Poetry and the Persiles: Cervantes' Orphic Mode
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Date
2017
Authors
Middlebrook, Leah
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
eHumanista/Cervantes
Abstract
The topic ‘Cervantes and poetry’ has given rise to a great deal of criticism, much of it shaped by tantalizing moments in which Cervantes appears to have commented on his skills with rueful self-knowledge – for example, in the well-known lines of the Parnaso: “Yo, que siempre trabajo / y me desvelo / por parecer que tengo la gracia de poeta / que no me dió el cielo” (Parnaso I.25-27). Such asides, woven into works from the Galatea through Don Quijote and the Viaje del Parnaso, suggest that Cervantes wished he were a better poet. The first premise of this essay is that the question of Cervantes and poetry turns on that one ingenious conceit, “Miguel de Cervantes,” el manco sano, who in the Persiles serves as the point from which Cervantes undertakes the testing of poetry, of poetic speech, and of the poets who claim poetic license that is such a consistent feature of his writing. The second premise is that Cervantes' final, posthumous work, the romance Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, represents his most fully-elaborated idea of poetry. I argue this point by showing that in the Persiles, Cervantes drew on Ovid’s myth of Orpheus to stage a final demonstration of the truth of poetry. The Orphic subject position establishes the narrative as unfolding on the threshold between this world and the afterlife, a space in which poets graced with divine gifts of song are permitted to pass beyond the human world and retrieve essential truths for the living. When Cervantes writes to the Count of Lemos that he is composing the Dedication of the Persiles having received the extreme unction and “Puesto ya el pie en el estribo” (108), or when he offers his final valediction in the Prologue: “¡Adiós, gracias! Adiós, donaires; adios regocijados amigos! Que yo me voy muriendo y deseando veros presto contentos en la otra vida” (114), he establishes the narrative on this Orphic threshold between life and death. Ultimately, Cervantes believed, like William Carlos Williams, that, "love and the imagination / are of a piece / swift as the light / to avoid destruction."
Description
Keywords
Cervantes, poetics, William Carlos Williams, Orpheus, Persiles y Sigismunda, early modern poetry, lyric, Spanish literature
Citation
eHumanista/Cervantes(5). 2016. Monographic issue. Persiles at 400. Ed. Maria Mercedes Alcalá-Galán. 2017. 370-386.