Acceso usuarios
E. Michael Gerli
The result is a two-part, intertwining tale that sheds light on the evolution of the literary values and components that shaped not only the literary career of Cervantes leading up to 1613 but much of the fiction of the Golden Age.1 The two novellas in one comprise nothing short of an exploration of the modes of the art of fiction and the forms that make fiction possible in its broadest sense: mimesis and anti-mimesis, or Aristotelian versus what may be designated more abstract Platonic and other symbolic approaches to representation that interrogate how to value fiction as something separate from reality-as something which justifies itself and at the same permits for the moral edification of the reader, thus performing one of literature's essential ethical tasks. [...]Riley maintains that the theory of verisimilitude proved much too narrow a concept for Cervantes as the basis for all fiction, and that it actually bothered Cervantes, who always sought to test and investigate its limits, a tendency that doubtless culminated in the Novelas ejemplares but markedly in the two stories in one encompassed by the "Casamiento engañoso" and the "Coloquio de los perros" (Teoría 281-84) and, of course, in the posthumous 1617 Persiles y Sigismunda (Teoría 264). According to B.W. Ife, Renaissance intellectuals, echoing Plato, feared the power of language and literature to stage disruptive, shocking, and unrestrained human unrealities, which the public harbors and experiences vicariously through fiction, a medium constructed from lies and counterfeit realities. "Even when it sets its face against the bad examples, art is still bad for us simply because it is mimetic, because it purports to be other than it is" (Ife 38). Since works of literature have the power to convince in the face of rational disbelief, their bad examples are particularly dangerous; the mediated vicarious experience they offer the reader is particularly intense, their lies can be particularly deceptive, and the reader's grasp on reality is often acutely weakened by their imagery.
