Mario Praz laments the current neglect of emblematic literature in Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, 2nd ed. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1964. Giuseppina Ledda, in Contributo allo studio della letteratura emblematica in Spagna (1549-1613), starts out by lamenting the lack of interest contemporary readers have for this genre, p. 7. Albrecht Schone, at the beginning of his important study quotes Herder, who asked himself in 1793 about why so many books of emblems had been published at the end of the 16th and in the early 17th centuries. He concluded: «Die Geschichte dieser Zeit and dieses Geschmacks liegt noch sehr im Dunkeln», Emblematik und Drama im Zeitalter des Barock (München: C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1964, p. 17. The obscurity to which Herder referred still persists in relation to the history of emblems in Spain, a field almost untouched, except for the pioneering work of Karl-Ludwig Selig.

In the Centuria I, Emblema 17, Covarrubias writes under the image of a caged bird: «Tal es la cárcel desta vida, cuando / se ase el hombre a su volubil rueda / de perpetua mudanza, siendo solo / constante el eje del celeste polo». See also I, 9, «Cuncta fluunt». In Juan de Borja, N. 29, p. 30, one can see the serpent devouring its own tail, a frequent theme, with the inscription «Omnia vorat». There is also a notable subscriptio: «Quien considerare con atención la destrucción de tan grandes provincias y de tan señaladas repúblicas, y la fin de todas las supremas monarquías que ha habido en el mundo (que por ser tan grandes parece que era imposible acabar ni destruirse), verá que sólo el que ha podido acabar y destruir tanta grandeza ha sido el tiempo, con su paso continuo y lento, encerrándolo todo en sí como en última sepultura que es de todas las cosas. Lo que se da a entender en esta empresa de la culebra con la punta de la cola en la boca (por lo que los antiguos significaban el año y el tiempo) con la letra que dice: OMNIA VORAT, que quiere decir, TODO LO TRAGA O GULLE».

Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, Padua edition of 1611, p. 235, reproduced in New York by Garland Publishing Co. in 1976. In previous editions, for example the one of 1603, only the description existed without an illustration. The first edition of 1593 in Rome lacked any illustration: this is a case where words become progressively visualized. Ripa's illustration is still valid in the 18th century, as can be confirmed in the Hertel edition of 1758-60 with 200 Baroque and Rococo illustrations, reproduced in New York by Doren Publications in 1971 with a prologue by Edward Maser. History is emblem 122 in this edition. An alternative figure is the three-faced History found in Christophoro Garda, Bibliothecae Alexandrinae Icones Symbolicae (Milan 1628), p. 125, reproduced in New York by Garland Publishing Co. in 1979. The importance of History as reiteration is clearly seen in the conquest of America, where, as shown by Enrique Pupo-Walker, «impelidos de esta manera por un idealizado proyecto de vida, los europeos que tomaron contacto con América confundirían aquellas tierras con los esquemas mentales de una geografía que en parte habían profetizado Platón y Aristóteles», La vocación literaria del pensamiento histórico en América (Madrid: Gredos, 1982), p. 43.

In an extremely interesting emblem of Joannes Sambucus, History appears accompanied by Dialectic, Rhetoric, and Grammar. He affirms that History «Ordine simpliciter geritur quod narrat ab ovo», Emblemata, second edition, 1566, p. 121.

Cf. Ledda, Contributo, p. 82: «L'argomento principale è sempre quello dell'esistenza terrena concepita come un breve ed imperfetto prologo della vita eterna». In Fortunata y Jacinta, in the drugstore where Maxi works, there is an emblem that alludes to the brevity of human life: «un emblema pintado en el techo de la botica, en el cual estaban, decorativamente combinados, la serpiente de Esculapio, el reloj de arena del Tiempo, un alambique, una retorta, el busto de Hipócrates y una calavera», Cuarta Parte, I, 9.

The unity between social and personal development is also a basic tenet of faith for Madariaga. Cf. for example, the prologue to Diálogos famosos, p. 36: «La vida en una sociedad es toda una y solo nos es dable distinguir y separar la vida de sus diversos individuos de la del conjunto mediante operaciones meramente intelectuales como el análisis y la abstracción». Therefore, for Madariaga social transformation must have a parallel psychological change. Peter M. Daly in Literature in the Light of the Emblem (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1979), expresses his disagreement with a scholar of German literature for reasons similar to those that lead me to dissent from Madariaga's view, because he imposes «an anachronistic psychological pattern on the novel [Simplicissimus] by setting up the theme of 'self-realization,' albeit as an author, as the focal centre of the novel, to which all the other themes are relegated», (p. 179). This coincidence, noted when this paper was well advanced, confirms that the point of view presented by emblematic literature forces us to reconsider anachronistic interpretations, as ingenious as they may be, or at least to map out the forces that led to a creative misreading.

Alban Forcione affirms in Cervantes, Aristotle, and the «Persiles» (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 198, that the episodic nature of the novel was an important concept discussed in Cervantes' time, and in general theorists considered that the success of a narration depended on its episodes.

This paper is a revised version of that given at the Washington Symposium, and in subsequent modified forms at the Royal Irish Academy's National Committee for Modern Language Studies Thirteenth Annual Research Symposium (October 1986) and the British Comparative Literature Association (December 1986). I am still working on it.

Words and music by Nik Kershaw, Rondor Music, MCA records, July-August, 1985. My thanks to Dr. Jennifer Lowe for spotting this and other Quixotic items for me.

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Val Arnold-Forster, The Guardian, October 10th, 1980, p. 11.