I was surprised to learn that Cervantes, author of the classic "Don Quixote," thought that his last work, "Los Trabajos De Persiles Y Sigismunda," was his greatest achievement. You can take that opinion for what it's worth, considering that he finished writing "Persiles And Sigismunda" three whole days before he died of diabetes.
The title "Los Trabajos De Persiles Y Sigismunda" has a number of translations – "The Wanderings Of Persiles And Sigismunda" and "The Travels Of Persiles And Sigismunda" are the ones I've run across so far. This too is a surprise to me; as I recall from my middle school Spanish, "trabajo" means "work", and according to online sources, that's the meaning in modern Spanish today. It may have had other meanings in 1616, when Cervantes completed it, of course.
So much for the preliminaries. The greatest surprise of all to me is the fact that for almost all of its length, this novel has no characters named Persiles and Sigismunda – the names don't even get a mention until about halfway through. It's not at all difficult to guess which of the characters are the real Persiles and Sigismunda, but since the action here begins in medias res (in the middle of the story), their identities remain secret for quite a while.
Critical sources tell us that this work falls into the category of "Byzantine novel," which is a revival of the ancient Greek romance of Roman times, initiated in twelfth century Constantinople. Wikipedia tells us that this sort of literature "featur[es] complex turns of events taking place in the ancient Mediterranean, complete with the ancient gods and beliefs...but are also medieval, clearly belonging to the era of the Crusades as they reflect customs and beliefs of that time."
In this particular case, what this means (as the title suggests) is that a group of mostly young people find themselves traveling by ship from island to island, trying to get back to Europe where most of them were born, dealing with those who want to distract them by various means – some want to marry one or the other of them, some want to enslave them, some want to kill them, and all like that there.
So there's a great deal of incident, some in real time and some in flashback as someone in the party tells about his or her history, and much of it disconnected from the rest. It's only toward the conclusion of our story that some of the characters reappear and finish up their individual adventures. In that way, "Persiles and Sigismunda" resembles a lot of the literature of its time – it's at least as much a series of short tales regarding the same characters as it is a unified story. At least it wraps up fairly neatly.
It shares other characteristics with its contemporaries, too, some of which modern creative writing programs would cover it with red ink for. The main characters are uniformly virtuous, and even when crossed they rarely if ever get angry – one of them just leaves the city, plops himself down near a convenient river, and sighs. The narrator frequently interrupts his action to deliver a lecture (mercifully short most of the time) on things like religion and the jealousy lovers naturally feel at various times. And I might as well admit that, as understandable as it is, I got a little annoyed at how often the narrative assumes that the characters' adherence to Catholic doctrine is better than anything they do otherwise. What did I expect, right?
In short, I can't agree with Cervantes that "Persiles And Sigismunda" is superior to "Don Quixote". Still, I'm glad to see that he ended his life convinced that he'd hit a high note.
Benshlomo says, You can disagree with the opinions of geniuses – they're not always right.
Comments