Some Uses Of Pastoral In Don Quijote1 B.W. Ife
I
In spite of Cervantes's assertion in the prologue that Don
Quijote is 'one continued satire upon books of chivalry',
2
the pastoral was never very far from his or from Don Quixote's imagination.
Towards the end of his third and last sally, on the way back from
Barcelona, Quixote first raises the possibility that, when the time
comes for him to retire from his career as a knight errant, he and
Sancho might take up a new occupation as shepherds:
'I will buy sheep, and all other materials necessary for the pastoral
employment; and I calling myself the shepherd Quixotiz, and you the
shepherd Panzino, we will range the mountains, the woods and meadows,
singing here, and complaining there, drinking the liquid crystal of the
fountains, of the limpid brooks, or of the mighty rivers. The oaks with
a plentiful hand shall give their sweetest fruit; the trunks of the
hardest cork-trees shall afford us seats; the willows shall furnish
shade, and the roses scent; the spacious meadow shall yield us carpets
of a thousand colours; the air, clear and pure, shall supply breath; the
moon and stars afford light, in spite of the darkness of the night;
singing shall furnish pleasure, and complaining yield delight; Apollo
shall provide verses, and love conceits; with which we shall make
ourselves famous and immortal, not only in the present, but in future
ages.'
3
Once again, Quixote has lost no opportunity to display the breadth
and depth of his reading, and Sancho is quite taken with his evocation
of the idyllic commonplaces of the pastoral. But there are at least a
couple of ironic commentaries. Quixote's proposal that they should
consider taking up a second career as shepherds is prompted by the fact
that the two heroes have now arrived on their return journey at the very
spot where, nine chapters earlier, on their outward leg, they had met
some of the Duke and Duchess's retainers posing as shepherds and
shepherdesses in the episode of the false Arcadia. That incident ended
with Quixote and Sancho being trampled by a herd of bulls (II, 58). Don
Quixote's resolve to become a false shepherd himself also leads to his
being trampled, this time by a herd of six hundred hogs (II, 68). As we
shall see, stampeding livestock are, for Cervantes, a frequent hazard of
the pastoral lifestyle.
In spite of these indignities, Don Quixote and Sancho by no means
abandon their pastoral ambitions. On finally making it home from his
wanderings, the knight returns to his resolve with all seriousness,
telling Sansón Carrasco and the priest that:
'he had resolved to turn shepherd for that year, and to pass his time
in the solitude of the fields, where he might give the reins to his
amorous thoughts, exercising himself in that pastoral and virtuous
employment; beseeching them, if they had leisure, and were not engaged
in business of greater consequence, to bear him company; telling them he
would purchase sheep and stock sufficient to give them the name of
shepherds; acquainting them also, that the principal part of the
business was already done, he having chosen for them names as fit as if
they had been cast in a mould. The priest desired him to repeat them.
Don Quixote answered, that he himself was to be called the shepherd
Quixotiz; the bachelor, the shepherd Carrason: the priest, the shepherd
Curiambro, and Sancho Panza, the shepherd Panzino.
4
Their astonishment at this fresh manifestation of Quijote's madness
is tempered only by the need to prevent him from rambling once more from
the village, and resuming his chivalric career. In the hope that he
might be cured within the year, they reluctantly fall in with this new
project, and agree to join him. Sansón Carrasco displays his learning by
discoursing on the need to find shepherdesses to whom they might give
'the names we find in print, of which the world is full, as Phillises,
Amarillises, Dianas, Floridas, Galateas, and Belisardas' (Jarvis, II,
73, p. 604). Quixote, however, as he points out, is spared this aspect
of the game, already having 'the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso, the glory
of these banks, the ornament of these meads, the support of beauty, the
cream of good humour, and, lastly, the worthy subject of all praise, be
it never so hyperbolical'.
5
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II
It should not surprise us to find pastoral themes and incidents
recurring in Don Quijote. We know that Cervantes was a great admirer of
the genre, and even if he had not been, his fascination, even obsession,
with the interplay of genres would have led him to include elements of
classical, renaissance and home- grown Spanish pastoral literature in
what is, after all, the classic example of a book about books. Cervantes
wrote his own pastoral novel, the Galatea, published in Alcalá de
Henares in 1585. It had a limited success, but was clearly important in
his literary apprenticeship, and a number of the characters, situations
and incidents turn up again in others of his works, including Don
Quijote.
As has already been indicated, Part II of Don Quijote in particular
contains a number of pastoral interludes, such as the false Arcadia,
most of which occur during the long masque-like section of the narrative
(chapters 30-57) when Quixote and Sancho are guests of the Duke and
Duchess and are on the receiving end of numerous charades and confidence
tricks, many of which have classical literary origins. The Altisidora
episodes are frequently pastoral in feel, and there are several oblique
and overt references to Virgil, such as the wild boar hunt and the
allusions to Dido and Aeneas sheltering from the storm in chapter
34.
What is more, there is in each of Parts I and II a fully-fledged
self-contained pastoral narrative among the interpolated stories which
are such a feature of Don Quijote. In Part II, there is the story of
Camacho's wedding, deriving from an episode in Cervantes's own Galatea,
and, in Part I, the narrative on which I will want to focus towards the
end of this paper, the episode of Grisóstomo and Marcela, in chapters
11-14.
We know, also, that Don Quixote himself was an avid reader of
pastoral romances. There were several in his library, which is subjected
to such rigorous scrutiny by the priest and the barber in chapter 6 of
Part I. Chief among these were the twin peaks of Spanish pastoral
romance: the Diana of Jorge de Montemayor, published in Valencia,
probably in 1559, and the Diana enamorada of Gaspar Gil Polo, also
published in Valencia, in 1564.
6
Though the priest and the barber have
misgivings about some aspects of the Diana, both works survive the
bonfire, though very much against the niece's better judgment:
'And so opening one, it happen'd to be the Diana of Montemayor; which
made him say (believing all the rest to be of that Stamp) these do not
deserve to be punish'd like the others, for they neither have done, nor
can do that Mischief which those Stories of Chivalry have done, being
generally ingenious Books, that can do no Body any Prejudice. Oh! good
Sir, cry'd the Niece, burn 'em with the rest, I beseech you; for should
my Uncle get cur'd of his Knight-Errant Frenzy, and betake himself to
the Reading of these Books, we should have him turn Shepherd, and so
wander thro' the Woods and Fields; nay, and what would be worse yet,
turn Poet, which they say is a catching and an incurable Disease. The
Gentlewoman is in the Right, said the Curate, and it will not be amiss
to remove that Stumbling-block out of our Friend's Way; and since we
began with the Diana of Montemayor, I am of Opinion we ought not to burn
it, but only take out that Part of it which treats of the Magician
Felicia, and the inchanted Water, as also all the longer Poems; and let
the Work escape with its Prose, and the Honour of being the First of
that Kind. Here's another Diana, quoth the Barber, the second of that
Name, by Salmantino; nay, and a third too, by Gil Polo. Pray, said the
Curate, let Salmantino increase the Number of Criminals in the Yard; but
as for that by Gil Polo, preserve it as charily as if Apollo himself had
wrote it.'
7
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III
Although the appearance of these two works by Montemayor and Gil Polo
marked the coming of age of pastoral prose fiction in sixteenth-century
Spain, there had, of course, been many precedents, and the vogue of the
pastoral in Spain was as widespread and as dependent on classical and
Italian models as anywhere else in Europe. Virgil's Eclogues and
Theocritus's Idylls were well known and much alluded to, Petrarch and
Boccaccio were influential, but perhaps the most effective catalyst for
the writers of prose was Sannazaro's Arcadia, originally published in
1504, but not appearing in Spanish until 1549.
There were also a number of more home-grown precedents: the medieval
serranillas, the many pastoral interludes in Spanish fiction before the
mid-century, especially the romances of chivalry, some of the early
court dramas, and the eclogues of Garcilaso de la Vega, the second of
which may well have been intended to be staged as a masque. The
shepherdesses who confront Don Quixote in the episode of the false
Arcadia tell him that they have prepared two eclogues, neither of which
they have yet performed ('representado'), one by the famous poet
Garcilaso, and the other by the most excellent Camoens (II, 58, p.
958).
As we might expect, the Spanish pastoral, as evidenced in these and
similar examples, draws heavily on conventions which were common across
renaissance Europe. The world of Arcadia is a private, abstract world
largely existing in the mind. Only love and its attendant emotions
matter. The bucolic outer shell is there purely to give the abstractions
some form. The landscapes are of no real significance except for their
residual allegorical function: the pleasures and pains of love being
represented by pleasant if rather bland landscapes bordering on occasion
on the rocky and the barren. There is no serious attempt to create a
sense of a real physical landscape -all the trees tend to be leafy, all
the grass is green, and all the brooks are babbling, a geographical
implausibility which was a particular gift to those in Spain, and there
were many of them, who were inclined to mock.
8
The shepherding itself is
never of any real significance. Time and space do not matter beyond the
daily passage of the rising and setting sun, or the allegorical journey
in search of a solution for the trials of love.
In Spain, as elsewhere in Europe, the pastoral world was essentially
a place where intellectual debates about the nature of love were held.
The lovers who gain access to this world do so by virtue of their
sufferings in love, and when they enter, they leave behind the material
preoccupations of everyday social life and wander about distraught,
sometimes in communion with nature, more often alienated from it.
Arcadia is a mental landscape of emotional distress.
Within this artificial world of debates about love, Montemayor and
Gil Polo, though only five years apart in terms of publication, could
not have been further apart in ethos.
9
Montemayor's view of love was
essentially a conservative one, despite the fashionable gloss he tried
to give it by including an extensive summary and quotations from Leone
Ebreo's neoplatonist treatise on love, the Diálogos de amor. For
Montemayor, love is a destiny against which it is useless for the lover
to struggle, an irrational force, hostile to reason. Love entails
suffering and jealousy. The suffering can be ennobling to an extent, but
the jealousy is destructive. Readers of Spanish poetry are used to this
rather unedifying perspective on love from the cancioneros of the
fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Because love is so extreme, so
variable and so fickle, the characters fall in and out of love at the
slightest provocation, and love is rarely if ever reciprocated. In the
structure of his plot, Montemayor presents us less with an eternal
triangle than with an eternal polygon, in which each character loves
another, who loves a third, who loves a fourth, and so on. Everyone is
miserable, everyone unrequited.
10
If the underlying philosophy of Montemayor's Diana can be summed up
in one of his verses:
Amor loco ¡ay amor loco! |
|
yo por vos y vos por otro, |
|
11
then Gil Polo's approach can be similarly encapsulated in one of
his: " No es ciego amor, mas yo lo soy..."12
Gil Polo takes on his predecessor at a polemical level and sets out
to correct his assumptions using the same generic constraints, and often
the same narrative structure and characters. What is impressive about
Montemayor is his technical facility at generating and maintaining
complex plots, a feature which must have appealed to Cervantes. The
basic plot is constantly interrupted by interludes, interrelated
sub-plots, and self-contained short stories. All these elements are
skilfully woven together to provide a strong sense of accumulation as
the characters successively join in the pilgrimage, not to see the
Wizard of Oz, but to visit the wise Felicia, who they hope will be able
to sort out all their problems. But, for Montemayor, the wise Felicia
can only cure the lovers' ills, which are irrational, by recourse to a
magic potion, which is also irrational. This, as we have seen, was what
Cervantes objected too, and wanted removed from the novel if it was to
stay in Quixote's library. But Gil Polo makes Felicia more of a
counsellor than a witch doctor. Her solutions are carefully prepared and
psychologically more convincing, and depend, crucially, on the
characters being honest with themselves and with each other.
If Gil Polo's novel is to be preserved 'as charily as if Apollo
himself had wrote it' it is undoubtedly for the strong humanist values
which it promotes and which were so much to Cervantes's liking. It will
not surprise us, then, if we find more than a trace of Gil Polo's
muscular rationalism in some of Cervantes's own treatments of the
genre.
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IV
The vogue of the pastoral in Spain; the popularity and publishing
success of Montemayor's pastoral romance; the attractiveness to
Cervantes of Gil Polo's humanistic treatment of the theme; Don Quixote's
own fondness for these books and the bucolic alternative they offer for
his old age: these are all reasons why the pastoral should occupy such a
prominent place in what is essentially a romance of chivalry. But there
is another important consideration: the fact that any knight errant
venturing forth in early modern Spain could not have gone far without
coming across a sheep, if not several thousand of them. And this is
exactly what happens in chapter 18 of Part I, not long after the start
of the second sally:
'Thus they went on discoursing, when Don Quixote, perceiving a thick
Cloud of Dust arise right before 'em in the Road, the Day is come, said
he, turning to his Squire, the Day is come, Sancho, that shall usher in
the Happiness which Fortune has reserv'd for me: This Day shall the
Strength of my Arm be signaliz'd by such Exploits as shall be
transmitted even to the latest Posterity. See'st thou that Cloud of
Dust, Sancho? It is raised by a prodigious Army marching this Way, and
composed of an infinite Number of Nations. Why then, at this Rate, quoth
Sancho, there should be two Armies; for yonder's as great a Dust on
t'other Side: With that Don Quixote look'd, and was transported with Joy
at the Sight, firmly believing that two vast Armies were ready to engage
each other in that Plain: For his Imagination was so crowded with those
Battles, Inchantments, surprizing Adventures, amorous Thoughts, and
other Whimsies which he had read of in Romances, that his strong Fancy
chang'd every thing he saw into what he desir'd to see; and thus he
could not conceive that the Dust was only rais'd by two large Flocks of
Sheep that were going the same Road from different Parts, and could not
be discern'd till they were very near.'
13
Don Quixote might have been transported with joy at the sight, but there
were many whose hearts would have sunk at what was a common feature of
the Spanish landscape, the great herds of sheep being driven seasonally
between summer and winter pasture.
The Spanish economy had been dominated by live-stock farming since
the introduction of the merino sheep with its fine, high-quality wool
into Andalusia from North Africa in the early fourteenth century.
14
It
made a lot of sense, in a country which enjoys or suffers from extremes
of climate and terrain, to develop an agricultural system which made
large stretches of land productive which were not suitable for arable
cultivation. The successful prosecution of the reconquest helped to
create the conditions in which this economy could flourish. Extensive
tracts of new land became available in the south and opened up
possibilities of large-scale seasonal migration across the peninsula
which ensured maximum advantage to the sheep-farming aristocracy.
Exports grew to northern Europe, especially to the Flemish weavers who
dealt with Spanish suppliers through a network of established fairs, the
local textile industries also flourished, and the crown had a source of
ready money through taxation of the trade which was organised by the
great live-stock guild, the Mesta.
It made a kind of sense, therefore, for the crown to protect the
rights and privileges of the Mesta when there were conflicts, as there
often were, with arable farmers.
15
Sheep farming was compatible with
long- standing aristocratic attitudes to industry; it was easy, it was
not labour-intensive, it released manpower for overseas projects in
Europe and America, it was lucrative for a monarchy that was always
strapped for cash. The Catholic Monarchs declared that 'the breeding and
preservation of livestock ought to be the principal substance of these
kingdoms.'
16
Paradoxically, though, the very peace and stability which
followed the union of the crowns also produced the conditions in which
the imbalance of the Castilian agrarian economy in particular would
become progressively serious and ultimately destructive for Spain. By
the early sixteenth century, Spain had a stable and growing population
which it became progressively more difficult to feed from the
low-yielding crops grown in the peninsula. Imports of grain became a
significant and permanent feature of the economy.
Conflicts between farmers and cowboys are as old as time, from the
first rustic who ever chased away a goat that was nibbling his vines,
17
to the large-scale ranch wars set to music by Rodgers and Hammerstein in
Oklahoma. In early modern Spain, these conflicts were just as serious.
Migrations of sheep monopolised vast tracts of land, did serious damage
to cultivated areas when they overran their confines, and prevented the
enclosure of land for further cultivation: any land which had ever been
used for pasture was protected for that purpose in perpetuity. Don
Quixote's joy at the sight of two vast flocks of sheep throwing up large
dust clouds aligns him indirectly and implicitly, perhaps, but very
clearly, with his own class, the land- owing, sheep-farming gentry, and
against the peasant farmers, insecurely-tenured, trying to scratch a
living from an ungrateful soil in the face of marauding livestock which
they viewed with all the enthusiasm they might reserve for a plague of
locusts.
But there is a poignancy here. The imbalance of the Castilian economy
became critical once the impact of American silver had had its effect.
Rapidly rising prices and restrictive legislation made Spanish textiles
uncompetitive on the European markets. Foreign weavers continued to buy
up raw wool, weave it into superior cloth and sell it back to Spaniards
at a considerable profit. While the treasure fleets lasted, the
Spaniards could afford to pay, but at a long-term cost. American bullion
went out of the country as fast as it came in, and Spain found itself
with a massive imbalance of trade. Luis Ortiz, a government accountant,
reported to Philip II that by his reckoning, Spain was importing goods
at up to ten times the value of its exports, and that in many cases it
was exporting to foreign producers the very raw materials that it was
re- importing as finished products.
18
Towards the end of the century, then, and during the lifetime of both
Cervantes and Don Quixote, the Spanish wool trade declined rapidly as a
result of the price revolution and the shift in European taste away from
woollen goods towards cotton and silk. The power of the Mesta also
started to fall away rapidly. At its height in the 1520s, it managed
flocks of some 3.5 million sheep across the peninsula. Between 1552 and
1564 alone the numbers fell by 20%. By the beginning of the seventeenth
century they were down below 2 million.
When Don Quixote looks out across the plain at the two great clouds
of dust, then, he is looking at a symbol of decline of which he is
himself a part. What he is seeing is the progressive impoverishment of
the minor land-owning gentry of which he is a member, the passing of a
period in which the values of the once militant nobility, the ideals of
chivalry which he represents and tries to uphold, no longer apply; and
he is witnessing in a cruel paradox of both history and fiction, the
onward march of that hunger which has never been far away throughout the
sixteenth century, a hunger which his countrymen are increasingly
suffering, and which he and Sancho constantly suffer throughout the
book. Cervantes drives home this paradox -sheep everywhere, but nothing
to eat- in a telling passage in Part II, chapter 59. Immediately
following the episode of the false Arcadia and the stampede of bulls,
Don Quixote and Sancho fetch up at an inn. Sancho asks the host what
there is for supper, and the host offers whatever they wish. In an
exchange reminiscent of that with the proprietor of the celebrated
cheese shop which has no cheese, Sancho proceeds to suggest a full range
of dishes -chickens, pullets, bacon and eggs- all of which turn out to
be off the menu. Sancho has to settle for a pair of cow-heels, which at
least are an improvement on their regular diet of acorns and medlars;
but, perhaps significantly, there is no mention of mutton or lamb.
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V
What I am suggesting here is that, in Spain at least, the pastoral
is not a single, undifferentiated phenomenon.
19
The pretty, bucolic
world of make-believe, seen at its most extreme in the episode of the
false Arcadia, where we know that the characters are playing a part,
has an all too real counterpart in the contemporary world through which
Don Quixote makes his way. Like the pigs and the cattle and the goats
that roam and trample this rural landscape, the sheep are not just
properties in a stagey form of fiction. They are real-life symbols of a
nation undergoing a tremendous long-term shift in moral and economic
values.
One of Cervantes's great achievements in Don Quijote is to bring
together and hold the balance between several versions of pastoral,
bringing the genre out of the bucolic vacuum which it frequently
inhabits and putting it to work in a contemporary rural context.
Sometimes he does this by bringing out the latent artificiality of
pastoral, as in the false Arcadia; sometimes he does it in a
self-consciously mocking way, as when Don Quixote checks off what he
needs to become a shepherd and what he can expect to be doing once he
takes up office. But his most subtle handing of the theme comes,
significantly, early on in the book, in the episode of Grisóstomo and
Marcela.
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VI
There is good reason to believe that Cervantes originally intended
the episode to come later. If he moved it to give it more prominence,
it is not difficult to see why. The opening chapters of Don Quijote are
almost unrelentlessly parodic of the chivalresque ideals and behaviour
which Quixote embodies. Cervantes clearly felt that, after the
conclusion of the battle with the Biscayan, interrupted briefly to
introduce the Arabic author Cide Hamete Benengeli, the reader was ready
for a change of material and a change of mood. As always with
Cervantes, this is carefully prepared and subtly executed.
Don Quixote and Sancho find themselves in the company of a group of
goatherds who invite them to share their rustic meal. Inspired by the
handful of acorns he has for his supper, Quixote launches into the
first of his many after-dinner speeches, in which Cervantes gives the
knight his head to develop his philosophy and expound his ideals to the
sceptical but often admiring company:
'Happy age, and happy days were those, to which the ancients gave
the name of golden; not that gold, which in these our iron-times is so
much esteemed, was to be acquired without trouble, in that fortunate
period; but because people then were ignorant of those two words MINE
and THINE: in that sacred age, all things were in common; no man was
necessitated, in search of his daily food, to undergo any other trouble
than that of reaching out his hand, and receiving it from the sturdy
oak, that liberally invited him to pull his sweet and salutary
fruit...'
20
The argument is subtle. 'In this detestable age no maid is secure'
(85),
21
he says, echoing many an ageing cynic's assertion that things
aren't what they used to be. Hence the need for knights errant like
him. But what is noticeable is the consistently bucolic tone of his
argument, which though it addresses the need for chivalry, in fact
anticipates the theme and form of the next episode.
When he finishes his speech, the bathos is really quite crude ('this
tedious harangue, which might very well have been spared' (86),
22
and there is no sense that these goatherds are anything other than what
they purport to be: rather dim fellows from the real world of the rural
poor, who are just looking after goats and know nothing of the literary
world that Quixote inhabits. But before long another goatherd comes
along, one who we are told can read and write, and who plays the rebec.
The musical note marks a subtle transition to a different level. In
Part II the episodes at the court of the Duke and Duchess are also
heralded by music, as if to emphasise their theatrical quality. The new
arrival, Antonio, sits down 'upon the trunk of an ancient oak' (87),
23
and sings a plaintive ballad at the request of the assembled
company.
Next comes another goatherd, Pedro, from the village, with news of
the death of Grisóstomo, who has died that morning from unrequited love
of a girl called Marcela, 'she that roves about these plains in the
habit of a shepherdess' (91).
24
Grisóstomo, we learn, was the son of a
rich farmer, had studied at Salamanca, had come home and taken to
wandering about with a friend, dressed as shepherds. When his father
died, 'he inherited great riches that were in moveables and in lands,
with no small number of sheep...and a great deal of money' (93).
25
He represents, then, a rare example of a feigned shepherd who is in
reality a sheep-farmer, a young, wealthy landowner who could perfectly
well keep sheep without the need to act the part.
Marcela is the daughter of an even richer farmer. Her mother died in
childbirth, her father, of grief soon after; she has been brought up by
an uncle and now she has grown so beautiful that all the young men are
desperately in love with her. Naturally, she spurns them all. Pedro is
disdainful of their sighing and complaining, their dirges and ditties,
their tears and despair. They who know her are keen to see who, if any,
will overcome her disdain, tame such an unsociable humour and enjoy
such exceeding beauty. Quixote willingly agrees to join the group on
their journey next day to the funeral.
So far, Cervantes has taken us skilfully from a world of goats, via
the first bucolic note of the rebec, to a classic narrative of love and
disdain, madness and death. But he has made it clear that pastoral is a
game that only rich children play. Next there comes an interlude, while
chivalresque themes re-enter and the tone becomes ironic again. On the
road to the funeral some fellow travellers question Quixote about his
armour and all that it entails. Quixote rehearses his thoughts about
valour and the need for knighthood in this benighted world, and soon he
comes round to the topic of his own love, Dulcinea, and her disdain.
Chivalry and pastoral unite around a common theme.
Before long the different worlds of rural poverty and wealth, low
pastoral, chivalry and high pastoral finally come together. Don Quixote
and the goatherds see a group of shepherds, about twenty of them,
descending through a cleft made by two high mountains, clad in jackets
of black sheepskin and each crowned with a garland of cypress and yew.
They carried a bier strewn with branches and flowers, and having lain
down the body, they begin to dig into the rock. One of the group,
Ambrosio, turns to Quixote, and in one of those surges of intense which
Cervantes conveys so well, delivers himself of an impassioned funeral
oration:
'This corse, gentlemen, which you behold with compassionate eyes,
was the habitation of a soul, which possessed an infinite share of the
riches of heaven: this is the body of Chrysostom, who was a man of
unparalleled genius, the pink of courtesy and kindness; in friendship a
very phoenix, liberal without bounds, grave without arrogance, gay
without meanness; and, in short, second to none in every thing that was
good, and without second in all that was unfortunate. He loved, and was
abhored; he adored, and was disdained; he implored a savage; he
importuned a statue; he hunted the wind; cried aloud to the desart; he
was a slave to the most ungrateful of women; and the fruit of his
servitude was death...'
26
One of Grisóstomo's songs of despair is read aloud, and Marcela appears
on top of a rock above the grave. Ambrosio flings recriminations at her
for her cruelty, and she replies, rationally at first and then with
growing passion, that it is unreasonable for men to blame her for their
affliction. Why should an object which is beloved for its beauty be
bound to love its admirer? Patiently she breaks down and exposes the
absurdity of the values and the rhetoric which underlie the very game
in which she is a star player:
'I was born free, and to enjoy that freedom, have I chosen the
solitude of these fields. The trees on these mountains are my
companions; and I have no other mirrour than the limpid streams of
these crystal brooks. With the trees and the streams I share my
contemplation and my beauty; I am a distant flame and a sword afar off:
those whom my eyes have captivated my tongue has undeceived; and if
hope be the food of desire, as I gave none to Chrysostom or to any
other person, so neither can his death, nor that of any other of my
admirers, be justly imputed to my cruelty, but rather, to their own
obstinate despair. To those who observe that his intentions were
honourable; and that therefore I was bound to comply with them, I
answer, when he declared the honesty of his designs in that very spot
where now his grave is digging, I told him, my purpose was to live in
perpetual solitude, and let the earth alone enjoy the fruits of my
retirement, and the spoils of my beauty: wherefore, if he,
notwithstanding this my explanation, persevered without hope, and
sailed against the wind; it is no wonder that he was overwhelmed in the
gulph of his rashness.'
27
In spite of her eloquent defence of her position, Marcela has been
criticised, as she is in the goatherd Pedro's narration, for her
cruelty and insensitivity.
28
It is true, as A. J. Close argues in a
short but perceptive account of the importance of this episode,
29
that there is a great deal of ambivalence both in Cervantes's attitude to
the pastoral and to the compelling but eccentric behaviour of both
Grisóstomo and Marcela; but, taken in the context of the debate about
love conducted in the two Dianas, there can be no doubt about where
Cervantes's humanistic sympathies lie, and why he felt that Gil Polo's
text deserved to be saved from the flames.
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VII
The episode of Grisóstomo and Marcela shows how Cervantes, not for
the first time, contrives to bring several strands of literary tradition
together, and makes them work with and against each other. Each frames
the other's image. There is low pastoral and high, the eloquence of Don
Quixote's vision of the golden age and the bathos of Sancho's and the
goatherds' response; there is the irony of Pedro's commentary on the
foolish lovers and the travellers' mockery of Quixote's ideals; the
pathos of the funeral oration and the devastating critique of
traditional views of love and disdain, passionately argued by the
wronged Marcela.
The several strands of the narrative, the interleaving of literary
genre and social class, have been beautifully captured in one of the
engravings which illustrate the 1765 edition of Smollett's translation.
At the top of the picture, perched on a high overhanging rock, is
Marcela; below her, Ambrosio utters his fierce condemnation of her
cruelty, while Quixote and Sancho, surrounded by the other members of
their group, look on; Ambrosio gestures towards the dead body of
Grisóstomo, almost reclining in a classical pose and naked but for some
drapery; and below, two gravediggers, one grasping a mug of ale,
excavate Grisóstomo's final resting place 'in the field, like a Moor
(God bless us!) at the foot of the rock, hard by the cork-tree spring'.
30
The interweaving of narrative and generic threads in this way
underlines the parallels in Cervantes's mind between this episode, and
the pastoral genre for which it stands, and Don Quixote's chivalric
designs. Quixote's eccentricity, bordering on madness at times, is
mirrored by that of Grisóstomo, who literally goes mad from love and
destroys himself in the process, and by that of Marcela, who imprisons
herself in solitude in a perverse attempt to preserve her freedom. Let
them both be a lesson to Don Quixote, who, for all his ineptitude and
inability to bring about a compromise between his ideals and the need to
make them work in the real world, does at least manage to stumble
through life while avoiding the more catastrophic consequences of his
lunacy. Others are less fortunate.
But what is most interesting is that Cervantes's version of pastoral,
like his version of the chivalresque, is located in a real world, near a
place in La Mancha whose name he cares not to remember, a place where
impoverished gentlemen read books and dream dreams and live out the
passing of the very values by which they set their store. Cervantes
takes his version of pastoral down from the bookshelf and sets it to
work in a rural world populated by real livestock. The goatherds in this
episode are just one of the ways in which literary pastoral is allowed
to grow naturally and almost imperceptibly from the natural landscape of
early seventeenth-century Spain.
In doing this, Cervantes provides a very subtle commentary on the
central theme of the book. Because there were no knights errant in
Cervantes's Spain, Don Quixote's attempt to revive the heroic ideals of
chivalry can only seem anachronistically comic, except when,
significantly, he recreates them wholly in words. But sheep there were
in plenty, even after the heyday of the Mesta was long past, and the
counterpoint between real landowners and feigned shepherds gives
Cervantes the opportunity to gloss the antics of Don Quixote in a rather
less comic vein. Nevertheless, the light he shines on the cuestión de
amor of Grisóstomo and Marcela is typically ambivalent. There is irony,
there is mockery; but as with the chivalresque, Cervantes turns the
pastoral into something which is deeply felt, something whose loss makes
us all much the poorer.
Ambrosio mourns the death of Grisóstomo
Engraving by G.V. Neisl after F. Hayman in
The History and Adventures of Don Quixote, translated by T. Smollett,
3rd edition corrected (London, T. Osborne et al, 1765),
volume I, facing page 113
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