Spanish Literature: Figures, El Cid, Lazarillo & La Celestina

Posted on Sep 21, 2024 in Latin

Figures of Speech

Phonetic Figures

  • Alliteration: Repetition of one or more phonemes in a verse.
  • Anaphora: Repetition of a word at the beginning of successive verses or grammatical structures.

Syntactic Figures

  • Pleonasm: Repetition of unnecessary words.
  • Parallelism: Repetition of similar syntactic structures.
  • Polysyndeton: Repetition of conjunctions.
  • Epanalepsis: Begins and ends with the same word.
  • Anadiplosis: Repeats at the beginning of a verse the word that ends the previous one.

Figures of Meaning

  • Allegory: Transforms the overall meaning of a text.
  • Antithesis: Contrasts words or sentences with opposite meanings.
  • Hyperbole: Exaggerates reality.
  • Metaphor: Identifies one term with another imaginary one. Can be pure if the real term replaces the imaginary or impure if it appoints an area and an imaginary one.
  • Personification: Attributes human qualities to irrational beings or objects.
  • Simile: Compares two realities by using a comparative term.
  • Synaesthesia: Combines two sensations with different senses.
  • Epithet: Adds two adjectives to a substantive.
  • Paradox: Combines two irreconcilable ideas.
  • Asyndeton: Eliminates conjunctions.
  • Ellipsis: Suppresses one or more words.
  • Hyperbaton: Alters the order of the sentence.
  • Chiasmus: Crosses equivalent elements in a sentence.

El Cid

Structure

  • Song of Exile: El Cid is banished by King Alfonso VI. He leaves his family in a monastery and begins his exile.
  • Song of the Weddings: Narrates the conquest of Valencia. The Counts of Carrión ask for the hand of El Cid’s daughters in marriage. The song ends with the marriage.
  • Song of the Shame of Corpes: The Counts of Carrión mistreat El Cid’s daughters and abandon them in the oak grove of Corpes. El Cid demands justice and wins a trial by combat. The infants of Navarra and Aragon ask to marry his daughters.

Internal Structure

  • El Cid’s disgrace and his path to regaining the king’s pardon.
  • Family disgrace caused by the insult of Corpes.

Style

  • Irregular hemistich measures.
  • Use of repetitions and rhetorical pleonasms.
  • Varied lexicon with use of cultisms and Arabisms.
  • Use of technical terms.
  • Free use of verbal tenses.
  • Epic epithets that characterize the hero’s social ascension.

Themes

  • The hero’s journey from a situation of dishonor to regaining his honor through effort and fame.
  • Honor, justice, and betrayal.
  • El Cid’s increasing power and the qualities that differentiate him from others.

Lazarillo de Tormes

Issues of Authorship

  • The first three editions are from 1554.
  • It was written after 1525.

Argument

  • Autobiographical novel written in the form of a letter.
  • Lázaro sends his story to “Your Grace” to explain how he ended up sharing his wife with another man.
  • Lázaro’s story is that of a humble child, with no father and a mother who becomes a prostitute. His development is seen through his different masters.
  • In the end, Lázaro gets a job as a town crier and marries one of the maids of the archpriest.

Themes

  • Honor: The novel criticizes the superficial conception of honor based on external appearance, money, and lineage.
  • Religion and Hunger: The novel presents a strong anticlericalism. Five of Lázaro’s masters are clergymen. It offers a critical vision of a religious Spain where people lack dignity and are driven by self-interest.

Style

  • Simplicity and agility of language.
  • Use of colloquialisms and proverbs.
  • Rhetorical resources: antithesis, paradoxes, and euphemisms.

La Celestina

Argument

  • Recounts the love affair between Calisto and Melibea.
  • Calisto falls in love with Melibea after a chance encounter, but she rejects him.
  • Sempronio seeks help from Celestina, a bawd who succeeds in changing Melibea’s mind.
  • Calisto gives Celestina a gold chain, but she is killed by his servants for not wanting to share the reward.
  • The servants are caught and executed.
  • Calisto dies falling from a ladder while visiting Melibea at night.
  • Melibea, heartbroken, throws herself from a tower.
  • The play ends with the lament of her father.

Style

  • Rich language with a mix of formal and colloquial registers.
  • Theatrical features through dialogues that reveal the characters’ personalities. Three types of dialogues: rhetorical with long speeches, long speeches with short replies, and conversational dialogue.
  • Monologues that reveal the characters’ doubts and fears.
  • Asides used by the author to address the audience indirectly.
  • Stage directions used to introduce new characters or describe offstage actions.