161
Jorge Checa's paper, «Simbolismo y espacio en los tablados alegóricos y en las imágenes arquitectónicas de la literatura renacentista», read at the December, 1983 MLA Convention made me realize that, Cervantes, following his own practice of changing the accepted meanings of Renaissance terms, turns around a current Renaissance concept to give psychological depth to an allegorical abstraction.
162
For the parodic implications of turning a rhetoric term, antonomasia, into a proper name see Ernst R. Curtius, Literatura europea y Edad Media latina, 2 vols., translated by Margit Frank Alatorre and Antonio Alatorre (México, 1955), II, 593; and María Rosa Lida, «Perduración de la literatura antigua en Occidente» (Romance Philology 5 (1951-2), 114-5. For the phonetic parodic significance of the name see Dominique Reyre, Dictionnaire des noms des personnages du «Don Quichotte» de Cervantes (Paris: Editions Hispaniques, 1980), pp. 40-1.
163
I am indebted to professor E. C. Riley who was present when I delivered this paper, for alerting me to the existence of Agustín Rodondo's article, «De Don Clavijo a Clavileño: algunos aspectos de la tradición carnavalesca y cazurra en el Quijote» (Edad de Oro, 3 [1984], 181-99), a reprint of which the author was so kind as to send me. In his thought-provoking article, Professor Redondo shows how Cervantes' story abounds in sexual allusions made in a burlesque, insinuating language directed at the «accompliced reader» and aimed at deriding the established values of the dominant ideology. Professor Redondo's perspective is different from my own, as is the context each of us perceives in Cervantes' multi-contextual fiction.
164
Dolorida's name derives from
,
fraud, deceit, astuteness. Her nickname, Lobuna, derives from
loba, a figurative term for a
prostitute and a courtesan. Her squire Trifaldín, a name that
misleadingly appears to be only a diminutive of Trifaldi, derives,
nevertheless, from
truffatore, deceiver, thus being
associated with the buffoons and comedians of the Italian Commedia dell' Arte.
Dolorida is an image of deception and corruption. See Corominas'
Diccionario etimológico de la lengua
castellana, under
dolo, and
lobo.
165
Outside of the Quijote, the personification of Poetry as a beautiful, chaste, honest, discreet, and delicate maiden endowed with the power of uplifting the true poet's soul, is the underlying theme in La gitanilla. This novela ejemplar has captured the attention of scholars and its aesthetic thrust has been the subject of particular study by Karl-Ludwig Selig, in «Concerning the Structure of Cervantes' La Gitanilla» (Romanistisches Jahrbuch 13 [1962], 273-6); Edward C. Riley, in Cervantes Theory of the Novel, 2nd ed., (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1964, pp. 73-75); Alban K. Forcione, in Cervantes, Aristotle, and the «Persiles» (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970, pp. 311-3), and, again, in Cervantes and the Humanist Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982, pp. 215-22).
166
On the subject of mimesis see Riley, «Art and Nature, Imitation and Invention», op. cit., pp. 57-61. On the subject of Renaissance interpretations of imitation, see Forcione's Cervantes, Aristotle, and the «Persiles», pp. 45-8.
167
See Ernst R. Curtius, «El mono como metáfora», op. cit., pp. 750-2. See also Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the «Persiles», p. 147.
168
Alban K. Forcione writes with reference to La gitanilla that Cervantes is concerned «not only with distinguishing chastity and rational love from lust, authentic freedom from license, and true nature from physical nature, but also with separating genuine poetry from its debased forms». This critic adds that Cervantes «rejects the poetry that corrupts by its appeal to the passions» (Cervantes and the Humanist Vision, p. 217). His view coincides with that of Joaquín Casalduero who states that, for Cervantes, sensual, lascivious art is debasing. See Sentido y forma del «Quijote» (Madrid: Insula, 1966), p. 315.
169
See Cesare Ripa's representations of Poetry and Painting in Baroque and Rococo Pictorial Imagery. The 1758-60 Hertel Edition of Ripa's «Iconología» with 200 Engraved Illustrations, Ed. Edward A. Maser (New York: Dover, 1971), Plates 183 and 197, respectively. An analogy between Cervantes and Goya and Picasso on the monkey motif as an image of mimesis was touched upon in the oral presentation of this paper but has been omitted here for brevity's sake. It will be developed elsewhere.
170
Henry Green, Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers (London: Trubner, 1870); Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948).