The Curious Reciprocity of Country and City in Some Spanish Pastoral Novels

John T. Cull

A reader familiar with the venerable pastoral tradition would normally expect it to consist of a paean to the simple life that evolves within the confines of the bower. «Art» and «Nature» (embodied in city and country, respectively), find themselves pitted as adversaries. In the greensward, inhabitants of the great metropolis seek moral and spiritual regeneration during the pastoral interlude, as a rearmament and preparation for a return to the city. The bucolic retreat, then, in typical Renaissance pastoral, presents feigned shepherds who desire to experience the lure of pastoral simplicity: the pleasant lie that the poets depict in their treatments of the Beatus Ille topos. Though the city is exiled from the pastoral pleasance, it is always lurking just beyond the periphery of the confines of the garden, and it is always present in the implicit contrast between country and city¹. The present study proposes to account for deviations from these norms in Antonio de Lofrasso's Diez libros de Fortuna de amor (1573), Gaspar Mercader's El prado de Valencia (1600) and Miguel Botello's Prosas y versos del pastor de Clenarda (1622).

To some extent, the interpenetration of country and city is inevitable by the very nature of the pastoral fiction. The inseparability of these seemingly mutually exclusive concepts was underscored in Spain, prior to the vogue of the pastoral romance², in Fray Antonio de Guevara's famous treatise, Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea (1539)³. This contrastive praise of the simple life and condemnation of courtly hypocrisies forms an integral part of all subsequent pastoral. Indeed; the disjunctive of country and city is consciously evoked, after the fashion of Guevara, in virtually all of the Spanish pastoral novels. The protagonists of these works of fiction tend to be disenchanted or disillusioned city dwellers who seek moral and spiritual rekindling through their contact with real shepherds in the bower.

Not surprisingly, then, the city makes its presence felt in many ways in the typical Spanish pastoral romance. Some of the conventional manifestations of the intrusion of city upon country include: the enchanted palace where distraught lovers seek a remedy to their malady⁴; the interpolated story in which, through a temporal flash-back, a character relates experience with the city from the safe perspective of the pastoral retreat⁵; the obligatory praise of noble patrons and maecenases who reside at court; the equally inevitable encomium of illustrious poets who labor in the city; evocation by means of dreams, poetry and music, and recourse to the allegation that the material narrated is autobiography, or roman à clef, in which seemingly extraneous material is included and justified as a concession to verisimilitude. Whether or not we choose to view these incursions of things urban as examples of pastoral decadence⁶, the majority of the Spanish pastoral romances present movement in only one direction. The city imposes itself on the country, and this kind of unilateral movement does not clash too violently with our expectations of post-Theocritean pastoral tradition⁷.

Nevertheless, in the three Spanish pastoral novels penned by Lofrasso, Mercader and Botello, we find curious cases of bipolar movement: not only do gentlemen and women adopt the humble trappings of the shepherds, but the rustics and pseudo-shepherds also make unheard-of sojourns to the city: an unusual aberration of the integrity of the pastoral pleasance. For each novel I will describe the circumstances surrounding the unconventional incidents of the interpenetration of country and city, and I will address the differing motives the novels have for such gross violations of pastoral decorum. Finally, I will argue, albeit briefly, that the three novels under discussion helped pave the way for one of the world's greatest literary treatments of the reciprocity of country and city: Cervantes's Don Quijote.

Antonio de Lofrasso's Los diez libros de Fortuna de amor⁸ is an extreme example of the Spanish tendency to hybridize the pastoral mode. Though the setting and trappings appear to be genuinely bucolic, the actions portrayed go far beyond the simple depiction of honest loves recommended by some of the leading theorists⁹. Pastoral purity is sacrificed here and in other novels for the sake of maintaining reader interest. This is a natural consequence of trying to adapt the material of poetry to the needs of narrative prose. We will consider only those non-pastoral concerns of Antonio de Lofrasso's novel that reflect on the «incestuous» relationship between country and city.

Fortuna de amor presents an immediate complication. Its protagonists, the young lovers Frexano and Fortuna, are not true rustics, since they were born in the city. However, their life in the bower is not a mere interlude prior to a return to commitment in the urban sprawl. Rather, they are malleable, amorphous characters that seem to be able to adapt to either environment with equal facility. This is the first, though by no means most egregious, «perversion» of the pastoral ideal that surfaces in the novel. To phrase it more properly, city and country are not seen in opposition. The passage between the two can be made without transition, and indeed, the border that divides the two is at times indistinguishable. It would be never-ending to compile a catalogue of all the ways in which city and country intertwine in Fortuna de amor. I will focus instead on only a few noteworthy violations of the pastoral norm that seriously test the limits of a flexible mode that is generally accommodating.

Traditionally, for example, the shepherd's absolute freedom in the bower is a clear yardstick by which the pastoral life can be differentiated from the restrictions imposed by city life. Along with liberty, tranquility and peace are identifying characteristics that contribute to the pastoral myth. The only form of violence that is tolerated in the bower, outside of good-natured rough-housing, erupts when the shepherds are unable to control their amorous passions¹⁰. This form of violence is rather frequent in the pastoral tradition, but pardonable, since it does not really violate that highest value of otium except in a fleeting sense. Frexano, however, protagonist of Fortuna de amor, is the unwitting victim of the unacceptable, premeditated form of violence that one normally associates with the city.

Frexano is forced to languish for more than two years in a rustic prison within the pleasance, his liberty absolutely deprived, for a crime he did not commit. Treacherous Espuriano murdered Mireno, a shepherd to whom Frexano owed money. The corrupt local judges, swayed by bribes, imprison Frexano on the strength of the flimsy circumstantial evidence. While still in prison, our hero learns of the murder of his friend Duriano, another highly principled shepherd whose struggle against corruption in the bower cost him his life. Obviously, this kind of intrigue that we associate with urban miscarriages of justice has no legitimate place in the pleasance, the locus amoenus. In an intentionally ironic twist, Frexano, once out of jail, decides to journey to Barcelona to exonerate himself and seek redress, since he can find no justice in the country.

Clearly, the egalitarian society that we expect from the humble station of shepherds is conspicuously absent from Lofrasso's Fortuna de amor. Indeed, the rigid social structure portrayed in this novel is a strong argument in favor of the interpretation of the Spanish pastoral novel as a barometer of social reality and an instrument of moral didacticism¹¹. Even within the bower, we are faced with an inflexible caste society, where upward mobility is not predicated on the notion of individual merit, but rather on the ability to purchase favor and advancement. As the Ovidian quip goes, «the golden world is not past since now all things may for Golde be had»¹². At several junctions in the novel, Frexano and ill-fated Duriano acrimoniously bewail the decadent state of the bower, and point an accusing finger at the perpetrators of the iniquities: the filthy swineherds. The harangue against this segment of the pastoral society and the dissolute officials in collusion with them is unusually frank and vehement. Its realistic presentation seems to be a convincing proof of one of the reasons Julius Klein lists for the decline in rural population and agrarian way of life in late sixteenth-century Spain. Simply put, the pastoral economy of Spain faded in large part because of the loss of valuable pasture land and grazing privileges to a group with greater political clout: the vile and contemptible herders of swine so ferociously denigrated in Lofrasso's book¹³.

The values embraced by the shepherds were seriously threatened by the new order and preeminence of the swineherds. The «civiles y bajos groseros porquerizos», (Fortuna, f. 152r) according to Duriano, elevate individual concerns over the common good, while at the same time they ignore the dictates of law. This type of antisocial behavior, common in cities, is foreign to the bower.

The message central to this particular episode in the novel can arguably be labeled one of propaganda. Duriano's mission, as the elected representative of the shepherds, is to restore peace and harmony to the bower by demanding justice from the head herdsman, or gran mayoral. The egress of shepherds from the countryside must be checked. Specifically, and backed by ancient law and tradition, Duriano demands that the swine:

The threat to repatriate themselves is the shepherds' best weapon to gain the sympathetic ear of the authorities. The cities of Spain were overrun with the mass influxes of peasants by the end of the sixteenth century. In this novel the protagonists reiterate on repeated occasions the wisdom of staying in the country and working out their problems.

The economic mayhem wreaked by the swineherds is not nearly as serious as the threat to social stability and the status quo. Their ill gotten wealth has turned the social order upside-down. Even the once virtuous shepherds and ox-herds, compelled by avarice, allow their children to marry wealthy herders of hogs. In this way the latter are able to permeate the infrastructure of public office (Fortuna, f. 93v and ff. 152v-153r). The dispute between the various groups leads to multiple acts of violence. Frexano himself wields a cayado engraved with the menacing epigram, «En favor de ovejeros / y contra falsos porqueros» (f. 153v).

Nevertheless, it is also Frexano who conveys the optimistic, and perhaps propagandistic, message that rural depopulation is a threat that can be overcome: «por causa de ellos, verás muchos deshabilitarse y privarse de entrar en los oficios que ellos entran, y despoblar el prado, mas yo confío se dará orden en conservar lo que antiguamente está ordenado y jurado...» (Fortuna, ff. 153v-154r). This entire polemic, a demythification of the pastoral illusion, places country and city on equal footing. Each is governed by a rigid and corruptible hierarchy. Unfortunately, Antonio de Lofrasso quickly abandons his initial novelistic pretenses, and this interesting dispute between ovejeros and porquerizos is left unresolved. We would be too lenient if we speculated that the author realized that his shattering of the pastoral myth was so serious a transgression that he could not possibly hope to extricate himself from the entanglement that ensued when he fused country and city.

Not only does the «machine» (city) invade the «garden» (country) in this novel¹⁴, but the rustic Frexano also makes a trip to Barcelona. From a pragmatic point of view, this trip can be justified in that it affords the author the opportunity to court favor with the principal personages who are hyperbolically lauded in the novel. The jolt caused by a shepherd's visit to the metropolis is here attenuated somewhat by the fact that Frexano takes up residence with an old friend in the meadows just outside the city, where he feels more at home. In any event, the city is portrayed in suspiciously favorable terms, and its inhabitants are, curiously, magnanimous and receptive to one and all. The humble shepherds are as welcome to the palaces of the great as the noblemen are when hunting on the outskirts of the bower. In sum, city and country are harmoniously reconciled.

The significant aspect of Frexano's visit to the city, for our purposes, is the desire it instills in him to return to his homeland, thereby reinforcing the interpretation of the novel as demographic propaganda. It is an ironic inversion of the normal situation, since a trip to the city seems to regenerate this shepherd spiritually and morally: «aun tenía esperanza de repatriarse del todo, sin descuidarse de la que tanto amaba...» (Fortuna, f. 241v) Again, because the novel is truncated so abruptly, the results of Frexano's declared purpose in visiting Barcelona are never revealed. Antonio de Lofrasso's Diez libros de Fortuna de amor, in spite of its relatively early date of publication, offers abundant pastoral anomalies, many of which have gone undocumented here. Without question, it is one of the most curious of the Spanish pastoral novels, and the one which makes the most consistent effort to reconcile the fundamental pastoral opposition of city and country. This effort, doomed to failure, obeys in large part political motives.

Gaspar Mercader's El prado de Valencia¹⁵ is, like Lofrasso's book, only marginally a work of fiction. More appropriately, it is a poetic anthology woven together with the thinnest of fictional threads. The Prado de Valencia also shares with Diez libros de Fortuna de amor an element of autobiography and the claim that these pastoral romances are in fact roman à clef. Among other similarities, both works inexplicably abandon the plot line with nothing resolved and no promise of continuation. Neither work, therefore, should be judged by the same criteria we would apply to a polished work of fiction. With this caveat in mind, let us examine the reciprocal influence of country and city in El prado de Valencia.

The area that constitutes the pastoral pleasance in Mercader's romance is of course historical. That is to say, the bower again lies adjacent to the court, which greatly facilitates the intercourse between the two. It is but a short leap to pastoral's legacy to subsequent literature: the enclosed garden¹⁶. No longer a sanctified, remote enclosure that requires an arduous pilgrimage to reach, and which absolves and regenerates, the prado of Valencia is merely a source of recreation and entertainment to fill the leisure hours of the idle ruling class. At the same time, the greensward retains the essential features of a pastoral abode for the shepherds that make it their homes. The degeneration of the pastoral ideal is everywhere in evidence in Mercader's little book, and the presence of the city dwellers in the garden, who hide their identities behind masks, is often no more than unabashed voyeurism (See Prado, p. 26).

Mercader was a prominent member of Valencia's Academia de los Nocturnos¹⁷. Henri Mérimée, in his critical edition of El prado de Valencia, establishes that many of the lyrical compositions included in the novel were penned by his fellow academicians for the Cancionero de los Nocturnos (See Prado, «Introduction», pp. xcix-c). It should not surprise us, then, to learn that the enticement that draws the shepherds from their humble huts to the great palaces of Valencia is a poetic joust between the illustrious members of the academy, undertaken at the behest of Belisa, one of the rustic protagonists of the novel. The excursion en masse to the great metropolis is somewhat ingeniously effected, as the shepherds' sojourn takes them from a «natural» bower, the prado, to an «artificial» one, the house of none other than don Gaspar Mercader, the competition's judge. The house has been decorated to resemble the habitat of the shepherds. Likewise, the prizes to be awarded to the winners are intended to parallel those granted to the victors of the pastoral amoeban singing contests (Prado, pp. 47-89).

The very name assigned to the competition, a justa poética, strives to harmonize country and city, since poetry is traditionally viewed as a natural attribute of the shepherds, and jousting as a recreation of the city. Not only is this competition negotiated (emphasis added) between the respective leaders of city and country, but so too is the reciprocal celebration in which the shepherds host the city folk. Predictably, the rustic entertainment is far too ornate and sophisticated for credibility¹⁸. The limits of verisimilitude are severely tested (Prado, pp. 92-146).

The world envisioned by Mercader is indeed topsy-turvy. At the height of the celebrations we learn that one of the principal shepherds is absent because he has gone off to war to cure his love sickness. This course of action constitutes a gross violation of the pastoral ideal. War and violence form part of the urban horizon (Prado, p. 93). Nevertheless, Mercader here is following what became a conventional topos in the Spanish pastoral novel: the shepherd/warrior who realizes that only in war is a man judged on his true merits.

Other inversions that deviate from the norm surface repeatedly in the novel, in an apparent attempt to reconcile country and city. Among them we find: regal and rustic musical instruments that join in song (Prado, p. 212); the game hunted in honor of a rustic wedding includes squab brought down from the city towers (Prado, p. 212), etc. The hunt is not the only indignity suffered by the innocent animals in this novel. The shepherd Fideno, one of the protagonists, is willing to sell the animals he herds in order to finance a bash for both city folk and shepherds:

Long gone are the days when the animals were the shepherds' equals and faithful confidants! The passage is also significant in that it reiterates the complaint voiced by Lofrasso and others: even in the bower, man is not judged by his intrinsic merit. Economics outweigh all other considerations. The sovereignty of wealth is underscored in this novel by the fact that Belisa's relatives, hypocrites all, decide to marry her off to a rich, undeserving stranger. Fideno's unswerving virtues are powerless to stave off the execution of their greedy desires. The legendary Spanish preoccupation with personal honor infects even the democratic pastoral mode (Prado, pp. 188-89).

Another curious episode that yokes together country and city in El prado de Valencia may have inspired a similar one in the Quijote (II, 17). In the second book, a lion, symbol of royal authority, escapes from the Casa Real and threatens the safety of the prado. Fideno, with the stone handed him by Belisa, spills the lion's blood on the meadow: «tal lance hizo, que la estampó en el ojo derecho del León, con cuya sangre él mismo se bañaba todo, dando saltos sin concierto de puro dolor» (Prado, p. 135). This violent spectacle provides a source of entertainment for the idle rich as well as the shepherds: «Muerto el León, llegaron infinitas gentes, y aun no todos sin miedo; no fue menester buscar entretenimiento para aquel día, que bastantemente le hubo en semejante caso» (Prado, p. 135). The search for stimulation, the pursuit of novel ways to occupy leisure hours, cannot help but be a pernicious influence on the shepherds in the bower. The Quijote's exploration of the problem of acceptable enjoyment of otium echoes the solution embraced by pastoral: adherence to the aurea mediocritas.

Finally, just as in the Quijote, Mercader's novel shows that maliciousness is not the exclusive domain of the idle citizen. The rustics are also capable of merciless barbs. One of the distinguished voyeurs to the prado stands accused of being overly affected: «y entre otros andaba uno que dio ocasión a todos de mirarlo, porque hacía piernas tan afectadamente, y con tales pausas, que ni el son, ni la caja creo yo que le faltaban en la cabeza¹⁹» (Prado, p. 98). Fideno hastens to mitigate the tension provoked by the insult by reworking it into a playful conceit: «Y como acostumbra ser / ociosa y vana esta gente, / por esto viene a querer / hacer piernas solamente / por tener algo que hacer. / Y así pues hacen eternas / estas costumbres modernas, / yo de su ejemplo movido, / por hacer algo, he querido / hacerles pies a sus piernas» (Prado, p. 100). The wealthiest noblemen and the poorest shepherds share the problem of confronting the dangers posed by sloth. In Mercader's novel the path commonly chosen leads them to incur in conduct that is at worst morally reprehensible, and at best still an aberration of all that classical pastoral holds sacred. Gaspar Mercader's aborted incursion into the pastoral mode, in its unusual and unjustifiable reconciliation of country and city, falls prey to an inordinate number of violations of pastoral convention.

Miguel Botello's Prosas y versos del pastor de Clenarda²⁰, a relatively late example of the vogue of the Spanish pastoral novel, is another work of mixed pedigree that is only marginally deserving of the appellation of bucolic romance. Botello, aware from the very beginning of his constant deviations from the pastoral norm, attempts to deflect potential criticisms in his dedication to the reader: «mas si te pareciere que en algunas partes no guardo el decoro al estilo pastoril, ha sido por importar a la historia disfrazada con estos pastores²¹» (Clenarda, «Al Lector», n. p.). The pastoral fiction here is little more than a veil to cover a true story, then, if we are to believe Botello. This alleged novel, like the other two under consideration, is an aesthetic failure in large measure because it purports to accomplish something beyond simply writing a pastoral novel.

The interpenetration of country and city in Prosas y versos del pastor de Clenarda is not as complete as in the other two works analyzed. In fact, with one major exception, the pastoral pleasance is an inviolable, self-contained space in Botello's contribution to the genre. This contributes evidence to the view that the element of decadence in the Spanish pastoral novel does not follow a strictly chronological pattern. Rather, decadence, where it exists, has to be viewed as a function of the talents and aims of the individual artists. Even those novels that show the highest degree of decadence in terms of the reciprocity of country and city are nevertheless fundamentally moral-didactic in intent. They employ a unique and perhaps lamentable strategy to prove that the stasis of the bower is naught but deceitful appearance. Time and change are as inevitable within the pleasance as in the city. Pastoral otium and human love, the universal subject matter of these books of shepherds, both give the false impression of being eternal. The mixing of country and city leads to the conclusion that compromise is inevitable. Pastoral unrelentingly withdraws from its cherished illusions and points to the necessity of engaging in a give-and-take concession to the reality of surviving in the material world.

The single extraordinary event that warrants the inclusion of the Pastor de Clenarda in this study is the trip to the city that Lisardo, its protagonist, makes at the insistence of the head herdsman, Albanio. With certain letters in tow, Lisardo is encharged with conducting certain pastoral business matters at court. The actual journey to the city is largely undocumented. Only when Lisardo is safely returned to the bower do we get, in retrospect, an account of the noteworthy happenings during his stay at court. This narrative strategy is a felicitous compromise designed to infringe as little as possible on pastoral propriety. Lisardo's experiences in the city confirm once again that the simple disjunctive of menosprecio de corte / alabanza de aldea is unsustainable. In their own way, both city and country offer the best and worst that the human experience harbors. Our protagonist relates, practically in the same breath, the horrendous beheading in the Plaza de Madrid of don Rodrigo Calderón, Marqués de Sieteiglesias, who died «tan varonilmente» (Clenarda, f. 151r), and an enthusiastic, if servile, encomium of the glorious poets who make up the new Parnassus that is Madrid (Clenarda, f. 153r).

Before abandoning our consideration of Botello's novel, we should take note of a very common technique used by the Spanish pastoral novelists to introduce the city into the country, and ably exploited by Botello. It is the use of the afore-mentioned historia intercalada, or interpolated story. The reader here ponders a verbal recitation of actions and events that would seem to have no legitimate place if acted out within the confines of the pastoral enclosure. This is a gentle, attenuated method of allowing the city to intrude on the country. Of course, the very fact that the shepherds are aware of and curious about urban happenings is an indication of how far these novels are from the original impetus behind pastoral poetry. In the Pastor de Clenarda the two urban novellas are meant to be exemplary. They teach the shepherds that with persistence and boldness, and aided by some crafty wiles (all is fair in love and war), even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, one can attain the object of one's amorous desires. Botello does, nevertheless, draw a sharp distinction between pastoral love and that practiced in the city: «Olvida tu pretensión, viendo que en Madrid se trueca el amor en interés que nada sin él se consigue» (Clenarda, f. 98r-v). Though country and city draw increasingly closer to one another, they are still barely distinguishable here.

We can posit a number of theories, all with some degree of validity, to account for the interpenetration of country and city in the three novels under consideration. The most negative and least enlightening motive will occupy us first: they are second-rate novels that fail to adhere to the dictates of pastoral decorum. That is to say, they are examples of the Renaissance «perversion» of pastoral. Secondly, a more plausible reason for the shepherds' journeys to the great city is the influence of such popular byzantine novels as Heliodorus's Historia etiópica²², and the rediscovery of the first of the pastoral romances, Longus's Daphnis and Chloe²³. In both romances the lowly protagonists discover at court their noble origins at novel's end. A third possible explanation for the reciprocity of country and city in some of the Spanish pastoral novels is their attempt to work out the great Renaissance debate over the relative positions of art versus nature²⁴; an effort to take these concepts out of opposition and harmonize them. The fourth theory arises out of the fact that pastoral is one of the most self-conscious forms of narration. We might therefore choose to view the melding of country and city in these novels as a form of ironic self-consciousness of the very illusory nature of the pastoral fiction. Finally, the fact that the vogue of these books of shepherds coincided with a serious incidence of rural depopulation in Spain can be seen in certain cases as a tool of propaganda. In other words, perhaps the often unfavorable depiction of life in the city in certain novels is in some measure intended to undeceive the masses who were flocking to the cities in record numbers, and who, directly or indirectly, formed part of the audience to whom these books were addressed²⁵.

In any event, the three novels studied here broke strongly with pastoral tradition and, not uncoincidentally, were not held in great esteem by the reading public nor subsequent criticism²⁶. But even the humblest manifestations of a given genre contribute something positive to the course of its evolution, and at least a drop of nectar to be distilled by the practitioners of literary mimesis. Indeed, the contributions of Antonio de Lofrasso, Gaspar Mercader and Miguel Botello, are of considerable importance for an understanding of the vogue of the pastoral romance in Spain. Not only did they provide materials that astute readers could integrate into their own literary creations, but they greatly expanded, for better or worse, the horizons of the pastoral novel. At the same time, as is often the case with minor authors not well versed in the art of subtlety, the concerns articulated in the vast expanses of these novels give us a vivid picture of the social realities that are often not so readily apparent in the aesthetic elaborations of more accomplished artists.

The yoking of country and city that is effected so clumsily and naively in Fortuna de amor, Prado de Valencia and Pastor de Clenarda, whether born of ignorance of the parameters of the genre or a product of inevitable decadence, has positive reverberations. In many ways, Don Quijote is an exploration of the interworkings of country and city. Quijote himself serves as the mediator between these two worlds, at times in opposition and at times in harmony²⁷. Cervantes, of course, was an avid consumer and cultivator of the pastoral mode. The Quijote, the ultimate demythification of all things chivalric, courtly and pastoral, would not have been possible in the absence of novels such as those of Lofrasso and Mercader. The final determination of Quijote and Sancho to put on shepherds' trappings, though significant, is tragically impossible (Quijote, II, 67). Don Quijote has learned, through his readings and through his experiences, that things are never what they seem at first glance²⁸. There is no terrestrial paradise that has not been contaminated by civilization, and there is no civilized person who does not yearn for a return to some pristine pleasance that never existed: utopia. This is the paradoxical and irreconcilable reciprocity of country and city gleaned from a careful reading of some of the more curious of the Spanish pastoral romances.