The Poetics of Friendship in Early Modern Spain: A Study in Literary Form by Donald Gilbert-Santamaría (review)

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• The Poetics of Friendship in Early Modern Spain: A Study in Literary Form by Donald Gilbert-Santamaría
• Shai Zamir

Donald Gilbert-Santamaría. The Poetics of Friendship in Early Modern Spain: A Study in Literary Form EDINBURGH UP, 2020. 248 PP.

THIS STUDY explores literary representations of ideal friendships and friends. The author argues that such representations were part of a poetic form that emphasized the impossible quest to achieve such sublime relationships in actual, lived human experience. A growing awareness of the scriptedness of literary friendships pushed Spanish writers to question longstanding notions of such ties. Cervantes's novella "El curioso impertinente," intercalated in Don Quijote, Parte 1, delivered the ultimate blow to this tradition: "The betrayal and death of the two friends, Anselmo and Lotario, and the attendant destruction of the tale of two friends paradigm, may be read … as a symbolic act designed to clear the way for the new literary order of the novel's main narrative" (10).

The book begins with a compelling introduction to the fundamental questions and canonical texts related to friendship, above all Aristotle's Ethics and Cicero's more skeptical responses to it. While Aristotle portrayed friendship as an idealized relationship between the good, Cicero suggested a more pragmatic vision, in which friendships change over time, and friends must adjust themselves accordingly. Such a realist approach allowed Cicero to escape the more general "problem of epistemological alienation" described by Gilbert-Santamaría (15): that too perfect of a friendship, for the sake of the friend alone, will lead us to say nothing of importance about the friend, because the friend who is loved for his particular attributes will not be loved for himself (the paradigmatic friend in this tradition is male). The perfect friend is therefore known through acts of self-sacrifice. Cicero, however, chose a different path. In his epistolary writings, he was able to combine the ideals of perfect friendship with the instrumentalist practices of epistolary and gift exchange; one could enjoy friendship and benefit from it aesthetically and rhetorically without giving up on the entire enterprise of virtuous friendship.

The plot thickens: Petrarch brought Ciceronian friendship to the attention of early moderns, who practiced the writing and reading of intimate letters in imitation of both him and Cicero. In chapter 1, Gilbert-Santamaría [End Page 413] demonstrates that Petrarch's friend, Boccaccio, while at first glance seeming to simply write his own version of perfect friendship in the Decameron, was in fact somewhat satirical. In the story of Gisippus and Titus, what Boccaccio presents as the "law of human friendship" might surrender to the "laws of love" (39), as when the beautiful Sophronia stands between the two male friends. Even when the two friends commit ultimate acts of self-sacrifice for each other, they still give voice to obstacles to friendship such as passion. Boccaccio's perfect friendship is stained by "the practical idiosyncrasies of human desire" (41).

In this genealogy, Cervantes's La Galatea (1585), discussed in chapter 2, continues Boccaccio's parody by showing that "representations of the chaos, unpredictability, and complexity of everyday life repeatedly disrupt the fulfillment of the orthodoxy of perfect friendship" (56). La Galatea mocks the heroic and selfless acts of pure friendship with typical Cervantine humor. When the friend Timbrio wishes to turn himself in to the authorities to save his friend, he is warned that no one is interested in such gesture, and that the priests who arrested his friend would only get more annoyed by this dramatic act of amity. Gilbert-Santamaría guides the reader to identify several other moments within the plot as the friends deviate from what is expected of them as perfect friends, as when Silerio has to accept a marriage to Blanca, Timbrio's wife's sister. Instead of using the scene to support the notion of the friend as a second self and friendship as a loving act of free will, Cervantes shows how friendship forced Silerio to compromise his true feelings for Timbrio's wife. Friendship stops being the autonomous site of authentic expression.

Silerio and Timbrio, like the two friends of the later "El curioso impertinente" discussed...