Chapter 6 - The Literary Character as Poet: Lyric Subjectivity, Chronotopic Dynamism, and Plot in the Galatea

Summary

Chapter 6 examines the force of lyric subjectivity as narrative emplotment in the Galatea. At the confluence of verse and prose, allegory and history, mimesis and poiesis, this chapter treats the Galatea and contemporary works, beginning with the 1582 transition from verse to prose in Pedro de Padilla’s Églogas pastoriles (Seville). While the Galatea has often been dismissed in scholarship as a partially formed and immature work, or reinterpreted through standard approaches to the DQ, this chapter studies the chronotopic dynamism of Cervantes’ first prose fiction through the narrative emplotment of Lauso’s lyric interior. It is attuned to the sophisticated narrative architecture of an unprecedented capacity to juggle multiple lyric temporalities within a single narrative landscape. The Galatea lent novelistic immediacy to the timeless retreat of the pastoral through the use of lyric subjectivity. As a meditation on the nature of love and lyric subjectivity inherent in Pastoral Petrarchism, in the Galatea the figura of the poet as literary character was fully developed in Lauso. As a novel in key, the Galatea not only pertained to the fábulas of Cervantes’ literary milieu, it also wove a tapestry of narrativized lyric intersubjectivity necessary to the conception of the first modern novel.