The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Miguel de Cervantes · Novelas ejemplares · twelve novellas with the author’s prologue and a dedication to the Count of Lemos, the last two framed as one · Madrid, Juan de la Cuesta, 1613 · scored as one book on Cervantes’s Spanish, read from knowledge with no text in hand; Spanish quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own English beneath, and no translation quoted
Mode
Collection of novellas, idealist and realist, set out as a game of honest recreation; romance, tableau, case history, cautionary tale and Lucianic dialogue in one book
Mythos
The man of glass whose fragility licenses truth; the talking dogs, their metamorphosis promised and left in doubt; the foundling restored by recognition; a thieves’ house kept as a church
Phase
From a gypsy girl’s terms to her lover, through the thieves of Seville, a madman cured into silence and a jealous man’s walls, to two dogs talking through one night in a hospital
Presentation
Fiction; twelve novellas in the order of the 1613 printing, with a prologue, a dedication and prefatory verses by other hands; the eleventh frames the twelfth as a manuscript; lengths very unequal; one piece nearly all dialogue
Register
Thieves’ cant and devotion, a madman’s aphorisms, two dogs’ talk that comments on itself as it goes, gypsy songs, and the long set speeches of the romances
Scale
Spain and its edges seen from below: Seville, Toledo, Valladolid, the Indies, Italy and Flanders, the Turkish sea and London, from slaughterhouse to court
Governing Proposition
Eight years after the first part of his long novel, Cervantes sets out twelve short ones like a game in a public square, open to anyone, and claims to be the first to write them in his own tongue. The wager of the book is that a short tale can be honest pleasure and still tell the truth about its society: that a world which lives by forms is best seen from below and from outside, by thieves, gypsies, a madman and a dog, and that what is false in fact may be true in invention.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“yo soy el primero que he novelado en lengua castellana”
“I am the first to have written novellas in the Castilian tongue” (Prologue). The claim is made in public, in the prologue of a book printed in Madrid in 1613 by Juan de la Cuesta, who had printed the first part of Don Quixote eight years before. The novella was known in Spain as an Italian thing, Boccaccio’s and Bandello’s, read in translation. Cervantes claims the form for his own language and says the tales are his own, and he puts his name to the claim under the shadow of the long novel’s success, risking the comparison.
In the same prologue he says what kind of thing the book is: “una mesa de trucos”
“a billiard table” (Prologue), set out in the square for anyone to play at, an honest recreation. The book is dedicated to the Count of Lemos and carries prefatory verses by other hands. The unit scored here is the collection as it was printed, its twelve novellas in the order of 1613: La gitanilla, El amante liberal, Rinconete y Cortadillo, La española inglesa, El licenciado Vidriera, La fuerza de la sangre, El celoso extremeño, La ilustre fregona, Las dos doncellas, La señora Cornelia, El casamiento engañoso and El coloquio de los perros, the last printed as the continuation of the eleventh. La tía fingida, which survives only in a manuscript and whose attribution is doubtful, is not in the book.
The twelve are of two kinds. Four are romances on the Italian and Byzantine pattern, of lovers parted by corsairs, by sea and by disguise and restored by chance and token. The others look at Spain from below: thieves, gypsies, a madman, a jealous old man, a deceived soldier and two dogs. The lengths are very unequal; the Coloquio and La gitanilla are among the longest, the Casamiento the shortest. Pairs answer each other across the book, two jealous households, two disguised girls, two framed fictions, and the game of the prologue claims one rule for all of them. Whether the twelve make one design or a sequence of attempts is the question the book leaves its readers.
Movement II
Two boys come to Seville and are taken into the house of Monipodio, where the city’s thieves are organised as a brotherhood. They watch it at work for an afternoon. There is an image with a lamp before it, and alms, and candles; there is a register of the commissions of the house; after a theft an old woman goes to her devotions. The thieves pay their dues to the image and to the constable. The afternoon ends, and nothing is resolved.
That is the whole design of Rinconete y Cortadillo, and it is the instrument of what the story knows. A plot would have made the thieves a story; a visit with no plot makes them a society, and the reader sees what the society is: the underworld keeps the forms of a religious confraternity, its observances exact, and the forms are kept most scrupulously by those who live off them. The making is in the talk, Monipodio’s court with its malapropisms and its mix of cant and devotion. No scene is idle, and no scene advances anything; every one is part of the one disclosure. The book’s parody church is the image of it the reader keeps.
The first novella of the book looks from outside, too. Preciosa, a noble girl raised among gypsies, is fifteen and sets her lover, Andrés, his terms: two years among the gypsies. The story has warmth and lightness, in her songs and in her dealings with him, and it ends in the oldest of romance patterns, the foundling restored by recognition. What is made new is the girl, particular and self-possessed, setting the conditions of her own story. The gypsy camp and the thieves’ house stand among the first three pieces of the book, and from them its Spain is seen.
Movement III
Tomás Rodaja, a student, comes to believe that he is made of glass. He asks to be spoken to from a distance, and he sleeps in straw. The delusion was a known case of melancholy, and Cervantes turns it into a figure: a man whose fragile, transparent body is the condition of his speech. Because he may break, he may say anything, and he does, in a string of aphorisms each given its occasion.
The court follows him and listens to him as an oracle while he is mad. Then he is cured. Restored to sanity and to his own name, he is ignored, and he goes off to die a soldier in Flanders. The story is in three parts, the student, the madman and the cured man, and the three parts are its argument: truth is licensed only as madness, and the sane man who would say the same things has no hearers. The glass man has become a type, of the truth-teller whose fragility is his licence.
Beside these the book sets its exemplary tales of honour. La fuerza de la sangre stages a rape and resolves it by marriage, and the frame that would make the resolution an example cannot quite hide what it shows. The romances carry the book across the sea: a Spanish girl taken in the sack of Cádiz is cherished as a Catholic at Queen Elizabeth’s court; lovers are parted by corsairs on the Turkish sea; girls in disguise go in pursuit. These are pleasing and accomplished, made with long set speeches and recognitions by token, and chance in them serves virtue. They are half the book’s range and its weaker half.
Movement IV
Carrizales comes home from the Indies rich and old, and buys himself a young wife. He walls her in, raising the walls of his house, and sets a turnstile in it. El celoso extremeño is the story of what the walls do. They are meant to keep the world out; they teach her the world.
A seducer lays siege to the house from outside and works inward through the household: the duenna and a black eunuch are won over by a guitar. Carrizales finds his wife asleep beside him. On his deathbed he forgives her and blames himself; the fault, he says, was his. It is the book’s second height, the dignity of a tragic end in a comic world.
The story exists in an earlier version, in the Porras de la Cámara manuscript, and there the wife yields to the seducer. In the book of 1613 she does not. The book is what is scored, but the two endings stand side by side for anyone to compare, and the story has been read as a tale of the Indies, of honour, and of control defeating itself. In every reading the walls are the subject: the man who would shut out the world has shut it in.
Movement V
The ensign Campuzano has been sweating out a disease in the Hospital of the Resurrection in Valladolid. He was deceived by a woman’s show of wealth, and he tells his friend Peralta how he was cheated, in a story whose truth depends on whether he too was deceiving. Then he hands Peralta a manuscript: a dialogue he heard, he says, between two dogs of the hospital, Cipión and Berganza, at night, and wrote down. Peralta reads it, grants its art, and does not believe its event. The frame is the book’s teaching about fiction: what is false in fact may be true in invention.
Berganza tells his life, and Cipión checks him. The life is a survey of masters: a slaughterman in Seville, shepherds whose life gives the lie to pastoral, a merchant, a constable on the take, a company of soldiers, gypsies, a Morisco gardener whose thrift the dog condemns in a tirade the book does not clearly answer, a poet, actors, a witch, and the projectors of the hospital itself. Berganza keeps straying and Cipión keeps calling him back, and the quarrel over digression is an argument about how a life should be told. The picaresque autobiography, a rogue narrating his life as a sermon, is given to a dog, with a second dog as its critic: the form is turned on itself.
In Montilla the witch Cañizares tells Berganza that he may be the son of a witch, transformed. She anoints herself and lies as if dead, and the dog drags her into the courtyard. The prophecy she gives, that the dogs will be restored to their form when the proud are cast down and the humble raised by a mighty hand, is grotesque and grand together. The book does not decide it: the prophecy may be true, Campuzano may have dreamed, and the dogs themselves doubt it. The talking dogs went on. Hoffmann wrote a sequel for Berganza in 1814, and the young Freud and his friend Silberstein took the dogs’ names for their letters to each other.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test divides the book. Within its best pieces nothing is idle: in Rinconete y Cortadillo every scene of an afternoon in Monipodio’s house serves one disclosure, and the Coloquio is digressive by design, the quarrel over digression being its argument about how to tell a life. The cost is at the level of the book. Remove Las dos doncellas or La señora Cornelia and the collection loses variety, not knowledge; their scenes of disguise, pursuit and reconciliation could be exchanged between them, and the romances’ set speeches could lose a third. The cap is met, narrowly, because the plan of twelve pieces answering one another is itself a reason for most of them to be there. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve is the romances’ slack.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated. A society that lives by forms (honour, lineage, purity of blood, religious observance, the law) is shown from below and from outside, by thieves, gypsies, a madman and a dog, and the forms are kept most scrupulously by those who live off them: Monipodio’s thieves pay their dues to the image and to the constable. Vidriera’s court hears truth only as madness. El celoso extremeño shows enclosure teaching what it shuts out. La fuerza de la sangre resolves a rape by marriage, and its exemplary frame cannot quite hide what it shows. Held below the gate because the romances, half the book, disclose little the genre did not know, and because the Coloquio’s tirade against the Moriscos is spoken by a dog the book does not clearly answer.
Score: 8.4 / 10
A comic and ironic book, whose height is rare and real. The summit is the night with the witch Cañizares in Montilla: she tells Berganza he may be a witch’s son transformed, anoints herself and lies as dead while the dog drags her into the courtyard, and the prophecy of the dogs’ return to human form, when the proud are cast down and the humble raised by a mighty hand, is grotesque and grand together. Carrizales’s deathbed, the jealous man forgiving and blaming himself, has the dignity of a tragic end in a comic world. La gitanilla has warmth and lightness. Elsewhere the elevation is of wit, and the romances’ reunions please rather than rise. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve is frequency: the height comes twice.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Two figures have become types, and they are built, not evoked. The glass man takes a known melancholic case and makes it a figure of the fragile, transparent truth-teller, whose body is the condition of his speech. The talking dogs are built on Apuleius’s ass and Lucian, with the metamorphosis left unresolved: the prophecy may be true, the ensign may have dreamed, and the dogs themselves doubt it. Preciosa is the old pattern of the foundling restored by recognition, made particular in a girl of fifteen who sets her lover terms. Monipodio’s house is a parody church the reader keeps. What holds the axis down is the romances, where lovers parted by corsairs, sea and disguise are inherited furniture, used as convention rather than made to bear weight.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is the Italian novella of Boccaccio and Bandello, read in Spain in translation; the Byzantine romance of Heliodorus; the pastoral; the picaresque of Lazarillo and Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599, 1604); and the Lucianic dialogue. The turn is stated in the prologue’s claim to be the first, and it goes three ways. The Italian novella’s erotic trick gives way to exemplarity, a wager that the short tale can be honest entertainment and tell the truth. Rinconete drops plot almost entirely for a tableau observed. The Coloquio gives the picaresque autobiography to a dog, with a second dog as critic of every moralising digression. The stake was public, under the shadow of the long novel’s success. Held at the gate, not above it: four of the twelve pieces keep to the path they inherit.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form of the Casamiento and Coloquio and the knowledge goes. A cheated, diseased ensign, deceived by a woman’s show of wealth, tells a story whose truth depends on whether he too deceives, then hands over a dialogue of dogs that cannot have happened; his friend reads it, grants its art and does not believe its event. The frame is the book’s teaching about fiction: what is false in fact may be true in invention. Rinconete’s plotless visit is the instrument of its disclosure, since a plot would have made the thieves a story instead of a society. Vidriera’s three parts are the argument. Held below because the romances use the novella as a container for plots that could be plays, and several became plays.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Evidence rather than promise. The question the title poses, in what sense these tales are exemplary, has been argued for four centuries and is not closed: whether the exemplarity is sincere, ironic, structural, or a cover for the realism, and whether the idealist and realist pieces form a design or a sequence of attempts. The Coloquio has been read as satire, as a theory of fiction, as an answer to Alemán, as an allegory of the converso, as a study of language and madness; Vidriera as a portrait of the humanist, of melancholy, of the writer at court; El celoso extremeño as an Indies story, an honour story and a story of control defeating itself, with two endings to compare. Held a step down because the romances yield little on return.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is Spanish prose fiction of the early seventeenth century and, through it, European short fiction. The intrinsic force: the book founded the original novella in Castilian, as it claimed, and showed that the short tale could carry social observation and a theory of its own making, not only an anecdote or an erotic trick; in the Coloquio a narrative form criticises itself in the act of narration. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the century’s vogue for the novella in Spain, with Lope de Vega’s Novelas a Marcia Leonarda and María de Zayas in its wake; Middleton and Rowley’s The Spanish Gypsy (1623) and plays by Fletcher and his collaborators; Hoffmann’s sequel for Berganza (1814); Preciosa made a play with Weber’s music; the young Freud and Silberstein writing as the two dogs. Held below the top because the long novel redirected more, and wider.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Four centuries, and survival is demonstrated. Form: the text survives whole in the 1613 printing, with the author’s earlier versions of two pieces in a manuscript as well; nothing that made the work is lost, and the doubtful extra novella stands outside it. Presence: continuous in Spanish since 1613, reprinted, edited and taught across the Spanish-speaking world, with Rinconete and La gitanilla the pieces most read by the young. Fabric: the surfaces fixed to their moment, the romances’ corsairs and the Coloquio’s tirade, have aged as surfaces and have not taken the book with them. The charge is on presence outside Spanish: translated into the major languages from the seventeenth century, but read there mainly in selection and in the academy, a classic beside a greater one.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on the Spanish, as far as a reader without a native ear can follow it; the rhythm of its sentences is neither credited nor charged. The dialogue is the making at its best: Monipodio’s court with its malapropisms and its mix of thieves’ cant and devotion; the dogs’ talk, where narrator and critic make a two-part prose that comments on itself as it goes; Vidriera’s sayings, a string of aphorisms each given its occasion. The scene: the turnstile and the wall in Carrizales’s house, the seducer working from outside inward through the household. The control of the frame in the Casamiento is exact. The charge is in the romances: long rhetorical speeches, recognitions by coincidence and token, plots on a chain of accidents the writing does not make inevitable.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Coloquio’s witch, anointed and insensible in a courtyard, and La española inglesa’s London, where a Spanish girl taken in the sack of Cádiz is cherished as a Catholic at Queen Elizabeth’s court. The book claims one law for both: exemplarity, honest pleasure that shows the truth, set out in the prologue’s billiard table, and a providential order under which lovers are restored and the dogs may be. In the best pieces the law holds across a wide range, from the gypsies’ camp to the Toledo inn. But the idealist and realist pieces obey different physics: in the romances chance serves virtue; in Rinconete, Vidriera and the Coloquio the world is indifferent and the forms are empty. Pairings can be shown; the design is argued rather than felt.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Judged as one book of twelve tales. The Coloquio alone holds more orders than most novels: the Seville slaughterhouse, shepherds whose life gives the lie to pastoral, a merchant’s household and its school, the constable’s corruption, a soldier’s company, the gypsies, a Morisco’s thrift, a poet and the theatre, witchcraft and its theology, the hospital and its projectors. Around it: the underworld of Seville and its confraternity; the university and the courts; the Indies and the fortune brought home; Italy, Flanders and the soldier’s road; the Turkish sea; England under Elizabeth; law, honour, marriage, rape and its redress; madness and its cure; the sacred, as devotion kept by thieves and as providence. Held below the top because the orders are spread across twelve pieces, integrated in one structure only in the last.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.5. A text whole since 1613 and continuously read in its own language for four centuries; the novella claimed for Castilian and turned three ways, from erotic trick to exemplary truth, from plot to tableau, and from the rogue’s confession to two dogs arguing over how to tell a life; and a vogue for the novella in Spain, plots taken at once by the English stage, and a dialogue of dogs that the Romantics continued.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable and The Sublime at 7.6. The romances, a third of the pieces and half the range, carry scenes that could be exchanged between them and set speeches that could lose a third; and the height of a comic, ironic book comes twice, at the witch’s night and the jealous man’s deathbed. Next above them, The Inner Law at 7.8: the idealist and realist pieces obey different physics, and the design across the twelve is argued rather than felt.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.4, The Living Form at 8.2, The Inner Law at 7.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Swerve at 8.5 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.5 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two exactly at it, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 7.6, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. The aggregate, at 8.2, stands below the summit’s 9.0 in any case.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Miguel de Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares, scored as one book: the collection as printed in Madrid by Juan de la Cuesta in 1613, under privilege and approvals of 1612 and 1613, with the dedication to the Count of Lemos, the author’s prologue, prefatory verses by other hands, and the twelve novellas in the order of that printing, El coloquio de los perros printed as the continuation of El casamiento engañoso. La tía fingida, which survives only in the Porras de la Cámara manuscript and whose attribution is doubtful, is not in the book and is not scored. The same manuscript’s earlier versions of Rinconete y Cortadillo and El celoso extremeño are named as context only; where the earlier Celoso differs, the book is what is scored. The pieces weighed most are the Casamiento and Coloquio together, Rinconete, El licenciado Vidriera and El celoso extremeño, then La gitanilla, La ilustre fregona and La fuerza de la sangre; the four romances, El amante liberal, La española inglesa, Las dos doncellas and La señora Cornelia, are known in outline, their sentences not closely, and are charged only on their plot, the role of chance in them and the kind of resolution they reach. Every axis is judged on Cervantes’s Spanish, in the text of the standard modern editions, Harry Sieber’s for Cátedra among them. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, no length is given in words, and no quotation was checked against a file. Spanish is quoted only where its words are certain, in the two phrases of the prologue, with the desk’s own English beneath; everything else is paraphrase, and citations are by novella. Translations · the bilingual Aris and Phillips edition and Lesley Lipson’s Exemplary Stories for Oxford World’s Classics, a selection, read for sense. Neither is quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the book. The sound of the prose sentence by sentence is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the number and places of the editions that followed in the first years, where in Don Quixote one of the novellas is named, the particulars of the Aris and Phillips edition, which of the novellas Fletcher’s plays drew on, and the course of modern criticism of the book’s order and design.