Sound on the Page: Sung Music in Cervantes’ Narrative

Abstract

This essay explores how Cervantes endeavours to make inaudible music sound in the text. In sung music, the characters hear a melody and, in some inexplicable way, we readers read a nonexistent melody. It is not a matter of imagining a melody, but of imagining that we have imagined one whose void and nonexistence we don’t perceive. This process is possible owing to the reader’s musical memory that is activated by enunciation in the text. The emotion of the characters is an important means by which the reader connects with sung music that is neither described nor heard.

Keywords:

• Cervantes
• poetics
• representation
• memory
• enunciation
• sound
• music
• song
• lyrics
• emotion
• empathy

Notes

1 I quote from the following editions of Persiles (1617) and Don Quixote (1605, 1615): Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, ed., con intro., de Carlos Romero Muñoz, 2^nd ed. (Madrid: Cátedra, 2002); and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed., prólogo & notas de Francisco Rico, 2^nd ed., 2 vols (Barcelona: Crítica, 1998), Vol. I.

2 For a study on the affective mediation among characters, see Steven Hutchinson, ‘Afinidades afectivas en Don Quijote I’, in El ‘Quijote’ en Buenos Aires: lecturas cervantinas en el cuarto centenario, coord. Alicia Parodi, Julia D’Onofrio & Juan Diego Vila (Buenos Aires: Univ. de Buenos Aires, 2006), 181–86.

3 Bernhard F. Scholz, ‘ “Sub oculos subiectio”: Quintilian on Ekphrasis and Enargeia’, in Pictures into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis, ed. Valerie Robillard & Els Jongeneel (Amsterdam: Amsterdam U. P., 1998), 72–99 (p. 74).

4 Nicola Creighton, ‘Peace Talks between Image and Word: Carl Einstein’s Struggle for a Non-Totalizing Ekphrasis’, in Narrative(s) in Conflict, ed. Wolfgang Müller-Funk & Clemens Ruthner (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 63–86 (pp. 70–71).

5 Michel Foucault illustrates this problem in his analysis of Las meninas: ‘But the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the other’s terms: it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say. And it is in vain that we attempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors or similes, what we are saying; the space where they achieve their splendour is not that deployed by our eyes but that defined by the sequential elements of syntax’ (Michel Foucault, ‘Las meninas’ [from Les Mots et les choses], reproduced in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David H. Richter, 3^rd ed. [Boston: Bedford Books/New York: St Martin’s Press, 2007 (1^st ed. 1989)], 1357–66 [pp. 1361–62]).

6 Given that there is no documental trace of the works described by Philostratus the Elder and the Younger, their existence has always been subject to speculation. Besides, various translations and editions of the Imagines would be illustrated by artists and engravers, among which the French edition illustrated by Antoine Caron (1614) would stand out.

7 See the Introduction by Frederick A. de Armas, in Ekphrasis in the Age of Cervantes, ed. Frederick A. de Armas (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 2005), ii–ix; and Mercedes Alcalá Galán, ‘Retórica visual: ékfrasis y teoría de la ilustración gráfica en el Quijote’, in Autour de ‘Don Quichotte’ de Miguel de Cervantès, ed. Philippe Rabaté & Hélène Tropé (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2015), 175–81.

8 James A. W. Heffernan, ‘Ekphrasis As Representation’, in Probings: Art, Criticism, Genre, New Literary History, 22:2 (1991), 297–316 (p. 299).

9 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), 151–52.

10 Claus Clüver, ‘Quotation, Enargeia, and the Function of Ekphrasis’, in Pictures into Words, ed. Robillard & Jongeneel, 35–52 (p. 49).

11 Clüver, ‘Quotation, Enargeia, and the Function of Ekphrasis’, 36–39.

12 Creighton, ‘Peace Talks between Image and Word’, 70.

13 David Le Breton, Sensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses, trans. Carmen Ruschiensky (London: Routledge, 2017 [1^st French ed. 2006]), 63–64.

14 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. & ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Penguin, 1982), 520.

15 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will and Represntation, trans. Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman & Christopher Janaway, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2010 [1^st German ed. 1818]), I, 3.

16 Juan Fernando Anta, ‘Representación, predicción y música’, Epistemus. Revista de Estudios en Música, Cognición y Cultura, 2:1 (2013), 23–50 (p. 25).

17 Anta, ‘Representación, predicción y música’, 29.

18 Anta, ‘Representación, predicción y música’, 32.

19 Charles O. Nussbaum, The Musical Representation: Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007), 22.

20 Ted Gioia, How to Listen to Jazz (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 4.

21 Indeed, the individual experience of listening to music can sometimes be so powerful as to entrance the listeners, creating a subjective sense of intimacy and solitude.

22 François Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Pierre Jourda, 2 vols (Paris: Garnier, 1962), II, 55–56.

23 Steven Hutchinson, Cervantine Journeys (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 9–11.

24 Barry Ife states in his unpublished paper, ‘When Don Quixote Starts to Sing, What Are We Supposed to Hear?’ (given at the symposium ‘Sound Politics: Somatics and Semantics in the Early Modern World’, University of Southern California, 8 May 2021): ‘When we read, we subvocalise. […] And while we’re reading subvocally we can hear the associated sounds in our inner ear by virtue of our acoustic memory and imagination’ (4).

25 This is the song that begins ‘Suelen las fuerzas de amor / sacar de quicio a las almas’ (II, 46, 1001). On this passage and the interchange with Altisidora, see Mercedes Alcalá Galán, ‘El Cancionero de Dulcinea en el Quijote o la creación coral de un metapersonaje en evolución’, Calíope. Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, 22:2 (2017), 19–42.

26 I owe this observation to Ignacio López Alemany.

27 For an interesting analysis of this episode, see Barry Ife, ‘Feliciana’s Little Voice’, BHS, LXXXVI:6 (2009), 867–76.

28 The other example, that of the Portuguese don Manuel de Sousa y Coutiño, is also interesting in terms of the relationship between music and lyrics in singing, although it is poetically less complex. The transcribed sonnet ‘Mar sesgo, viento largo, estrella clara’ (Persiles I, 9, 196) represents an incomplete and fragmented hearing because the lyrics of the song in Portuguese have been eluded.

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.