1
Julio Cortázar, «Diario para un cuento», Deshoras (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1982), 158.
2
All references to these novelas are from volume 2 of Harry Sieber's edition of Cervantes' Novelas ejemplares (Madrid: Cátedra, 1981).
3
To avoid confusion, I shall use the singular form
(and not the plural
) for plural as well as singular
meaning.
4
I have taken the translation from Forcione (44):
|
Forcione discusses the literary sources of this divination (44-48).
There are two minor discrepancies between Cipión's version (346) and Berganza's (338). These could well be Cervantes' inadvertent errors: he is not, after all, renowned for accurate citation. Or they could be attributed to numerous others, ranging from the dogs to Cervantes' typesetters.
5
There is an ambiguity here concerning whether la Cañizares is present at the deathbed scene and hears the divination directly, or whether she receives it from la Montiela. Because of the text's insistence on la Camacha's speaking to la Montiela (e.g., la Camacha «llamó a tu madre y le dijo...»; «Esto dijo la Camacha a tu madre...», 338-39), I favor the latter. If this is the case, a further ambiguity concerns how la Cañizares comes to know the prophecy, whether by reading or listening («Tomólo tu madre por escrito y de memoria, y yo lo fijé en la mía...»).
6
Ruth El Saffar analyzes both the anticipation and the centrality of the witch episode in her study Cervantes: El casamiento engañoso and El coloquio de los perros, 59-70. See also sections devoted to these novelas in her Novel to Romance, especially 72-81.
7
José María Pozuelo attempts to produce such a scheme for the novela. The result is applicable neither to the entire novela, since narrative strata continually change, nor to any particular moment in the text, since both Campuzano' s autobiographical tale and his Colloquy are made to occupy different levels of the hierarchy at the same time, whereas in fact they should be somehow parallel and mutually exclusive in terms of discursive time. Pozuelo also seems to be unaware of several levels of enunciation / reception.
John Barth (54) much more successfully plots out complex citation in other works by taking temporality into account.
8
Jorge Luis Borges, «Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote», in Prosa completa (Barcelona: Bruguera, 1980), 1:425-33.
9
The classic structuralist analyses of narrative all elude questions concerning process, preferring to deal with a more stable entity, the textual product (Levi-Strauss, Genette, Todorov...). Oddly enough, recent narratology seems not to have taken up the challenge of rethinking «levels» in terms of the dynamic processes involved (e.g., Bal, Rimmon-Kenan). Deconstruction, for its part, seems to be as entrapped as ever in this sort of terminology.
10
After this article had gone to press, I came across the following quotation which may further illuminate what Cervantes meant by having his priest call pastoral romances libros de entendimiento. It is from the glosas to the allegorical bucolic satire Coplas de Mingo Revulgo (c. 1464):
| (Quoted in Mia Gerhardt, Essai d'analyse littéraire de la Pastorale dans les littératures italienne, espagnole et française, The Hague: Van Gorcum, 1953, p. 63). See also Ed. Viviana Brodey (Madison, 1986), p. 95. | ||
and specifically equates pastoral (or at least bucolic) literature, intellect, and the search for truth, as embodied in the hidden meaning of the allegorical text.