Archipelagoes: Insular Fictions from Chivalric Romance to the Novel

Conclusion: Archipelagic Possibilities

155 Throughout this book I have been presenting different discourses that in the late Middle Ages and the early modern world led up to an intimate relation among insularity, fiction, and event: from voyages to maps to literature, from romance to book of chivalry to novel. The cultural atmosphere that in the late medieval period looks to insularity as a new way of interrogating the real with tools that draw from the encyclopedic and the singular, from bookish knowledge and humanist curiosity, allowed the emergence of genres in literature and cartography that focused on insularity as the space to explore those relations. In the book of chivalry and the isolario, island and fiction are articulated as a structure that comes to function as a stand-in for fiction itself, as the form of fiction where events will have taken place. This shape is taken from a geography in late medieval texts, as in Amadís and the Liber insularum archipelagi, then displaced to discourse in seventeenth-century elaborations, as in the late isolarii and Barataria. In the Amadisian archipelago, fiction is the set of possible itineraries between islands, a probable constellation to be constituted by the relation among islands; it is a grouping process among them that might emphasize ontology, politics, or ethics. The relations are themselves underlined and linked through the figure of a subject that ties them together as itinerary, as narrative. Interestingly, Amadís does not point at any evolution in this itinerary of narrative: it does not present a development or progress (which is what many, even today, find “primitive” in the book of chivalry), but leaves QW conclusion Archipelagic Possibilities The question of fiction is first a question regarding the distribution of places. —jacques rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics 156 Conclusion it up to the reader to chart her own routes. Cervantes, by voiding the insular /the fictional from any particular geography, makes of any fiction that is framed, circumscribed by language, the possible site for the production of truths. The status of truth within fiction in early modern Iberia has been studied from many points of view, particularly within the Renaissance debate in Italy surrounding Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and the chivalric romanzo in general . In the Iberian Peninsula, the main attacks on chivalric literature were of a moral nature; that is, criticism centered not on the structure of romance but on its pretended moral implications and its effects on readers, with many critics taking this criticism as Cervantes’s own. Among the zealous attackers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were Luis Vives, Pedro Malón de Chaide, Pero Mexía, Alonso de Fuentes, Arias Montano, Gaspar de Astete, Gonzálo Fernández de Oviedo, and Miguel Sánchez de Lima, all cited by the influential critic Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo who, four centuries later, concurred that “the clamor of moralists against books of chivalry, which they saw as perpetual incentive of idleness and a plague of customs, were old and quite justified,” establishing a national-critical continuity in the judgment of both the chivalric genre and its fictional core.1 The two best-known Golden Age attacks on books of chivalry that argue for a structural reform based on morality and verisimilitude in such texts are Juan de Valdés’s Diálogo de la lengua of 1535 and Alonso López Pinciano’s Philosophia antigua poetica of 1596. Valdés’s criticism focuses on the way chivalric fictions fail to present their “lies”—which is the nature of every fiction, according to Valdés—as believable truths. The failure is due to the anachronisms that plague books of chivalry, exemplified by Valdés with passages taken from Amadís de Gaula. In this book, the critic argues, the problems with verisimilitude are worsened by the unbelievable immorality of characters belonging to the nobility (such as Elisena, Amadís’s mother), a criterion intimately tied to Valdés’s political emphasis on the respect of the customs and habits of a social hierarchy , on one hand, and to the use of “special effects,” that is, unconvincing illumination or sound references in the narration of passages on which Valdés places a curious emphasis, on the other. In other words: Valdés’s arguments lock together politics and poetics. Conclusion 157 López Pinciano, on his part, elaborates on the concepts of imitation and verisimilitude to draw conclusions on genre...