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La gitanilla : a tale of high romance

1977; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 54; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1475382772000354283

1469-3550

Frank Pierce,

Early Modern Spanish Literature

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: CERVANTES SAAVEDRA, MIGUEL DE (1547–1616) NOVELAS EJEMPLARESGITANILLA, LA [M. DE CERVANTES]NOVELAS EJEMPLARES [M. DE CERVANTES] Notes 1. It was earlier set to music in 1812 by Schulz and Seyreid as ‘Gitanilla’. Weber's librettist was P. A. Wolff who also called it ‘Gitannila’. See Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed. (London 1954), IX, 213–14. For Schulz, see idem, vol. VII, 598. 2. The following have made significant contributions: J. Casalduero, in his stimulating if controversial Sentido y forma de las ‘Novelas ejemplares’, 2nd corrected ed. (Madrid 1969), 56–77; Franz Rauhut, in a sound criticism of the intentions and values involved, ‘Consideraciones sociológicas sobre La Gitanilla y otras novelas cervantinas’, Anales cervantinos, 3 (1950), 143–60; Agustín González de Amezúa, in his exhaustive and scholarly survey, Cervantes, creador de la novela corta española, 2 vols. (Madrid 1956–58) (see II, 5–41); K. L. Selig, in his brief but sensitive study of poetry in the novel, ‘Concerning the structure of Cervantes's La Gitanilla’, Romanis-tisches Jahrbuch, XIII (1962), 273–76, reprinted as ‘La Gitanilla y la poesía’, in Libro de Homenaje a Luis Alberto Sánchez (Lima 1967), 449–53; Jennifer Lowe in Cervantes: Two Novelas Ejemplares, La gitanilla, La ilustre fregona, Critical Guides to Spanish Texts (London 1971), 27–55; Alban K. Forcione, in his important original monograph, Cervantes, Aristotle and the ‘Persiles’ (Princeton 1970), 306–19; and Ruth El Saffar, Novel to Romance: A Study of Cervantes's ‘Novelas ejemplares’ (Baltimore 1974). Harri Meier's exhaustive analysis, ‘Personenhandlung und Geschehen in Cervantes Gitanilla’, Romanische Forschungen, LI (1937), 125–86, places Cervantes within the tradition of literary usage as it concerns rhetoric and grammar in the broad sense, and the characters and settings of the Gitanilla are submitted to a keen linguistic scrutiny. All students of our short novel can derive much from this admirable application of linguistics to a piece of fiction. 3. Casalduero (59–65) divides it into four parts which envisage a looser frame for the tale and which attempt to intertwine narration and description in a way typical of this critic. Mrs Lowe (27–32) emphasizes the deliberate setting of the scene by describing Preciosa. 4. That is up to p. 35 of the ed. normally used, namely that by F. Rodríguez-Marín, Novelas ejemplares, Clásicos Castellanos, I, 1–130. The reader's attention is also drawn to the very competent translation, including admirable renderings of Cervantes's conventional verse, by the late C. A. Jones, Cervantes: Exemplary Novels, Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth 1972), 19–84. 5. See Casalduero (58) and Jennifer Lowe (32 and 40). Mrs Lowe, in commenting on the introduction of Preciosa into the story, makes one of several simplistic remarks on Cervantes's intentions: ‘it is surely impossible for us to swallow this description of Preciosa. But of course we are not intended to accept all this as literally true, or even as feasible’ (28). One must accept Preciosa as literarily (but not literally) true; otherwise one leaves the story aside. Then Mrs Lowe has second thoughts: ‘Cervantes is here deliberately going to extremes of exaggeration in order to underline for us the vast difference between Preciosa and her fellows, a difference which is of vital importance for our understanding of the novela’ (28). This is better, but then this is what the novel really is about! As Rauhut puts it: ‘… Cervantes no plasma a su protagonista como milagro sobrehumano, sino más bien como personaje ideal dentro de la realidad’ (146). 6. Mrs Lowe comments ‘we cannot imagine any young man actually talking in these terms and this style to a gypsy girl’ (32). Surely the point is that Cervantes is using this manner precisely because he has conceived the two lovers of his romance in such literary terms. Preciosa is no ordinary ‘gypsy girl’, as we have seen and been told, and it is this fact which has made her noble lover offer her equality with him. 7. Some critics read a lot into this meeting and single out the page's famous definition of poetry (‘es una bellísima doncella, casta, honesta, discreta, aguda, retirada y que se contiene en los límites de la discreción más alta. Es amiga de la soledad …’ [49]). Some of these adjectives have been applied to Preciosa, and the whole statement is not dissimilar from the longer one in Don Quixote, II, 16. This latter point is stressed by Selig who also traces the continuing connexions between Preciosa and poetry including the symbolic references to her name (273–74). Not every reader will grant this subject such a central significance. 8. There is a general similarity between the necessary disguises (including Andrés's new name) and this ceremony of initiation on the one hand, and the experience of the two young rogues Rinconete and Cortadillo as they join Monipodio's confraternity, on the other. The apprenticeship or period of trial required of the lovesick suitor is of course no new thing and can be found in much pastoral literature, not to mention the well-known Biblical case of Jacob and Rachel. 9. Cf. Amezúa (II, 5–12) who includes a reference to the speech in a useful account of the social and legal reality of gipsy life in Spain at the time. For Casalduero (62) the speech is to be seen as linking the Golden Age with the Beatus ille theme. Rauhut (148) states that the old man's speech underlines the special features of Cervantes's gipsies who, although they have certain similarities with pícaros, are nevertheless seen as ‘natural men’ set apart from other social types. Forcione (311–12) also relates the ‘sermon’, as he calls it, to poetry. Mrs Lowe (38) stresses the speech's ambiguities. 10. Casalduero (69–75) very explicitly emphasizes the central importance of marriage in our novel and how the heroine is thus made to contrast the Christian ethic with that of the natural man. One parts company however with this critic when he seeks a significant connexion between the tale and Luis de León's treatise on marriage or places it too dogmatically within the so-called Tridentine dispensation. Amezúa (13–16) also stresses Cervantes's idealized portrayal of his heroine, and Jennifer Lowe (38) rightly separates the idealism of Preciosa from the freedom sought by the old man. 11. Casalduero (61–62) also refers to the two earlier speeches (by Preciosa and Andrés) and the two later ones (by the old man and Preciosa). The echoes and correspondences are, however, more complex, since Preciosa's first declaration was followed by the abuela's down-to-earth outburst. 12. To talk of a beginning, a middle and an end in the Gitanilla may produce an uneven structural pattern, since the travelling begins more than halfway through and covers only about 16 pages or so, whereas the ending is protracted and the opening sections take up rather more than half the story. No rigid scheme should be applied to a story that unfolds with at least as much attention to the setting of the scene and the presentation of the characters as to its action. 13. The rôle of Clemente has clearly fascinated, even puzzled, more than one critic. Thus Casalduero (63–64) sees the poet-page as having a special relationship with Preciosa, as giving her a new symbolic significance, and his final appearance as changing her life with Andrés; he concludes that poetry upsets the calm surface of the novel's reality and obscures the action without explaining it. Selig gives a brief analysis of Clemente's rôle in the camp and rightly sees the ‘triangle … resolved through poetry’ (275), more strictly through the amoebaean song and Preciosa's redondilla, although he also finds a touch of ambiguity in the whole episode. Mrs Lowe (40–43) gives a balanced account of the whole triangle affair stressing its psychological aspect, and draws a parallel with Cervantes's own Galatea, while also noting the rôle of poetry. Forcione (311–19) goes beyond Casalduero and examines the rôle of poetry in the novel which for him is chiefly identified with Preciosa and Clemente; the latter's ambiguous nature is made clearer in this context, although Forcione also sees Clemente as the poet-outsider eventually transformed into a disguised wanderer like Maese Pedro or Pedro de Urdemalas. Mrs El Saffar (101–02)’ echoes Selig in seeing Preciosa as a symbol of poetry and, because Clemente is ‘incapable of true commitment to poetry or Preciosa’, she concludes, pushing the novel's innate symbolism rather too far, that ‘Andrés is the true poet by dedicating himself to bring alive … the charms of Preciosa’. 14. It has been noted that the incident of the planted jewels has most probably a Biblical or folklore origin. Casalduero (65) finds in it a reflection of the story of Potiphar's wife (Genesis, XXXIX); the use of a Biblical scene raises the tale's level and gives it ‘volumen típico’. It is not clear whether Casalduero is also referring to the story of Joseph and his brethren in Egypt (Genesis, XLIV). Amezúa prefers the source suggested first by Marcel Bataillon (see BHi, LII [1950], 274–76), who cites the well-known tale from Santo Domingo de la Calzada, on the road to Santiago, also involving a false denunciation by a rejected innkeeper's daughter, but also the un-Cervantine detail of the miraculous saving of the victim and the further miraculous announcing of it by birds. Jennifer Lowe (43–45) adds a parallel case to La Carducha from the Persiles, and then goes on to give a good analysis of the episode which she finds as psychologically true and not in need of a source to interpret it. 15. Franz Rauhut's main thesis regarding the Gitanilla (146–51) is that it is concerned as much with honour as with the trial of love. See also F. Pierce's ‘Reality and realism in the Exemplary Novels’, BHS, XXX (1953), 134–42, in which what is called ‘social geography’ is linked to classes, to escapades over class boundaries and the essential social conservatism of the Gitanilla and other short novels in the collection.