Robert Coover has said that Cervantes called his novellas
"exemplary" because they represented the different writing ideas he
was working on from the 1580s to 1612.
Coover claims that Cervantes' stories also "exemplified the dual nature
of all good narrative art by attempting to create a "synthesis between
poetic analogy and literal history." Jose Ortega y Gasset provides a more
developed analysis of the synthesis suggested by Cooover by pointing out how
Cervantes experiments with two different kinds of narrative--fantasy stories in
which the events are improbable and realistic stories in which hardly anything
happens. Randall Jarrell has extended this dichotomy to stories in general by
suggesting that in spite of the wide variety of narrative, there are two
extremes: "stories in which nothing
happens and stories in which every thing is a happening."
However, since fantasy stories derive from the
sacred tradition and thus have a highly formalized set of conventions that
govern their structure and way of meaning, Ortega points out that the problem
with understanding Cervantes' innovation is understanding the nature of
"realism"--not the nature of the symbolism that underlies the
fantasy/allegorical/sacred tradition.
Ortega says that contrary to what the "naivete of our learned
researchers suppose, it is the realistic tendency that is in greater need of
justification and explanation."
This is, of course, also the claim that Roman
Jakobson makes in his famous distinction between metaphor and metonymy, arguing
that it is insufficiently realized that the predominance of metonymy underlies
and predetermines so-called realism. "Consequently," says Jakobson,
when constructing a metalanguage to interpret tropes, the researcher possesses
more homogeneous means to handle metaphor, whereas metonymy, based on a
different principle, easily defies interpretation." The problem alluded to
by Coover and discussed by Ortega and Jakobson is of course the crux of story
that E. M. Forster and C. S. Lewis have so famously exposed--the seeming
impossibility of the metonymic structure of realistic prose narrative--just one
damned thing after another--to serve as a signifier for anything.
Boccaccio's use of "real" characters in
exemplum stories may have begun the shift from anecdote to literary fiction,
but it is with Cervantes' exemplary stories that this displacement from the
metaphoric or allegorical structure of the old fable toward the metonymic
structure of realistic narrative marks, as suggested by Clement and Gibaldi in
their study of the novella, "an end as well as a beginning in the
history of short fiction," a metamorphosis of the novella into
"what for want of a better term, we call `the modern short story.'"
However, as Ortega points out, the movement away
from metaphor and mythos toward metonymy and realism is not made in a single
leap. "The myth," says Ortega, "is always the starting point of
all poetry, including the realistic, except that in the latter we accompany the
myth in its descent, in its fall." Ortega argues that the collapse of the
mythic is the theme of realistic poetry and that reality cannot enter into art
in any other way than "by making an active and combative element out of
its own inertia and desolation." The means by which Cervantes explores
this tension between the poetic and the realistic has, of course, been
discussed in great detail in many studies of his masterwork, Don Quixote.
Although Don
Quixote may be written in a metonymic style in which the Don seems to exist
in the everyday world of reality, the theme of the novel is the secularized
version of the old romance, which assumes that true reality does not exist in
the everyday world but rather is transcendent. The final twist of Cervantes'
great novel is that what was previously
taken to be transcendent is revealed to be hallucinatory, existing in the mind
of the Don himself--a tactic that shifts the world of the sacred into the purely
subjective reality of the individual. As Ortega suggests, in the Renaissance
the reality of the adventure is reduced to the psychological.
Jorge Luis Borges also explains how Cervantes
straddles this divide between the old transcendent world of narrative and the
new immanent world of perspectival or psychological reality by avoiding the
transcendent, yet smuggling it back in a new way. Borges says the
"supernatural" is revealed in the reflexive nature of Don Quixote,
manifested as the result of the basic assumption that reality is not absolute
but rather a variety of subuniverses in which the subuniverse of everyday
reality is no more real than any other. Even as Don Quixote seems a
challenge to the mythic world by its metonymnic method of realism, it posits
the world of the marvelous on a more basic level, the truly marvelous
realization that the world of everyday reality may also be a fiction. Borges
suggests that the shift that takes place in Cervantes establishes a dual mode
of narrative that dominates the development of fictional forms ever since.
The paradox is that even as Cervantes' fiction
becomes more metonymic, that is, more focused on the everyday world in its
detailing of physical events and psychological characters--because its theme is
the destruction of the mythic--it comes to be more about itself, more about the
apprehension of the everyday world as a fictional construct. By parodying the
old notion of the marvelous in the romance, Cervantes lays that notion bare and
furthers Boccaccio's discovery of a new basis for the marvelous--one that makes
aesthetic or fictional creation rather than religious and transcendent
universality the only significant truth.
In Exemplary Novellas, although Cervantes
adopts Boccaccio's novella pattern as the foundation for his stories, he
shifts the dominant interest from plot to character and thus undermines the old
poetic justice pattern and replaces it with a more ambiguous moral pattern of
psychological indeterminacy. One of the best examples of this shift can be seen
by comparing Boccaccio's treatment of the jealous husband theme in the three
stories from the Seventh day with Cervantes' jealous husband story, "The
Jealous Hidalgo." The tension between plot and character is so central to
Cervantes' novella that each undermines the other and thus foregrounds
Cervantes' usual theme of the conflict between reality and fantasy.
Whereas
jealousy is the fuel for plot reversals and poetic justice in Boccaccio's
stories, for Cervantes jealousy is an obsession that, even as it is personally
pathological--compelling its victim to imagine that which is not and forcing
him to create a reality that conforms to his fantasy--it is also the
psychological equivalent of what was once one of the central sources of the
allegorical exemplum and what later becomes one of the driving forces of
19th-century short fiction--a mysterious, inescapable conviction with no
empirical basis--what Poe called "The Imp of the Perverse."
"The Jealous Hidalgo" begins in a traditional
parable fashion, with echoes of the Biblical prodigal son story. However,
Cervantes cues the reader very early that he will not depend on an external
parable plot, but rather on the inner life of a character, for the prodigal
introduced here becomes pensive, thinking about his past, resolving to change
his life. Metaphorically, plot elements in the story, such as the reality of
the becalmed fleet, are backgrounded, while the psychological fact that a storm
is going on inside the mind of the protagonist is foregrounded. The potentially parable nature of the story
is hinted at again when the protagonist is called "the most jealous man in
the world." However, that his jealousy is psychologically obsessive rather
than metaphorically allegorical is suggested when the mere thought of marriage
preys on his imagination and arouses his jealousy even though he does not have
a wife of which to be jealous. As Angus
Fletcher has argued, the proper analogue to allegory is obsessive-compulsive
behavior. The obsessed mind, much like a
character in an allegory, seems obsessed by an idea over which it has no
control. Cervantes's story marks a point at which a character who formerly
would have been an allegorical function of a transcendent theme or a plot
function of poetic justice becomes an obsessed character in a story or fantasy
of his own making.
No sooner does the Hidalgo say, "I do,"
than he is seized by the most violent jealousy, even though he has no grounds
for it. He then begins his efforts to
control reality, to force it to conform to his own obsessions. In a Boccaccio
story, the absurd measures the Hidalgo takes--not allowing a tailor to measure
his wife but getting a stand-in for her, boarding up all the street side
windows of the house, hiring a castrated Negro stableman and female slaves as
servants--would all serve merely as comic causes for the inevitable reversal to
be played upon him. However, the reader does not laugh when, as her parents
release the young bride to her jealous husband, "it seemed to them that
she was being taken to her grave."
The bride, only fourteen, still playing with dolls,
is restricted to an artificial environment calculated to perpetuate her
innocent childhood, in which the "entire house reeked of chastity,
reserve, modesty." The husband will not even allow male animals in the
house, and the stories the servants tell around the fireplace must be free of
all hint of lewdness. At this juncture
of Cervantes' tale, things could go either way--toward the comic reversals of a
Boccaccio story or toward the tragic inevitability of the obsessed character. However,
at the point in the story when the narrator says that for all the husband's
precautions it was "impossible to forestall or avoid the calamity he most
feared, or, at any rate, to believe it had happened," the narrative goes
both ways at once.
For the story to veer toward the Boccaccio mode, the
jealous husband must temporarily disappear to allow for plot trickery. Thus,
metaphorically, the Hildago "falls asleep" as far as the narrative is
concerned, while the young gallant and the typical Boccaccio themes of
disguise, cleverness, and the concocting of deceptive schemes are
introduced. One of the chief devices in
the Boccaccio story is the stratagem of deception, for such tactics are tacit
promises that something will either turn out as projected, or, in true
peripetea fashion turn out just the opposite of what is planned--which is
precisely what plot means in the Boccaccio novella.
In what might be called the Boccaccio section of the
story, the narrator notes that much could be said of the way the characters
dress and behave, but he abstains from telling all this, for realistic
description recedes to the background while the plot/plan energy of the Boccaccio
type story takes control. The central motif of pretense replacing reality is
announced immediately when the narrator says that the young gallant Loaysa
disguises himself so well as a lame beggar that he is a more convincing poor
cripple than a real one. Loaysa develops
complex plans to counterfeit a key to the young wife's room, convinced in
typical Boccaccio fashion that "an elaborate well-planned beginning will
assure a good end," and convincing the servant that only cleverness,
shrewdness and ingenuity will assure success.
The Boccaccio type story ends when the Hildago
awakes and sees his wife in bed with Loaysa and goes to his room to get a
dagger to kill them. In the Boccaccio story, such an action would trigger the
successful fulfillment of wife/lover schemes and thus conclude with poetic justice
for the jealous husband. However, when Cervantes' husband enters his room, he
faints with grief and distress and, on awakening, sends for his wife's parents
as if he were in a spell. Instead of a comic
reversal in which the husband gets what he suspects and thus deserves, the
Hildago accepts responsibility in a recognition scene reminiscent of Sophoclean
tragedy: "As human diligence cannot
forestall the punishment which divine will chooses to lay upon those who do not
place in it all their desires and hopes, it is not to be wondered at that I was
defrauded in mine, and that with my own hand I manufactured the poison which is
doing away with my life." When
Carrizales admits, "I myself fabricated the house in which I shall
die," he announces a short fiction convention that weaves in an out of the
form's history--the concluding recognition of characters that they have been
trapped in stories of their own making.
When the young wife tries to explain that she has
offended her husband only in thought, not in deed, her tongue becomes numb and
she faints; the story ends quickly with the Hildago's death and the wife
becoming a nun. The narrator says he presents this episode as an example of how
little trust can be put in keys and walls when the will is left free,
concluding, "The only thing I do not know is why Leonora did not make more
of an effort to excuse herself and convince the jealous husband how guiltless
she had been in that whole affair. But confusion tied her tongue, and the
rapidity of her husband's death gave her no opportunity to exonerate
herself."
The story thus ends with the realization that
thought rather than action is most telling and that whereas actions can be
explained, thoughts cannot. If the
novel, exemplified by Cervantes' Don Quixote begins as a satire or
parody of the romance, then the short story, exemplified by his Exemplary
Novellas, begins as a tension between the demands of plot, which by its
very nature is patterned and exemplary, and character, which by its very nature
is unpredictable and realistic. Just as
Boccaccio made trivial what had formerly been serious, Cervantes makes serious
what Boccaccio made trivial.
Rather than a simple illustration of the foolishness
of a jealous husband, Cervantes' story becomes an examination of jealousy as a
complex human emotion based on obsessive fantasy. Just as the husband has tortured himself with
jealousy over something that does not exist, he dies in grief over an
infidelity that did not take place. The
confusion that ties the tongue of the wife is a result of the "house"
that Carrizales has "fabricated."
Because of her artlessness--an artlessness he has encouraged--the young
wife has no means to understand the complexities of the events that have
occurred. Plotting is beyond her.
Moreover, the end of the story focuses on the problem of how she has
offended her husband not in action but only in thought--a problem that exceeds
her ability to explain it. The ultimate
implication of the story--that thought is as powerful as action and the
psychological as powerful as the physical--is the central theme that so
fascinates Goethe, Tieck, Hoffmann, and the other German Romantics, who, in the
early 19th century take the next important step in the development of short
fiction.
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