From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 8 special issue (1988): 7-15.

Copyright 1988, The Cervantes Society of America

ARTICLE
La Galatea: The Novelistic Crucible
JUAN BAUTISTA AVALLE-
ARCE

N THE YEAR 1585 the printing press of Juan Gracin in Alcal de Henares
witnessed the delivery of a manuscript novel by a son of that same university town,
although he had been away from it for many years and he was practically unknown in the
world of letters. The novel was, of course, La Galatea, whose author always referred to it
as an gloga, and the novelist-to-be was Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. The new author
was not less than 38 years old, which, to us, is not precisely the age of haviendo salido
apenas de los lmites de la juventud, as the author will describe himself in the prologue to
the Curiosos lectores. Such a bold statement, however, fits well with the traditional
divisions of the ages of man Dr. Juan Huarte, for example, had recently stated that youth
extended from the 25th to the 35th year of a man's life. The youth of the novelist had been
brutally stormy, and had thrown him around both extremes of the Mediterranean, and in one
of them he had recently spent five years in anguishing imprisonment. All of this helps to
explain, in some way, the late formal literary debut. Another possible motive, also of a
biographical nature, which might have contributed to such a delay, was the fact the novelist
had been married at about the same time as his first-born work was being printed. The
licencia of La Galatea was signed by his friend Antonio de Eraso on 22 February 1584; the
wedding was celebrated on 12 December 1584.
The fact that Alcal de Henares was chosen as the place for printing his first work could
have been dictated, at the simplest level,

8 JUAN BAUTISTA AVALLE-ARCE Cervantes

by the evidence that this was the birthplace of the author. Besides, it was a town of a very
illustrious typographical tradition, abetted by the happy circumstance of harbouring its
already very famous university, the favourite creation of the formidable Cardinal Cisneros.
It was there, precisely, that the world-famous Biblia Polglota Complutense had been
printed, to become the pride of the Spanish press, all of this at the behest of Cardinal
Cisneros. Ever since then the university town kept in its midst some very illustrious
printing houses. The printer of the Galatea, Juan Gracin, was not chosen by Cervantes, as
I will explain shortly. Furthermore, Juan Gracin would die soon after: by 1588, the second
edition of the Cancionero general de la doctrina cristiana of Juan Lpez de beda was
published by the herederos de Juan Gracin. But Gracin had been a distinguished
printer, who in 1580 had brought out the first Spanish translation of Os Lusiadas of
Camoens, done by his compatriot Benito Caldera. To be sure, the same four poets who
praised Caldera's translation in Gracin's edition (el maestro Garay, Luis Glvez de
Montalvo, el maestro Vergara and Pedro Lanez) were allotted laudatory octaves in
Cervantes' Canto de Calope, and Pedro Lanez even appears as a character in La Galatea,
under the poetic pseudonym of Damn. The same place, the same printer, and the same four
poets appear in both works. I mention this en passant for I think that it would be
worthwhile to reconstruct and study these provincial poetic cliques, because they might
solve more than one small literary mystery of the times.
I mentioned that Cervantes had not chosen Juan Gracin as his printer, and I say that
based on the following information. On 14 June 1584 Cervantes had sold the original
manuscript of un libro de prosa y verso en que se contienen Los seis libros de Galatea
and the privilegio to Blas de Robles, a librero from Alcal de Henares. The same document
tells us that in exchange for the 1,336 reales that he paid for La Galatea, he would have it
printed and he would sell the first novel of his paisano. So it is to Blas de Robles that we
owe the first edition of La Galatea, as the man who owned the privilegio and who paid for
the printing costs. Such cases occurred quite frequently at that time. An author lacked the
financial means to pay for the printing costs of his work, so he set about looking for a
librero who would do so, in exchange for the privilegio and some additional sum that the
librero would pay the author. Of course, if the author had the wherewithal he would pay for
the printing costs. Much later on, Cervantes would dramatize some of this familiar
dilemma, when, in Barcelona, Don Quijote visits a printing house and talks to the famous
translator of Le

8 (1988) La Galatea: The Novelistic Crucible 9

Bagatele, and asks him: Pero dgame vuestra merced: este libro, imprmese por su cuenta,
o tiene ya vendido el privilegio a algn librero? Por mi cuenta lo imprimo respondi
el autor, y pienso ganar mil ducados (II, 42). The author of La Galatea could never fool
himself with such an illusion, because on its title-page we read: A costa de Blas de Robles
mercader de libros.
I would like to stop here for a minute, on the attractive personality of Blas de Robles,
because, as will be seen immediately, we cervantistas owe our earnest gratitude to him and
his family. They were a veritable lineage of libreros from Alcal de Henares. The first one
to stand out was Bartolom de Robles, who practised that trade in Alcal, and who was a
contemporary of the licenciado Juan de Cervantes, grandfather of our novelist, and who
must have known Rodrigo de Cervantes, father of Miguel. The son of Bartolom was our
Blas de Robles, also a librero alcalano, as we already know, and who paid for the first
edition of La Galatea. Blas married Mari Lpez, daughter of Francisco Lpez el Viejo, a
librero from Madrid, and this explains why Blas established himself in Madrid, although
not giving up the family trade in Alcal de Henares. In Madrid Blas quickly appears with
the honorific librero del rey, and as such he dedicated to Philip II the Methodus medendi
of the famous contemporary physician, el divino Valles, which appeared in Madrid, 1588. It
was the worthy Blas de Robles who facilitated the entrance of the unknown Cervantes into
the republic of Spanish letters. He died in 1592. He was followed in the trade, as honorific
librero del Rey, by his son Francisco de Robles, who lived all his life in Madrid, where he
signed his will in February, 1623. Circumstances in the lives of both men made Francisco
de Robles keep the same relations with Cervantes that his father had had, and gave them
new impetus and effectiveness. It was Francisco de Robles who bought from the author the
two parts of Don Quijote and the Novelas ejemplares. What this means is that in three
decisive moments of the life of the novelist Cervantes, it was Francisco de Robles who
stood up and solved his most immediate economic problems. I want to remind you, and to
repeat, that the father of Francisco, Blas de Robles, had done the same for the unknown and
inexperienced author of La Galatea. I think all of us cervantistas have contracted a debt of
gratitude with this attractive family of libreros from Alcal de Henares, a family of
worthies in Spanish letters.
By June, 1584, as I have said, Cervantes had solved the vexing problem of how to pay
for the edition of La Galatea. Other

10 JUAN BAUTISTA AVALLE-ARCE Cervantes

prerequisites of the contemporary censorship laws had been met beforehand. But he still
had to fulfill a pleasant convention of the time, which could be quite profitable, if one was
lucky. I am referring to the ever-present, or almost, dedication of the finished work to
someone the author considered the appropriate Maecenas. In the case of Cervantes and his
Galatea the search could not have been very long, and the novel appears dirigida al
ilustrsimo seor Ascanio Colonna, Abad de Santa Sofa, as is printed on the title-page,
illustrated with the canting arms of the Colonna family. I am sure the search was brief
because Luis Glvez de Montalvo, author of the much admired El pastor de Flida, was a
dear friend of Cervantes, for whose Galatea he wrote a sonnet, and at this time was serving
in the household of Ascanio Colonna. In the search for a Maecenas the name of Colonna
must have seemed natural. Furthermore, Ascanio Colonna had studied at the university of
Alcal de Henares, where he had taken his licenciatura and maestra in 1578. In the
academic years 1579-1580 Colonna was registered at the University of Salamanca among
the estudiantes generosos (with Gngora), and at this time the second Spanish translation of
Os Lusiadas, done by the maestro Luis Gmez de Tapia and published in Salamanca, 1580,
was dedicated to him. It is interesting to observe that for the second time the great epic of
Camoens, in Spanish, appears in the background of the still shadowy figure of the novelist-
to-be Cervantes. Anyhow, the essence of all of this is that the Galatea appeared dedicated
to Ascanio Colonna, and that the dedication was written after the sale of the privilegio to
Blas de Robles, in other words, when the novel was already being printed. This is easy to
prove: in the dedication Cervantes alludes to the recent death of Ascanio's father, Marco
Antonio Colonna, General of the papal galleys at Lepanto, and this had occurred on 1
August 1584, in Medinaceli, not far from Alcal de Henares.
The printing of La Galatea was dictated by the terms of the contract signed between
Blas de Robles, librero, and Juan Gracin, impresor. The contract is not extant, but to judge
by the available copies of the editio princeps the terms were good, easy and favourable to
Robles and Cervantes. I will quote, at this point, the dean of Cervantine bibliographers,
Don Leopoldo Rus y Llosellas, who describes that edition as: Letra de gran cuerpo y
clara; buena impresin y excelente papel. Esta edicin prncipe de La Galatea es bastante
correcta y esmerada, superior en ambos conceptos a varias de las posteriores.
While Juan Gracin's workmen were busy setting up the body of the novel, the author to
be published went about meeting the

8 (1988) La Galatea: The Novelistic Crucible 11

requirements of a last convention of his time, which consisted in soliciting and printing
laudatory poems from friends, acquaintances, relatives. This audience is well aware of how
many of these conventional preliminaries were discarded or mocked in the next novel of
Cervantes, which happened to be the Quijote of 1605. Therefore, I will not insist upon that.
Again, Cervantes did not have to look far for complimentary poems, because he was not as
yet tan falto cle amigos, as the venomous Alonso Fernndez de Avellaneda would make
him out to be much later. Three true friends Cervantes had then at hand, or nearby. These
were Luis Glvez de Montalvo, Don Luis de Vargas Manrique and Lpez Maldonado. I
have already mentioned some aspects of the relations between Glvez de Montalvo and
Cervantes. The latter always praised most eloquently El pastor de Flida, and he once
referred to its author as nico pintor de un retrato (Coloquio de los perros). Montalvo
would drown off the coast of Sicily shortly after the publication of La Galatea, as Lope de
Vega would remember in la viuda valenciana: Con hbito de San Juan / muri en la mar.
Don Luis de Vargas Manrique was a good friend of Cervantes and of Lope de Vega, who
would still remember him in his late Dorotea. Of a jocund nature, his name was dragged,
together with Cervantes' own, very few years later, into the scandalous and unedifying
Proceso de Lope de Vega por libelos contra unos cmicos (1588). The sonnet of Lpez
Maldonado obviously pleased its own author very much, for he would have it reprinted in
his own Cancionero, about to come out the year after in Madrid (1586). In this Cancionero
Cervantes repaid doubly the debt he had contracted for the sonnet in praise of La Galatea,
for among its preliminaries there are a sonnet and some dcimas of our novelist. To be sure,
in the preliminaries of this Cancionero the name of Don Luis de Vargas Manrique will
reappear, as author of a sonnet. In the event, the names of these good friends and poets will
each receive its laudatory octava in the Canto de Calope, towards the end of our novel.
With a brief look at the prlogo I will complete this rapid examination of the
introductory material which the inexperienced author Cervantes, literary conventions, and
the censorship laws put before the eyes of any possible reader of La Galatea, or any other
book of the period. In this case a brief approach is particularly pertinent because we are
confronted with the first novel of the first novelist of the world, that is to say, the reading of
the prologue should allow us to appreciate the first public attitude, that, knowingly,
Cervantes adopted toward his written work. Of course, we are all fully conversant

12 JUAN BAUTISTA AVALLE-ARCE Cervantes

with the fact that the designation prologue is deceiving. Because we all know that a
prlogo is not what antecedes the discourse, the written text, it is not what is written first,
but rather what is written last, after the work has been finished. There one usually gathers
as in a sheaf the final conclusions of the work, one points or hints at its moral, social, or
aesthetic message, or what have you. Strictly speaking, a prologue is an epilogue.
From this vantage point, we must consider the prologue to the Galatea as the
retrospective look the author gives his finished book. From this perspective, the author sees
some points which he considers the most appropriate to underscore for his informative
aims, so that the reader can confidently enter the world of the novel. And it is at this point
that we must realize that the prologue is indeed very cervantino, because of the fact that the
author can very well ask que se le den alabanzas, no por lo que escribe, sino por lo que ha
dejado de escribir, as the plaintive Cide Hamete Benengeli once wrote. The truth of the
matter is that the prologue to La Galatea tells us very little about the true nature of the
work we are about to read. A new reading of the prologue leaves the following balance of
intrinsic characteristics of La Galatea that the author wants to emphasize on this occasion:
1. the work was written to be aesthetically pleasing (para ms que para mi gusto slo le
compuso mi entendimiento); 2. there is a mixture in it of philosophy and bucolic (haber
mezclado razones de filosofa entre algunas amorosas de pastores), and 3. its characters
are real persons disguised (muchos de los disfrazados pastores della lo eran slo en el
hbito). One need not be particularly erudite to conclude that these three characteristics
constitute some of the fundamental elements of the pastoral genre in Spain, that all three are
the most habitual and commonest ingredients of the pastoral novel. In other words, the
author pretends to give us the principal characteristics of the Galatea, when what he is
really doing is to point up some of the more general and external traits of the pastoral as a
whole. This is to say that we are given the indispensable pieces of clothing that Galatea
needs to dress herself up as a shepherdess, just like the Diana of Montemayor or the Flida
of Glvez de Montalvo. But those intrinsic characteristics that will allow her to be Galatea,
and not Diana nor Flida, those are left unmentioned, with the reticence that will become
fundamental to the art of allusion-elusion, so central to the Cervantine narrative, and which
I have expounded at length elsewhere. When we come to it, what do we know about La
Galatea as a novel of differentiated personality within

8 (1988) La Galatea: The Novelistic Crucible 13

the Spanish pastoral genre when we have finished reading the prologue? Nothing. There
can be no doubt left: much more important here is what the author has left unwritten, than
what he actually wrote. He alludes profusely to the pastoral, and he eludes its
characterization hic et nunc.
Allow me now to go back to some of my favourite truisms of today. When he wrote his
prologue (which is really an epilogue) Cervantes knew only too well (how could it have
been otherwise?) which were the strident novelties, of a truly revolutionary nature, which
he had introduced into his pastoral, which could not be a run-of-the-mill pastoral, or else he
would not be Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. I lapse into a truism when I say that Cervantes
had a very clear and perfect knowledge of how anti-pastoral, at bottom, his pastoral really
was. But, on second thought, who was Cervantes in 1585 to start vociferously calling
everybody's attention to the revolutionary newness of his novel, which went brutally
against the grain of some of the things most jealously treasured by the Spanish pastoral?
The inexperienced but prudent author would not come out to the main forum of the republic
of letters and start tearing down the building. An identical attitude will dictate the prologue
to the Quijote of 1605, but I will not insist upon this today. Let us not forget that in spite of
the assurance with which he goes about his pastoral revolution in 1585, twenty years later,
by 1605, he is still not disposed to call the public's attention to such novelties, nor is he
very satisfied with his solutions: Propone algo y no concluye nada, he will tell us about
his Galatea in the Quijote of 1605. Only in 1613, in the prologue to his Novelas ejemplares,
will Cervantes feel himself sufficiently authorized to declare in public something which he
knew from way back: Yo soy el primero que he novelado en lengua castellana. Yes,
indeed, sir. But this he could not have said, and did not want to say in 1585, he could have
said it, but certainly did not want to say it in 1605, he could say it, he did want to say it, and
he said it, in the loudest of tones, in the prologue to his Novelas ejemplares.
Many are the things which differentiate La Galatea from the rest of the Spanish
pastorals, which give it an unequivocal novelistic identity. Cervantes took care not to
mention them in his prologue, in the certainty that his most absent-minded reader would
notice them as soon as he entered the world of his first novel. Its beginning must be fresh in
all your memories, so I will briefly point at some very few things. Its opening is
rigourously stationary; there is not the slightest movement, only the sound of a song, its
sense of sonorous, sad

14 JUAN BAUTISTA AVALLE-ARCE Cervantes

melancholy underscored by its initial words: Mientras que al triste lamentable acento. It
is Elicio, who is singing his love sorrows for Galatea. The presence of Erastro breaks this
motionless solitude, and he is also in love with Galatea. In the ensuing dialogue we are
informed that there is no rivalry between them, just a painful friendship. The canto amebeo
that they both sing expresses all the sentiments mentioned. And at this very moment comes
the most strident break with the established pastoral canons: Ya se aparejaba Erastro para
seguir adelante en su canto, cuando sintieron, por un espeso montecillo que a sus espaldas
estaba, un no pequeo estruendo y ruido. It is the shepherd Lisandro, pursuing the
shepherd Carino, whom he catches, y asindole por el cabezn del pellico, levant el
brazo cuanto pudo, y un agudo pual que sin vaina traa se le escondi dos veces en el
cuerpo. This is a cold-blooded murder in the middle of the stage of the pastoral world,
with witnesses, as if to leave no doubt as to the homicidal violence of the opening incident.
Nowadays we are all familiar with the fact that this crime tears apart completely the most
elementary canons of the pastoral, and we can all recite with satisfaction Fernando de
Herrera's definition of gloga in his Anotaciones to Garcilaso (1580). By now, we are used
to the idea that a certain degree of violence does exist in the pastoral world, but either as
violence justified ideologically, or well wrapped up in some intercalated story, which
withdraws it from the bucolic world of the main narrative. But here in the Galatea we are
confronted with an extraordinary, initial and inexplicable murder, which decidedly,
forcefully and overtly breaks all literary canons. This is a case of absolute novelty within
the traditional pastoral world, to which the words of the prologue seemed to direct us.
There had been, to be sure, other subtler (more Cervantine) ways in which the author had
prepared the alert reader for this veritable literary earthquake, which is precisely what this
crime represents in the idyllic world of the shepherds. In the dialogue that precedes the
crime, Erastro tells how, in order to cure his lovesickness, he went to the village physicians,
and, even more unheard of, its priests. The latter ones had recommended to him that me
encomiende a Dios. Upon hearing all of this, Elicio reacts in a most unusual way, given
the gamut of feelings that structure the pastoral: No pudo dejar de rerse Elicio de las
razones de Erastro. There is no point in insisting today that physicians and priests are
professions totally alien to the pastoral world, for its hermetic and paganizing bucolism
rejects the entry of the Christian God. And insofar as laughter is concerned, we know that it
is

8 (1988) La Galatea: The Novelistic Crucible 15

incompatible with pastoral love, which is pained and sad in its very root. The pastoral novel
is not concerned with happy love, and smiling attitudes are alien to it.
The elements which I have just mentioned are not customary in the literary pastoral
world, and some, like the town priests, are antagonistic to its very essence. Upon gathering
them in a sheaf, we can appreciate the Cervantine intention given the narrative place they
have of using them as a gradual introduction to the outrageous murder of Carino by
Lisandro. Death has entered Arcadia, led by the hand of Cervantes, and this more than fifty
years before Nicolas Poussin saw her, hallucinated, murmuring to the shepherds, Et in
Arcadia ego. But Death's hegemony is exercised only where there is Life, and its presence
in the Cervantine Arcadia should make very clear the fact that Cervantes wanted to create
live shepherds, flesh and blood beings, not the idealities that the Diana of Montemayor had
brought into Spanish soil. The Dianas and Siralvos are pure theory, and abstraction
untouched by reality. But in the card-game of Life, Death is the trump. This is why, in the
first moments of the Cervantine pastoral Carino will be stabbed to death in front of the
other astonished shepherds. The shepherds of Cervantes live in the shadow of death
precisely because they are alive (or such is the artist's intention), because they want to
assert the fact that they are not theoretical creatures valid only as abstractions. In a
forthright way which will become characteristic of Cervantes' art, without the slightest
hesitation, the first step has been taken towards the humanization of the literary character,
in what I shall call the mortalization of the bucolic shepherds, who had lived, until now, in
timeless Arcadias.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA