San Juan de la Cruz & Renaissance Prose: Literary Analysis
San Juan de la Cruz (1542-1591)
Life: Born into a humble family, he studied philosophy and theology at the University of Salamanca as a Carmelite. Admiring St. Teresa of Jesus, he became a Discalced Carmelite and dedicated himself to founding new convents. He wrote poems about his religious experiences. Santa Teresa suggested he write comments on the poems to clarify their meaning. He suffered imprisonment on suspicious charges related to religious renewal. His poetry explores the mystical experience of the soul’s union with the divine (mystical ecstasy). The poetry of John and Teresa is mystical because its central theme is the expression of religious experience.
To achieve union between the soul and divinity, one must take the path of ascetic purification of the soul through sacrifice, prayer, and the shedding of worldly vanities. Asceticism is a path that everyone should follow as Christians.
The Poetry of St. John of the Cross
His work was published in 1618. Manuscripts of his work circulated, resulting in numerous variants of the texts. His early poetry often adopts traditional love poems, imbuing them with a sense of religion (divine poetry). These are love poems whose main character is often a shepherd.
His most original poetry reflects his mystical experience. The language is often insufficient to convey this type of experience and is expressed through symbols.
Key Poems
- Dark Night of the Soul
- Spiritual Canticle
- Living Flame of Love
These poems, written in liras, reflect the path to union with God and the pleasure this brings. Dark Night of the Soul tells how a young woman secretly goes out to surrender to her lover. Spiritual Canticle is a dialogue of love between husband and wife, or the shepherd and the shepherdess whom she seeks to find. Symbols are transmitted through the sensations experienced in the process of union with the divine and final ecstasy. Living Flame of Love is a hymn to the joy of mystical union. His prose work explains the meaning of the poems.
Style
He employed a new poetic language through symbols originating in human love, the Bible, and nature. His expressive language was very emotional and intense, featuring many exclamations, alliteration, and enumerations. He used contrasts and antitheses, assimilating various influences.
The Renaissance: Prose and Drama
The Narrative of the Sixteenth Century
The century’s two narrative tendencies coexisted: the idealistic novels (sentimental romances, pastoral novels, Byzantine novels, and Moorish novels) and the realist novel (exemplified by the picaresque novel). Narrative culminates in the work of Cervantes.
The Idealistic Novel
The most popular types in the 16th century are:
- The novel of chivalry: This places the action in the Middle Ages, and its hero is a gentleman who represents the model of an epic hero.
- Pastoral novel: This tells love stories among shepherds in a bucolic setting.
- The Byzantine novel: This features the adventures of a pair of lovers of high lineage.
- The Moorish novel: This develops the action in an idealized Muslim world.
- Sentimental novel: It is a loving, unhappy story, ending with the death of a character, e.g., “Prison of Love.”
The Realistic Novel
This reflects the cultural movement of bourgeois society in the nineteenth century, which no longer favored fantasy and romantic idealism. Main features include:
- Monitoring and accurate description of reality.
- Location close to the facts.
- Frequent social order and political criticism.
- Simple and sober style.
Books of chivalry were the preferred reading in court. They presented themselves as true stories that were written in a strange language, with the author stated as the translator of the novel. A key example is Amadis of Gaul.
The pastoral novel incorporates the bucolic setting of Virgil’s Eclogues and Sannazaro’s Arcadia, and tells love stories between shepherds. The most famous is Los Siete Libros de la Diana by Jorge Montemayor, or Galatea by Cervantes.
The Byzantine novel mimics a story by Heliodorus discovered in 1534 and follows the adventures of a couple in love, always of high lineage. It combines the love story with countless adventures: trips, kidnapping, shipwrecks, separation… It usually has a happy ending.
The Moorish novel gained popularity following the publication of Historia del Abencerraje y la hermosa Jarifa. The taste for exoticism, refinement, and color of an idealized Muslim world would persist in many later writers.