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Cervantes and Courtly Love: The Grisóstomo-Marcela Episode of Don Quixote

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Herman Iventosch
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Abstract

In his celebrated quasi-bucolic episode of the first part of Don Quixote, Cervantes mocks and parodies the old school of the Frauendienst, even as he levels his irony against a chivalric ideal that had come under increasing scorn since at least the end of the fifteenth century. Various elements are blended to achieve his story. Grisóstomo's suicide turns out to be incontrovertible as well as illustrative of the essentially Petrarchan though parodical character of the famous poem “La cancion desesperada,” while the generally bucolic although mixed and burlesque quality of the entire episode issues straight from a central theme of the Renaissance pastoral, the whole matter of man's freedom. The very term “canción desesperada,” and probably other features of the long poem in Ch. xiv, derive directly from a sixteenth-century bucolic poet and fervent Petrarchist, Gutierre de Cetina.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 1 , January 1974 , pp. 64 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

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References

Note 1 in page 74 See esp. Dâmaso Alonso, “Tirant lo blanc, novela moderna,” in Primacera temprana de la literatura europea (Madrid: Ediciones Guadarrama, 1961), pp. 203–50.

Note 2 in page 74 “Los prologos al Quijote,” Reiista de Filologia Hispanica, 3 (1941), 337; article reproduced with additions in Hacia Cervantes, 3rd ed. (Madrid: Taurus, 1967), pp. 262–301. “Grisostomo y Marcela: la verdad problemâtica,” in Deslindes cervantinos (Madrid: Edhigar, 1961), pp. 97–119.

Note 3 in page 74 The inventor of the name, following the Hesiodic “chryseon genos” (“the golden race of men”), was a Francesco Arsocchi, at the very beginning of whose first eclogue (1481) appears a Grisaldo whose songs and “golden” character are opposed to the sorcerers, giants, and boasting knights of chivalry: “Dimmi Terîto che hay zâpogna & cetera / trovuâsi egli oggi de pastori che câtino / como faceuan que dell eta uetera / Grisaldo e / non cisono maghi che incantino / e horchi ne giganti non sitrouano / ne cavalieri erranti che siuantino” (Firenze, 1494). The name was taken up by Sannazaro, as Crisaldo, and then spread into Spain: Crisalvo, Crisio, and Grisaldo in Cervantes' Galatea; Crisalo and Crisalda in Lope de Vega's Arcadia, etc.

Note 4 in page 74 Avalle adduces considerable evidence of the possible theological connotation of desesperarse, including Covarrubias' Tesoro (1611), the 18th-century Diccionario de Autoridades, and a series of literary samples: Cervantes himself, Lope de Vega, etc.

Note 5 in page 74 Here is the entire list: “desperata via,” “desperar del porto,” 'Talma desperando,“ ”desperata vita,“ ”quella che … Como dogliosa e desperata scriva“ (see Kenneth McKenzie, Concordanza delle ”Rime“ di Francesco Petrarca, New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1912). Unlike Cetina, whom he inspired directly, Petrarch uses no adjectives whatever (except possessive) to address his Canzoni in the final stanza; thus Cetina—and then Cervantes—are using a Petrarchism with a later Renaissance elaboration.

Note 6 in page 74 Cetina and Cervantes appear to be unique in addressing their canzone in the last stanza with “Cancion desesperada.” But note, in addition, how Cetina develops the motif of “hopeless” (i.e., “despairing”) love from the beginning to the final climax: “Esperanza rendida y desmayada” (in the first stanza, p. 213), “ Y la esperanza amiga / A los piés del dolor quedo tendida” (p. 215), “Entre mil desventuras voy buscando / En que fundar una esperanza” (p. 215). This, or similar, helped to inspire Cervantes' “nunca alcanza / mi vista a ver en la sombra a la esperanza, / ni yo, desesperado, la procuro.” And finally some very Garcilasian jealousy (as also Cervantine) in Cetina's next-to-last stanza: “;Es posible que ardor nuevo os encienda?/ cQue puedaneuvo amor de mi apartaros? / cQue la fé que era mia de otro sea?” (p. 217). Cetina elsewhere (his Cancion in) develops the motif of “despair” with an intensity beyond any other poet I know of that time: “misera esperanza” (i, 221), “esperanza enganosa” (p. 222), “esperanza perdida” (p. 222), “esperanza incierta” (p. 222), “esperanza loca” (p. 223), “esperanza traidora” (p. 223), “esperanza grosera” (p. 223), “esperanza quitada” (p. 224). Though all courtly poets “despaired,” it seems that Cetina out-despaired them all until Grisostomo bested him by taking that one additional step into oblivion, that is, by making the allegorical love-death real. The works of Herrera also are replete with expressions of “despair.”

Note 7 in page 74 The irony of things : the poet who sang almost beyond them all of despair and death through love, eventually was to die by error, killed by a certain jealous lover who mistook Cetina for a rival, in the colonial Mexican city of Puebla.

Note 8 in page 75 The prestige of Petrarch appears to have inspired poets to leave their cancion in the final stanza unadorned, without adjectives: thus, at least, Garcilaso in all his canciones, Francisco de la Torre (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1956), Lopez Maldonado (Cancionero, 1586; rpt. Madrid: Libros Antiguos Espaholes, 1932), Montemayor in his two clearly Petrarchan canzoni (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1946, pp. 27, 233), in two similar ones in Gil Polo's Diana enamorado (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1953, pp. 77, 255), and in both Camoen's and Sa de Miranda's entire roster of canzoni. Camoen's “cançâo de cisne” (in) may have been inspired by Cetina's own: “cancion permita el cielo / que sea esta del cisne …” (i, 224).

Note 9 in page 75 It may be observed here that insanity would exempt the suicide from the usual condemnation of the Church. “Desvario” means “madness,” and Covarrubias said, as Avalle quoted him: “Esto [the general sanctions, including the ”acompaiîar a Judas“] no se entiende de los que, estando fuera de juicio, lo hicieron, como los locos ? frenéticos” (p. 107). It is of interest in this connection that psychoanalysis has determined that all suicides are “mad”: that is, self-destruction is considered a psychotic solution in all cases. A good study of Christian despair is Arieh Sachs's “Religious Despair in Medieval Literature and Art,” Medieval Studies, 26 (1964), 231–56.

Note 10 in page 75 Dala dolce mia nimica Nasce un duol ch'esser non suole: ? per pi ù tormento vuole Che si senta e non si dica. Seeesp. F. Rodriguez Marin, ed., Don Qttijote de la Mancha (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1948), xi, 164–65, n. 16, and H. Iventosch, “Dulcinea, nombre pastoril,” NRFH, 17 (1966), 72. n. 25; cf. ?. M. Wilson and A. L. Askins, “History of a Refrain: ‘De la dulce mi enemiga,‘ ” MLN, 85 (1970), 138–56.

Note 11 in page 75 One of the most piquant cases of this is, of course, Don Quixote's famous quoting of Garcilaso's sonnet upon espying the Tobosan jars at the threshold of Diego de Miranda's house:—Oh dulces prendas, por mi mal halladas, dulces y alegres cuando Dios queria! followed by: “ ;Oh tobosescas tinajas, que me habéis traido a la memoria la dulce prenda de mi mayor amargura!” (Pt.il, Ch. xviii).

Note 12 in page 75 Fantasia, as before descario, relates again to madness, and means something like “maddened resolve”: Yo muero, en fin; y porque nunca espere buen suceso en la muerte ni en la vida pertinaz estaré en mi fantasia.

Note 13 in page 75 It cannot help but amuse that Cervantes insists—almost, it seems, defensively—on his eschewal of the satiric mode (it enjoyed a low status in the Renaissance) just prior to boasting of one of the most sarcastic and satiric things ever to come from his pen: Nunca volo la pluma humilde mia Por la region satirica, bajeza Que a infâmes premios y desgracias guia. Yo el soneto compuse que asi empieza, Por honra principal de mis escritos: “Voto a Dios que me espanta esta grandeza” (11. 34–39)

Note 14 in page 75 Quoted by F. Lopez Estrada, éd., La Diana of Jorge de Montemayor (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1946), p. xliv.

Note 15 in page 75 Kohler's thesis at once parallels and departs from my own interpretation here. One of the most valuable parts of his chapter on the Marcela-Grisostomo episode, which is a not very long section in a lengthy comparative study of Arcadian freedom from the Middle Ages to the 18th century, is the discovery of a series of as yet comparatively undeveloped aspects of the same theme in earlier works: Montemayor's Diana, Cervantes' own Galatea, etc. Somewhat overschematic and mechanical, however, it seems to me, are his notions concerning “free love” in the Golden Age and its breakup in Cervantes' realistic work, although there is a kernel of truth, I think, in the idea. The gist of it derives from a notion offered in a seminal article by H. Petriconi (“Uber die Idee des goldenen Zeitalters als Ursprung der Schaferdichtungen Sannazaros und Tassos,” Die Neuren Sprachen, 38, 1930, 265 ff.), according to which the main charge of the pastoral in Sannazaro and Tasso was “free love” or “freedom to love” (Liebesfrei/ieit). If this was true in these “mythical” Arcadias, then its opposite will be discovered in Cervantes, whose approach to the pastoral in the Quixote is through a “breakup” of the Arcadian promise (“Selbstaufhebung Arkadiens”); i.e., if the shepherds of the early Renaissance had “freedom” to love, then Marcela has the freedom not to love. Some of this may be vaguely present as a general background for Cervantes' prosaic reduction and parodical treatment of pastoral themes, but of much more importance, as we have seen here, are Marcela's perfectly humdrum and prosaic reasons for not loving, not to speak of the presence of the Diana syndrome present ever in the Renaissance pastoral, from the beginning to the end. And in addition, of course, “Arcadia” is emphatically present always, albeit in altered and prosaic terms: the goodness of men (the “dignity” of men, philosophical writers would say), the glory of Nature, etc.

Note 16 in page 75 See Marc'Antonio Epicuro, I drammi e le poésie italiane e latine, a cura di Alfredo Parente (Bari: Laterza, 1942).

Note 17 in page 75 See Agustin G. de Amezua, éd., Nocelas amorosas y ejemplares, by Dona Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor (Madrid: Biblioteca Selecta de Clâsicos Espanoles, 1948), pp. xxii-xxv. The almost contemporary Mexican poetess Sor Juana Inès de la Cruz falls into the same general category: Hombres necios que acusâis a la mujer sin razon, sin ver que sois la occasion de lo mismo que culpâis.

Note 18 in page 75 The Renaissance bucolic impresses us with its vehement expressions of affection between men and women, men and men, and women and women: the same de Gennaro, e.g., says: “Colendio mio, si affabile et dolcissimo” (viii.17), and such expressions are common. Italians tend to be somewhat more emphatic than Spanish pastoralists, but we encounter “amigo carisimo” as an evidence of the same mode in Montemayor's Diana.

Note 19 in page 76 Quoted by Paul Hazard, “Don Quichotte” de Cervantes (Paris: Mellottée, 1949), p. 317.

Note 20 in page 76 Names in Phil-, stemming from Theocritus' Philinus (ii.115; vii.105), were without question the most abundant of pastoral names in the Renaissance, and they flowed out of the pastoral into almost all other areas: Pamphilus “allloving” already in a neo-Latin eclogue of Petrarch (Ecloga vi), and following him in practically every pastoral in the Italian Renaissance. Similarly in Spain: in Encina's early Fileno y Zambardo and in innumerable works (in almost all pastoral novels) after it. As a certain early Neapolitan pastoralist, who even renamed himself after that bucolic fashion, Filenio—neé Filipo—Gallo, says: “io son pastore, e ? mio nome é Phylenio” (in his one long eclogue, 1. 190). To be sure, forms of the name existed in ancient Greece and Rome, and came down to such works as the medieval Pamphilus de amore, but our interest is in their heavy absorption into the pastoral.