Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares: Table of trucos, Tricks of the Trade

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Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares: Table of trucos, Tricks of the Trade

___________________________________________Anne J. Cruz

The four-hundredth anniversary of Cervantes’s Exemplary Novels, celebrated last year, presents us with the occasion to re-conceptualize and recontextualize the genre of the novella as

it took root and developed in early modern Spain.1 In a classic essay, Tzvetan Todorov commented that “there has never been a literature without genres; it is a system in continual transformation, and the question of origins cannot be disassociated, historically, from the field of genres themselves” (161). This pronouncement has certainly been challenged by Don Quixote’s inclusionary praxis, whose incorporation of many kinds of literature precluded any single model.2 Such is not the case, however, of the Novelas ejemplares: their title boldly proclaims the influence of the Italian novelle, written first by Giovanni Boccaccio and followed by Matteo Bandello and Giovanni Battista Giraldi (Cinthio), among numerous others, as the genre became increasingly popular

1 An earlier version of this essay was given as the keynote address at the Cervantes Society of America’s Business Meeting during the Modern Language Association, Boston, January 3, 2013. My most appreciative thanks to the Cervantes Society of America for inviting me to pres-ent my talk and to the audience for its comments. A brief version was presented at the Florida Cervantes Symposium, University of Central Florida, April 6, 2013. I thank Martha García for organizing the symposium, and the participants for their enthusiasm and comments.

2 Rosalie Colie’s study of Renaissance genres called attention to the “shallowness of rigid doctrines of mimesis” when discussing Don Quixote as a new form that both reduces and mythicizes “kinds” (117). Considering Don Quixote within the classical tradition of Aristotelian imitation, Aurora Egido suggests that Cervantes’s preference for inventio over elocutio may have contributed to his modernity, given the thematic and situational freedom of his narra-tives (24). For an alternative view that examines the novel’s anti-naturalism, see Cascardi. On Cervantes’s postmodernity, see Cruz and Johnson; and Friedman.

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from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century.3 Yet the novella (which I will refer to as “novel” in this essay), was not easily categorized when Cervantes decided to write his. Their other likely literary source, the Spanish short stories known alternatively as cuentos, consejas, exempla, facecias, fábulas, and patrañas, grounded mainly in the oral tradition, are also often cited by critics when seeking to establish the novels’ be-ginnings.4

Thus, although Boccaccio’s novelle were translated into Spanish as early as 1496,5 and the term “novela” immediately introduced into Castilian, both novela and cuento, in all their permutations, main-tained a close affinity. In his study, El cuento popular en los Siglos de Oro, José Manuel Pedrosa demonstrates how slippery these terms remained. Although he believes that the Decameron influenced the Spanish short story more than what he calls the “cuento propiamente folclórico,” he is right to insist that, “en muchas ocasiones, las andaduras de ambos llegaron a cruzarse de forma difícilmente deslindable” (43). In fact, in sixteenth-century Spain both terms, novela and cuento, were used in-terchangeably: in the Diálogo de la lengua, for instance, Juan de Valdés states as much: “decimos cuento […] por novela” (qtd. in Pedrosa 50).6 The reason might be owed as much to their similar narrative structure and brevity as to their supposed purpose. Both kinds of literature relied on the Horatian dictum of prodesse et delectare in their admixture of entertainment and instruction; although their endings clearly spelled out moral messages, the medieval exempla, folktales, and patrañas also

3 Jean-Michel Laspéras has traced the genre from Aristotle to Counter-Reformation po-etics, calibrating the novels’ differences and similarities (171-73). Although he states that the Italian novelle were more than likely read in the original, he also lists translations of Francesco Gucciardini and Giovanni Francesco Straparola, among others (55-66).

4 On the complex function of medieval literature’s orality, see Palafox. See also Chevalier. 5 The first translation in Spain was in Catalan (1429); the complete Spanish translation

was first published in Seville (1496), and then in Toledo (1524), Valladolid (1539), and Medina del Campo (1543). See Conde.

6 As late as the seventeenth century, Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa attempted to define the genre, first by describing the novels’ current status, then by how they should be conceived of:

“por novelas al uso entiendo ciertas patrañas o consejas […] vienen a ser unas bien compuestas fábulas, unas artificiosas mentiras […] tomadas con el rigor que se debe, es una composición ingeniosísima, cuyo ejemplo obliga a imitación o escarmiento” (qtd. in Bonilla Cerezo 11). I thank Professor Bonilla Cerezo for the kind gift of his book.

Volume 34.1 (2014) 17Table of trucos, Tricks of the Trade

delighted readers with their jocose and often ribald plots, while the Italian novelle, especially Bandello’s, frequently if at times surreptitious-ly censored unacceptable social behavior.7

In what might be the earliest definition of “novela” in Spain, Lucas Gracián Dantisco, in his Galateo español, a glossed imitation of Giovanni Della Casa’s courtesy book Il Galateo, also refers to the two terms as if they were one and the same when discussing the importance of good storytelling:

Tales pueden ser las novelas y cuentos que allende del entreteni-miento y gusto, saquen dellas buenos exemplos, y moralidades, como hazian los antiguos fabuladores, que tan artificiosamente ha-blaron […] y a su imitacion debe procurar el que cuenta las fabulas y consejas o otro qualquier razonamiento. (103)

Even while referring to earlier story-tellers’ inventive oral delivery, the aim Lucas Gracián Dantisco assigns to contemporary novelas and cuentos to advance good examples and morals, is explained by means of a written example, which he titles “Novela del gran Soldan, con los amores de la linda Axa y el Principe de Napoles” (105).8 We can as-sume that Cervantes was aware of the “buenos exemplos” that Gracián Dantisco—as a humanist and censor who had written an aprobación for Cervantes’s Galatea in 1584—expected novels to offer their readers, since the two had long been friends. Moreover, as writers, both were familiar with contemporary literary expectations.9

7 According to Mary Gaylord, contemporary readers would understand the allusion to “two distinct kinds of narrative”; she ascribes their fusion in Cervantes’s novels to his wish to “put a personal copyright on a new form of storytelling” (109). For Bandello’s influence on Cervantes, see Zimic (224-33).

8 Gracián Dantisco’s dedication is dated 1582; the 1593 edition adds two brief narra-tives, both called “novelas,” taken from Juan de Timoneda’s Patrañuelo (Suárez Figaredo,

“Advertencia” 3).9 The “good examples” may also be taken as literary, according to Margherita Morreale,

the Galateo’s editor, who noted its introduction of Italianisms, but also criticized the book as a courtly manual “en tono menor” (71-79).


Some thirty years later, after having written numerous plays and published part one of Don Quixote, Cervantes formally took up Gracián Dantisco’s challenge. In his famous prologue to the Novelas ejemplares, he makes it clear that he had not attempted to imitate or follow in any way those ancient “fabulators”:10

Yo soy el primero que he novelado en lengua castellana, que las mu-chas novelas que en ella andan impresas, todas son traducidas de lenguas estranjeras, y éstas son mías propias, no imitadas ni hurta-das; mi ingenio las engendró, y las parió mi pluma, y van creciendo en los brazos de la estampa. (2: 52)

Given Cervantes’s memorably ludic attitude in his prologue to part one of Don Quixote, where he purports to be not the father, but the stepfa-ther of his book, the seriousness and assurance with which he informs his readers that these novels are his alone—not imitated or stolen, but engendered by his intelligence and birthed through his pen—have in-spired countless commentaries.11 In their efforts to explain Cervantes’s elusive imitative gesture as it is played out in his novels, modern crit-ics have posited similarities as well as disparities between them and their suggested models.12 To many critics, Cervantes’s evident parody of other kinds of literature in Don Quixote, along with the unquestion-able ambiguity of its moral message, works resolutely against any paral-lelism with the short stories that Cervantes titled novelas and deemed ejemplares. Alban Forcione, one of the novels’ most perceptive critics, sums up the issue neatly:

10 Ironically, Robert Scholes revalidates the medieval term to describe postmodern writ-ers who “delight in design,” marking a shift from a naturalistic content to a “care for form” (2, 41).

11 On Cervantes’s prologues, see Boyd; McSpadden; Rivers; and Weiger (among others).12 Agustín González de Amezúa y Mayo is one of the earliest and most vocal in declar-

ing that the novels owe their literary structure to the Italian novelle: “la arquitectura literaria, acabada y perfecta de las ejemplares, diósela a no dudarlo la novela corta italiana, tan conocida de antiguo asimismo por él” (1: 440).


In view of Don Quijote’s unsparing criticism of the poetics of ex-emplarity and its powerful construction of a radically new, anti-es-sentialist, fictional world which was to become itself the exemplary literary model for modern man [sic], Cervantists of the twentieth century have frequently found it difficult to account for Cervantes’s Exemplary Novels. (“Afterword” 334).13

Concentrating on the novels’ content and plot structure to distin-guish generic variances, Cervantes criticism introduced yet another di-chotomy: that of the “romance” versus the “novel.” This distinction was first suggested by Ruth El Saffar in her book, Novel to Romance, which divided the novels into an earlier grouping ending with the destruction of the central character or with no conclusion; and a later grouping that showed detachment from everyday reality. El Saffar’s typology, based on the differences that she found in parts one and two of Don Quixote and in Persiles y Sigismunda, was challenged by E. C. Riley, among others, who contended that Cervantes wrote in “either vein or in some combination of the two” (70). More recently, Anthony Cascardi has argued that this split is not to be found in the different works, but within the tensions of each novel: although the novels offer the subject freedom, closure is achieved only by means of a morally binding law (“Exemplary” 68). Stephen Boyd comes to the same conclusion: “An important concomitant of Cervantes’ original approach to exemplarity is that the characters in his stories do not simply exist as ‘illustrations’ of good and bad qualities and behaviours” (29). Instead,Boyd explores the dynamics of opposites—of vice and virtue—in the characters rath-er than through them (29). Still another approach, one that extends to the novels’ audience, is that of Nicholas Spadaccini and Jenaro Talens, who displace exemplarity from the author’s moral lesson to the reader’s imaginative exploration of the self (117, 120).

13 Forcione himself delves deeply into the similarities between Don Quixote and at least one of his novels, the “Colloquy of the Dogs,” which to him “goes beyond any of Cervantes’ other works except the Quixote, with the result that a kind of literary experimentalism and doc-trinal instability pervade the text in a way that at first glance recalls the novelistic masterpiece more than any other of the novellas” (Mystery 17).


Nineteenth-century Cervantes scholars instead compared the vari-ous literary genres familiar to Cervantes to attempt to decipher the Novelas ejemplares’ place in his oeuvre. In his Orígenes de la novela, Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo states that he studied the earlier Spanish stories, which he dismisses as “incipiente literatura,” to better gauge the success of Cervantes’s novels, “para que se comprenda qué prodigio fueron las Novelas ejemplares […] surgiendo de improviso como sol de verdad y poesía entre tanta confusión y tanta niebla” (cxl). Along with others of his generation, Menéndez y Pelayo exalted Cervantes’s “divina espontaneidad,” admiring his light after what seemed so much literary darkness. To be sure, critics have long since rejected his view of an in-tuitive Cervantes and of a pre-Cervantine inchoate literature; nonethe-less, we still have much to learn by historicizing the genre in light of its contemporary reception. As Thomas Hart asserts, the modern compul-sion to divide the novels into two opposing or integrative groups, such as was done by El Saffar and others, was foreign to Cervantes’s contem-poraries (2). The title of Michael Gerli’s article, “Romance and Novel: Idealism and Irony in “La Gitanilla,” anticipates the interplay between these two apparently oppositional modes. Yet the conundrum we face in assigning a specific typology to a literary work comes from the fact that the terms, established a priori, quickly become fixed, irreducible categories. Even to say, as Gerli does, that Cervantes was aware of two distinct kinds of literature, one that he criticizes for its lack of unity and verisimilitude, and the “type he offers in its place,” requires the author to have preemptively recognized their existence and assumed their difference (“Idealism” 30n2).14

In effect, the term “romance,” as it is used today to refer to early modern Spanish idealist fiction, was not in Cervantes’s vocabulary; it is both an anachronism and an Anglicism.15 The English term itself, as Barbara Fuchs argues in her study of romance, admits to its elusive na-ture, since it defies proper definition (1). If, therefore, we wish to appre-

14 See also Gerli (Refiguring Authority 24-39). 15 This is not to say that the term, which etymologically harks to the medieval French

romanz or work written in the vernacular, is not serviceable to our present understanding of idealist literature. For a valuable discussion of the term as applied to some exemplary novels, see Gerli (Refiguring Authority 26-27).


hend the Novelas ejemplares according to the mindset of the period, we cannot transform or assimilate them into an inexistent or foreign genre, but must seek their shifting meaning within their historical context. It helps, then, to know that Juan Gaitán de Vozmediano, the translator of Giraldi Cinthio’s “cien novelas,” or Hecatommithi, published in Toledo in 1590, considered the Italian short stories a new form of writing in Spain that would attract authors:

Ya que hasta ahora se ha usado poco en España este género de libros, por no haber comenzado á traducir los de Italia y Francia, no solo habrá de aquí adelante quien por su gusto los traduzca; pero será por ventura parte el ver que se estima esto tanto en los extrangeros para que los naturales hagan lo que nunca han hecho, que es com-poner novela. (Qtd. in Fernández de Navarrete 137)

One need not fully accept Vozmediano’s claim that few or no trans-lations had been done of French or Italian novels (at least three had already been published of the Decameron), or that the stories had not been read in Italian, to sense the enthusiasm with which he heralds the genre. Although no doubt a self-serving statement, his assertion that Spaniards would begin something never before attempted broadens the question of the genre’s definition to that of its function and purpose. The Hecatommithi responded to Counter-Reformation moral concerns, which had resulted in the Decameron’s censorship and its expurgated edition printed in 1573. Indeed, in spite of conceding Boccaccio’s im-portance in establishing Tuscan as the literary language, Bartolomeo Cavalcanti’s dedicatory letter to the Hecatommithi stresses the 1565 edi-tion’s call to virtue and good behavior, in contrast to the Decameron’s lasciviousness.16

16 “Perchè, ancora che quelle del Boccaci siano dette felicemente e che a ragione possia-mo dire che egli solo in quella opera ci abbia mostrata la vera forma del dire toscano […] porto nondimeno con loro molto spesso più del lascivo che non si converrebe” (qtd. in Aldomá García 17). Giraldi Cinthio’s treatise on the novel, Discorso intorno al comporre dei romanzi, published in Venice in 1554, may well have influenced Cervantes in its insistence on verisi-militude and admiratio, following neo-Aristotelian tenets (Aldomá García 18). For its probable influence on La Galatea, see Allen.


When comparing Cervantes’s novels to the Italian genre, therefore, the functionality of their title, both as novela and as ejemplar, needs to be reconsidered. Before affirming that he was the first to “novelize” in Castilian, Cervantes had already problematized the process by al-luding to it as a game: “Mi intento ha sido poner en plaza de nuestra república una mesa de trucos, donde cada uno pueda llegar a entre-tenerse, sin daño de barras. Digo, sin daño del alma ni del cuerpo, porque los ejercicios honestos y agradables, antes aprovechan que da-ñan” (Novelas ejemplares 1: 52). Sebastián de Covarrubias defines the

“mesa de trucos” as a form of billiards introduced recently into Spain by the Italians. The Diccionario de Autoridades describes how the game was played: “Juego de destreza y habilidad que se executa en una mesa dispuesta a este fin […] siendo el fin principal dar con la bola propria a la del contrario, con otros lances y golpes, con que se ganan las rayas hasta acabar el juego” (370). Cervantes’s metaphorical allusion to his collection of novels as a game table (“he de poner una mesa de trucos”) invites his readers to entertain themselves by joining in the game. The Horatian dictum of prodesse et delectare is again recalled, as he is quick to remark on the novels’ virtuousness as protection against any harm to the reader’s body or soul. The novels’ ludic intent along with their moral decency is further reiterated by Fray Juan Bautista Capataz, who approved their publication for their “eutropelia,” which he defines as

“entretenimiento honesto” that combines both the qualities of delight and instruction: “porque entretienen con su novedad, enseñan con sus ejemplos a huir vicios y seguir virtudes” (45).17 As important in Fray Juan Bautista’s “aprobación” is his statement that the author’s success in carrying out his intended purpose honors the Spanish language, all the while warning other countries of the harm that comes from vices:

“y el autor cumple con su intento, con que da honra a nuestra lengua castellana, y avisa a las repúblicas de los daños que de algunos vicios se siguen” (45). The novel’s moral objective is thus conflated with the

17 Following Jones, Hart points to the description as a means of combining opposing categories: “The concept of eutrapelia thus dissolves the apparent opposition in the familiar Horatian doctrine that poetry should be pleasant and morally beneficial: poetry is beneficial because it gives pleasure” (16). See also Jones; Thompson; and Wardropper.


political import of the Spanish language implicitly surpassing that of Italian, since translations from that language are no longer required.18

What Cervantes implies through the game metaphor is his novels’ double function, the dialectic between the two halves of the title’s ap-parent dichotomy. The novels’ material exhibition in the most public of urban sites, the “plaza de nuestra república,” becomes a double chal-lenge: by “truco” is meant a competitive sport, in which one player must knock the other’s ball either into a pocket or through an iron hoop to score. The reader is invited to enjoy the game by playing it “sin daño de barra,” hitting the hoop without penalty, a metaphor for read-ing the novels without any bodily or spiritual risk. The author, however, must set up the table where the game will be played: in the market-place, where his game is to displace other authors’ texts. The freedom granted the reader to take pleasure in the game is not one available to the author, who must exhibit his works in order to compete with other writers, while readers exchange entertainment for instruction and vice versa, since one salient meaning of the term “trucco” in Italian is that of “trueco” or exchange.19 As I mention at greater length below, writers not only competed against each other for the publication, popularity, and marketability of their literary products, they vied with each other as to the censorship they would incur. Thus, by drawing on two appar-ently opposite genres, Cervantes’s game metaphor confounds one or the other supposed intent assigned the novels, affording the reader his or her own selection of interpretation.

At the end of his novels’ prologue, Cervantes proffers a clue to his stratagem of disguising pleasure with exemplarity and morality with aesthetic delight. Because he dared to dedicate them to his politically powerful mentor, the Count of Lemos, he has enclosed within the nov-

18 Anxiety about the superiority of Italian over Castilian began as early as Juan Boscán’s and Garcilaso de la Vega’s introduction of Italianate lyrics; although the Marquis of Santillana had earlier composed sonnets, Boscán—understanding the implications of humanist imita-tion—claimed to be the first to write poetry in the Italian style (Boscán 89).

19 While it is tempting to apply the metaphor of “trick” to the game table, this meaning of “truco” is not recorded by Joan Corominas, Sebastián de Covarrubias, or the Diccionario de Autoridades. It is closer to “trueco” in the sense of exchange, from the Italian “trucco” or

“baratto,” terms Cervantes would have known.


els a hidden mystery that elevates them presumably to higher truths—but which also, I contend, places them above the criticism frequently aimed at short stories: “que pues yo he tenido osadía de dirigir estas novelas al gran Conde de Lemos, algún misterio tienen escondido que las levanta” (1: 53). The dedication to such a high-ranking noble excuses him from having to justify or specify the novels’ moral or aesthetic intent, all the while allowing the reader (and the critic) the liberty of interpretation. Accordingly, two of the poets who dedicated prefatory poems to the collection discern in the novels Cervantes’s penchant for seeking truth through fiction.20 This notion forms the core mes-sage of the first sonnet, by the Marquis of Alcañices, which perceives Cervantes’s novels as both a “moral example” and “sweet admonition” whose combinatory poetics create an illusory paradise for the reader:

Si en el moral ejemplo y dulce aviso,Cervantes, de la diestra grave lira,En docta frasis el concepto miraEl lector retratado un paraíso; (1: 54)

The reader should know instead that the paradisiacal fiction is con-strued as a lie that will expose the truth:

Mira mejor que con el arte quisoVuestro ingenio sacar de la mentiraLa verdad, cuya llama solo aspiraA lo que es voluntario hacer preciso. (1: 55)

The second sonnet “a los lectores” by Juan de Solís Mejía also reveals that the novel secretly hides the truth:

¡O tú, que aquestas fábulas leíste:Si lo secreto dellas contemplaste,

20 Although the literature on Don Quixote’s play between truth and fiction is extensive, there are few studies of the Novelas ejemplares on the subject. See Colin Thompson’s fine essay, although I take a different view.


Verás que son de la verdad engaste,Que por tu gusto tal disfraz se viste! (1: 56)

Assigning the didactic term of “fábula” as a synonym of the novels, the poem enjoins the reader to uncover the novels’ hidden secret and observe their truth, which has remained disguised precisely to offer the reader the pleasure of discovery.21 The sonnet’s second quatrain clari-fies that the author, knowing all humans’ disposition, has applied the Horatian dictum by sweetening the moral message, thus nourishing both body and soul:

Bien, Cervantes insigne, conocistela humana inclinacion, cuando mezclastelo dulce con lo honesto y lo templaste tan bien que plato al cuerpo y alma hiciste. (1: 56)

Any attempt to recontextualize the Novelas ejemplares, however, would remain incomplete if delimited only to the genre’s internal dia-lectics of moral doctrine and entertainment, with no discussion of their role in Cervantes’s experience as an author. If he ostensibly declared his novels’ exemplarity while intermixing their entertainment function to conceal a deeper truth value, he did so at least in part to protect his work from censors. Anthony Close has commented on what he calls the metamorphosing or dissimulating of the Spanish comic mentality after 1559, the year of the publication of Fernando de Valdés’s Index of Forbidden Books, since after that date, the genre of the short story or novela—which he categorizes as comic prose fiction—was either expurgated, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron and Lazarillo de Tormes, or censored altogether, as was the case with Erasmian satire.22 Close points out that after Philip II’s death in 1598, when Italian novelle circulated

21 The term “fabula,” however, has been compared negatively to Cervantes’s “maestría” in composing novels; see Márquez Villanueva (“Novela contra fábula”).

22 Carmen Rabell, in her thorough study of the impact of the Counter-Reformation on generic change, suggests that the Spanish novel’s ambiguity was due to the controversies exhib-ited in canon and civil laws. For a study of Valdés and the Inquisition’s Indices, see González Novalín. See also Manning.


in greater numbers, interest in the comic mode renewed, owing to the court’s relaxed austerity; to the increasing commercialization of urban culture, including theater; and to the best-selling status of the Guzmán de Alfarache, which encouraged authors to again pick up the strains of comic discourse (28).23

Nevertheless, popular literature continued to be suspect for em-phasizing solely its diversionary factor (Hart 12-13). For Covarrubias, entretenimiento meant anything that could distract, such as a game, conversation, or a lecture (526). His definition of novela, which al-ludes directly to Boccaccio yet maintains its affiliation with cuentos and patrañas, elides any mention of virtue: “Novela, un cuento bien compuesto o patraña para entretener los oyentes, como las novelas de Bocacio” (831). Similarly, among the term’s meanings in Italian are discorso, conversazione, chiachierata: discourse, conversation, chatter. Novellar is to chat with someone; to gossip. By extension, novella as-sumed something frivolous or a trifle, as in “I have no time to waste on these novellas.”24 Thomas Aquinas’s definition of eutrapelia, the term utilized by Fray Juan Bautista Capataz, dismissed any adverse judg-ment, categorizing the term as “playfulness [that] includes making a light-hearted insult by way of entertainment and fun and not to dis-credit and upset the other. And this can be quite innocent, provided the circumstances are right” (qtd. in Thompson 262).25 When Covarrubias defined the term in 1611, he began by reiterating Aquinas: “Un entre-tenimiento de burlas graciosas y sin perjuyzio” (574); yet he also gave a far more negative definition that he attributes to Saint Paul: “San Pablo toma esta palabra en mala parte: vale tanto como chocarrería,

23 According to Muñoz Medrano, up to 1600, Spaniards read only Italian novelists, mainly in Italian. Although numerous translations had already been made, the language was sufficiently close to Spanish to be read in the original.

24 “Nell’uso tosc. ant. (ma non del tutto scomparso), discorso, conversazione, chiac-chierata: entrare in novelle con qualcuno, mettersi a chiacchierare; tre spiriti venner sotto noi, […] Per che nostra n. si ristette, E intendemmo pur ad essi poi (Dante); ma son novelle!, sono chiacchiere! In partic., mettere in novella o in novelle, canzonare, beffare: le monache incomin-ciarono a dargli noia e a metterlo in novelle, come spesse volte avviene che altri fa de’ mutoli (Boccaccio). Per estens., faccenda di poco conto, in frasi come: non ho tempo da perdere in codeste n., e sim” (www.treccani.it/vocabolario/novella).

25 Thompson’s own citation comes from Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.


obscenitas et stultiloquium et scurrilitas” (574). Despite the disguised ex-emplarity with which Cervantes may have wished to imbue his novels (Thompson 266), the juxtaposition of “insulto” with “diversión,” and of “chocarrería” with “entretenimiento,” hints at a more violent dialec-tic than the game “sin daño de barra” set up by the author in the plaza.

Surely wary of the real consequences of the genre’s moral ambi-guity, Cervantes’s friends intended to safeguard his reputation as an author of exemplary stories that were neither obscene nor scandalous. Thus, Capataz’s aprobación extends his definition of eutrapelia to cover the novels’ exemplarity, whereas another of his friends, Juan de Solís Mejía, praises them as Neoplatonist expressions of moral doctrine. His dedicatory sonnet’s final tercets stress that, like truth, the novels’ moral philosophy, whose virtue and greatness are never appreciated by mere mortals, is disguised as fiction so as not to elicit contempt or derision:

Rica y pomposa vas, filosofía;Ya, doctrina moral, con este trajeNo habrá quien de ti burle o te desprecie.Si agora te faltare compañía,Jamás esperes del mortal linajeQue tu virtud y tus grandezas precie. (1: 57)

As we have seen with Capataz’s aprobación and Gracián Dantisco’s Galateo español, Solís Mejía’s sonnet dwells on the serious aspects of storytelling. Cervantes’s decision to title his novels “exemplary” both protected and legitimized them, but their superior narrative quality over the Italian translations ensured sales as well. Indeed, he seems to have followed in his novels Gracián Dantisco’s advice that stories by courtiers demanded refined language and the ability to narrate plots well: 26

26 Both Gracián Dantisco and Cervantes could have learned this from Il cortegiano, whether in Boscán’s translation or in the Italian. Reaching as far back as Federico Fregoso’s description in chapter two, the practice of story-telling “helps to account for the Cinquecento commitment to the genres of novella and romanzo as literary activities and […] as objects of literary-critical scrutiny” (Norton and Cottino-Jones 322).


Procure el gentil-hombre que se pone a contar algun cuento o fa-bula, que sea tal que no tenga palabras deshonestas, ni sucias, ni puercas, que puedan causar asco a quien le oye, pues le puede dezir por rodeos y terminos limpios y honestos, sin nombrar claramente cosas semejantes, especialmente si en el auditorio huviesse mugeres, porque alli se debe tener mas tiento y ser la maraña del tal cuento clara y con tal artificio que vaya cebado el gusto, hasta que con el remate y paradero de la novela, queden satisfechos y sin duda. (103)

Although Gracián Dantisco takes care to explain a novel’s rhetorical dispositio, he also insists on elocutio, its “traje,” as Solís Mejía mentions in his sonnet. The formal aspects of language are intimately bound to what Norbert Elias has called the civilizing process, both as manifes-tations of nation and social formations. The Galateo español, like its Italian model, and Baldassare Castiglione’s earlier courtesy manual, Il cortegiano, translated into Spanish by Boscán in 1534, aimed to trans-form bourgeois men and women into courtiers and courtesans. If good grammar and elegant language informed courtly behavior, by Gracián Dantisco’s standards, good story-telling signaled good breeding.

We may argue that Cervantes was aware of such perceptions in his continued defense of his novels. Taking the literary definition of exemplary, in his Viaje del Parnaso, finished shortly after the Novelas were published, he boasts that he had furnished the Spanish language the means by which nonsense could be converted into a proper piece of fiction:27

Yo he abierto en mis Novelas un caminopor do la lengua castellana puedemostrar con propiedad un desatino. (vv. 25-27)

In this, perhaps the most autobiographical of his works, Cervantes not only recalls but insists on the political value that Fray Juan Bautista had

27 For the Viaje as propaganda, see Stagg.


attributed to his use of the Spanish language. He complains, however, that his inventiveness has negatively affected his success:28

Yo soy aquel que en la invención excedea muchos […] (vv. 28-29)

***Con mi corta fortuna no me ensaño,aunque por verme en pie como me veo,y en tal lugar, pondero así mi daño.Con poco me contento, aunque deseo mucho. (vv. 64-68)

Cervantes’s lament over his bad luck (“corta fortuna”) despite his cre-ativity or invención anticipates his prologue two years later to his Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos, nunca representados. It begins with a captatio benevolentiae that inverts the humilitas topos by asking the reader to forgive his lack of modesty: “me perdones si vieres que en este prólogo salgo algún tanto de mi acostumbrada modestia” (“Prólogo” 7). As in the Novelas ejemplares, he prides himself on being “the first”; this time, the first to represent on stage what lies hidden in the soul:

fui el primero que representase las imaginaciones y los pensamien-tos escondidos del alma, sacando figuras morales al teatro, con ge-neral y gustoso aplauso de los oyentes; compuse en este tiempo hasta veinte comedias o treinta, que todas ellas se recitaron sin que se les ofreciese ofrenda de pepinos ni de otra cosa arrojadiza; co-rrieron su carrera sin silbos, gritas ni barahundas. (“Prólogo” 9-10)

In effect, Cervantes’s penury did not keep him from publicizing his literary talent, a move that he may have found necessary after his rejection by the Argensola brothers to accompany the Count of Lemos to Naples (Stagg 25). In the Licentiate Márquez Torres’s aprobación to

28 Cervantes may here be claiming that, as Egido has stated, he sought the verisimilar plots required by inventio (26).


part two of Don Quixote, we read that the novels were praised by the French entourage that visited Spain in 1615 to arrange the wedding of the Infanta Ana Mauricia to Louis XIII. Márquez recorded their com-ments: “Apenas oyeron el nombre de Miguel de Cervantes, cuando se comenzaron a hacer lenguas, encareciendo la estimación en que, así en Francia como en los reinos sus confinantes, se tenían sus obras: la Galatea […] y las Novelas” (2.prelim:30). When told that Cervantes is a poor, old soldier who is not appreciated in Spain, one of the Frenchmen responds that he should remain poor so he can keep writ-ing: “Si necesidad le ha de obligar a escribir, plega a Dios que nunca tenga abundancia, para que con sus obras, siendo él pobre, haga rico a todo el mundo” (2.prelim:31). The aprobación’s ironic dialogue—since it simultaneously exalts the author, resents his treatment by Spaniards, and protests his deprivation—has appeared to some critics to have come from Cervantes’s pen rather than from the Licentiate’s (Mayáns y Siscar 56-57; Canavaggio 38n3).

Although, as we have seen, Cervantes had numerous friends who supported him and admired his works, others reacted strongly against the Novelas, either because of their dislike for the genre itself, or be-cause they were in competition with their author. In Tirso de Molina’s miscellany, Los cigarrales de Toledo, which was not published until after Cervantes’s death, one of the protagonists in the “Cigarral Segundo” remembers Cervantes, perhaps ironically, as “nuestro español Bocacio” (Cigarrales 236). The Mercedarian undoubtedly had the Novelas ejem-plares in mind when he describes a promised collection of novels in a

“Segunda parte” of the Cigarrales that was never published: “Tambien han de seguir mis buenas o malas fortunas, Doce Novelas, ni hurtadas a las toscanas, ni ensartadas unas tras otras como procesión de disci-plinantes, sino con su argumento que lo comprehenda todo” (Cigarrales 108). Since the phrase “ensartadas como procesión de disciplinantes” refers to an arbitrary order, as in Cervantes’s collection, the negative allusion to Cervantes is obvious.29 Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa was an

29 According to Luis Vázquez Fernández, the editor of the Cigarrales, Tirso here pro-claims his own notion of the “arte de novelar,” “en contraposición con el Boccaccio y con


even harsher critic of the Novelas ejemplares: shortly after Cervantes’s death, in his Plaza universal de todas ciencias y artes, partly translated from the Italian in 1612, he bitterly criticizes Cervantes for imitating the Italian novelle, blaming the novels for behaving like literary pro-curers and attacking “la virtud de las mujeres casadas, la castidad de las doncellas, y la preciosa honestidad de las viudas” (566). He also mocks the author for including some of his biographical anecdotes in his fiction, such as in “El amante liberal” and “El capitán cautivo,” and for continuing to write prologues and dedications at death’s door (Wickersham 68).30

Cervantes’s greatest literary nemesis, however, one who had already defeated him as playwright and poet, was Lope de Vega. The two were still on good terms when Lope wrote his epic, La Dragontea, which boasted a prefatory sonnet by Cervantes, yet by 1604, their friendship had cooled considerably.31 Believing that Cervantes had penned an in-sulting soneto en cabo roto against him, Lope or his academic circle responded with a far more personal and virulent attack (Martín 157-58). Cervantes expressed his continued resentment of Lope, as Ellen Lokos sustains, in the lines of the Viaje del Parnaso:

Llovió otra nube al gran Lope de VegaPoeta insigne, a cuyo verso o prosa ninguna le aventaja ni aun le llega. (vv. 388-390)

Lokos compares the actions of the poets, who must climb Mount Parnassus to attain fame, with Lope’s facile poetry and prose that hy-perbolically rains down on—and drowns out—his contenders (66). The mention of Lope’s prose is significant, since before the Viaje’s pub-lication, Lope had declared in La hermosura de Angélica, that he found

“Los cuentos y novelas cosa indigna de hombres de letras” (qtd. in

Cervantes” (Cigarrales 108n3). González Amezúa y Mayo, however, believed that Tirso was a fan of the Novelas (616-17).

30 According to Crawford, Suárez de Figueroa may have envied the favor that the Count of Lemos bestowed on Cervantes (67).

31 For a history of their relationship, see Pedraza Jiménez. For Cervantes’s vindication through poetry and in Don Quixote, see Martín.


Hernández Valcárcel 5). As this statement was part of a discourse given by Lope at the literary academy founded by the wealthy veinticuatro of Seville, Juan de Arguijo, himself a renowned poet, the barb may have been aimed at Cervantes’s still-unpublished Novelas ejemplares.

The competition among and within literary academies was dead-ly serious, since the reunions opened doors to wealthy patrons; not one to miss a good opportunity, Lope dedicated his Rimas to Arguijo. Cervantes’s marginalization from the more prestigious academy fed his resentment against the younger poet and playwright, as he did not belong to the Arguijo group, but to a less important and more rowdy academy. This academy was infamous for directing sonetadas or bur-lesque sonnets at their competition, and it was at one of these sonnets that Lope took umbrage. However, the members of Arguijo’s acad-emy were known for their storytelling; moreover, according to Beatriz Chenot and Maxime Chevalier, Arguijo had collected 691 cuentos in manuscript that covered a broad range of folkloric topics (6-7). Lope’s comment may well have been intended to elevate his work over these storytellers. If so, it shows that for Lope at this time, cuentos and nove-las were still one and the same; it also proved that both the classic style to which Arguijo’s own excellent sonnets aspired, and the more realistic, earthy mode of the cuentos could inhabit the same realm.

Although the two authors would never reconcile, after Cervantes’s death, Lope conceded the importance of Cervantes’s novels by com-posing four of his own. Although critics have rightly noted their simi-larities, there are nevertheless considerable disparities; María Ángeles Fernández Cifuentes, for one, comments that Lope’s “incursión es-porádica en el género desvirtúa de alguna manera el intento cervan-tino de dignificarlo y darle carta de naturaleza” (41).32 Eschewing the title of “exemplary,” Lope’s novels no longer found it necessary to dis-simulate from the Horatian delectare. The few novels that Lope did write, however, do not obscure his realization of the changes that had accrued to the genre. The dedication to Marcia Leonarda of his first novel, Las fortunas de Diana, clearly illustrates his appreciation of the

32 On the similarities between Cervantes and Lope, see Brownlee.


radical changes undergone by the novel since Cervantes published his. Given its importance, I cite the paragraph in its entirety:

En tiempo menos discreto que el de ahora, aunque de más hom-bres sabios, llamaban a las novelas cuentos. Estos se sabían de me-moria y nunca, que yo me acuerde, los vi escritos, porque se redu-cían sus fábulas a una manera de libros que parecían historias y se llamaban en lenguaje puro castellano caballerías, como si dijésemos

“hechos grandes de caballeros valerosos.” Fueron en esto los espa-ñoles ingeniosísimos, porque en la invención ninguna nación del mundo les ha hecho ventaja, como se ve en tantos Esplandianes, Febos, Palmerines, Lisuartes, Florambelos, Esferamundos y el celebra-do Amadís, padre de toda esta máquina que compuso una dama portuguesa. El Boyardo, el Ariosto y otros siguieron este género, si bien en verso; y aunque en España también se intenta, por no dejar de intentarlo todo, también hay libros de novelas, de ellas traduci-das de italianos y de ellas propias en que no le faltó gracia y estilo a Miguel Cervantes. Confieso que son libros de grande entreteni-miento y que podrían ser ejemplares, como algunas de las Historias trágicas del Bandello, pero habían de escribirlos hombres cientí-ficos, o por lo menos grandes cortesanos, gente que halla en los desengaños notables sentencias y aforismos. (Las fortunas 104-06)

Lope’s mistaken belief that the novela devolved into the novel of chival-ry, which he celebrates as a sign of Spanish literary achievement, none-theless reiterates the early affiliation, grounded in the oral tradition, between the novela and the cuento, as well as the lack of distinction between long and short tales. He continues to misinterpret generic genealogies by attributing the emergence of the romanzi, or heroic po-ems, to the imitation in Italy of the novels of chivalry by such poets as Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto. Yet what Lope does understand vis-à-vis these generic shifts is that by the time he under-took to write his novels, the oral cuento could no longer be confused with the novel’s written form, which he calls “libros de novelas,” both as translated from the Italian and as written in Spanish.


The ambiguity with which Lope’s novels deal with moral lessons evinces even more the generic turn initiated by Cervantes.33 The altera-tions in literary taste and social perspective, from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century, would guide the recovery of the novela from the rejection of the earlier forms dependent on the comicity of the Spanish short stories and the Italians. Perhaps most importantly, the need to dissimulate the novel’s entertainment value, to present an exemplariness both in form and in fiction, was no longer central to the author’s purpose. By the middle decades of the seven-teenth century, the abundance of printed books, the growth of reading, and the demand for what B. W. Ife calls “old products in new formats” (7-8), ensured that the Horatian dictum would tilt away from prodesse and toward delectare. Such was the popularity of the novelas that print-ers, applying their own tricks of their trade, cobbled together clandes-tine collections with old approbations or, even in some cases, without real authors’ names (Ripoll 161).34 If Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares were not the only novels called “exemplary” during this period, the changes he introduced reformulated the genre from its uncertain beginnings to such an extent that the next generation of authors—beginning with Lope de Vega and followed by a stream of writers, among them Juan Pérez de Montalbán, Alonso de Castillo Solórzano, Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo, Tirso de Molina, María de Zayas and Mariana de Carvajal—would recognize his novels’ singularity, all the while chal-lenging them and bringing their own to the mesa de trucos.

[email protected] of Miami

33 Samson rightly notes that Lope’s “refusal to pass sentence ironizes the rhetorical pro-cedure of offering up sententiae, even as it undermines the authority of the narrator to do so” (144).

34 “Fruto del gusto de la época por las novelas es la aparición de recopilaciones fácil-mente abordables por los impresores al poder rescatar viejas licencias y censuras. En otros casos, se puede tratar, simplemente, de ediciones clandestinas” (Ripoll 161).


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Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares: Table of trucos, Tricks of the Trade

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