Artifice and Invention in the Spanish Golden Age

Stephen Boyd

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351575287
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoría: Languages

The corpus of literary works shaped by the Renaissance and the Baroque that appeared in Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a transforming effect on writing throughout Europe and left a rich legacy that scholars continue to explore. For four decades after the Spanish Civil War the study of this literature flourished in Great Britain and Ireland, where many of the leading scholars in the field were based. Though this particular 'Golden Age' was followed by a decline for many years, there have recently been signs of a significant revival. The present book seeks to showcase the latest research of established and younger colleagues from Great Britain and Ireland on the Spanish Golden Age. It falls into four sections, in each of which works by particular authors are examined in detail: prose (Miguel de Cervantes, Francisco de Quevedo, Baltasar Gracian), poetry (The Count of Salinas, Luis de Gongora, Pedro Soto de Rojas), drama (Cervantes, Calderon, Lope de Vega), and colonial writing (Bernardo Balbuena, Hernando Dominguez Camargo, Alonso de Ercilla). There are essays also on more general themes (the motif of poetry as manna; rehearsals on the Golden Age stage; proposals put to viceroys on governing Spanish Naples). The essays, taken together, offer a representative sample of current scholarship in England, Scotland, and Ireland.

PART I
Prose

FIG. 1. Diego Lopez, Declaración magistral sobre las Emblemas de Andrés Alciato (Nájera: Juan de Mongaston, 1615), Emblema 43: Spes proxima, p. 144. By permission of University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections

CHAPTER 1
Wind and Will in Cervantes’s El celoso extremeño

Stephen Boyd

At the conclusion of Cervantes’s El celoso extremeño, readers are left to grapple with a series of puzzles concerning both the behaviour of the central characters, Felipo de Carrizales and his young wife Leonora, and the narrator’s valedictory remarks about the story’s exemplarity.¹ With regard to the characters, the most important questions that arise are: why, and how freely, does Leonora, having got as far as sharing a bed with Loaysa, reject his advances at the last moment?; why, and how freely, after the death of her husband, does she choose to enter a strictly enclosed convent?; and to what extent, if any, is Carrizales’s declared forgiveness of his wife indicative of a genuine and redemptive change of mind and heart? With regard to the narrator’s remarks about exemplarity, one is bound to ask how the novela can be, simultaneously, an ‘ejemplo y espejo de lo poco que hay que fiar de llaves, tornos y paredes cuando queda la voluntad libre’ (pp. 368–69) and of the vulnerability of girls ‘de verdes y pocos años’ (p. 369), such as Leonora, to manipulation at the hands of ‘dueñas de monjil negro y tendido’ (p. 369), such as Marialonso, and, further, how these claims are compatible with the notion of Leonora remaining ‘limpia y sin ofensa [...] en aquel suceso’ (p. 369). The difficulty of judging the behaviour of Carrizales and Leonora at the end of the story arises from the fact that we are not made privy to what is going on in their minds. In the absence of such insight, or of authoritative guidance — the narrator is generally unreliable, inconsistent and, on the question of Leonora’s failure to vindicate her innocence, self-professedly (and disingenuously?) ignorant — readers are given the responsibility and the freedom to interpret and evaluate for themselves the actions and motives of the characters, the degree to which they act freely, and the narrator’s judgements on all of these matters. We can do so only on the basis of what we have learned or can surmise about the characters’ circumstances, dispositions and behaviour (and, in the latter two cases, those of the narrator), of our reading of the symbolic patterns within the story (its allusions to classical mythology, for example), our knowledge of the social and ethical norms prevailing in early seventeenth-century Spain, our sense of the extent to which these are implicitly endorsed or questioned by Cervantes, and also, inevitably, our own experiences, predilections and prejudices. The wide range of judgements proffered by commentators on these questions is symptomatic of the open-endedness and calculated indeterminacy of the text.² In this essay, it will be argued that two early, strategically placed and interrelated passages in the novela may be seen to function together as an imaginative paradigm of the range and interaction of forces at play, as well as of the variable degrees of both freedom and compulsion involved, in the decision-making processes of individuals (and particularly of Carrizales), and so to provide us with an anticipatory framework within which to assess the behaviour of the main characters, one which intimates the uncertainty of such assessments, and stimulates a sense of the freedom of the will as a mystery rather than the kind of unproblematic ‘given’ which the narrator would have us believe that it is.³

Both passages in question focus on Carrizales. In both, readers are made privy (to a degree that will not be repeated) to what appear to be the inner workings of his mind.⁴ Both come, as has been said, close together, at the very beginning of the novela, the first when Carrizales reflects on his past life at the beginning of his sea journey to the New World, and the second when, having just returned to Seville after twenty years spent in Peru, he reflects on what to do with his fortune and the rest of his life. Both — the first in a more extensive and sustained way than the second — insinuate an interplay between the wind and the movements of Carrizales’s will. Both represent an abrupt shift in the relationship of narrative to narrated time with respect to the passages immediately preceding them, and, finally, both evidence changes made by Cervantes when he was reworking an earlier version of the story, collected in the Porras Manuscript (c. 1604–06), for publication in 1613.⁵

The first of the two passages in question describes the destitute Carrizales’s abandonment of Spain and his journey across the Atlantic to the New World. In the immediately preceding, opening passage of the novela, the first forty-eight years of his life are summed up in just two sentences. In them, he is presented in exclusively generic and archetypal terms as ‘un hidalgo’, ‘un otro Pródigo’, one of many ‘perdidos’ and ‘desesperados’ thronging the streets of Seville — a distant, anonymous figure, glimpsed, as it were, from afar. Then, quite suddenly, the narrative pace slows as the reader is informed in some detail about his preparations for the Atlantic crossing (‘acomodándose con el almirante della [la flota], aderezó su matolataje y su mortaja de esparto’; p. 327) and about the moment of departure itself; it slows yet further as the vastness of the Ocean is evoked, and then, further still as, in a change of pace and focus analogous to the becalming of the ship on which he travels, we are offered a close-up view of the workings of his mind, and, for the first time, informed of his name. Let us consider, first, the description, in both the Porras MS and printed versions, of the departure of the flota:

zarpó la flota, y con general alegría dieron las velas al viento, que blando y próspero soplaba, el cual en pocas horas les encubrió la tierra y les descubrió las anchas y espaciosas llanuras del gran padre de las aguas, el mar Océano.

(p. 327)

[la] flota [...] se partía [...] zarpando las anclas y dando a el viento las velas con general alegría; el cual era favorable y soplaba, que en pocas horas les cubrió la tierra y les descubrió las espaciosas llanuras del mar Océano.⁶

In a previous consideration of this passage, I drew attention to the new emphasis (in the 1613 text) on the sheer expanse of the Ocean — ‘espaciosas llanuras’ become ‘anchas y espaciosas’ — and argued that the addition of the epithet, ‘el gran padre de las aguas’, to ‘el mar Océano’, signals an allusion, not just to the classical mythological figure of Okeanos, ‘father of gods and nymphs’, as Peter Dunn has pointed out, but also to the Christian God, which he (Dunn) had thought less likely.⁷ I adduced two aspects of internal context in support of this argument: the reference to Carrizales as ‘un otro Pródigo’ in the opening words of the novela, and the process of self-examination which finding himself out on the open sea, and far from the distractions of the land, seems to stimulate in him. Like the biblical character, Carrizales has travelled far from home, wasted his inheritance in wild living, and reached a point of absolute destitution, but, unlike the Prodigal, he has not literally been able to return to his father’s house, his parents having died before he ever gets back to Spain. In the Gospel parable, the Prodigal Son, of course, represents the repentant sinner, and his father, God the Father, who generously forgives and welcomes back the one who ‘was dead, and is alive again; [...] was lost, and is found’ (Luke 15:32).⁸ On board ship, and surrounded by the vast and, at this point, tranquil expanses of ‘el gran padre de las aguas’, Carrizales seems to come to his senses:

Iba nuestro pasajero pensativo, revolviendo en su memoria los muchos y diversos peligros que en los años de su peregrinación había pasado, y el mal gobierno que en todo el discurso de su vida había tenido; y sacaba de la cuenta que a sí mismo se iba tomando una firme resolución de mudar manera de vida, y de tener otro estilo en guardar la hacienda que Dios fuese servido de darle, y de proceder con más recato que hasta entonces con las mujeres.

(p. 328)

The topical reference to his life and wanderings as a ‘peregrinación’,⁹ and the use of the term ‘una firme resolución de mudar manera de vida’, recalling the ‘propositio no peccandi de caetero’ [‘the firm purpose of amendment’] which the Council of Trent (Session XIV, Chapter IV) defined as an essential element of the contrition required for receiving sacramental absolution, both seem designed to encourage the reader think that he may be undergoing a religious conversion.¹⁰ Other signs, however, suggest that this is not the case: as Dunn pointed out, Carrizales proposes to change his ‘manera de vida’, his ‘estilo en guardar la hacienda que Dios fuese servido de darle’, and to ‘proceder con más recato [...] con las mujeres’ (emphases added).¹¹ There is no mention of his feeling any sorrow for his failures; instead, the use of terms from the lexis of administration and commerce, such as ‘mal gobierno’ and ‘la cuenta que se iba tomando a sí mismo’, imply that he is engaged not so much in an examination of conscience as in a kind of behavioural stocktaking exercise aimed primarily at future damage limitation.¹² If fear is the true motive for his ‘firme resolución’, it appears not to be the supernaturally inspired fear of, or even guilt at, having offended God, which define the imperfect form of contrition known as attrition.¹³ If the sea’s vast calm does imaginatively evoke the omnipresence of God, it seems that he has no awareness of it.

In the third segment of the passage, we learn that while Carrizales had been engaged in this process of introspection, the ships had been becalmed, but that, subsequently, the wind ‘tornó a soplar’, blowing them swiftly and safely across the Atlantic to the port of Cartagena de Indias:

La flota estaba como en calma cuando pasaba consigo esta tormenta Felipo de Carrizales, que éste es el nombre del que ha dado material a nuestra novela. Tornó a soplar el viento, impeliendo con tanta fuerza los navíos, que no dejó a nadie en sus asientos; y así le fue forzoso a Carrizales dejar sus imaginaciones y dejarse llevar de solos los cuidados que el viaje le ofrecía; el cual viaje fue tan próspero, que sin recibir algún revés ni contraste llegaron al puerto de Cartagena.

(p. 328)

Several features of this section are worth noting: first, the pointed and eloquent juxtaposition of the ‘calma’ of the sea and ships with the ‘tormenta’ raging inside Carrizales; second, the sequence of events: the fact that the wind gets up again after he has made his ‘firme resolución’, and, third, the emphasis on the force of the wind. Let us consider each of these in turn. The contrast between the repose of the ocean and the turmoil experienced by Carrizales is one between the literal and the metaphorical, the elemental and the emotional, but also, implicitly, one of scale: between the ‘anchas y espaciosas llanuras’ of the Atlantic, stretching from one horizon to the other, and the relatively tiny space within Carrizales’s head. It is a contrast which evokes the pathos of the nearness and yet inaccessibility to him of the great peace with which he is surrounded, but it also suggests a causal relationship: the motionlessness of the ships as what not only accompanies but stimulates his tormented self-examination, as well as a point of c...