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ArribaAbajo La Galatea and Cervantes' «Tercia Realidad»

Elizabeth Rhodes



Boston College

for WFK

The 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   —18→   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   —19→   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:

  —20→  

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   —21→   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).

  —22→  

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   —23→   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   —24→   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,   —25→   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   —26→   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   —27→   «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'   —28→   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.