—131→
Assumption College
Cervantes scholars were fortunate to greet the publication of two new books on Viage del Parnaso within the last year: Ellen Lokos's study, The Solitary Journey, which is the first volume of the new series edited by Eduardo Urbina, «Studies on Cervantes and His Times»; and Elias Rivers's new critical edition, which presents Viage along with Cervantes's occasional poetry for the Clásicos Castellanos series. Since a reassessment of Viage del Parnaso, which concerns both authors to some degree, is predicated on access to the text, I shall discuss Rivers's edition first.
Elias Rivers brings to his task years of editorial experience;
the result is an even-tempered, highly accessible edition of the poem. Rivers
compiles and summarizes footnotes from earlier editions rather than simply
crossreferencing them. He dismisses as
«prescindibles»
(97, n. 32) earlier critical squabbles over precise
geographical mapping of the fictional route from Valencia to Genoa. He notes
but does not alter verses that have not been understood but that appear clearly
in Cervantes's manuscripts. Likewise he simply states, in a few rare cases,
when we do not know who the person Cervantes mentioned is. Most importantly, he
gears his explications of poetics to students and general readers.
The edition is at its best when Rivers clarifies the poem's
burlesque language. He makes intelligible the sparring between Neptune and
Venus, as well as Neptune's disgust over clichéd references to his
reign. By highlighting neologisms, such as
«alfileresca»
(137), and unusual words unique to this Cervantine
text, such as
«trafalmeja»
(119), Rivers offers evidence for reading
Viage as a mock-epic, as he had argued before
in his 1973
Suma cervantina essay. Rivers's notes are
indeed in proportion to the significance of the passages for an overall
appreciation of the text. Cervantes's neologistic opposition
-«garcilasista o
timoneda»
(174), under which rubrics Cervantes groups good or
bad poets- merits one of the edition's longer notes.
While the modern annotated text of
Viage alone would be sufficient reason to
recommend Rivers's edition for classroom use, the four-part introduction with a
bibliography of critical studies on
Viage del Parnaso further recommends the text
to a wide range of potential readers. Rivers reviews the conventional issues of
genre and influence, aids the general reader with a chapter-by-chapter plot
summary, and suggests new avenues of interpretation. The first introductory
segment locates
Viage within the tradition of Menippean
satire while examining theories of influence posited by many other modern
Hispanists. (Rivers is not convinced by Lokos's theory of an anonymous Peruvian
source, calling it
«posible»
and
«discutible»
(15]). The second segment further considers
Viage's generic classification, as well as
the critical interventions that have helped forge this perception, to find the
—132→
Italian links, Caporali and Berni, among others, still most
convincing. Rivers concludes by noting the lack of attention that has been paid
to
«la presencia de Quevedo en la
'Adjuncta'»
(22), and suggests a new possibility for research
based on the recent work of Lía Schwartz Lerner on Menippean satire.
The last two segments address the importance of Viage del Parnaso and how to best read the poem. For Rivers, its importance lies in the autobiographical dimension. This difficult undertaking, an intertextual reading of life and art, is beyond the scope of the introduction. Nonetheless, Rivers does point to Jean Canavaggio's work as a model for the poetics of self-fashioning that he is advocating.
The final section of the introduction explains and justifies the joint publication of Cervantes's occasional poetry in the edition. Rivers argues that the best introduction to Viage del Parnaso may be Cervantes's two famous burlesque sonnets from the latter's crisis years. Once again Rivers focuses on the irreverent tone that Cervantes deploys to present important historical events. If readers can hear and see Cervantes's voice at work, they will have fulfilled Rivers's concluding injunction (30). His balanced and moderate introduction certainly leads in that direction.
Ellen Lokos in
The Solitary Journey also chooses to focus on
the reader. She begins on a polemical note:
«The inadequacies so often cited in relation to the
Viaje do not pertain to its author, but
rather, to its readers»
(3). She sets out
«to rescue the poem from the process of critical
fossilization to which it has been subjected and restore it to its original
vitality and vigor»
(3). To accomplish this task, she dedicates four
chapters and two appendices to
«literary history, the poetics of the period, and the
socio-literary milieu in which Cervantes was writing»
(5).
Chapter I, «Texts and Contexts: Literary Models for the
Viaje del Parnaso», gives a selective
overview of the sources for the poem. As a model, Lokos first posits the Voyage
to Parnassus. Differing significantly from other critics, including Rivers, as
to the centrality of Caporali, Lokos dismisses him as
«an amusing literary antecedent»
(11). Furthermore, she argues that the allusion to him
in
Viage functions as a
«camouflage»
(12). It diverts the reader from Cervantes's
intentions, subverting the
«generic equation»
(12) embodied by Caporali's name. One would welcome a
sustained discussion of what this subversion means in terms of literary history
and of reading. Was the camouflage so successful that no reader until Lokos has
seen through the disguise?
Throughout this chapter, the author puts a great deal of emphasis
on the last word of the poem, «jornada», arguing that it
«makes it clear that Cervantes is defining the
Viaje as a journey, in terms of its overall
structure»
(21). The contemporary use of the «dream
vision/allegorical journey» is not adequately treated. Lokos only
discusses Suárez de Figueroa's
El Passagero (1617) in her footnotes, and no
mention is made of Quevedo's
Sueños, which were circulating in
manuscript form at that time. Although no one can doubt the pervasive influence
of Dante on Renaissance culture, Lokos correlates the use of the journey to
their respective physical and spiritual
—133→
exiles (13). I assume her
title echoes this relation. The scale of this comparison is somewhat
disturbing. Is Cervantes's lack of recognition, the Argensola snub, the
equivalent of exile? I am far more convinced by Rivers's assessment of
Cervantes's ambiguous relation to the literary traditions of his age:
«Tanto en el
Viage del Parnaso como en el
Quijote, vemos que para nuestro autor
la literatura era una morada vital y al mismo tiempo una máquina
absurda»
(29).
Drawing primarily on Curtius's work, Lokos closes her chapter on
influences with a discussion of another popular genre, the
Panegyrico por la poesía, or Praise of
Poetry, noting that Cervantes diverges from the more theological interpretation
of art found in this text. Although it is indeed a
«tempting»
(48) connection, for our more feminist and
multi-cultural times, to find a Peruvian poetess as a source for Cervantes's
text, Lokos's discussion of the military language, the application of the word
«preciosa» to poetry, the
necessity of study, and the use of «entendimiento» all seem more plausibly
linked to the
Zeitgeist than to that
«tempting» direct influence. Despite her disclaimers, the book
reads as a
«positivistic source-hunt»
(146).
From its very title, «The Importance of Being Ironic: The Satiric Dimension of the Viaje del Parnaso», traces of the dissertation style mark the second chapter. (Lokos's Ph.D. thesis was «Models, Genres, and Meanings of Cervantes's Viaje del Parnaso», Harvard, 1988.) The author takes a rather formulaic, academic approach to the topic of satire. After carefully outlining R. C. Elliot's Power of Satire, she clearly deals with the paradox of Viage announcing itself as satire, and then with Cervantes's disavowal of ever having written satire, in distinguishing between scurrilous comments (also termed personal satire) and the proper satirical mode. When she turns to the object of Cervantes's satirical attack, that is, Poetry, she returns again to the issue of lists, now asserting that the choice of this form was ironic (75). Her constant recourse to this kind of displacement makes her argument unconvincing, especially when one is dealing with formulaic elements. Recall that the much praised premática uses another listing format. Is it ironic?
In this chapter and the next, Lokos discusses the academies. The
satiric correction that Lokos sees Cervantes as advocating is
«a thoughtful, academic type of literature that flourished
in Italy in the sixteenth century»
(89). She traces his motivation for writing
Viage to his negative experience in the
Academia Parnaso, or variously, Selvaje. To view Cervantes's work as a
«product of discussions held in academic
sessions»
(115) is an appealing theory of historical
consequence, even though it is hard to prove, since there are no academic
minutes to which to refer, only minimal letters and documents of academies'
ordinances. What Lokos does with this contextualization is, however,
questionable. Once again she uses it to displace criticism of Cervantes as
poet:
«Cervantes's
Viaje, which has often been criticized for
the 'informality' of its verses, reflects the characteristic informality and
extemporaneous quality of these academic eulogies»
(123, n. 49).
Noting that Cervantes never mentioned the word
«academy» in his poem, nor did
«... he ever characterize the poem as academic»
(116), Lokos recurs to what she calls
«the genre of fictional academies»
(116) to bolster
—134→
her argument. While her
brief concluding citation of Francisco de Andrés's
Aganipe,
«recognizing it [Viage] as an
academic work»
(125), is a persuasive, contemporaneous allusion, her
primary choice for postulating a «genre of fictional academies», a
nineteenth-century
costumbrista text by Julio Monreal is
too far removed to make a convincing historical argument. Moreover, Lokos here
overuses the proof by genre; she has so far identified three -the Journey to
Parnassus, the Praise of Poetry, and now the Fictional Academy. Proportionally
the book becomes more of an essay on the existence of these genres than a new
reading of
Viage del Parnaso.
The fourth and final chapter, «The Emblematic Language of
the
Viaje del Parnaso», intends to instruct
the reader in the
«coded language»
(132) of the text and in the
«reading context of the period»
(132). Later Lokos considers
«the influence of the emblems as a mental habit which
provides an alternative to the traditional mechanical reading of the
poem»
(142). Beyond a brief citation of Jonathan Culler,
there is little acknowledgement here of the considerable critical discussions
of reader-response or reception theories, which are the logical correlatives of
this reader-centered approach.
Outlining the historical context, Lokos stresses the primacy of the word over the visual element in Spain, and she emphasizes the connections of the emblem makers with the academies. Her most significant interpretation has been published previously in Cervantes, 9 (1989): 63-74. In her admiration of Cervantes, Lokos comes down too heavily on Lope, and her reading appears arbitrary. Lokos also explores Fortune as an emblem. The list of related texts in this section is predictably long and sheds little light upon the reading of Viage.
In sum, Lokos's study is a very useful summary that will remind scholars anew of all the traditions that converge in Cervantes's poem. The recuperation that Ruth El Saffar did for Persiles, in reasserting its centrality to Cervantes's corpus, remains an illusive goal here.