by Steven Moore
It’s odd that a man with that attitude would choose to write an autobiographical novel; by the time he wrote it, Espinel had taken orders and was choirmaster at a Madrid church, so perhaps the novel was an act of confession for which he hoped to receive absolution. Thus it looks back to the religiose Guzman of Alfarache and would soon inspire French picaresque writers (especially Lesage, who stole shamelessly from Marcos de Obregón), but its conflicted attitude and tortured self-consciousness point the way to the modern novel.
While the picaresque remains Spain’s greatest contribution to the development of the European novel, other Spanish writers revamped other genres with interesting results. In 1619, after a long delay, the second half of Ginés Pérez de Hita’s two-part novel The Civil Wars of Granada (Las Guerras civiles de Granada) was published, a ragged but influential work credited as Spain’s first historical novel. The first and better half had been published back in 1595 and was an attempt to give fictional form to historical documents and border ballads about the final years of Muslim Granada before it was conquered by Christians under King Ferdinand in 1492. The second half, finished in November 1597 but not published until 1619—by which time Pérez de Hita may have been dead—dramatizes the 1568 rebellion of the Moors and their failed attempt to retake Granada.32 Together they form a two-part novel that attempts to mix history, medieval romance, poetry, and war reportage—the author fought on the Spanish side during the 1568 revolt—which doesn’t quite cohere aesthetically but which paved the way for the more polished historical novels of the 19th century.
Like the magnolia-scented visions of the antebellum South still cherished by some Americans, Moorish Granada exerted a romantic appeal on many Spaniards long after Ferdinand demoted Muslims to second-class citizens, and The Civil Wars of Granada—along with the earlier novella El Abencerraje (1565)—is largely responsible for the stereotyped view of valiant Moors and their exquisite ladies swanning about the Alhambra. Part 1 in particular is filled with medieval pageantry, bullfights and elaborate fetes, ridiculously courteous personal combats, blood feuds and betrayals, all soundtracked by dozens of ballads that supplement the narrative. The title refers to the factional fighting in part 1 between Granada’s leading families, the noble Abencerrajes and the treacherous Zegrís; the latter have the ear of Granada’s cruel king Boabdil (a Spanish corruption of abu-Abdullah), and the infighting that ensued weakened Granada to the point that its conquest was a walkover for the Christians.
Fumbling with this new hybrid, Pérez de Hita seems to have been uncertain whether he wanted to be a historian or a novelist. Like Cervantes, he claims his narrative is based on the manuscript of an Arab historian and pretends to be only its translator; but he lurches between recorded history—even naming some of his sources as he goes along—and romantic fiction. Too often fictitious embellishments are added to the narrative at awkward places, and some dramatic sequences are spoiled by an intrusive historical note about contradictory sources. Sometimes the many ballads recapitulate prose episodes (as in medieval literature), while at other times the author trusts the ballads to carry the narrative. (In part 2, the ballads occur at the end of each chapter.) The author’s prejudices are blatant—he favors the As over the Zs, and Christians over the Muslims—which are certainly a novelist’s prerogative but which reduce the book’s claim to historical accuracy. He is sympathetic to the Moors—especially in part 2, where he regards their rebellion as a justifiable response to the Spanish “policy that unnecessarily outlawed all their cherished customs and traditions” (Carrasco-Urgoiti, 134)—but his Muslims do things forbidden by Islam (like creating pictorial representations of Muhammad), regularly cite Greco-Roman mythology, and (in the case of the Abencerrajes) secretly yearn to be Christians. That’s what Washington Irving objected to most; dismissing the work as a “Spanish fabrication,” he complained that the Muslim–Christian conflict in The Civil Wars “had been woven over with love tales and scenes of sentimental gallantry totally opposite to its real character; for it was, in truth, one of the sternest of those iron conflicts, sanctified by the title of ‘Holy Wars.’ ”33 At any rate, Pérez de Hita’s well-intentioned plea for greater tolerance of the Moors went unheeded; in 1609 King Philip III banished them completely from Spain, with disastrous economic and cultural results.
The prolific Lope de Vega (1562–1635) likewise experimented with the novel genre during the same period. He is celebrated primarily for his plays and poems (he wrote thousands of each), but he produced three novels—La Arcadia (1598), El Peregrino en su patria (The Pilgrim in His Own Land, 1604), and Los Pastores de Belén (The Shepherds of Bethlehem, 1614)—and a collection of four novellas, Novelas a Marcia Leonarda (1624), all of which are derivative and add nothing to their respective genres; Lope admits as much in the preface to Novelas, confessing fiction isn’t his forte. But three years before he died, he published a brilliant hybrid work entitled La Dorotea (1632) that combines the form of a play with the extended narrative reach of a novel. (The English translation runs 260 pages.) He called it an “action in prose” (acción en prosa), a cool term that might have appealed to Kerouac. Although it resembles the play format Lope was most comfortable with, Dorotea was also inspired by earlier dramatic novels like Rojas’s Celestina and Ferreira de Vasconcelos’s Eufrosina, both of which he acknowledges in his prologue.34 And he took from the pastoral novel the convention of incorporating songs and poems into the work, some several pages long, as well as its tolerance for extended philosophical discussions. The result is a tragicomic tour de force on love, disillusionment, and aesthetics.
Lope began the autobiographical novel in the 1590s, shortly after the melodramatic events that inspired it. For about four years (1584–88), Lope had an affair with an actor’s wife named Elena Osorio, the daughter of one of his producers in Madrid, which ended badly after she dumped him when a rich new suitor showed up; Lope wrote some scurrilous poems about her and her relations in revenge, who then sued him, resulting in jail and banishment. Lope revived this early work in the 1620s when he was indulging in yet another affair with a married woman, 25 years younger than he, and complicated by the fact Lope had been ordained a priest in 1614 with its attendant vow of chastity. Lope retained the 1587–88 setting from the early version but added a lifetime’s maturity and perspective to its revision. As for Dorotea’s plot, I can’t improve on the one translator Trueblood provides at the beginning of his massive study of the novel:
Dorotea and the penniless poet Fernando have been lovers for five years. Her mother, Teodora, at the behest of her friend Gerarda, a go-between of sorts, decides to break up the liaison in order to clear the way for a more profitable lover, the wealthy indiano (Spaniard returning from the New World) Don Bela. After some soul-searching, Dorotea informs Fernando that she has no choice in the matter, he takes umbrage, they quarrel, and Fernando rides off desperately to Seville after prevailing on a former mistress, Marfisa, with a rigged-up story of having killed someone, to let him have her jewels. Dorotea attempts suicide, convalesces, and eventually accepts Don Bela.
Three months after his departure Fernando returns to Madrid still obsessed with Dorotea, finds Don Bela in possession, meets him by chance under her windows and wounds him in a brief exchange of swordplay. Some days later he encounters the disguised Dorotea in the Prado, tells her his life story, and when she reveals herself, is reconciled with her. Arriving home in triumph, he encounters Marfisa, by now disabused, and is bitterly denounced by her. Fernando then reveals to his servant, Julio, that reconciliation has killed his ardor for Dorotea and that he proposes returning to Marfisa. He shares Dorotea surreptitiously with Don Bela for two more months, however, before abandoning her altogether. Dorotea, as much in love as ever, plays disconsolately with the thought of taking the veil. The accidental deaths of Don Bela and Gerarda bring the work to a close.35
Lope rewrote personal history to allow himself (as Fernando) to be the one who ends the affair, but otherwise is rather harsh on his younger, impetuous self.
He makes him a foppish poet (rather than the competent dramatist Lope had been), partly as an excuse to include many of the poems Lope wrote to his later mistress, and partly because Dorotea, like Cervantes’ Galatea (which Lope admired), is about the nature of poetry—or art in general—and the uses to which some people put it. Virtually all the characters in Dorotea write poetry, can recite it from memory, explicate it with scholarly ingenuity, or at the least have a keen appreciation of it. The principals conduct their lives as though they were in a poem, as though they were the future heroes and heroines of the kinds of songs and ballads they admire. Like beret-wearing habitués of poetry coffeehouses today, they love to strike artistic poses, to show off their reading, and to live their lives according to their favorite books. The young Lope was at home in this bohemian milieu, “a demimonde of theater people and loose women, frequented by students, aristocrats, and others,” as the translators explain, but when in trouble he resorted to “unrealistic schemes more suggestive of stage intrigues than of the everyday world, where they inevitably backfire” (271–72). The older Lope who wrote Dorotea looked back with a mixture of censure and bemusement at the phase many of us go through when, drunk on literature, we fail to distinguish between art and life.
Dorotea consists solely of dialogue—no stage instructions or authorial interventions—and at the surface level it is intoxicating. The dialogue sparkles with Mozartean grace, Wildean wit, Cole Porterly kick, Spackmanesque sophistication, and Therouvian erudition. Each of the male leads (Fernando, Bela) has a servant/companion (Julio, Laurencio) as well read as their masters, and the small cast is rounded off by bookish friends of Fernando’s like Ludovico and César, who help make this novel sound at times like a graduate seminar in Renaissance culture. (In act 4, Ludovico, César, and Julio spend 22 pages explicating a “terrible sphinx of a sonnet,” a parody of the baroque poetry of Luis de Góngora.) Dorotea, a harpist who occasionally sings her own compositions, is a sucker for poetry—“she is wild about hemistichs” (2.1)—and can blame most of her romantic troubles on failing to distinguish between Fernando the poet and Fernando the man, just as Fernando remains blind to his own faults through undeserved identification with the lovelorn poets of classical literature.
Beneath the sparkling verbal surface, however, is ugly reality. We learn that Fernando once slapped Dorotea for praising a bullfighter; Fernando asks Ludovico to slash Gerarda’s face for interfering; and Gerarda—like her model in Celestina—is an 80-year-old bawd who traffics in prostitution and witchcraft. Nearly all the characters (not Lope) express a demeaning, patriarchal view of women—“a woman’s only good is to furnish the stuff out of which men’s children are made” (1.1)—even though the women in the novel are as bright and witty as the men, especially Dorotea, who emerges as the wisest person in the book. To her Lope gives the novel’s take-away lesson: “One must prize disillusionment over beauty. Everything runs its course, everything palls, everything comes to an end” (5.11).
Except art. Elena Osario of Madrid is no more, but she lives forever in Dorotea. Despite Dorotea’s mistreatment by Fernando, the fact he’s writing poems about her thrills her, even though her maid Celia dismisses them as “a few lines of verse, some marginal notes, and the newfangled words used by people who pride themselves on speaking like no one else.” Dorotea counters, “Is there greater treasure for a woman than to find herself made immortal? Since beauty comes to an end and no one seeing her thereafter believes she ever possessed it, the verse in praise of her bears testimony, living on in her name” (2.2). Even though this is more likely the older Lope making amends for his younger self than a desire the real-life Elena Osario actually expressed, it adds to the sense throughout the novel that this work was Lope’s grand statement on life and art, the one work he wanted to be remembered by. (He didn’t even bother to save the scripts of most of his earlier plays, regarding them as ephemeral work for pay.) Speaking through his cultured characters, he provides a list of the finest poets of his youth—including Cervantes, Espinel, “and this Lope de Vega just starting out” (4.2)—pays tribute to his favorite poets and philosophers of the past, shows off his wide learning (admittedly cribbed from many secondary sources, as the translators’ notes indicate), denounces astrology and other pet peeves, mulls over aesthetics, and comments metafictionally on Dorotea as it progresses. At one point Julio says, “And if Don Fernando’s love affair were part of a play, we would have to throw the rules out the window” (3.4). Like all experimental writers, that is exactly what Lope did, resulting in what one of his translators calls “A play that is hardly a play and a novel that is not a novel” (275). Lope knew he was creating a unique hybrid of drama and fiction, and not surprisingly includes a self-assessment of his “action in prose” within its pages. Ludovico insists “Anything sui generis, applauded, and grand, though unforgivably outlandish, should be deemed a genuine achievement” (4.3). Agreed.
A Brief Digression on Verse Novels
Speaking of hybrids in Spanish fiction: The publisher of a recent edition of Góngora’s Solitudes (Soledades, 1612) calls it a “novel in verse,” but I’m not going to treat it here because it’s a tough call. It’s easy enough to spot a modern verse novel because the author or publisher describes it as such on the title page, but it’s trickier to identify older works that might belong to this vague genre. Making things harder still is the odd fact that few critics have addressed the topic: if there’s a book devoted to defining, theorizing, and historically accounting for the genre, I couldn’t find it, only a few essays—Dino Felluga’s “Verse Novels” and Catherine Addison’s “The Verse Novel as Genre: Contradiction or Hybrid?”—both of which deal mostly with obvious examples from the Victorian era onward.36
Conventional wisdom identifies Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1833) as the first novel in verse, but as usual conventional wisdom is wrong: in 1784 the British author Anna Seward published Louisa: A Poetical Novel in Four Epistles, which is, if not the first verse novel, the first to announce itself as such in the subtitle. A century ago, a critic named W. M. Dixon proposed an even earlier English work, William Chamberlayne’s Pharonnida (1659), as “our first, and perhaps still our best novel in verse” (Felluga, 172), though this is complicated by the fact Chamberlayne later rewrote it in prose as Eromena (1683), suggesting he didn’t consider the earlier version to be a novel. In my previous volume, I identified a number of premodern fictions as verse novels based on content and inspiration. That is, if a long narrative poem dealt with typical novelistic matter and was inspired by prose novels, then I felt comfortable calling it a novel. I treated the metrical narratives of Byzantine writers like Niketas Eugenianos and Andronikos Palaiologos as novels because they were love stories deliberately based on older Greek prose novels, whereas I disqualified the metrical narratives of Chrétien de Troyes (pace Denis de Rougemont, who calls them novels) because they dealt with legendary matter and were based on French lais. Similarly, there are Sanskrit verse narratives that follow in the tradition of older Sanskrit novels rather than mythological epics like the Ramayana. Setting aside the objection—which I would be the first to make—that a novel can be about anything, these distinctions (novelistic matter and models) would eliminate epics and mythological poems, medieval chansons de geste and allegories, long ballads, and the like. Góngora’s Solitudes strikes me as belonging to this camp, for the emphasis is more on the verse than the narrative.
But these distinctions raise difficulties when we reach the early modern period: no one would call Paradise Lost a novel, because it is clearly in the epic tradition;37 but how about Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, since it was modeled on Don Quixote? How about Pope’s mock-epic, The Dunciad?—the proportion of prose to verse in the final, 1743 version makes it look more like Nabokov’s Pale Fire than a poem. Byron’s Don Juan is usually called an epic poem or epic satire, though it has nothing to do with the epic (heroic, often legendary adventures leading to the foundation of a race or nation) and everything to do with rollicki
ng 18th-century novels like Tom Jones. (A few critics have indeed called Don Juan a verse novel, but only in passing). On the other hand, no one, I think, would consider his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage a novel, for it and other Romantic verse narratives are firmly in the poetic tradition, many of them “the modern equivalent of the medieval or minstrel romance.”38 This doesn’t account for all Romantic works, of course; in the preface to the 1815 edition of his poems, Wordsworth acknowledged what he called the “metrical novel,” but he did not attach that label to his Prelude, even though, as Felluga notes, it is arguably “one of the first bildungsromane and even künstlerromane [artist’s story], two novelistic subgenres that are integral to the development of the novel as a distinctive form” (172).
Shortly after he began work on Eugene Onegin, Pushkin wrote to a friend, “I am writing now not a novel, but a novel in verse—the devil of a difference.”39 A book is needed to explore that devilish difference, but for now, we can call a lengthy narrative poem a verse novel if it eschews the epic and/or fantasy tradition (which eliminates books like Wieland’s Oberon) and focuses instead, as Felluga suggests, on “those characteristics that made the novel such a popular success (narrative sequentiality, realistic description, historical referentiality, believable characters, dramatic situations, fully realized dialogism and, above all, the domestic marriage plot)” (171). All of those qualities characterize Goethe’s Hermann and Dorothea (1797), yet he seems to have considered it more a domestic epic than a versified novel, which is why I reluctantly decided to omit it from my discussion of his novels. Consequently, I won’t be including very many of what could arguably be called verse novels in this volume.
After Pérez de Hita invented the historical novel and Lope de Vega reconfigured the dramatic novel, the worldly María de Zayas (1590–1660?) revamped the story-cycle novel. In my last volume I argued that fictions like The Arabian Nights and Boccaccio’s Decameron can be considered long novels if there is as much emphasis on the characters in the frame-tale as there is on the tales themselves; that is, if the tales are the main attraction and their narrators merely talking heads, it’s a thematic anthology, but if the function of the tales is to dramatize the concerns of their narrators and listeners in the frame, it can be read as a novel—an unconventional novel, to be sure, but still a novel. The protagonists of most novels undergo experiences that test, reveal, develop, or modify their character; in story-cycle novels, the protagonists in the frame undergo vicarious experiences (via the tales) to the same purpose. In the Decameron or Marguerite of Navarre’s Heptameron, the inset tales exist partly (if not primarily) to reveal the sexual dynamics between the characters in the frame-tale, which is why I treated them as novels, as opposed to books like Ser Giovanni’s Percorone and Straparola’s Facetious Nights, whose utilitarian frames relegate them to short-story collections. The same goes for Giambattista Basile’s Tale of Tales (Lo cunto de li cunti, aka the Pentamerone), which was published in Italy around this time (1634–36).40 All of which is to say Zaya’s two books of fiction—The Enchantments of Love (Novelas amorosas y ejemplares, 1637) and its sequel, The Disenchantments of Love (Desengaños amorosos, 1647)—might best be read together as a 700-page novel.