Novelas ejemplares
The Novelas ejemplares are a collection of short stories by Miguel de Cervantes , written from 1590 to 1612. Juan de la Cuesta published them in 1613, due to the success of the first book of Don Quixote . Originally the collection was called “The Exemplary Novellas of All Venerable Entertainment” or Novelas ejemplares de honestísimo entretenimiento .
There are 12 short stories based on the Italian model. They call themselves exemplary because - according to Cervantes' foreword - they are the first of their kind in Spanish and have declared didactic moral intentions. Two types of novellas can be identified. Such idealistic and such realistic character. The idealistic ones lean more towards their Italian role models and are characterized by numerous love affairs and a multitude of events, ideal figures without character development and a lack of self-reflection. These include: El amante liberal , Las dos doncellas, La española inglesa , La señora Cornelia and La fuerza de la sangre .
The novellas of realistic type describe more social conditions, combined with the charge of hypocrisy . They are the better-known novellas Rinconete y Cortadillo , El licenciado Vidriera , La gitanilla , El coloquio de los perros or La ilustre fregona . However, a sharp separation is not always possible.
The novellas in detail
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La gitanilla
La gitanilla is the longest of the novelas ejemplares and may contain autobiographical elements in a love story that a distant relative of Cervantes had. Like many of these intrigues, it focuses on the art of recognizing a person at the end of the work. It is a girl of noble blood, kidnapped and raised by gypsies and a nobleman who falls in love with her and decides to live the life of the gypsies with her until everything is finally revealed and the story ends happily with the marriage of the Couple is made possible.
El amante liberal
El amante liberal is a Moorish novella in which the subject of deportation also appears and in which the homosexual love affairs of the Arabs are mocked.
Rinconete y Cortadillo
In Rinconete y Cortadillo, two young people flee their homes and, with the help of card games and theft, begin to lead a crook's life. They arrive in Seville, where they are forced by an organization of criminals to work as errand boys. The criminal syndicate is run like a lay brotherhood by the upper brother ( hermano mayor ) Monipodio. Different genre scenes occur, typical for an interlude or a Jácara . Corrupt bailiffs, thieves, bullies, pimps and whores appear. After this défilé of types, the two rascals decide to improve.
La española inglesa
In La española inglesa, robbery reappears in the person of a woman who is kidnapped during the English invasion of Cadiz and who is trained in London to be the maid of Isabel I , Queen of England, who is apparently described without animosity . She loses her hair and all her beauty because of a poison potion, but everything will be fine in the end.
El licenciado vidriera (The glass licentiate)
Tomás Rodaja wants to become famous through his studies in Salamanca and ends up as a pessimist in the Flanders War. Both his intellect and his madness exclude him from society (theme that pervades the novelas ejemplares ). But his real problems only begin when he returns to Spain. A lady who falls in love with him gives him a quince cheese to “win the rock of his love” and “rob him of his will” in the process. But this makes Tomás sick and almost dies. Then he thinks he is a person made of glass. His brain is dried out from the poisoning. He is becoming better known than before, only that his new celebrity has a dubious reputation.
La fuerza de la Sangre (The Power of Blood)
It is the most erotic of Cervantes' novels. It's about loss and reinstatement in the status quo ante . Leocadia is kidnapped by Rodolfo, brought to his property and raped. Then she is exposed at the main church of Toledo. Both do not know the identity of the other. A son emerges from the rape who grows up with his mother's family. The honor is taken from the girl of noble origin - but the incident is kept a secret and she disappears for four years in the city of her birth. Rodolfo travels to Italy for many years. When the young child named Luis, who has grown older, is overrun by a rider, it is brought to the property of the person who caused the accident. Leocadia follows and recognizes the place of her rape when she finds her son in the very bed of her abuse. With a crucifix that she had taken as evidence of the crime committed against her, she clears up the rider's wife. This causes the return of her son Rodolfo, under the pretext of having found a wife for him. Rodolfo marries Leocadia and Leocadia's honor is restituted through marriage. "Grandparents, parents, grandchildren - all of humanity, who were freed from original sin through Christ, will be purified in the act of sacramental marriage."
El celoso extremeño (The Jealous One of Extremadura)
Carrizales squandered his inherited fortune, went to the New World, got rich again and returned after twenty years. At the advanced age of 68, he realizes that he needs an heir and a wife for his fortune. He marries a “13 or 14 year old girl” of slightly lower origins to be sure of her loyalty. At first everything goes well, until the Carrizales unknown Loaysa is challenged to seduce the girl by the circumstances created by Carrizales. He disguises himself as a beggar in order to gain the trust of Luis, a black eunuch who is locked between a front door and the main entrance. The old man dies as a result of the incident, Leonora goes to a monastery and Loaysa leaves - like Carrizales before - for the New World.
The poetic use of language in the work gives many indications of the moral possibilities of interpretation of the work, whether the author's moral disapproval of the action. Carrizales has excluded himself from society. Although of very good origin, he has outlived all the people who once remained with him. So he decides to get a successor who can inherit him. He already knows in advance that a marriage would also give him the feeling of the constant possibility of loss. As a result, he built a house that was on the one hand an expression of his wealth and on the other hand an expression of his self-inflicted isolation. All that counted for Carrizales was keeping the outer world out of the inner world of his own constitution and the inner world in which Carrizales's own constitution is reflected: his house. When he realizes that he cannot escape the outside world, he has to die.
In addition to the psychological connotations, there are sexual ones: Carrizales knows about his old age. There is only one key to his house, which is guarded by a eunuch. This gives the house a feminine attribute. Carrizales sleeps with a key under his sleeping pillow, but on the night of Loaysa's visit they slip between "two pillows, almost under half of his body," from where the master keys are stolen. It could be a symbolic transfer. Carrizales, the manly is stolen by the key.
La ilustre fregona (The illustrious scrubbing maid)
In La ilustre fregona two boys run away from home under the pretext of courting the most beautiful girl in an inn. One can implement his resolution, the other cannot and is insulted by a group of pimps who call after him in the street and follow him everywhere.
Las dos doncellas
In Las dos doncellas, Teodosia confesses to a stranger who later turns out to be her brother, the relationship and the promise of marriage with Marco Antonio. In search of her husband, they meet Leocadia, to whom he has also promised marriage, but without taking away her respectability. Marco Antonio agrees to become Teodosia's husband and her brother, Rafael, that of Leocadia. The happy ending prevents a duel.
La señora Cornelia
This novella develops two levels. On the first level, the topic of “honor” between Cornela, the Prince of Ferrara and Cornelia's brother is explored. On the second level, the theme of “friendship” is explored by two friends, Don Juan de Gamboa and Don Antonio de Isunza, who are both observers and protagonists of the events. The action itself takes place in Bolonia, where the friends return to their parents' homes after leaving them.
El casamiento engañoso (The deceptive marriage)
The last two novels belong together more than the previous novels (which in their order seem to be typically only genre-related).
It is about the mutual deception of two marriage swindlers, Campuzano and Estefanía (subject of the self-deceived deceiver). The novella is a reference to the dialogue that follows later and can be understood as a novella on a meta-level .
The Alférez (Sergeant) Campuzano told - just released from the hospital - his friend the licentiate Peralta to have married a woman of bad lifestyle and to have been now leave from her. All that remained of her was syphilis. Peralta invites him to dinner to hear the story. So the reader also gets involved in Campuzano's story. But Campuzano's story is unreliable and the reader notices Campuzano's own blindness to the traps he fell into.
The "deceptive marriage" thus becomes the narrative framework for the subsequent novella El coloquio de los perros and becomes the connecting element of the Novelas Ejemplares . Peralta reads the text and enjoys the textual creativity of the spirit. This is not about actual deception, but about the process of being deceived. The Alférez goes to sleep, while the licentiate reads the "two-way conversation of the dogs" in dialogue form by Alférez happily. Campuzano learned a crucial lesson from Estefanía: he can now tell stories too. He knows how to present it in such a way that the desire of the listener / narrator to learn about the further course continues to grow until Campuzano can actually present the story of the two-way conversation between the dogs. He understands forewords and hints that encourage the desire for more. The story below follows.
El coloquio de los perros (The two dogs talk )
In the previous novella, the licentiate from El casamiento engañoso takes the Alferéz down and reads the life story of a dog. He talks to a second dog, -Cipión-, about their shared secret gift of human storytelling . They are not aware of Campuzano's listening. They are aware of their special gift and make this clear in their conversation ( speaker awareness ) that, like Cervantes in his works, they speak self-reflectively about their speaking.
At the same time, the novella reads like a parody of the picaresque genre popularized by Alemán , Martí, López de Úbeda and Quevedo at the time . This can be seen in the "autobiographical references, the unknown origin of the main character, the multitude of masters he served and the satirical role he takes when he punishes his masters for their hypocrisy", for example when he was his master - the shepherd - lets down, or when he doesn't let the black servant go on the nightly rendezvous with her lover.
Cervantes tries to emphasize that the human mind has to mediate between the imaginary and the real world. This is a human inclination, but at the same time a necessary discipline (and a hallmark of sophisticated literature). Therefore, he makes the reader feel strange by letting dogs talk to each other like humans. It is a clear violation of the Aristotelian aesthetic not to slide into the fantastic, but also an attempt to move the reader to spiritual abstraction.
interpretation
In the Novelas Ejemplares, Cervantes varied the themes of deception and self-deception in many ways (the dog Berganza calls this tropelía ). The conversation breaks with the previous novels because of their impossibility. The literary effect is to make the reader aware that even a story with a realistic course is still a story and thus a product of the human mind, but not a true reflection of reality. The examination of the topic of literary reality pervades Cervantes' work and found its most intense examination in Don Quixote .
Bibliographies
- Miguel de Cervantes: Novelas ejemplares II . Edited by Harry Sieber. Cátedra, Madrid 1988.
- Ruth El Saffar: Novel to Romance. A Study of Cervantes's “Novelas ejemplares” . Johns Hopkins University Press , Baltimore / London 1974, pp. 40-82.
- Peter Dunn: Las novelas ejemplares . In: JB Avalle-Arce, EC Riley (Ed.): Suma Cervantina . Tamesis, London 1973, pp. 81-118.
literature
- Stephan Leopold: "The negro between the doors - or the deconstruction of the Spanish house in the Novelas ejemplares ", in: Hanno Ehrlicher u. Gerhard Poppenberg ( ed .), Cervantes' Novelas ejemplares in the disputed field of methods. Exemplary introductions to the Spanish literature of the early modern period, Berlin: Walter Frey 2006, pp. 246–280.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Harry Sieber: Novelas Ejemplares . Madrid 2007, p. 12.
- ↑ II, 99
- ↑ La señora Cornelia . UW-Madison TEI edition, 200; Source: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra; La señora Cornelia (Cervantes Completo, 10); Alianza Editorial, Madrid 1996; pp.41
- ↑ Peter N. Dunn, p. 118
- ↑ cf. Harry Sieber, p. 37
- ↑ Harry Sieber, p. 35
- ↑ p. 35