NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVES IN SPANISH PASTORAL FICTION

Abstract

SINCE the publication in 1946 of a new edition of Montemayor's Los s;ete Libros de La Diana there has been something of a revival of interest in Spanish pastoral fiction, to which Professor Francisco Lopez Estrada, who prepared that edition, has made several notable contributions, culminating in a comprehensive study, Los libros de pastores en La literatura espanola, of which the first part has recently appeared.! We are now much better equipped to approach Spanish pastoral fiction than was the case three decades ago, and many earlier false conceptions are beginning to disappear. The present study has no pretensions to comprehensiveness, but, by drawing attention to the stories themselves and the manner of their telling, will perhaps help to dispel one common misconception, namely that pastoral novels contain no discernible action or movement. We may best begin by attempting to set the Spanish pastoral novels against their literary background.2 On the one hand there are the other manifestations of the pastoral mode in Spain: lyrical poetry and semi-dramatic verse eclogues, conforming for the most part to the well-tried patterns of Greek and Latin models and their imitations in Italian Renaissance literature, and reaching a pinnacle of excellence in Garcilaso's eclogues. Undoubtedly the task of Montemayor and his successors would have proved far more difficult without the precedents set by the poets who, by the mid-sixteenth century, had completely naturalized in Spanish the shepherds of Arcadia. But of more immediate interest for our present purposes is what lies on the other hand: an array of works of fiction in Spanish as varied in narrative technique as in content, and a source of inspiration far beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula. Indeed, it is scarcely an exaggeration to depict Spain in the sixteenth century as an experimental workshop for fiction serving all western Europe, so influential were the works first produced there, many times reprinted and translated. The emergence of a work of genius like Don Quixote at the end of the century is hardly surprising in such circumstances-and it is pertinent to observe in the present context that the pastoral genre held a curious fascination for Cervantes throughout his career.