Of Oaten Flutes and Magic Potions: Montemayor's Diana as Pastoral Romance

Abstract

The importance of Jorge de Montemayor's Siete Libros de la Diana for the development of novelistic writing in Western Europe has variously been pointed out; evidence to its instant popularity with readers and writers alike is furnished by the large number of editions that appeared in various languages in the decades following its first publication around 1559. 1 The reasons for its success were probably manifold and explanations have been attempted. Carroll B. Johnson, for example, traces the popularity of this early modern bestseller to its unique balancing of lyrical conventions of the traditional pastoral with narrative elements of the Greek romance. The presence of such devices as the in medias res beginning or the novella-like retrospective narratives of some characters "saves the work from becoming an endless eclogue" (26). Ruth El Saffar is one of the few critics who note that this symmetry does not extend far beyond the surface of the seven books; she finds it "more rewarding to find in the work's imperfections a reflection of the author's states of mind in a love situation the inherent dualism of which he was never able to transcend" (186). I agree with El Saffar about the general imbalance of the Diana. Her argument is, however, like that of Johnson and earlier critics, thematic rather than structural, and I contend that a close analysis of some of the narrative devices that Montemayor employed reveals not only a clear shift of the text's genre from pastoral to romance (and not a number of narrative parentheses within a pastoral frame, as Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce argues [79]), but also shows that this shift was the result of artistic intention rather than of a lack of poetic skill. The following article, then, aims to investigate the poet's particular manipulation of point of view and narrative voice, and, at the same time, to argue for a new approach to pinpointing the rather elusive pastoral as a genre instead of as a mode, as Paul Alpers has done. 2