Acceso usuarios
Javier Lorenzo Domínguez
Este trabajo se enfoca en la relación entre poesía y contexto narrativo que tiene lugar en la “Novela del cautivo.” Dicha relación resulta fundamental para comprender la dimensión retórica y política de los dos sonetos a la pérdida de La Goleta que Cervantes inserta en este relato del Quijote, en el que el carácter monumental de la poesía y su capacidad para perdurar se contraponen a la fragilidad de la arquitectura militar española en el norte de África.
In part two, chapter 44 of Don Quijote, Cide Hamete Benengeli promises the reader not to go back to the old narrative ways of part one by avoiding the addition of “novelas sueltas ni pegadizas” to the second installment of his “incomparable historia” (366). Making an effort to comply with the demands made by readers of part one, who were less than enthralled with “la gala y artificio” of his interpolated tales, the Arab historian vows to exclude from part two “novelas, como fueron la del Curioso impertinente y la del Capitán cautivo” (2.44:366) in order to preserve the unity and coherence of his tale. Missing from Cide Hamete’s statement of narrative compliance, however, is a reference to the many poems that pepper his tales. The omission reveals a basic truth about lyric insertions in Don Quijote and the Cervantine oeuvre in general: their complete integration into the narrative contexts in which they appear. This aspect is critical, as Pedro Ruiz Pérez has argued, for understanding the narrativized and contextualized engagement of Cervantes with poetry. Cervantes’s poetry, Ruiz Pérez contends, is highly contextual, and ignoring this fact can only produce faulty readings that distort “el valor pragmático de los poemas” in the settings in which they appear. This pragmatic value, which Ruiz Pérez defines as the ability of poetry to generate meaning by interacting with its “contexto enunciativo”, became, as Mercedes Alcalá Galán has argued, a central feature of Cervantine poetry after the publication of part one of Don Quijote. The task of the critic interested in exploring the rich and variegated poetry of Don Quijote will be, therefore, to read the verse contained in the book with an eye to its narrative context, for it is only in contact with the latter that the full communicative power of the poems is revealed. This dialogue between poetry and context is critical, I will argue in this essay, for understanding the rhetorical and political dimensions of the two sonnets on the loss of the Tunisian forts of La Goleta and the Nova Arx that Cervantes inserts in “The Captive’s Tale” (Don Quijote 1.40)
