by Steven Moore
Cervantes pinned his hopes for literary immortality not on the immortal Don Quixote but on the novel he finished shortly before he died, which was published posthumously in January 1617 as The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda (Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda). He evidently had been working on it since the 1590s, and a few months before finishing it he predicted “it will be either the worst or best [novel] ever composed in our language” (DQ2 dedication, dated 31 October 1615). It is certainly not the worst, and if Cervantes had never written Don Quixote, it (and his earlier Galatea) might be held in higher esteem; but anyone today who reads Persiles and Sigismunda on the heels of Don Quixote can scarcely believe it was written by the same author.
In the prologue to his Exemplary Stories, Cervantes claimed his work in progress is “a book which dares to compete with Heliodorus” (5). This 3rd/4th-century author produced the finest of the ancient Greek novels, An Ethiopian Story, which opens in medias res in imitation of the Odyssey and follows the adventures of a romantic couple named Theagenes and Charikleia. (Two 16th-century Spanish translations were available to Cervantes.) Persiles and Sigismunda likewise begins in the middle of things and reveals the backstory only in fragments later on, and the chronological beginning of the tale not until nine pages from the end of the 340-page novel. It concerns an incredibly handsome prince of Thule (Iceland) named Persiles, who falls for the incredibly beautiful princess of “Frisland” named Sigismunda, whom Persiles’ boorish older brother wants to marry. (The reader is reminded of the superlative physical beauty of these teenagers throughout the novel.) To escape that calamity, the pair leaves icy Thule for sunny Rome, pretending to be brother and sister and telling others that Sigismunda wants to go to Rome to improve her understanding of Catholicism, because the version “in those northern regions is somewhat in need of repair.”19 As in An Ethiopian Story and other Greek novels, the couple endures shipwrecks, separations, capture by pirates, crossdressing disguises, assaults on their virginity, and several near-death experiences before they are finally married in Rome and then return north to live happily ever after.
During their travels, the couple collects a small band of followers, each of whom has a colorful story, and during their journey they encounter dozens of others with stories to tell, which makes the novel read like an anthology much of the time, specifically an anthology of stories about the crazy things love makes a person do. Love and jealousy are the ostensible, intertwined themes of the novel, and the author shows great tolerance for the things done in the name of love, “for the powerful forces of love often confuse the most intelligent minds” (3.5).
This worldly theme is pitched to the common reader; for the cognoscenti, Cervantes overlays a Christian allegory about the soul’s progress from the dark, northern wastes of paganism to the pure light of Catholicism emanating from Rome, which represents Augustine’s civitate Dei. Sigismunda especially becomes more concerned with the state of her soul than her fiancé, and once in Rome decides to become a nun, which nearly destroys Persiles until some highly contrived plot upheavals cause her to relent. The novel is carefully structured by way of biblical parallels and typology, as critics have shown, and Cervantes apparently felt it was the redemptive marriage of the pagan Greek novel with Christian allegory that made Persiles and Sigismunda his crowning achievement. Late in the novel, Persiles learns of
the most unusual museum in the world, unusual because there were no figures in it of people who in fact had lived or did exist, but rather some blank spaces prepared so the distinguished people of the future could be painted on them, especially those who’d be famous poets in centuries to come. Among these empty places he’d especially noticed two; at the top of one of them was written Torcuato Tasso, and a little further down it said, Jerusalem Delivered, while on the other was written Zárate, and below that, The Cross and Constantine. (4.6)
Cervantes hoped to occupy one of those blank spaces, and considered his novel on par with those two Catholic verse epics, for as the canon of Toledo says, “the epic can be written in prose as well as verse” (DQ 1.47).
For some of us, there are few terms that induce narcosis quicker than “Christian allegory.” It’s more interesting to regard Persiles and Sigismunda not as an allegory of the growth of the soul but as one of the growth of a genre, for it seems to recapitulate the history of fiction. The first of the novel’s four books recalls ancient myths and legends: it begins with a barbarian shouting, followed by tales of werewolves, witches, a flying carpet, sea monsters, pagan rituals, and references to the Jewish legends of Noah’s ark and Jonah and the whale. The narrative style is straightforward, and while Cervantes’ northern settings don’t correspond very closely to actual geography, they evoke the mythic world of legendary regions and older forms of storytelling. At the beginning of book 2, however, we learn that we’ve been reading a translation, not an original account, and thereafter the novel becomes more complicated (that is, more modern) as the linear story becomes disrupted by inset tales dealing with earlier matters, and as what one critic calls the “narrative authority” begins to disperse and operate on an increasing number of levels.20 As the novel journeys southward, it evolves from ancient chronicle to medieval romance to premodern novel; it becomes more realistic, starts including recognizable geographies and datable historical events, and introduces more realistic characters from more levels of society, until by the concluding book 4 we are in contemporary Rome among prostitutes and their protectors, corrupt officials, two punk kids on the run, and the pope’s guards indulging in police brutality. (All this undercuts Rome’s symbolic value as the heart of Catholicism.) It’s not completely realistic at the end—in Rome a Jewish witch casts a near-lethal hex on Sigismunda—but it’s easy to see in Persiles and Sigismunda a formal and stylistic dramatization of the maturation of the novel from simple wonder tales to nonlinear, self-conscious metafiction.
It sounds good on paper, but I doubt Persiles and Sigismunda will ever be rediscovered as a great novel.21 Like Don Quixote, the chronology is contradictory—the novel seems to be taking place around 1560, but one incident places it in 1606—and there is some lazy plotting that takes way too many advantages of the romance novel’s tolerance for coincidence. The protagonists display a “strange affectlessness,” as Wilson admits (137), and most of the other characters are one-dimensional stereotypes (understandable in an epic, less so in a novel). The religious sentiments are embarrassingly unctuous (unless that betrays Cervantes’ insincerity), the inset tales of love and jealousy too familiar from European story-cycles (and from the interpolated novellas in Don Quixote), and the whole thing too decorous and humorless. The writing is fine and full of rhetorical flourishes—Cervantes is especially fond of zeugma, as in “The fire began to blaze, and its flames fed those Policarpo felt in his heart,” yoking actual flames with metaphoric ones—but nearly everyone speaks in the same elegant register. Only a sarcastic character named Clodio provides any edge, and though his slanderous witticisms get him killed in book 2, in book 4 the narrator admits he was the only one “so heartless and malicious that he’d suspected the truth” (4.1). I’d like to believe he represents Cervantes, heartlessly and maliciously contriving a respectable Christian epic to win fame from the literary gatekeepers of his day—who, then as now, usually prefer a work that judiciously builds on the traditional rules to one that, like Don Quixote, cunningly subverts them—but I suspect this is another example of an author who misjudged his own work. Persiles and Sigismunda belongs on the same neglected shelf as Melville’s Clarel, Hardy’s Dynasts, and Faulkner’s Fable, ambitious books more beloved by their authors than by readers.
But before I take “leave of the Spaniard—a modern and innovative author of novel and delightful books” (4.2)—I want to go on a short romp with the rambunctious novella The Dialogue of the Dogs, the last of Cervantes’ Exemplary Stories (pp. 250–305 in Lipson’s edition). El Coloquio de los perros is actually a continuation of the collection’s penultimate tal
e, “The Deceitful Marriage,” in which a soldier named Campuzano tells his student friend Peralta how he got scammed by an adventuress, who gave him syphilis in exchange for everything she stole from him. (The jewels he impressed her with turn out to be fake, so he takes some satisfaction in scamming his scammer.) While sweating out the cure in Valladolid, Campuzano swears he overheard two dogs talking of matters high and low over the course of two nights, which he recorded word for word. His friend is incredulous, but agrees to read the soldier’s manuscript; the short story (or prologue to the novella) concludes, “The Ensign lay back in his chair, the Graduate opened the notebook, and on the first page he saw the following title—”
The Dialogue of the Dogs is cast in playbook form (like earlier Spanish novels such as Rojas’s Celestina and Delicado’s Portrait of Lozana). The dogs Berganza and Cipión believe their “unexpected ability to speak” portends “some great calamity is threatening mankind” (251), but not to waste the opportunity, they agree Berganza will relate the story of his life one night, and Cipión his the following night. (We get only Berganza’s tale; Campuzano withholds the other. And note “Campuzano” and “Cervantes” begin with the same initial and have the same number of letters; a former soldier, Cervantes mocks his own transition from soldier to author via this character.) Through this magniloquent mutt Cervantes airs his unmuzzled views on a variety of topics, especially on genres of fiction. Just as Galatea subverts the pastoral, Don Quixote the chivalric novel, and Persiles and Sigismunda the ancient Greek romance, Cervantes’ canine colloquy subverts the Spanish picaresque novel, then at the height of its popularity. Like the prototypical Lazarillo de Tormes, it features a young character making his way through the rough world of swindlers, criminals, witches, Gypsies, and other “rabble,” as he calls them (a recurring target of criticism in Cervantes’ fiction). After serving a number of low-class masters, Berganza ends up assisting the begging monks attached to the hospital at which Campuzano is recovering, a parody of the pious ending of many picaresques.
This newish genre was rightly praised for its realism, but Cervantes shows that it’s not realism or moral exemplars that make for good fiction (as many even today believe) but aesthetic bliss. Talking dogs? So much for realism. Moral exemplars? Our narrator is a syphilitic soldier, duped by an adventuress who spun a fiction he fell for like a naive reader. Berganza briefly serves a witch whose tales of satanic gatherings are clearly inspired by psychedelic drugs,22 then a playwright whose obsession with fussily realistic details dooms his work to failure, and finally a poet working on an Arthurian romance based on what he mispronounces “the History of the Quest for the Holy Brail” (301), trivializing it as a quest for the Holy Skirt.23 Cervantes goes out of his way to expose fiction and fiction-writers/tellers as being disreputable and unreliable, yet at the end Peralta (like the reader) is so delighted by Campuzano’s shaggy dog story that he doesn’t care if his friend made the whole thing up. “I appreciate the craftsmanship of the dialogue and its inventiveness, so be satisfied with that,” he tells us (305). The skirt-chasing poet has studied Horace’s Ars Poetica, but in Cervantes’ final exemplary novella, a dogfight between various theories of fiction—Cipión frequently interrupts Berganza to criticize his narrative technique—he shows that writers can toss out the rulebook as long as the results are inventive and aesthetically satisfying.24
The picaresque genre Cervantes parodied was in full swing at the beginning of the 17th century in Spain, propelled by the extraordinary success of Mateo Alemán’s Guzman of Alfarache (1599). In 1605, the same year Cervantes published the first part of Don Quixote, a literary rival named Francisco López de Úbeda brought out what is considered the first female-fronted example of the genre, La pícara Justina. As is usually the case in standard literary chronology, this isn’t strictly true: the street-smart protagonist of Francisco Delicado’s bawdy Portrait of Lozana (1528) is an adventuress who scams her way from Andalusia to Italy;25 but Delicado was imitating an older novel (Rojas’s Celestina), not creating a new genre. López de Úbeda probably knew Lozana, but he was reacting against the pious Guzman, offering a clever girl in love with her life instead of a gloomy young man repenting of his.
Justina’s story is simple, the only thing about this extravagant novel that is.26 Justina Diez is the daughter of innkeepers, both of whom die under grotesque circumstances when she is in her teens. Bugged by her siblings, she leaves her hometown of Mansilla for nearby Arenillas, dancing, playing her castanets, and generally enjoying la vie bohème while dodging the inevitable attempts on her virginity. Abducted by a gang of roving students, she manages to get them drunk and leads them back to Mansilla, where they are mocked by the townspeople and she is honored. Hitting the road for a second time, Justina heads for the big city of León, where she engages in fraud, cock-teasing, blackmail, and other swindles, returning home again in triumph. “In examining my life, I can say that I hope to be good some day and even some night,” she winks à la Mae West in book 2 (trans. Damiani, 52), but for now she enjoys the freedom of her unconventional life, though by this point she’s picked up a case of VD. Her sisters and brothers still have it in for her, however, so she leaves home a third time to seek legal revenge, indulging in more juvenile delinquency while fending off the advances of a horny sacristan. Winning her lawsuit, she returns home and is courted by several disreputable suitors, settling on a soldier/gambler named Lozano, and promising to write a sequel about her later marriages, including one to Guzman of Alfarache!
As an author recollecting her life and committing it to paper years later, Justina is still grifting, promising more than she delivers, and distracting her mark with hilarious digressions and literary tricks as she pockets the royalties from her book. Her first-person account is framed by an elaborate, mock-scholarly format, beginning with a frontispiece allegorically depicting our heroine on a ship with Celestina and Guzman—Lazarillo is nearby in a rowboat—sailing on the River of Forgetfulness for the Port of Death: a harsh verdict on the picaresque life. Justina’s narrative is preceded by a table of the 51 verse forms featured in the novel, a dedication, two prologues by a male editor, and Justina’s own three-part introduction, addressed to her pen, ink, and paper. The narrative proper has marginal notes like a theological treatise, and each chapter begins with a summarizing poem and ends with a fatuous moral by the editor. Weighing in at 400 pages, Justina is not as long as Guzman, but it’s the most elaborately staged picaresque, the form itself indicating it was intended for the amusement of the nobles at the Spanish court rather than for the general reading public.
If the form didn’t scare off the average reader, its linguistic density would have. Critic Joseph Jones has called Justina “a lexicographical museum of jargon, slang, technical vocabulary, proverbs and dialect—not to mention imitations of the pronunciation of drunkards—and a textbook of the figures of speech . . . and of thought” (416). Justina is an entertaining motormouth— “my clack is the perpetual motion, and never lies still” (trans. Stevens 5)—and commands an arsenal of rhetorical devices, which she fires off with Rabelaisian flare: metaphors, similes, personifications, conceits, puns, paronomasia, neologisms, euphemisms, metaplasms, Latinisms and Italianisms, regional slang, “phrases fancifully artificial or involved, farfetched images, elaborate wordplays, metaphors falling over one another in contradictory confusion, innumerable repetitions as well as rare and invented words” (Damiani [106], who gives examples of all these devices). Alexander Parker calls Justina “a treasure-house of the language of burlesque, a riot of verbosity in which popular speech is given an exuberant ornamentation by being overladen with the language of polite learning” (46)—all of which probably explains why this dense, often cryptic novel has never been fully translated into English (though there are Italian, French, and German versions; Captain Stevens’ 1707 abridgment provides a pleasant two-hour read, but only skims the surface of the novel’s complex language). In addition, López de Úbeda stuffed Justina’s pretty head wi
th his immense learning, rather lamely explaining she picked up her vast erudition from some books left at her parents’ inn. There are references and allusions—usually facetious—to classical mythology, the Bible, lives of the saints, animal fables and folklore, medieval epics, and novels ranging from Apuleius’s Golden Ass through Alberti’s Momus and virtually every Spanish novel from Celestina to Don Quixote (which López de Úbeda apparently previewed in manuscript), along with countless works of history, theology, and philosophy. Damiani’s critical edition needs nearly 1,200 footnotes to explicate this encyclopedic novel.
And the point of it all? Though López de Úbeda mocks some of the social concerns of the day—specifically noble Spaniards’ obsession with the “purity” of their blood, unadulterated by Moors or Jews—his principal goal was to show that the novel should be a vehicle for profane play and vitality, not a form of Catholic confession and penance like Guzman of Alfarache. Arguing for a literary separation of church and state, the author gives us a choice between spending time with a morose penitent like Alemán’s protagonist or a flippant chica who embraces the picaresque life not out of poverty or desperation but for the joyous freedom it offers, linguistic, and otherwise. I know who I’d choose for a reading date. We badly need an English translation of Justina—¡ahora!