industria and ingenio and wins back his beloved Quiteria.
Mireno, on the other hand, without faith and hope lacks the fortitude to
seek such a remedy. Mireno's attitude and state of mind are similar to
Grisóstomo's and Cardenio's in Don Quixote I (cf. Javier Herrero,
“Arcadia's Inferno . . . ,” pp. 289-99, and also his article,
“Sierra Morena as Labyrinth: From Wilderness to Christian Knighthood,”
FMLS 17 [1981], 55-67). His attitude toward love also compares to
that of the characters in Montemayor's Diana (cf. Solé-Leris,
p. 77).
28 Cervantes'
position on this point remains consistent in his later works, as shown by
Marcel Bataillón, in “Cervantes y el matrimonio cristiano,”
in Varia lección de clásicos españoles (Madrid:
Gredos, 1964), pp. 238-55.
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one against the other have made possible her own misfortune. By the time
she makes up her mind to marry Grisaldo, she has missed her chance and events
are beyond her control. On the other hand, Artandro has proved that, for
better or for worse, bold action can change men's fortunes.
In contrast to the plights of both Rosaura
and Galatea, Silerio's story reaches an unexpected happy ending. The arrival
of Silerio's friends, Timbrio, Nísida, and her sister Blanca, together
with Silerio's decision to marry Blanca, concludes their trials and symbolizes
the attainment of self-knowledge and inner harmony by all four. It is the
only happy ending to any of the stories witnessed by Elicio and Galatea.
While the action and setting of this story are heroic, not pastoral, it contains
hopes, despairs, reversals of fortune, and travail comparable to those faced
by lovers in the pastoral world. Timbrio's stoic faith, his love for
Nísida, his friendship for Silerio, and his active pursuit of happiness
are a lesson to all lovers, courtiers and shepherds
alike.29
In the last book of La Galatea, Elicio's
description of the ideal landscape and the Canto de Calíope
both support the choice for action. At the end, surrounded by other lovers,
most of whom have failed love's trials, exhorted to courage by Damón
and Tirsi, Elicio sands at a crossroads that offers the same alternatives
and has the same significance as those faced by the knights of epic poems.
He spends the final night of the story in solitary contemplation and at dawn
he and his companions march on Galatea's father's house. Galatea's acceptance
of Elicio's help suggests their wills are now in harmony. The shepherds'
intention reflects a similar harmony in terms of contemplation and action.
They hope to sway Galatea's father with Tirsi's “razones” and will
use force only if that fails. Cervantes ends the story here, yet the lack
of closure in the action places more emphasis on the theme. Elicio's choice,
which is also that of the shepherds who follow him, is the external manifestation
of an internal state of mind synonymous with self-knowledge, love, and truth.
In short, this single act of free will realizes the model for harmony and
perfection.
29 The
story of Timbrio and Silerio is a version of the traditional story of “los
dos amigos.” Cf. Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, Nuevos deslindes
cervantinos (Barcelona: Ariel, 1975), pp. 182-89. The theme of conflict
between their friendship and their love for the same girl complements the
situation in the main plot with Elicio, Erastro, and Galatea. This fact,
the length of Silerio's and Timbrio's accounts, and the placement of the
ending, near the moment of Elicio's choice, makes it the most important of
the interpolated stories.
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Paradoxically, the shepherds' decision negates
the pastoral ideal in order to attain it. But this paradox in turn encompasses
the reconciliation of all the sets of juxtaposed opposites. Through the
resolution of the contrast between shepherd and knight, the opposition between
Art and Nature, pastoral and heroic, reason and experience, arms and letters,
action and contemplation are also symbolically reconciled and unified. The
separate actions are also unified since this one act and the state of mind
it represents comprise the solution to all the other quejas or
cuestiones de amor. Elicio's choice, then, is the structural and thematic
nexis of the La Galatea, through which variety and apparent discord
give way to concordia.
In the final analysis, the entire structure
of La Galatea grows out of the pastoral convention of endowing shepherds
with refined values or the inverse, making shepherds out of refined types,
which has essentially the same effect. In this respect, La Galatea
exemplifies what William Empson calls the “pastoral effect” of
combining the high and the low, the complex and the simple, or in his words,
“the clash and reconciliation of the refined, the universal, and the
low, which is the whole point of
pastoral.”30 Elicio's choice could have
been made by a knight instead of a shepherd. Heroic also “puts the complex
into the simple,” according to
Empson.31 But La Galatea makes an
all the more encompassing statement about man and the universe by realizing
this function in characters of low station.
Whatever criticisms Cervantes may level at
the surface conventions of pastoral in his later works, it seems unjustified
to classify La Galatea as an “unsuccessful experiment.”
In fact, La Galatea comes close to fulfilling the criteria for the
ideal romance which the Canon describes in Don Quixote I, 47.
Admiratio seems to come naturally from the combination of opposites
inherent in the convention. In addition, La Galatea contains a variety
of characters, subject matter, and exemplary actions. It does in fact compose
a single “tela de varios y hermosos lazos tejida,” which through
“perfección y hermosura” accomplishes “el fin mejor
que se pretende en los escritos, que es enseñar y deleitar juntamente
. . . .”32 Indeed, the
only criterion that La Galatea really does not meet is that of
verisimilitude. In conclusion, I suggest that one
30 Empson,
p. 249.
31 Empson, p.
140.
32 Obras
completas II, 1460.
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ROBERT M. JOHNSTON |
Cervantes |
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reason Cervantes never wrote the promised continuation of La Galatea
is that it could already stand as a finished work. I also suggest that if
we can imagine the combination of verisimilitude with the pastoral design
as employed in La Galatea —the contrast of opposite worlds, high
values in lowly characters, and high characters in lowly disguise— we
can see the continuation of the most successful features of La Galatea
in Don Quixote, the Novelas ejemplares, and the
Persiles.
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Prepared with
the help of Myrna Douglas |
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