Cervantes, Aristotle, and the Persiles

by Alban K. Forcione

Overview

Any student of Cervantes' literary production must at some point take into account the theories that inspired the plan and creation of Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda for, of all Cervantes' works, it is the one most directly related to the author's awareness of literary theory.

This volume, in attempting to clarify the Persiles, traces the major influences reflected in the Renaissance literary theories which inspired it, examines Cervantes' ambivalent attitude toward those theories as revealed in his works, and provides a close examination of the structure of the Persiles.

Originally published in 1970.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691620978
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/08/2015
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1807
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

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Cervantes, Aristotle, and the Persiles

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By Alban K. Forcione

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1970 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06175-7

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CHAPTER 1

The Critique and Purification of the Romance of Chivalry

If I were permitted now, and my hearers desired it, I would say something about the qualities that books of chivalry require in order to be good.

Pero Pérez, the curate

If it could ever be said that a work of literature is almost exclusively a product of literature and literary theory, it could be said of Cervantes' final work Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. Everywhere the eclectic character of the work is visible: in its undisguised appropriation of scenes and passages from Virgil's Aeneid and Heliodorus' Ethiopian History, in its inclusion of an Italian novella and many brief reminiscences from biblical tradition, medieval romance, and other works of classical antiquity, and in its presentation of various recurrent topics of imaginative literature which are as old as literature itself. Moreover, the specific literary theories which inspired the fusion of so many widely disparate elements into a coherent whole are everywhere apparent in its texture. They are revealed in occasional authorial digressions about aesthetic problems and in brief remarks of the self-conscious narrator drawing attention to the criteria governing his selective processes in the inclusion of a specific element. But more basically they become deeply imbedded in the action of the work itself, informing an extended dramatic situation and its development in the second book.

Considered from any point of view, e.g., Cervantes' orthodoxy, Cervantes' idealism, Cervantes' supposed senility, the Persiles is undeniably both literary and literarily self-conscious. In this respect it can be said of Cervantes' final work that it was a product of his epoch, an age that has been called by one of its recent analysts the "age of criticism." With the rediscovery of Aristotle's Poetics shortly before the middle of the sixteenth century, the appearance of the numerous commentaries on Horace and Aristotle that immediately followed, the rising influence of the literary academies in Italy in the second half of the century, and the literary polemics associated with these academies, the artist of the time could hardly escape the heavy burden of a critical self-consciousness and its inevitable effect on his creative powers. It was in this "age of criticism" that Cervantes' sensibilities were molded, and his creative production can be understood properly only against the background of critical ferment that surrounded the solidification of the Aristotelian canon of criticism.

In order to discover the way in which literary theory was the generating force in the conception and creation of the Persiles, it is necessary to trace briefly the fortunes of the romance of chivalry in critical thinking of the sixteenth century. It is my belief that both Cervantes' aesthetic orientation and literary aspirations were analogous to those of his Italian contemporary, Torquato Tasso, whose theories and example dominated literary thinking in both Italy and Spain of the period. Like Tasso, Cervantes was deeply attracted to the free fantasies of the medieval romance, which he knew to be an outmoded literary genre. At the same time he conceived of the possibility of a new genre which would retain the appeal of the romances and, by its observance of Aristotelian rules, meet the demands of contemporary literary tastes. Fortunately Greek antiquity, though not precisely the classical period, offered a model for the endeavor in the prose romance of Heliodorus. Just as Tasso had the examples of Virgil and Homer to guide him in his task, Cervantes had in the Aethiopica, the rediscovery of which coincided roughly with that of Aristotle's Poetics, a model which in academic circles was regarded as an epic in prose, a model, along with the works of Virgil and Homer, for the aspiring epic poet of the period.

THE MORALISTIC CRITIQUE OF THE ROMANCE OF CHIVALRY

The age which witnessed the discovery of Heliodorus' Ethiopian History and the emergence of the Poetics of Aristotle as the theoretical basis of literary tastes was also the age in which the romance of chivalry reached its apogee. The years between 1510 and 1550 produced a vast proliferation of Spanish works dealing with the exploits of such figures as Amadís, Esplandian, and Palmerín, and their translation and diffusion all over Europe was immediate. These were the years when Saint Teresa indulged her fantasy with the heroics of the knights-errant and King Francis I of France is said to have demanded personally a French translation of Amadís de Gaula. The romances of chivalry were the first "best-sellers" of the age of printing, and their influence was felt in all stations of society.

It is not strange that the extraordinary popularity and diffusion of these final offspring of a genre which had originated centuries before should provoke a strong reaction in various circles, some of which had been traditionally hostile to imaginative literature. The documents and substance of the sixteenth-century critique of the romances of chivalry have been treated in various contexts, and it is unnecessary to deal with them at length here. However, not enough attention has been given the varying perspectives which lay behind the criticism and which must be borne in mind when we deal with the complexity and ambivalence that mark the attitudes of such figures as Tasso and Cervantes toward this type of fiction.

The criticism can be broken down conveniently into two types, that which is based on criteria which we regard today as nonliterary and that which results from a basically aesthetic point of view toward the work of art. The former was in no way a revolution in critical tastes and is far older than the romances themselves. It focuses on two aspects of imaginative literature, its untruth and its powers to arouse the passions of the reader. Both objections are of remote and illustrious origins. The contrast between fiction and truth is at least as old as Hesiod's "we know how to utter many false things which are like the truth." Coupled with the removal of fictional imitation from the realm of the true, criticism of the harmful effect that literature has in exciting passions regarded as undesirable in real life forms the basis of Plato's influential banishment of all poets from his ideal state. Both of these arguments were applied to the romances of chivalry at an early date and were repeated with renewed vigor by Renaissance moralists in response to the enormous popularity of the old genre in the age. In Petrarch's phrase "dream of sick minds and foolishness of romances" (sogno d'infermi e fola di romanzi), which was to become a commonplace of Renaissance criticism of the romances, we discern the Horatian censure of an art which deviates from nature as well as an echo of the more ancient critique of the lie in literature. A century later Alfonso Martínez de Toledo's defense of the truth of the examples which he presents for moral edification is coupled with a disparaging remark about the fictitious character of both contemporary historiography and the romances of chivalry: "This is neither a chronicle nor a history of deeds of chivalry, in which they occasionally put B for C, for you are to know that what I have said is truth."

In humanist Luis Vives' De institutione feminae christianae traditional criticism of mendacity fuses with the Platonic-Christian suspicion of the effect of literature of the imagination on ethical behavior to form one of the most typical documents of the purely moralistic attacks on the romances in the Renaissance. Vives' discussion of the literature that young ladies should read is informed by a puritanical attitude toward the corruptibility of human nature and a belief that only through surveillance, strict education, and constant activity can the young lady resist the temptations of the flesh. These temptations are strongest in moments of idleness, and it is in such moments that man turns to literature for pleasure. Vives sadly notes that the most popular books among his contemporaries are those written in "romance" on arms and love. The humanist has no sympathy for these works, which he calls "pestiferous books," claiming that they are "composed by writers who are idle, lazy, and ignorant, men much given to vices and impurity." He offers a long list of examples, including many of the most famous Spanish and French romances of chivalry as well as the Celestina, the Decameron, and Cárcel de amor, and proposes that there be a law prohibiting the appearance of such books. Although at one point Vives voices his distaste for the glorification of deeds of war in the romances, the recurrent theme of his attack is the danger they represent to the morals of young ladies. Referring to the poisonous effect of reading of "other people's love affairs" and the fires of hell which will punish a woman following her surrender to vice, Vives asserts that the plot of such books has no other rationale than to demonstrate the arts of seduction. He then suggests that their authors would do better to write manuals of pandering (libros de arte lenonia). What we observe in Vives' argument is essentially the same indictment of the romances that two hundred years earlier Dante had presented in the fifth canto of his Inferno. For it was an old French romance that Paolo and Francesca were reading when their fatal passion erupted, and in the words of Francesca the book itself was the pander ("Galeotto fu il libro e chi Io scrisse") of their liaison. It was an old argument but one which would be repeated with minor variation often through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries all over Europe. For example, in 1605 François de la Noue would attack the Amadís books, suggesting that they were to be recommended for those men who would like to grow horns.

To this traditional argument, which ultimately derives from Plato, Vives adds the other Platonic criticism of imaginative literature, which, as we have already seen, had similarly been directed against the romances during the Middle Ages. Such literature, it is charged, is fictitious and as such consists of lies. Vives denies that there can be any pleasure in "things which they feign so foolishly and openly" (... in rebus quas tarn apertè et stultè confingunt). As examples he offers the case of one man's killing thirty opponents and two giants, and his miraculously fast recovery from wounds sustained in battle, concluding: "Is it not madness to be carried away by such idiocies and to be held by them?" (Quae insania est, iis duci, aut teneri?) It is important to observe here Vives' distaste for such impossible occurrences in the romances, for it is characteristic of a general attitude of the humanists toward the fantastic elements in literature which had formed before the popularization of Aristotle's Poetics and which would have an influence on the way in which the humanists would interpret Aristotle's concepts of mimesis and verisimilitude in the following decades.

In its austerity Vives' critique marked one extreme in the attacks on the romances, an extreme which was well represented throughout the century. There was, however, particularly among Vives' fellow humanists, a more benign critique of the genre. In its orientation toward the practical problems of life, Christian humanism simply objected to the lack of doctrine in the romances and their nonutility, failing to associate them necessarily with the temptations of the flesh and the instruments of the devil. What annoyed the spokesmen of this tendency in romance criticism was not the loss of the reader's soul, but rather his loss of hours which could be put to more profitable use. The recurrent motifs of their attacks were the observance of the unreality of the fictions in the works and the characterization of the reading of the romances as a waste of time. Again this criticism represented nothing new, for in the early fifteenth century Pero López de Ayala had complained:

Plógome otrosi oyr muchas vegadas,
Libros de deuaneos e mentiras probadas,
Amadis, Lanzalote e burlas asacadas,
En que perdi mi tiempo a muy malas jornadas.

In the writings of Spanish humanists we observe the frequent resumption of López de Ayala's criticism, which, like Petrarch's "sogno d'infermi e fola di romanzi," may be said to be a topic of sixteenth-century criticism of the romances. In 1529 Antonio de Guevara laments his contemporaries' love of the books of chivalry: "They waste time, for in such works one does not learn how vices must be shunned." In the prologue of his translation, Las obras de Xenophonte (1552), Diego Gracián de Alderete complains that the romances "serve no purpose other than to waste time and to discredit other books which are good, truthful, and full of good doctrine and profit. For the monstrous and disorderly fables which are read of in these mendacious books destroy the credit of the true deeds which are read of in true histories." We observe the same attitude in Juan de Valdés' benign criticism of the nonutility and lies of the romances and his admission that during the ten best years of his life his literary tastes were so corrupted that he devoted his hours of reading almost exclusively to "these lies."

It is significant that the first translators of Greek romances into Spanish echo this attitude toward the romances of chivalry, revealing how omnipresent the suspicion of imaginative literature of any type was among the humanists. In justifying his labors in translating Ludovico Dolce's Ragionamenti amorosi, itself an Italian translation of the last four books of Achilles Tatius' Clitophon and Leucippe, Alonso Nunez de Reinoso claims that he undertook the enterprise to "instruct in how to live well" (avisar a bien vivir), that there is an allegorical significance in each character, and that the work is in no way to be identified with the "vanities" of the romances of chivalry. In concluding, he emphasizes that he did not waste (malgastar) his time, but rather: "I consider well employed all the time which I have spent in this." In a similar vein J. Amyot, whose prologue to his French translation of Heliodorus' Ethiopian History will be the subject of closer examination below, justifies his efforts only after acknowledging that man should be very careful when reading fiction, "fabulous books, lest his mind become accustomed gradually to loving lies and vanities; besides his time is ill-spent." He admits that these dangers lend validity to the argument that "all fabulous writings, those in which the subject is not true," be condemned. He proceeds, however, to justify imaginative literature, asserting that in its weakness human nature demands the pleasure it affords and offering in Heliodorus' work a form of fiction which, in its lofty moral tone, the plausibility of its lies, and its wealth of erudition, is to be preferred to the useless romances of chivalry.

THE AESTHETIC CRITIQUE OF THE ROMANCE OF CHIVALRY

It is indeed the generous attitude toward imaginative literature of such humanists as Valdés and Amyot that paved the way for the recognition both that the fictitious element is essential to literature and that literature exists in an autonomous province and is not to be measured by the standards of historiography. Like Amyot, Valdés cannot escape the prejudice against the lie which marks theoretical writings on literature since Plato; yet like Amyot he can prefer a lie that is plausible to a lie that is implausible. Echoing the Horatian precept, "Let what is feigned for the sake of pleasure be very close to truth" ("Ficta voluptatis causa sint proxima veris"), Valdés criticizes the inverisimilitude of the romances:

Since those who write lies should write them in such a way that they approximate truth as much as possible, so that they can sell their lies for truths, our author of the Amadís, sometimes in carelessness and sometimes I do not know for what reason, says things that are so clearly mendacious, that in no way can you accept them as true.

The samples of the implausibilities in the Amadís which Valdés proceeds to offer are interesting, for they reveal the intensity of the humanist's preoccupation with the necessary illusion of empirical truth in a work of art. The writer errs in allowing Perión de Gaula to cast his sword and shield to the floor in his nocturnal encounter with Elisena, for it is inconceivable that the noise of such an act would not attract the attention of the others in the castle. Valdés finds a breach of decorum, i.e., an implausibility in character, in Elisena's decision to receive Perión as her lover on the first night of their acquaintance. In a king's daughter such conduct is beyond the limits of the credible.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Cervantes, Aristotle, and the Persiles by Alban K. Forcione. Copyright © 1970 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Preface, pg. vii
• Contents, pg. ix
• Introduction, pg. 1
• CHAPTER I. The Critique and Purification of the Romance of Chivalry, pg. 11
• CHAPTER II. Heliodorus and Literary Theory, pg. 49
• CHAPTER III. The Dialogue Between the Canon and Don Quixote, pg. 91
• CHAPTER IV. The Narrator and His Audience The Liberation of the Imagination, pg. 131
• CHAPTER V. The Critical Examination of Literary Theory in the Persiles, pg. 169
• CHAPTER VI. Periandro's Narration THE HERO AS POET, pg. 187
• CHAPTER VII. Topics of the Marvelous THE GARDEN PARADISE, pg. 212
• CHAPTER VIII. The Narrator of the Persiles, pg. 257
• CHAPTER IX. The Cervantine Figure of the Poet: Impostor or God?, pg. 305
• CONCLUSION, pg. 339
• Bibliography, pg. 349
• Index, pg. 361