Tr aditional tales and facetiae (cuentecillos)

Finally, traditional tales (cuentecillos), or brief stories of folkloric origin with strong traces of their oral roots, contributed to the great fund of

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Antecedents of the novel in sixteenth-century Spain 199

Narrative that circulated in sixteenth-century Spain and served as a foundation for the development of the novel. These concise, homespun anecdotes, not unlike a variety of jokes, yarns, and tall tales in contemporary Anglo-American folklore, often took the form of a short dialogue or a jest whose sole purpose was the production of wit and laughter. In addition to circulating orally, they were disseminated principally in three printed forms: in several notable compilations (e. g. the two assembled by Juan de Timoneda [1520–1583], El sobremesa y alivio de caminantes [“Table Conversation or Balm of Travelers,” Valencia 1563], and the Buen aviso y Portacuentos [“Good Advice and Portable Tales,” Valencia 1564], plus Floresta espan˜ola de apotegmas y sentencias [“Spanish Grove of Maxims and Sayings,” Toledo 1574] by Melchor de Santa Cruz de Duen˜as [1515? – after 1576]); as stories that were recorded or told by characters in other works (e. g., El cortesano [“The Courtier,” 1561] by Luis Mila´n [fl. second half of sixteenth century], and in the many continuations of Celestina); and as plot sketches for brief narratives or dramatic interludes (e. g. Timoneda’s El patran˜ uelo [“The Hoaxster,” Valencia 1567] and El deleitoso [“The Delightful One,” Valencia 1567] by Lope de Rueda [1510?–1565]). Many cuentecillos found their way into works by imaginative prose writers like Mateo Alema´n, Quevedo, and especially Cervantes, whose Don Quijote incorporates a great deal of folk material with oral origins. With their roots in the oral tradition and their plain colloquial style, the cuentecillos served as points of reference for modeling the earthy sensibilities, rustic imaginations, and ordinary speech of characters like Sancho Panza.

Blurred genres and the problems of taxonomy

As early as Amad´ıs de Gaula in 1508 it is possible to find a premonition of the pastoral in a chivalric romance. As a result, it is clear that the newly emergent narrative typologies of sixteenth-century Spain from the point of their first appearance began to incorporate elements that blurred and undermined the dominant modes of their representation and relation. With the very first hint of a pastoral episode in chivalric romance it is possible to detect the infiltration of other narrative styles and motifs into an identifiable type of literature, which gives the lie to the notion of the stability of genres and their characterization as taxonomies composed of enduring forms and conventions. Narrative prose fiction, like all types of literature, is continuously subject to modulation, refinement, and change by the interplay of genius, imagination, taste, and even the market. Like all discursive constructions, literary forms and styles evolve and transform themselves as they come into contact with the other forms

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200 Early Modern Spain: Renaissance and Baroque

And styles that populate the vast universe of texts and language. Any historical characterization of a genre or genres therefore, like the written grammar of a language, remains reductive and factitious. It constitutes an artificial synthesis of a dynamic, ever-evolving process into a convenient fabrication that permits access, understanding, and discussion.

Only critics and historians search for process, form, and structure to impose order on the past. Writers and artists simply give expression to their ideas and to the symbolic forms that inhabit their imaginations. There is nothing inherently neat or fixed therefore in the world of sixteenth-century Spanish prose fiction we have described, nor did it possess a teleology. Although each of the kinds of narrative that have been outlined allows for the grouping of certain works, these did not constitute independent, monolithic models, but manifestations of an endless sequence of transactions in continuous flux that took place not only between texts and other texts, but between authors, readers, and patrons, and, even as in the present day, between publishers, booksellers, and the buying public. It is not possible to speak of stable narrative forms and models in sixteenth-century Spain that may serve as the categorical precursors of something we call “the novel” – for which there is also no single narrative paradigm – yet all the books examined here did in one way or another help mold narrative styles and tastes that would lead to the novel’s appearance from the hand of Miguel de Cervantes.

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• If the narrative dwells on the poverty…

Reduced to a mere paragraph of euphemisms that cannot be lost on any competent reader. The temporal configuration of the narrative is such that, although it is the older La´zaro who tells the tale, interest is always displaced away from controversy and from the present toward the past, to the

• The plays of both Virue´s and Cueva may be related to political…

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 242 Early Modern Spain: Renaissance and Baroque Diverse contributors shaped the theatrical mix in the second half of that century. Juan de Timoneda’s own texts – particularly Las tres comedias (“The Three Comedies,” 1559), adaptations of Italian erudite prose comedies to Spanish taste –

• They utterly rejected the treatment of it as a work of coarse…

11 Miguel de Cervantes ANTHONY CLOSE Cervantes’ Don Quijote was published in 1605. Its immense popularity in Spain, which quickly spread to other European countries – for example, via Thomas Shelton’s (1612) and Ce´sar Oudin’s (1614) translations of Part I into English and French respectively – stimulated Cervantes into adding a second

• Set on the Christian and Muslim frontier before…

Cambridge 190 Early Modern Spain: Renaissance and Baroque Moorish romances An elegant, intensely moving narrative of love and chivalry entitled Historia del Abencerraje y la hermosa Jarifa (“History of Abencerraje and the Lovely Jarifa”), whose chief protagonists are a pair of noble Moorish lovers and a Christian knight, was probably written around the

• Vazquez Montalban and Almodovar (like many of their contemporaries) have…

However, Goytisolo’s (censorship) bull did not die with a triumphant first thrust. Virtually all the writers of the seventies listed above were still struggling for political/cultural freedom specific to their own circumstances, regardless of their (new) international inclinations. It was the seminal novel by Luis Mart´ın Santos (1924-1964), Tiempo de