From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
8 special issue (1988): 1-5.
Copyright © 1988, The Cervantes Society of America
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ALAN S. TRUEBLOOD |
AS THE QUADRICENTENNIAL of the publication
of La Galatea (1585) approached, the
Cervantes Society of America, though still
a newcomer on the scholarly scene, decided the time was ripe for contributing
through a symposium to “the deeper and broader understanding of Cervantes
and his works” which its founders had envisaged in the Society's
constitution of 1979. The resultant
“Celebration of Cervantes on the Fourth Centenary of La Galatea,
1585-1985” was held on October 25-26, 1985 at the Library of Congress
in Washington. The Society is grateful for the active collaboration on that
occasion of the Library through its distinguished Librarian, Daniel J. Boorstin,
and in particular through the cooperation of the Library's Hispanic Division
and its Chief, Sara Castro-Klarén. We likewise acknowledge with
appreciation the sponsorship of the Embassy of Spain, the Programa de
Cooperación Cultural, the Real Academia de la Lengua, Duke University,
Georgetown University, and the Johns Hopkins University.
Though La Galatea had enjoyed a modest
succès d'estime when it appeared, a chief distinction of the
pastoral romance in the eyes of posterity lay in its foreshadowings of the
art of Don Quixote. It seemed appropriate, therefore, not only to
examine La Galatea in its own right but to take the opportunity the
occasion offered for examining other works of Cervantes in the light of their
nearly four centuries of afterlife. What follows is a sampling of the papers
presented on that occasion. The Society regrets that for technical reasons
it was not possible to reproduce those dealing directly with others arts
than the verbal, most especially “Cervantes' Sensitivity to the Music
of His Epoch: Dances, Songs, Instruments” by Professor Robert M. Stevenson
of the University of California at Los Angeles. Several papers in
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the present selection do touch, however, on the relation between pictorial
art and Cervantes' verbal mastery in Don Quixote.
The first three papers, which reexamine the
circumstances of the publication of La Galatea, its distinctiveness
within the tradition of the pastoral, and the artistic principles on which
it is built, exemplify the fruitfulness of the reassessment of this early
work prompted by the quadricentennial. In “La
Galatea: the Novelistic Crucible,” Juan-Bautista Avalle-Arce's
unrivaled understanding of both Cervantes and the pastoral mode in Spain
leaves us in no doubt that the trailblazing originality of Cervantes' art
characterizes it from the outset. Both Professor Avalle-Arce and Elizabeth
Rhodes in “La Galatea and Cervantes' ‘Tercia
Realidad’” see the work as marking a stage of gestation in Cervantes'
career. For Professor Rhodes the broad pendular swings between extremes of
history and poetry in both the inner and the outer lives of the characters,
which contribute to the unusual dynamism of La Galatea, do not as
yet allow for that settling at a mid-point which will later individualize
the inhabitants of Cervantes' fictional worlds. On the other hands, the thematic
reading of Robert M. Johnston in “Cervantes' La Galatea: Structural
Unity and the Pastoral Convention,” finds La Galatea a fully
achieved work in consequence of the exemplary pattern of moral development
present throughout. This is possible, he tells us, because, exceptionally
for the pastoral, we are here in a postlapsarian world and the whole work
is built upon a reconciliation of opposites.
Though, as the reader will find, different
perspectives in these studies bring views in some respects at variance with
one another, the total result of these penetrating inquiries is to shed new
light into recesses of the surprisingly complex cosmos of Cervantes' earliest
work.
Coming to Don Quixote, which was a subject
of two sessions on Cervantes in European culture, we find three papers which
view the work in historical contexts —those of its age or of our own.
A fourth paper approaches the masterpiece as a test case for the efficacy
of current theories of narrative fiction.
Professor Antonio Vilanova of the University
of Barcelona applies his expertise as a student of Erasmus to “Erasmo,
Sancho Panza y su amigo Don Quijote.” The result is an illumination
of the twilight zones separating different gradations of Erasmus' Folly.
It provides further evidence of the formative rôle of Erasmism in
Cervantes' world-view.
Dealing, in “Metamorphosis and Don
Quixote,” with what he calls
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“the Third Part” of the novel —the critical corpus which has
accumulated about it over the centuries— Randolph D. Pope offers a
challenging lesson in the historical relativism of all literary criticism.
His focus is the widely influential reading of Salvador de Madariaga dating
from the 1920s, the misreading which he sees as underlying it, the unconscious
revaluation subsequent criticism has made of Madariaga's basic premise, and
the need for a new critical understanding more in accord with the common
temper of Cervantes' age and our own.
In “Don Quixote: from Text to
Icon” Edward C. Riley surveys a profusion of visual material lying scattered
about today's world of mass media, Madison Avenue (and its British equivalent),
and Star Wars (as yet fought only in fiction, fortunately) —material
which had been begging for a critic skilled and sharp-eyed enough to see
its interconnections and grasp its import. One could not ask for a more lively
—one is tempted to say Cervantine— demonstration of the capacity
of Don Quixote and Sancho to keep in step with evolving mass culture, a process
to which there is happily no end in sight. While Professor Riley candidly
acknowledges his perplexity as to “precisely what happens at the interchange
of verbal and visual codes,” he takes us a long way toward an answer.
In “The Archeology of Fiction in Don
Quixote” Inés Azar seizes the superior opportunity provided
by the Quixote for inquiring into the nature of all literary fiction.
Long before modern theoreticians of language, she tells us, Cervantes
demonstrated, through Don Quixote, that truth lies not in objects but in
language, the truth of literature being therefore a truth of language. Moreover,
literature is the persistent subject of the Quixote: the work is a
fiction about fiction. Within it Don Quixote is the archeologist who would
reimpose his resurrected chivalry by virtue of speaking its extinct, hence
solipsistic language which ipso facto dooms him to isolation and
failure.
We rediscover the quintessential comic genius
of Cervantes with Javier Herrero's only seemingly enigmatic query apropos
of the interlude “El viejo celoso”: “Did Cervantes Feel Calixto's
Toothache (La Celestina, Act IV)?” Perfectly demonstrated in
this piece of scrupulous sleuthing is the capacity of exacting philological
inquiry to unravel a whole train of meaning. Even in the written version
of the inquiry, the light touch with which it was delivered remains perfectly
attuned to the amusing nature of the subject. One might mention here an
additional straw in the wind which turned up in the discussion
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that followed the paper: the wily Sansón Carrasco's mischievous
instruction to Don Quixote's housekeeper to say a prayer for him to St. Apollonia
and the housekeeper's uncomprehending rejoinder that her master's ailment
is not in his teeth but in his brain (II, 7).
The two papers which concluded the sessions
examined pictorial analogues or metaphors as keys to the understanding of
Cervantes' broader meanings. In “Cervantes, the Painter of Thoughts,”
Helena Percas de Ponseti, by looking into hints dropped by Cervantes and
applying iconographical and chromatic symbolism, elaborates a view of Cervantes'
art of poetic-pictorial composition as a transcending of the Aristotelian
literary canon of his age and an anticipation of twentieth-century schools
of painting. In demonstrating her thesis she offers innovative readings of
a series of episodes of the Quixote of 1615.
Marisa Álvarez, in “Emblematic
Aspects of Cervantes' Narrative Prose,” reexamines certain episodes
of the Quixote in the light shed on them by contemporaneous emblem
literature. She discovers in specific emblems clues to the moral or esthetic
implications of Don Quixote's actions. Like Professor Percas de Ponseti and
Professor Riley, she finds verbal and visual registers to be inextricably
interwoven in Cervantes' art. Are there perhaps indications of a critical
trend in the fact that Professor Pope also addresses the relevance of the
visual-pictorial sphere to the understanding of Cervantes' novelistic art?
While the papers we are publishing convey well
the essence of the Symposium, the written word is powerless to reproduce
the atmosphere surrounding them. They proved unusually effective in setting
listeners' ideas in motion and stimulating lively, occasionally heated, and
sometimes hilarious exchanges. Over the flowing bowls at the receptions
hospitably offered by the Library the discussions continued, converting the
occasion into a Symposium in the full sense of the word.
The meetings marked the opening of an
extraordinarily rich exhibition built around the Library's holdings of Cervantes'
works, including first editions of almost every one. (The Librarian apologized
for having had to borrow a first edition of La Galatea!) Literature
of Cervantes' day, beginning with romances of chivalry; translations; versions
of Don Quixote for the performing arts; pictorial representations
were only a few of the areas covered. (In mounting this memorable display
from its own holdings, the Library had the able assistance of Professors
E. Michael Gerli and Harry Sieber.)
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In his remarks at the opening of the exhibition, The Librarian of Congress observed that in his case the Celebration had already achieved one of its aims: it had sent him back to the Quixote. We hope that the exhibition, which remained on display for six months, had a similar effect on many others. Though the Cervantes Society has no need to proselytize, it sees no harm in engaging from time to time in a bit of preaching to the unaware, the unconverted, or those who somehow have managed to forget the unforgettable.
| BROWN UNIVERSITY |
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Prepared with the help of Myrna Douglas |
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| Fred Jehle jehle@ipfw.edu | Publications of the CSA | H–Cervantes |
| URL: http://www.h-net.org/~cervantes/csa/articw88/truebloo.htm | ||