From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
8 special issue (1988): 135-48.
Copyright © 1988, The Cervantes Society of America
Cervantes the Painter of
Thoughts1
HROUGHOUT HIS
NOVEL, Cervantes presents verbally and depicts graphically the moral
issues he raises. Although no conclusions are verbally drawn, Cervantes'
moral and ethical stands are pictorially clarified. In my talk I shall use
the terms impressionism, expressionism and surrealism, not coined until the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, because Cervantes' literary
practices fit the meanings these terms usually convey. Impressionism refers
to the immediate, non-critical impression on the artist of objective reality
and his conveyance of it. Expressionism refers to the artist's critical,
subjective expression of objective reality. Surrealism refers to the artist's
representation of what he conceives to lie below or beyond objective reality.
Don Quijote voices Cervantes' claim that “the
painter and writer are one and the same” (II, 71). The narrator-editor,
a character in the book, affirms that Cide Hamete, the manifest author of
Don
1 The
present paper elucidates in the context of the theme of this “Celebration
of Cervantes,” one aspect of Cervantes' graphic style studied in greater
detail in a monograph I have just completed. In this monograph I update and
bring into sharper focus Cervantes' narrative and pictorial stylistic
interactions, a subject treated in my book Cervantes y su concepto del
arte (Madrid: Gredos, 1975), pp. 305-406. The translations of the Spanish
text of Don Quijote are borrowed from various editions and some are
my own, for which I assume full responsibility for the meanings conveyed.
135
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Quijote, “paints thoughts” and “reveals intentions”
(“pinta los pensamientos, descubre las imaginaciones,” II, 40).
But is Cide Hamete aware that his
realistic-impressionistic depiction of characters has an expressionistic
dimension adumbrating their psychology; that his detailed reporting of events
contains surrealistic penstrokes prompting provocative ideas; that he is
a forerunner of painters to come? Cide Hamete and his creator, Cervantes,
are offering two different views of life through the same words. While Cide
Hamete gives the facts, Cervantes runs a pictorial commentary. How this is
so is the subject of this paper.
The analogy between painting and writing in
Cervantes' masterpiece is explicitly brought up by Don Quijote in the course
of a conversation about the history earlier published of the knight's adventures
(II, 3). This is the story or history known to the reader as Part I of Don
Quijote. The knight rightly suspects that the author of his biography
(Cide Hamete) “set himself to write it down blindly and without any
method to turn out whatever may come” (“salga lo que saliere”),
and compares him to Orbaneja, the painter of Ubeda, who, when asked what
he was painting, replied: “Whatever it turns out to be” (“lo
que saliere”). Don Quijote goes on the elaborate:
Sometimes he painted a cock in such a fashion and so unlike one that he had
to write in Gothic characters beside it: “This is a cock” (II,
3).
Behind the good-humored anecdotic reference
to Orbaneja's artistic limitations, and by extension to Cide Hamete's, we
detect Cervantes' serious statement of artistic purpose. Mimetic representation
of reality is rejected as false. External reality —actions, conversations,
settings— though necessary to maintain coherence and continuity on the
narrative level does not tell the “truth,” a term repeatedly used
throughout the novel, about the essence of reality. The writer, like the
painter, must deal with the appearance of reality in such a way as to give
objective expression to inner experience, precisely what the expressionistic
painter purports to do.2
An ambiguity in the lettering style of the
“Gothic characters” of Orbaneja's label “This is a cock”
gives us a further clue as to how we
2 See
Ulrich Weisstein, Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon.
Twenty-one essays and a bibliography (Paris-Budapest: Didier-Akademiai
Kiadó, 1973), pp. 24-5.
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must approach Cide Hamete's “paintings” and labels. From the context
we gather that Gothic characters are
large,3 thick
letters,4 or Roman
capitals,5 clearly stating what the subject
matter is about.
However, if we are to believe the authoritative
sixteenth-century linguist Covarrubias, Gothic characters means “coarse,
artless, and plebeian letters drawn by men of little
intelligence.”6 Indeed, Don Quijote's
fear that his biography “will need a commentary to be understood”
because his author is “an ignorant chatterer,” and Sancho's instinct
that Cide Hamete writes the first thing that comes into his
“noggin”(“magín”), “mixing everything up”
(“berzas con capachos,” II, 3) coincide with Covarrubias' definition.
Therefore, by using Gothic characters to make his label perfectly clear,
Cide Hamete is unconsciously betraying his incompetence to understand and
interpret the reality he is depicting as well as his ineptitude in imparting
meaning. “Gothic” expresses a negative judgment of the painter's
—writer's— artistry and discernment.
There is a third meaning of Gothic characters.
If we accept the deductions of two informed sources as reliable as Covarrubias,
Georges Cirot and Millares Carlo, they are the Visigothic script found in
medieval manuscripts difficult to decipher even for expert
linguists.7 Readers who are aware of this
third meaning will understand that the apparent clarity of the label is
deceptive.
What are we to conclude from the Orbaneja anecdote?
The analogy between Cide Hamete's unsophisticated and coarse depiction of
reality and Orbaneja's unsophisticated and coarse brushstrokes, and the
amphibology of the supposedly clarifying label suggest, by implication, that
the text of Don Quixote to which the anecdote refers contains graphic
and linguistic distortions aimed at extending meanings and revealing hidden
messages. In fact, the “moles” on the face of the narrative are
really the “beauty spots” that enhance it (II,
3 Pellicer,
Diego Clemencín reports, emended “large” on the grounds
that the Spanish seventeenth-century public would not understand the term
Gothic. The Spanish Academy did not accept Pellicer's emendation and
restored the original text. See El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la
Mancha, Ed. IV Centenario (Madrid: Ediciones Castilla, 1966), Vol. V,
p. 1529, note 24.
4 For
Clemencín, Gothic letter type, commonly called “letra de
Tortis,” was large and thick so as to be easily read on signs (Loc.
Cit.).
5 See H[enry]
Thomas, “What Cervantes meant by ‘Gothic letters’,”
Modern Language Review 33 (1983), 412-16.
6 Tesoro de
la lengua castellana o expañola, under letra.
7 See
Thomas, p. 414.
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3). Indeed, we should praise the author “not for what he writes but
for what he has left unwritten” (II, 44).
On the surface of the story “there is
nothing to raise any difficulty,” Sansón Carrasco declares. To
prove his point he reports that whenever people see a lean horse go by they
cry: “There goes Rocinante.” In the context of Don Quijote's misgivings
about his author's lack of insight to portray him faithfully, Rocinante is
a coarse label heard by Cide Hamete from Sansón's lips and con-critically
jotted down by the manifest author. It is a metaphor concealing Cervantes'
emblem of Don Quijote's carnal side. Where Cide Hamete writes Rocinante,
Cervantes means Don Quijote's animal
nature.8 Throughout the novel mounts reflect
their riders' natures, and in general animals in Cervantes' works allude
to human personality traits as I have repeatedly
observed.9
Let us see a couple of examples from Part II
in which Cervantes has clearly elaborated his painting technique. On the
road ahead, Don Quijote and Sancho suddenly see, crosswise, an open wagon
loaded with the strangest figures imaginable: Death with a human face; an
Angel with large painted wings; an Emperor with a crown, apparently of gold,
on his head; the God Cupid without his blindfold, but with his bow, quiver
and arrows; an ugly demon driving the mules; and, among other characters,
a knight singled out thus: “There was also a knight in complete armor
and ready for battle (“de punta en blanco”) except that he wore
no helmet or head piece, but a hat instead crowned with multi-colored
plumes” (II, 11): a “cock” with a “Gothic label.”
The wagon with its striking cargo suddenly encountered barring the road is
a surrealist spectacle deliberately drawn by Cervantes to provoke the reader's
discernment. Don Quijote is amazed. He is reminded of Charon's boat, a pagan
image.
The figures turn out to be a troupe of actors
dressed in the costumes of the roles they are to play at their next performance
of an
8 This
interpretation is clear from a drawing of Don Quijote riding Rocinante found
with the papers on the knight's life and prowess. At Rocinante's feet (“a
los pies de Rocinante”) there is a scroll bearing the name “Don
Quijote” (I, 9). The ensuring vivid description is of Rocinante and
not of Don Quijote.
9 See
“Plasticidad del símbolo cervantino” in Cervantes y su
concepto del arte, pp. 395-98; “Los consejos de Don Quijote a
Sancho,” in Cervantes and the Renaissance, Ed. Michael D. McGaha
(Easton, Pennsylvania: Juan de la Cuesta—Hispanic Monographs, 1980),
pp. 218-19; and “Authorial Strings:
A Recurrent Metaphor in Don Quijote,” in Cervantes
1 (1981), 52-54, 56-60.
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auto, a miracle play, The Parliament of Death, in a nearby
village, the devil driving the mules explains. A rhetorical error of the
informant, again uncritically recorded by Cide Hamete, states that the actors
represent the costumes they are wearing, and not that they are wearing the
costumes of the parts that they represent. Clemencín attributes a
simple error to Cervantes. Cervantes, however, through the presumed
“error” is calling our attention to the costumes as role definers
and as descriptive of character traits.
Unexpectedly, an actor called a clown by Cide
Hamete (another “cock” with a “Gothic” label) but behaving
like the devil, as Sancho calls him recognizing his ways, and disregarding
his costume, figuratively teases Rocinante's lower instincts by beating the
ground with his bladders, fencing with his stick, and sounding his bells.
The startled animal darts into an uncontrollable gallop landing with his
master on the ground, “the usual upshot of the horse's youthful
follies,” Cide Hamete reflects.
Why is Don Quijote being castigated in the
metaphoric castration of his nag? Because he has just betrayed the object
of his near mystic cult, Dulcinea, by offering his services to the comedians,
an unpardonable moral error. A knight errant is a symbol of a superior human
being, a figura moral that belongs in a miracle play. But like the
emblematic figure on the wagon, armed to the teeth yet wearing a soldier's
hat, as his colorful plumes betray,10 i.e.
dressed as a knight but thinking of less lofty matters, Don Quijote has
momentarily forgotten his commitment to
Dulcinea.11 As a consequence of his moral
error he has lost control over his baser forces represented by the runaway
Rocinante.12 The knight is “the master,
the logos, the spirit which prevails over the mount (that is, over
matter),” Juan
10 Cervantes
refers to the typical soldier's colorful outfit crowned with a plumed hat
when the student Tomás Rodaja, the main character in El licenciado
Vidriera, joins the army and gets dressed “de papagayo” (Obras
completas de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Edición facsimile de
las primitivas impresiones [Madrid: Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, 1917],
Vol. IV, p. 113).
11 We recall
with Howard Mancing that Don Quijote undertook his third sally urged by the
priest, the barber, and especially by Sansón Carrasco. See
“Knighthood Imposed,” The Chivalric World of Don Quijote. Style,
Structure, and Narrative Technique (Columbia and London: University of
Missouri Press, 1982), pp. 129 and ff.
12 The emblematic
figure of the runaway horse appears in the Bible, in Homer's
Illiad, in Plato's Phaedrus, in the allegorical medieval tradition,
also in several of Calderón's plays to signify uncontrollable passion,
and in his [p. 140] religious autos
“invariably to represent presumptuousness and the Devil.” See Pedro
R. León, “El caballo desbocado, símbolo de la pasión
desordenada en la obra de Calderón,” Romanische Forschungen
95 (1983), 23-35, particularly 35.
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Eduardo Cirlot reminds us.13 Now, matter,
Rocinante, is controlling spirit, Don Quijote, and comes a cropper. Here
we have a clear indication of Cervantes' ironic meaning behind Sansón
Carrasco's cunning or coincidental implication that Don Quijote's biography
is easy to understand because we can recognize Rocinante!
The subsequent clown-devil's race and fall
with Sancho's ass, Dapple, a symbol of simplemindedness, is an emblem for
Don Quijote's spiritual fall from his chivalric madness, locura in
the positive sense of the term signifying divine, poetic, and prophetic
inspiration, as Harald Weinrich defines
it,14 to folly, locura, in the negative
sense of the term, of yielding to the appeal of “comedy” and
“pantomime” to the extent of idealizing their “tinsel”
and “brass foil.” The identification of the clown with the devil,
a graphic image of the concept of madness in the sense of folly as symbolic
of moral error, informs the rest of the novel and will be repeatedly found
throughout Part II.
When Don Quijote wants to vent his anger on
someone on the wagon, Sancho stops him by pointing out that there is no knight
errant among the whole lot. What about the “knight” Cide Hamete
just labeled as fully armed and ready for battle? He is no knight for he
wears a soldier's hat. The dichotomous knight-soldier is a symbol for all
characters who are not what they seem, the first one Sansón Carrasco,
the disguised Knight of the Mirrors, who acts like a clown when he pretends
to be a knight and challenges Don Quijote to a duel using the devil's tactic,
deception, as the most effective cure for the knight's madness.
13 A
Dictionary of Symbols. Translated from the Spanish by Jack Sage, 2nd
ed. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1983), p. 169.
14 A lucid
distinction between madness and insanity is made in chapter II, “Ingenium
and Wahn” of Weinrich's Das Ingenium Don Quijotes, Ein Beitrag zur
literarischen Charakterkunde, (Münster-Westfalen: Aschendorff, 1956),
particularly pp. 30, 31, 33-6. It would be inappropriate to bring up out
of context Pierre Ullman's different view of Don Quijote's madness, his
“chivalric madness,” in the episodes under study without a proper
discussion of his perceptive and by now classic paper, “An Emblematic
Interpretation of Sansón Carrasco's Disguises” (Estudios
literarios de hispanistas norteamericanos dedicados a Helmut Hatzfeld con
motivo de su 80 aniversario. Compilados y editados por Josep M.
Solá-Solé, Alessandro Crisafully, Bruno Damiani [Barcelona:
Ediciones Hispam, 1974), pp. 223-38.
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Don Quijote, during the night, has recovered
from his momentary folly. Night is conducive to mystic meditation (I invoke
Saint John's “Dark Night of the Soul”), and Dulcinea has regained
her preeminence in Don Quijote's spirit.
When we first see The Knight of the Mirrors,
he is wearing over his armor “a surcoat or cassock [Cide Hamete cannot
distinguish which] of a material that seemed like finest gold, sprinkled
with shining little disk-like mirrors.” His visor is down, concealing
his face, an image of deception. On his helmet flutter a great many “green,
white, and yellow plumes,” like so many extensions from his brain that
seem to have pierced through his helmet —a surrealist touch behind the
impressionistic depiction of the “dazzling” (“vistoso”)
knight.
Sansón's exalted self-image is
expressionistically revealed by the colors of his plumes, his thoughts, if
we apply the conceptual European color symbolism and its heraldic significance,
as well as the traditional Spanish color
code.15 The green plumes, being the
color of nature and life, bespeak Sansón's optimism and
hope in the outcome of his undertaking. The yellow plumes imply
magnanimity, intuition, and illumination, yellow being the
attribute of Apollo, the sun-god,16 and,
in heraldry, generosity and
high-mindedness.17 The white
plumes bespeak purity, chastity, charity, and innocence, white
being a stock symbol in Western cultures.
In a declining scale of chromatic symbolism,
however, the significance of these colors has a negative import.
Green, the color par excellence of “antithetical tendencies,”
as Cirlot calls it, now signifies envy, jealousy, malevolence, and
death.18 Yellow indicates
malice, betrayal, treachery, hypocrisy, cowardice, and
death,19 among other negative
15
“Tienen las colores, en el vulgo, sus sinificaciones particulares, que
todos las saben, y no ay para qué gastar tiempo en esto” Covarrubias
tells us in his Tesoro, p. 339.
16 Cirlot, p.
54.
17 See Gertrude
Jobes, Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore and Symbols (New York: The
Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1961), p. 1704.
18 He clarifies:
“it is the colour of vegetation (or of life, in other words) and of
corpses (or of death): hence the Egyptians painted Osiris (the god of vegetation
and of the dead) green. Similarly, green takes the middle place in the everyday
scale of colours” (p. 56). Jobes reports that green indicates envy and
jealousy (p. 357).
19 Jobes, p.
1704. Furthermore, yellow was the color of the “Spanish executioner's
robe to denote treason” (Ibid.).
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attributes. White, “in so far as its quality of lividness
goes,” is by extension symbolic of
death.20 Death is the extreme meaning
in the debased direction of all three colors, green, yellow and white. They
belie Sansón's protestations of altruism and his justifications for
his expedient to achieve noble ends; they also denounce his malicious
self-indulgence in comedy and farce. He will fall off his horse once while
trying to dismount (II, 12), and will be unhorsed later (II, 14), both of
which graphically indicate that his animal nature is in control of his spirit.
Cide Hamete's information that Sansón's is a “hired horse”
is Cervantes' insinuation that the bachiller has assumed a knight's
role only temporarily.
Sansón's ambivalent motivations are
suggested by his “enormous and thick lance shod with more than a foot
of steel” (II, 14), and by his mismatched disguise. He wears a colorful
plumed helmet indicative of his gay mood, remindful of the plumed hat of
the actor dressed as the soldier-knight, and an adorned surcoat resembling
a cassock suggestive of the military uniform used in carrying out an
execution,21 shining, moreover, with false
gold reminiscent of the fake gold of the crown of the Emperor riding in the
wagon of death. Everything about Sansón reminds us of the actors.
In fact, we have the illusion that he is the knight-soldier on the wagon
of death who slipped away when he spotted Don Quijote and Sancho to finish
dressing for his part by exchanging his plumed hat for his helmet —one
of those mirages Cervantes lays before the reader.
The broken surface of the mirror on Sansón's
costume, designed by him in jest to mirror Don Quijote's madness, reflects,
instead, Sansón's own madness. (His squire will call him mad, and
Sansón will admit he is mad). The mirror, a classical symbol of
self-contemplation, leading to self-knowledge and hence to wisdom, is fragmented
on Sansón's disguise antithetically to denounce his self-delusion.
This meaning is sustained by a visual surrealist pun: Don Quijote's authenticity
as a knight errant shatters Sansón's image of him —the fragmented
mirror— reflects onto the bachiller his own lack of self-knowledge.
Sansón's falseness and treachery are
graphically revealed when Don Quijote raises the visor of the fallen Knight
of the Mirrors and discovers “the very form, the very aspect, the very
physiognomy, the very effigy, and the very image” —variants of
quasi-synonymity
20 Cirlot,
p. 58.
21 Covarrubias,
under casaca.
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alluding to the bachiller's features, earlier described as reflecting
craftiness, and “a mischievous disposition to jibes and japes”
(II, 3) —of his friend Sansón Carrasco. Sansón's real
identity, his face, and his claimed identity, his vizor, do not match. The
silent pun contained in this pictorial expressionism conveys that he is a
different man inside and outside, that he is two-faced.
In contrast, when in a second encounter with
Sansón, now disguised as The Knight of the White Moon, Don Quijote
is unhorsed, he declares without raising his vizor, “as from within
a tomb” —says his candid chronicler Cide Hamete— that the
ideal, Dulcinea, is the most beautiful lady in the world. The vizor that
he does not raise proclaims that his external and his internal identities
are one and the same. Don Quijote's armor, of neutral grey, stands as a symbol
of the solitude and sadness of the committed man. (Covarrubias equates grey
with crying).
Like the mirror, the moon painted on the Knight
of the White Moon's shield, his spiritual
identity,22 is a reflector, but of ambivalent
character: it is both protective and dangerous. Its faces or phases give
it a changeable character. Sansón's many faces are still his predominant
character trait. He claims on both encounters that he wants to cure Don Quijote
of his madness (II, 7, 15, 65), but he admits after Don Quijote initially
defeats him that he will seek revenge (II, 15).
In their second encounter, Sansón's
silhouette on the horizon between earth and sky seems to be what the
neo-Platonists called a ‘cosmological image’ encompassing the figurable
and the conceptual worlds, capable of performing on the receptor, in this
case Don Quijote, a sudden ‘allegorical cure’ of his presumed madness.
But it is the fallen Don Quijote who rises
to the category of ‘allegorical image’ endowed with the gift of
performing the ‘allegorical cure’ by imparting sudden moral knowledge
to Sansón, thus regenerating his spirit and curing him of his madness,
for Sansón will concede the unsurpassed beauty of the ideal,
Dulcinea.23 Sancho's
22 Cirlot,
p. 294.
23 Jorge Checa's
paper, “Simbolismo y espacio en los tablados alegóricos y en
las imágenes arquitectónicas de la literatura renacentista,”
read at the December, 1983 MLA Convention made me realize that, Cervantes,
following his own practice of changing the accepted meanings of Renaissance
terms, turns around a current Renaissance concept to give psychological depth
to an allegorical abstraction.
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dictum that Don Quijote returns home “vanquished by the arm of another
but as victor over himself” (II, 72) is well justified.
If we approach with the same criteria the
confrontation between Don Quijote and Don Diego de Miranda, the “gentleman
in green” (II, 16-18); Don Quijote's and his squire's sojourn at the
“country home,” “palace,” or “house of pleasure,”
for all three designations are used, of the Duke and Duchess (II, 30 and
ff.); Sancho's experience during the hunt of being left dangling from a tree
branch by his green hunter's suit (II, 34); Ricote's return to Spain disguised
as a beggar (II, 54); Sancho's fall with his donkey, Dapple, into a dark
pit (II, 55); in fact, all the episodes of part II, we discover that Cide
Hamete's non-critical, impressionistic depiction of what he sees before him
adumbrates Cervantes' surrealistic-expressionistic meaning of reality.
I shall resist the temptation to discuss here
the encounter between Don Quijote and Don Diego de Miranda, the “gentleman
in green,” very much a case in point for my development. Let me simply
indicate here in keeping with the thrust of my own focus that Cide Hamete's
impressionistic view of Don Diego's attire is of the gentleman's appearance
whereas Cervantes' expressionistic view of it is of his substance. Cide Hamete
presents Don Diego as a worthy, prototypical member of society. Cervantes
wittily insinuates that he is a fake and a rake. If I have aroused your curiosity
with these remarks you will find a detailed explication of Cervantes' dual
description of Don Diego de Miranda in my forthcoming monograph, Cervantes,
the Painter and the Writer of “Don Quijote.” In it, I briefly
discuss Gerald L. Gingras' important and thorough
article on Don Diego's attire
(Cervantes 5 [1958], 129-40) to make
clear that Cervantes intended the reader's first visualization of Don Diego's
garb to be from Cide Hamete's perspective so as to tone down his own ironic
parody.
How aware is Cervantes of the subtleties his
art suggests, and how deliberate are his techniques? The Antonomasia story
told by the Dueña Dolorida, the disguised Duke's steward, conceived
to poke fun at Don Quijote and Sancho, holds the answer to our question.
Antonomasia, the rhetorical term meaning “By
Another Name” (i.e. her real name is not
given),24 is a princess courted by Clavijo,
a
24 For
the parodic implications of turning a rhetoric term, antonomasia,
into a proper name see Ernst R. Curtius, Literatura europea y Edad Media
latina, 2 vols., translated by Margit Frank Alatorre and Antonio Alatorre
(México, 1955), II, 593; and María Rosa Lida,
“Perduración de la literatura antigua en Occidente”
(Romance Philology 5 (1951-2), 114-5. For the phonetic parodic
[p. 145] significance of the name see Dominique
Reyre, Dictionnaire des noms des personnages du “Don Quichotte”
de Cervantes (Paris: Editions Hispaniques, 1980), pp. 40-1.
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very bad poet, musician, dancer, and artisan excelling at making bird cages,
a metaphor for the imprisonment of the souls of his admirers. His name, Clavijo,
is a masculinized term for clavija, meaning peg of a string instrument
and rudder of a ship, thus implying the insignificance of the artist: he
lacks direction, and is reduced to the technical, manual side of his instrument,
or his vessel. His name further suggests that he is a bastard, for Clavijo
is a conceit based on colloquialism: Clavijo, hijo de clavo, son of a
. . . . I leave the rest to your imagination as Cervantes
does.25
The princess' guardian, Dolorida, also known
as Countess Lobuna and Countess Trifaldi, another conceit —Trifaldi,
tres faldas, tercera, go-between—, all three suggestive of fraud,
deceit, prostitution, and corruption,26 yielding
to Clavijo's bribes and trinkets, facilitates the lovers' romance and later
their secret marriage.
Antonomasia and Clavijo's marriage becomes
known when the princess grows heavy with child. In punishment for their
transgression the lovers are transformed, Antonomasia into a brass ape, and
Clavijo into a frightful crocodile of unknown metal. And the pair is placed
under a spell on top of Antonomasia's mother's grave.
With metaphoric explicitness Cervantes is
recreating the theme of Orbaneja's anecdote, in turn a graphic reference
to the whole novel Don Quijote. On a conceptual, pictorial level,
the Antonomasia fantasy is
25 I
am indebted to professor E. C. Riley who was present when I delivered this
paper, for alerting me to the existence of Agustín Rodondo's article,
“De Don Clavijo a Clavileño: algunos aspectos de la tradición
carnavalesca y cazurra en el Quijote” (Edad de Oro, 3
[1984], 181-99), a reprint of which the author was so kind as to send me.
In his thought-provoking article, Professor Redondo shows how Cervantes'
story abounds in sexual allusions made in a burlesque, insinuating language
directed at the “accompliced reader” and aimed at deriding the
established values of the dominant ideology. Professor Redondo's perspective
is different from my own, as is the context each of us perceives in Cervantes'
multi-contextual fiction.
26 Dolorida's
name derives from 
,
fraud, deceit, astuteness. Her nickname, Lobuna, derives from loba,
a figurative term for a prostitute and a courtesan. Her squire Trifaldín,
a name that misleadingly appears to be only a diminutive of Trifaldi, derives,
nevertheless, from truffatore, deceiver, thus being associated with
the buffoons and comedians of the Italian Commedia dell' Arte. Dolorida is
an image of deception and corruption. See Corominas' Diccionario
etimológico de la lengua castellana, under dolo, and
lobo.
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Cervantes' allegory of contemporary poetry, the unspoken name of Antonomasia.
We deduce as much from the description of the beautiful princess in terms
that recall Don Quijote's definition of poetry when lecturing at the gentleman
in green (II, 16). Antonomasia, Dolorida tells us,
reached the age of fourteen in such perfection of beauty that nature could
not raise her a point higher . . . . She was intelligent
as she was lovely. She was the most beautiful creature in the world
. . .” (II, 38).
until Clavijo debased her, it is understood. Poetry, Don Quijote had said:
is like a tender, young and extremely beautiful maiden, whom other maidens
toil to enrich, polish and adorn. She is formed of an alchemy of such virtue
that anyone who knows how to treat her will transform her into purest gold
of inestimable price (II, 16).27
Poetry is, in Aristotelian theory, the art
of the perfect imitation of nature.28 The
transformed Antonomasia cannot give birth to the perfect poem, the song,
the work of art, the child in her womb, because, like the libidinous ape
she has been turned into she can only mimic, not create. The
ape is, like the mirror, a symbol of mimesis among the
neo-Aristotelians.29 Cervantes borrows the
symbol in order to make a clear distinction between artless imitation or
copy —the disfigured princess— and genuine creation —his own
novel. He sculptures the ape in brass, an impure, hard-sounding alloy, the
only kind of poetry and music Antonomasia's husband, Clavijo, is capable
of
27 Outside
of the Quijote, the personification of Poetry as a beautiful, chaste,
honest, discreet, and delicate maiden endowed with the power of uplifting
the true poet's soul, is the underlying theme in La gitanilla. This
novela ejemplar has captured the attention of scholars and its aesthetic
thrust has been the subject of particular study by Karl-Ludwig Selig, in
“Concerning the Structure of Cervantes' La Gitanilla”
(Romanistisches Jahrbuch 13 [1962], 273-6); Edward C. Riley, in
Cervantes Theory of the Novel, 2nd ed., (Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
1964, pp. 73-75); Alban K. Forcione, in Cervantes, Aristotle, and the
“Persiles” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970, pp.
311-3), and, again, in Cervantes and the Humanist Vision (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1982, pp. 215-22).
28 On the subject
of mimesis see Riley, “Art and Nature, Imitation and
Invention,” op. cit., pp. 57-61. On the subject of Renaissance
interpretations of imitation, see Forcione's Cervantes, Aristotle, and
the “Persiles,” pp. 45-8.
29 See Ernst
R. Curtius, “El mono como metáfora,” op. cit., pp.
750-2. See also Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the
“Persiles,” p. 147.
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producing. Clavijo is nothing but a deceitful, seducing crocodile (in the
vernacular, a liar) made of “unknown metal,” a stuff not even found
in nature. He is unnatural: non-existent as an
artist.30
The untitled surrealistic sculpture-allegory
represents The Defacement of Poetry. Its appearance is its substance.
And the go-between Dolorida-Lobuna-Trifaldi symbolizes The Perversion
of Art. The sculpture allegory and the go-between exemplify, therefore,
what poetry should not be. The forms, the ape, the crocodile, the
bristly face of Dolorida, represent an abysmal concept; the
textures, the hardness and brittleness of the ape's brass, the blank
roughness of the crocodile's unknown metal, and the prickliness of Dolorida's
and other dueñas' bristles, are dismal qualities; the
colors, the mimetic green implied in the mere mention of the crocodile
(artistic dilletantism), the dullness of the brass of the ape (the uninspired
Muse), the blond, black, white, and generally varicolored bristles (confusion),
and the black attire (death) of Dolorida, in so many respects the unprincipled
poetry-science, allude to unsavory characteristics; all there, forms,
textures and colors, are irreconcilable with the laws of artistic creation.
By implied antithesis, the sculpture allegory
is Cervantes' Ars Poetica, and a precise pictorial execution of his
conception of fiction, of his Ars Pictorica. It is his metaphorical
spelling out of how he paints the truth about his society and the human condition
behind Cide Hamete's literal biography of the eccentric knight.
And, just in case we have missed the graphically
conveyed message, he refers to his style in a marker between the enchanted
lovers written in three languages, Syriac translated into Candayesque and
then into Castilian. The marker is Cervantes' hard-to-decipher label in
‘Gothic letters.’ Syriac invokes, because of the faithful translations
into that language of ancient texts that would otherwise be lost for posterity,
accuracy of reproduction and literal precision. This is Cide Hamete's language.
The Candayesque language from the non-existent kingdom of Candaya (really
a metaphor for Spain) is Dolorida's own prosaic
30 Alban
K. Forcione writes with reference to La gitanilla that Cervantes is
concerned “not only with distinguishing chastity and rational love from
lust, authentic freedom from license, and true nature from physical nature,
but also with separating genuine poetry from its debased forms.” This
critic adds that Cervantes “rejects the poetry that corrupts by its
appeal to the passions” (Cervantes and the Humanist Vision, p.
217). His view coincides with that of Joaquín Casalduero who states
that, for Cervantes, sensual, lascivious art is debasing. See Sentido
y forma del “Quijote” (Madrid: Insula, 1966), p. 315.
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language about a subject that needs deciphering. And the Castilian language
refers to Cervantes' cryptic but clear pictorial rendering of concepts,
containing all three styles.
Cervantes' invention of pictorial techniques
that address the far from perfect practices of contemporary artists, and
his departure from the classical representation of Poetry and of Painting
as beautiful women deified by transcendent symbols, and by mottos and
inscriptions, as found, for instance, in Cesare Ripa's 1603 edition of his
illustrated Iconologia,31 make of
Cervantes a conceptual forerunner of the great impressionist, expressionist,
and surrealist masters of recent times.
31 See
Cesare Ripa's representations of Poetry and Painting in Baroque and Rococo
Pictorial Imagery. The 1758-60 Hertel Edition of Ripa's
“Iconología” with 200 Engraved Illustrations, Ed. Edward
A. Maser (New York: Dover, 1971), Plates 183 and 197, respectively. An analogy
between Cervantes and Goya and Picasso on the monkey motif as an image of
mimesis was touched upon in the oral presentation of this paper but has been
omitted here for brevity's sake. It will be developed elsewhere.
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Prepared with
the help of Myrna Douglas |
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