—24→
This section focuses on some of Jay's lesser-known writings. Except for the introduction to the collection of documents, these are all excerpts. They have been reformatted in accordance with MLA documentation style, and some minor adjustments were necessary because they have been removed from their original context.
From Approaches to Teaching Cervantes' Don Quixote, ed. Richard Bjornson (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1984): 45-49.
The range of the novel's appeal astonishes quite as much as the extent of it. Catholic thinkers find their Catholicism vindicated by it, reformers find their criticism of the status quo supported, and Marxists discover that it prefigured their analysis of capitalist society. Throughout modern history, Don Quixote has inspired everything from ballads to ballet. How are we, as teachers, to cope with such a prodigious book?
There are so many innovations in Cervantes' novel -so many elements of previous works are refined and brought to perfection in it- that even a partial list is staggering: the creation of a selfconscious narrator, the illusion of the autonomous character as achieved by the subversion of narrative reliability, the integration of a multiplicity of styles, the assimilation of many different narrative genres, the profusion of various levels of fictionality, the transformation of events into experience through the manipulation of point of view, the elaboration of a subtle and pervasive irony, the masterful use of dialogue in the creation and development of character. The fundamental problem of the relation between art and life is developed in Don Quixote with respect to every conceivable —25→ set of paired opposites: illusion-reality, lies-truth, fiction-fact, poetry- history, mystery-revelation. Moreover, Cervantes' shift from action and passion per se to the development of character involved impressive perceptions of the way people change, dream, and fantasize.
Anyone who has taught Don Quixote has become involved in the complications of Cervantes' narrative, but it is always useful to remind students that the book entails the story of readers reading, or misreading, and of writers writing, or failing to write. Don Quixote's reading drives him mad, and his final regret is that he has no time left to read a different kind of book. The author's reading is said to have provoked him to write the novel. All the important characters of part 2 are readers of part 1, and most of the principals in both parts are readers of chivalric romances and other kinds of fiction. Both Don Quixote and the canon are would-be writers, and Ginés de Pasamonte is glimpsed at a moment when he is between two parts of the book he is writing. The «humanist» guide to the Cave of Montesinos is a professional author. As a writer, Cide Hamete is potentially so prolific that he asks to be praised for his restraint in limiting himself, as he has, in part 2. In the text, there is explicit discussion and criticism not only of narrative fiction but of drama and lyric as well. Books and manuscripts are bought and sold, handled, read aloud, acted out, annotated, translated, criticized, printed, plagiarized, burned, buried, and even kicked around by the devils of hell. Because the production and consumption of fiction are primary activities in Don Quixote, it is an ideal text for the teacher of literature.
The responsibility of introducing students to a work that has
had such a profound impact on the most serious and discriminating
minds of the past three hundred years is an awesome one, and
the incredibly diverse array of interpretations can only dismay us
further. Northrop Frye's injunction that we bring to literature «an
understanding as little inadequate as possible»
has never seemed
more appropriate. Fortunately, Don Quixote resists emasculation
and destruction in the classroom more tenaciously than any other
work I know. It gets through to students despite the teacher's
—26→
biases and obfuscations and pedantry, partly because such
shortcomings are satirized in Cervantes' characters and narrators
and thus easily discounted. Don Quixote's declaration that «there
are some who wear themselves out in learning and proving things
that once known and proved are not worth a penny to the
understanding or memory»
has always struck me as an apt
inscription for the portico of a university library. When I teach Don
Quixote, I try to acknowledge my consciousness of inadequacy and
partiality at the outset, as much to protect myself from exposure by
Cervantes as for the benefit of my students. If I seem at times (in
class or in print) to be more presumptuous, it is because so much
is at stake in the interpretation of this book. Cervantes' novel fairly
begs to be argued over, as a look at the history of Quixote criticism
reveals. But there is a good explanation for this phenomenon.
When the imagined world in a work of fiction approaches the
scope and complexity of the world we live in, we perceive the
interpretation of the one as a test of our adequacy to comprehend
the other, however different they may be from one another in
actuality.
As I see it, the study of literature is essentially a response to the
question «Whence comes this power?» We study literature not
primarily in order to appreciate it but in response to an intuitive
appreciation. When students are told that the study of Don Quixote
will lead to an appreciation of its power, we should not be
surprised if their response to our analysis is «so what?» The effect
is similar to that of needing to explain a joke to someone who
hasn't found it funny. Unamuno suggests this perspective when
he turns a classical aphorism on its head. «To be able to love
something, one must first know it» is a characteristic instance of
Roman banality, but it acquires a new sense when Unamuno
transforms it into the maxim: «to be able to know something, one
must first love it»
(92).
My ideal student is the one who comes to me with a copy of Don Quixote and says: «I love this book. Help me find out why».
—27→Unamuno y Jugo, Miguel de. Our Lord Don Quixote. The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, with Revised Essays. Trans. Andrew Kerrigan. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976.
1153 Stirling Drive
Danville, KY 40422
jjallen@kih.net
This excerpt, chosen by Jay, is from «Generational Conflicts within Hispanism: Notes from the Comedia Wars», published in Cervantes and His Postmodern Constituencies, ed. Anne J. Cruz and Carroll B. Johnson (New York: Garland, 1999): 68-78. The volume contains selected papers read at the Southern California Cervantes Symposium held at UCLA on May 23, 1996, entitled «Colloquies in Conflict: Cervantes and His Postmodern Constituencies».
The question we must ask of a piece of criticism is a... simple... one: how does it illuminate the work it treats? Not «How does it reveal the limitations of the text's author» or «What clues does it offer as to the nature of those limitations?» nor «How elegantly does it validate the theory being applied?» Those are perfectly legitimate questions, but they are not literary criticism. Which brings us to the real issue: what question do we put to the literary work?
What do we ask of Don Quixote when we presume to study it?
I would maintain the question is not «How does Don Quixote reveal
the limitations of Cervantes?» or «What clues does it offer as to the
nature of those limitations?» Nor «How elegantly does it validate
the theory being applied to it?» I am willing to concede, as Barry
Jordan would have it, that «reading, interpretation, and the production
of meaning are matters of negotiation, between the discourses
of the text and those of the reader, which take place, ...in
a field of relationships and forces and according to certain sites and
positions in which the text is both produced and consumed»
(28).
But insofar as this is true, it is true of what happens every time you
write me a memo; we do still manage somehow to communicate.
—28→
And who is to say that I am wrong to feel that I am closer in interpretive
community with Cervantes than I am with many of my
colleagues and some of my relatives?
Our primary interest, it seems to me, especially in our capacity
as teachers, is to respond to the power of the work, to its appeal.
If theory helps in that endeavor, as it often does, then bring on the
theory. But often, as Brian Vickers said in speaking of Freudian
and Lacanian analyses of Hamlet, «there is a strange disproportion
between the erudition and energy with which the critical model is
erected and the actual insight that it yields»
(308). Or as Cervantes
put it more simply: «There are people who exhaust themselves,
investigating matters that, after all their learning and all their
investigations, don't add a speck to our understanding and aren't
worth remembering»
(II, 22; 466).
Another option advanced by proponents of recent trends, in an
attempt «to make the American curriculum genuinely liberating»,
is picked up by Richter: «Traditional texts are to be kept in the curriculum
but read critically, with an eye toward exposing the
internal contradictions and false consciousness»
(20). Recall Raman
Selden's generalization: «for the New Critic, the unity of a literary
work is its mark of genius, whereas for the Deconstructionist it is
a mark of failure, or worse, bad faith»
(cited by Hart, 417). Then
listen to Cervantes' plea: «If aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus... [the
critics] ought to stop and think how wide-awake he had to be,
most of the time, to make his book cast so much light and so little
shade»
(II, 3; 369).
Malcolm Read «argues that the New Critics' desire for unity in
the text...betrays...a narcissistic intention»
(Hart 417), an astonishing
charge from such a source, for surely the breathtaking narcissism
of 1980s-90s critic-centered writing admits no rival. In fact,
one curious feature of some recent theory-based criticism is the
ease with which people otherwise skeptical of any sort of pretense
to objectivity about one's subjectivity privilege their testimony by
reference to their own experience. Read, for example, trumps Paul
Julian Smith (and Foucault) with «the period I spent as a privileged
visiting professor of Hispanic studies in the Third World, and sub
—29→
sequently, as a very underprivileged member of the dole queue in
the First World»
(«Traveling South» 143).
A fundamental premise of the New Criticism was that the work was the center of our interest, the assumption being that its enduring appeal meant that it had something important to communicate. If you came across a passage in Cervantes that seemed out of place or superfluous, then, as Frye -who was speaking of Shakespeare- suggested, either Cervantes didn't know how to write, or you don't know how to read. Look closely at the passage, said Frye, because the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of Cervantes' competence. The New Critical presumption of unity in a classic that so exercises Malcolm Read is simply a provisional recognition of its authority relative to that of the critic; it expresses a kind of minimal critical humility. If we are to look closely at the passage to find what it reveals despite Shakespeare's or Cervantes' best efforts, that's narcissism.
Recall that another of Read's charges against A. A. Parker and
his methodology is that of «ethicalism»4. I take it that this is related
to the providential world-view that Parker ascribes to the world of
the comedia as well as to Don Quixote, but -to speak only of the
latter- the point is not whether Parker believed his own world to
be providential (presumably he did), or whether I do (I don't), but
whether it can be argued persuasively that the world of Don Quixote
is providential. On the other hand, Read chides Paul Julian
Smith for not contributing to the liberation of the proletariat. Isn't
the expectation of contributing to someone's liberation through
literary criticism «ethicalism» with a vengeance? On this point,
Richter is surely correct when he says that «both the Right and the
Left...have massively overestimated what is at stake in the culture
wars of the 1990s. ... It is hard to believe»
, he says, «that Western
—30→
culture could be in any serious danger from an elite so briefly and
transiently radicalized, or that a cultural revolution could be
expected from those who have the most to gain from the status
quo»
(25). And as for the disdain for the New Critics' search for
unity in the work, isn't the desire and the effort to put the work
(and the author) meaningfully into a totalizing context, including
the unconscious and the repressed within (through psychoanalysis),
and the excluded and the oppressed without (through
Marxism), to reach for an encompassing «unity» beside which the
poor, small, text-bound «organic unity» of the New Criticism pales
in comparison?
My friend and colleague Steve Hart said in his attempt at
mediation between the generations that «we should beware of following
the wide path in which we delude ourselves in the belief
that, as inhabitants of the 1990s, we know de facto more than our
forebears of the 1960s, since this is a misreading of the Other as full
of epistemological pitfalls as the colonialist subjugation of the
Third World and the adult's rejection of the child's world»
(417).
Having lived in both the 1960s and the 1990s myself, I share his
desire to seek eclectically a middle ground, but not the faith in infallible
progress (or the Oedipal slip?) implied in the progression
from Third to First, and from child to adult. More disturbing yet,
in the search for internal contradiction and false consciousness in
the canonical works, Shakespeare and Cervantes, I am afraid, are
the children, and the critic is the adult.
For my part, I believe that both Parker and Read -both of these
ideologues- can help us. On the one hand, I hope that some
worth can continue to be conceded to the effort to understand
why some works of literature have had persistent appeal in widely
varying times and cultures, and within radically divergent social
and economic systems; why Don Quixote is such an important part
of the «enduring heritage of European literature»
, as Patrick Geary
said in his unpublished opening remarks to the 1996 «Colloquies
in Conflict» conference at UCLA; why, in the terms that Anthony
Cascardi proposes elsewhere in this volume, so many different
desires are persistently projected on this book. On the other hand,
—31→
I hope equally that the assumption in these works and in my own
commentary on them that serve my social, economic and psychological
needs at the expense of truth and justice will continue to be
exposed through the exercise of current theory-based literary investigation.
As Round put it: «the actual world-changing social
relevance of the Hispanic trade is a fairly modest affair.... We are,
when it comes down to it, the skilled producers of mental objects
that are locally useful, we hope durable.... To do this kind of thing,
well requires a mode of discussion that will blend openness and
exact judgment in emphatic yet equal proportions»
(144).
Before I close these considerations, let me hint darkly at
another of the deep misgivings I have with respect to the
consequences which some recent theoretical orientations portend.
I hear Barry Jordan again: «reading, interpretation, and the
production of meaning are matters of negotiation between the
discourses of the text and those of the reader, which take place,
...in a field of relationships and forces and according to certain
sites and positions in which the text is both produced and consumed»
(28). History, «herstory»5; our respective accounts of how
things are have a dismaying relativity to them, relativity that one
cannot read Don Quixote without acknowledging. But the relativity
is never total for Cervantes, nor can it be for us. What about the
Holocaust? There are thriving «interpretive communities» producing
accounts of how it never happened. O. J. Simpson? As Jeffrey
Rosen has recently written, in a review of books about that
celebrated case and the acquittal of the accused:
| (32) | ||
There is something vital at stake here and I, for one, cannot be comfortable knowing that an important and influential chunk of our theoretical vanguard can only be tolerated, forgiven, simply because we are all of us irrelevant to real life.
Cascardi, Anthony J. «Romance, Ideology and Iconoclasm in Cervantes». Cervantes and His Postmodern Constituencies. Ed. Anne J. Cruz and Carroll B. Johnson. New York: Garland,1999. 22-42.
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Trans. Burton Raffel. New York: Norton, 1995.
Frye, Northrup. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957.
Hart, Stephen. «'Mientras que en mi casa estoy, rey soy': More on the Politics of Hispanism». Journal of Hispanic Research 1 (1992- 93): 415-23.
—33→Jordan, Barry. British Hispanism and the Challenge of Literary Theory. Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1990.
Parker, Alexander A. The Approach to the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age. London: Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Councils, 1957. «The Approach to the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age». Tulane Drama Review 4 (1959): 42-49. Reprinted with important modifications as «The Spanish Drama of the Golden Age: A Method of Analysis and Interpretation». The Great Playwrights. Twenty-Five Plays with Commentaries by Critics and Scholars. Ed. Eric Bentley. 2 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1970. 1: 679-708.
Read, Malcolm K. «Traveling South: Ideology and Hispanism». Journal of Hispanic Philology 15 (1991): 191-207.
Richter, David H. Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature. Boston: St. Martin's Press, 1994.
Rosen, Jeffrey. «The Bloods and the Crits». The New Republic. December 9, 1996: 27-42.
Round, Nicholas G. «The Politics of Hispanism Reconstrued». Journal of Hispanic Research 1 (1992-93): 134-46.
Vickers, Brian. Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.
—34→
As of this writing there is no copy of this book in the United States; Jay himself does not have one. Our thanks to Miguel Ángel Coso Marín and Juan Sanz Ballesteros for having the following text sent by fax. It is the «Prólogo» to 20 documentos sobre Cerbantes [sic] en el Archivo Histórico de Protocolos de Madrid, ed. Carlos Baztán Lacasa and Beatriz Mariño López (Madrid: Consejería de las Artes de la Comunidad de Madrid, 2001): 11-13.
La documentación cervantina conocida hasta ahora se ha publicado recientemente, en una recopilación de transcripciones de distintas manos, en épocas variadas y con diferentes criterios. Sin negar el obvio valor de esta colección, reunida y editada por Krzysztof Sliwa6, se ha querido añadir el presente tomo de documentos cervantinos a los ya publicados de Calderón y Velázquez, todos nuevamente transcritos con los mismos criterios y todos del Archivo Histórico de Protocolos de Madrid.
Entre los documentos aquí reunidos hay referencias a todas las
épocas de la vida adulta de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, desde
su paso a Italia en 1569, a los 21 años, cuando su padre pide «información
de la limpieza de sangre de Miguel, estante en corte
romana»
(Prot. 490), hasta la publicación de las Novelas ejemplares
en 1613 (Prot. 1678), tres años antes de morir. Sobre los cinco años
y medio de cautiverio en Argel hay unos testimonios que hacen
constar las consecuencias económicas de esta época de su «vida
ejemplar y heroica»
, como la caracterizara acertadamente hace
años Luis Astrana Marín (Prots. 495 y 499), documentos que vienen
a complementar la serie de testimonios en el Archivo de Indias
sobre las circunstancias y el comportamiento de Cervantes en el
—35→
cautiverio. Hay que relacionar esos testimonios de sus compañeros
en los baños de Argel con los poderes aquí incluidos en que se obligan
sus padres, Rodrigo de Cervantes y Leonor de Cortinas, y las
hermanas Magdalena y Andrea a reunir dinero para el rescate de
Miguel. A estas obligaciones familiares se refiere Cervantes en el
conocido memorial de 1590 que se conserva en el Archivo de Indias
en el que le pide al rey que le conceda «un puesto en las Indias»
, al
decir que «fue cautivo en la galera del Sol él y un hermano suyo
que también ha servido a V. M. en las mismas jornadas y fueron
llevados a Argel donde gastaron el patrimonio que tenían en rescatarse
y toda la hazienda de sus padres y los dotes de dos hermanas
doncellas que tenía, las cuales quedaron pobres por rescatar a sus
hermanos»
7. Lo que ha querido hacer Cervantes al presentar los
testimonios incluidos aquí es establecer en detalle el sacrificio económico
a que ha dado lugar su servicio al rey en Italia, «lo que
costó mi rescate, y como lo quedo a deber dél y como yo salí a
pagallo a çierto tiempo»
(Prot. 499).
Como expuse hace años ya8, hay pasajes en las obras de Cervantes
en que se siente palpable al autor, al hombre, en su obra, y
son los lejanos recuerdos de su vida militar y del cautiverio los que
manifiestan la más honda compenetración de vida y literatura. En
el capítulo 63 de la Segunda Parte del Quijote -publicada más de
treinta años después de su rescate y el fin de su carrera militar- está narrando Cide Hamete Benengeli el encuentro entre las
galeras españolas y el bergantín de Ana Félix. A medida que se va
acercando al galera capitana al bergantín árabe, se empieza a sentir
la presencia de Cervantes, del Cervantes de Lepanto, de Navarino,
de la Goleta, detrás de su narrador. Porque no es Cide Hamete, el
historiador árabe, el que ahora empieza a hablar de «nuestras galeras
[españolas]»
. Y en el momento del encuentro -uno de esos
—36→
encuentros como el de la Marquesa en la Batalla Naval, donde
perdió Cervantes el uso de la mano izquierda- en ese momento,
dice Cervantes, «dos... turcos borrachos... dieron muerte a dos
soldados que sobre nuestras arrumbadas venían»
. Las «arrumbadas»
son los costados del castillo de proa, y sólo las puede llamar
nuestras el que está a bordo de la capitana. Hemos pasado de la
perspectiva del árabe9, por la de un autor español y patriota, a la
del Cervantes participante en un encuentro naval.
La extensa narración del capitán cautivo (Don Quijote I, 39-41)
está también íntimamente ligada a la carrera militar de Cervantes,
y donde se aparta de la vida propia del autor en algún momento
demuestra aportar el testimonio de sus compañeros cautivos en los
baños de Argel, como Rodrigo de Chaves, que había sido cautivado
en la defensa de Túnez (Prot. 499) y con quien Cervantes volvió a
España en el mismo bajel. Sería otro compañero que no venía con
las fuerzas españolas ante Navarino en 1572, como Cervantes, sino
bogando al remo de la capitana turca, quien habrá visto, comentándolo
luego a Cervantes, como lo cuenta Ruy Pérez de Viedma en
la venta en Don Quijote I, 39, «la ocasión que allí se perdió de no
coger en el puerto toda la armada turquesca, porque todos los
levantes y genízaros que en ella venían tuvieron por cierto que les
habían de embestir dentro del mesmo puerto, y tenían a punto su
ropa y pasamaques, que son sus zapatos, para huirse luego por
tierra...»
Estos documentos cervantinos, que se han conservado
durante más de cuatrocientos años, nos abren una ventana sobre
esa vida y esa etapa de la historia de España. Como ha dicho Jean
Canavaggio, el mejor de los muchos biógrafos de Cervantes:
Nutrido de la rememoración cervantina del cautiverio, este relato [del capitán cautivo] evidencia un autobiografismo ya no disperso, sino compacto; pero no por eso deja de mantener una relación ambigua con las experiencias del autor. Los sucesos que nos refiere el capitán...ofrecen, eso sí, un notable parecido con las aventuras del propio Cervantes, pero no menos significativos —37→ son los constantes desajustes, reveladores de una minuciosa reelaboración del material aprovechado.10 |
Siguen después de los documentos relacionados con el cautiverio, los referentes a la primera época de su vida de escribir, vuelto ya a España. Son los años de La Galatea (Prot. 417) y de las primeras obras de teatro. Se contrató en 1585 con Gaspar de Porres, uno de los «autores de comedias» más destacados de estos primeros años de la comedia nueva y la fundación de los corrales de comedias permanentes en Madrid (Prot. 1055), comprometiéndose a entregarle11 La confusa y El trato de Constantinopla y muerte de Celim12, dos de las comedias de su primera época de poeta dramático, obras hoy perdidas.
De las obras más conocidas de Cervantes hay tres referencias
entre los documentos reunidos aquí: la cesión del privilegio de impresión
de las Novelas ejemplares (Prot. 1678) y dos poderes que
atestiguan la popularidad de su Quijote y sus cuentos: el poder
otorgado en abril de 105 a favor de Francisco de Robles, Diego de
Alfaya y Francisco de Mar, «para querellarse contra los que han impreso
o quieran imprimir el Quijote en Castilla o Portugal»
(Prot.
1665) y otro en septiembre de 1613 otorgado por Francisco de Robles
a favor de Francisco Geraldo y de Melchor González «para
querellarse contra los que en Zaragoza hayan impreso o quieran
imprimir las Novelas ejemplares...»
(Prot. 1678).
Finalmente, se destaca el testamento de Catalina de Salazar y
Palacios, la mujer de Cervantes, por la luz que arroja sobre la vida
privada del escritor, a quien deja «la cama en que yo muriere»
, y
otros efectos personales, «sin que se le pida cuenta al dicho mi
marido por el mucho amor y buena compañía que ambos hemos
tenido»
(Prot. 1459).
—38→
University of Florida
This letter, published in PMLA 92 (1977): 125, is in response to Michael McCanles, «The Literal and the Metaphorical: Dialectic or Interchange», PMLA 91 (1976): 279-90. McCanles responds to Allen and other letterwriters in PMLA 92 (1977): 125-26.
To differ with Michael McCanles' interpretation of Don Quixote's
recantation is not to disagree with the thrust of his illuminating
and persuasive article, yet the issue is of such capital importance
for our understanding of the work that it must be raised. It is
true that «Don Quixote is a literalist par excellence»
(p. 284), but
it is not strictly true that, as McCanles goes on to say, «he cannot
grasp the metaphorical, fictive existence of Amadis of Gaul and
Orlando, but takes the verbal heterocosms in which they dwell as
literal histories»
. There are explicit indications in the novel that
Don Quixote engages in the literal-metaphorical interchange
willfully. The clearest example is the passage in which he explains
to Sancho his relationship to Dulcinea/Aldonza:
| (I, 25) | ||
What it is that drives him to embrace literalism is not an issue to be discussed here, but there are clear suggestions that the literalmetaphorical interchange is rather a symptom of Don Quixote's problem than its cause. Yet, while the knight's return to sanity and his recantation have their reason for being only in relation to that problem and its resolution, we may expect a concomitant alleviation of the symptom if a cure really has been effected.
McCanles thinks not:
—39→| (285) | ||
And yet, is this really the way we are to characterize this man
who on his deathbed sums up his gravely serious situation in a
metaphor: «En los nidos de antaño no hay pájaros hogaño?»
I think
that if one does not expect Cervantes to speak to us from the
twentieth century one can see that Don Quixote's recantation
moves, not toward a new obverse literalism, but rather, in McCanles'
terms, to a more self-conscious verbal heterocosm: the
Christian formulary as exemplified in the books he would not
substitute for those of knight-errantry, «otros que sean luz del
alma»
. This allusion to the transparently metaphorical title of the
religious work Quixote had seen at the printer's in Barcelona -Luz
del alma- points to a transcendent and divinely inspired literalmetaphorical
dialectic, understood as such, though not in those
terms, by Cervantes and his contemporaries. Long before the
inadequacy of the copy theory of word-object correspondence
became manifest, it had been widely understood that verbal
formulations of the transcendent reality of the divine could only be
metaphorical, as, for example, in St. John of the Cross.
It is tempting to imagine that McCanles' characterization of Alonso Quijano as «the dying knight» in the passage quoted above is in unconscious homage to the victory that this movement of transcendence presents.
—40→
Cervantes' Don Quixote. New York: Monarch, 1975, long out of print and hard to find.
The evolution of Cervantes' novelistic technique has never
been satisfactorily delineated by literary critics and historians. It
has often perplexed critics to note that Cervantes' first work, La
Galatea (1585), is an example of the highly artificial and imitative
genre of the pastoral novel, and that he refers several times
throughout the rest of his life to a «second part», in which he
seems to have been interested even as he was writing Don Quixote.
The curate finds a copy of La Galatea in the course of his scrutiny
of Don Quixote's library, and concludes that «we must wait for the
second part which he [Cervantes] promises»
, and in the Prologue
to Don Quixote II, and even in the Dedication of his Persiles, he is
still promising the reader this continuation of La Galatea. The
problem for criticism is of course the reconciliation of this affection
for the stylized and artificial pastoral in the author who created the
modern realistic novel. It is in fact Cervantes himself who first
points out the artificiality of the genre, in one of his exemplary
novels, «The Colloquy of the Dogs», when Berganza brings up the
discrepancy between the lives of real shepherds and those books
«dreamed up and well written for the entertainment of idle folks,
and not true al all»
. Two aspects of the pastoral novel may have
attracted Cervantes. First, it constituted an established genre and
therefore a logical vehicle for a writer's apprenticeship, and one
which combined prose and verse, thus afford a place for the poetry
which Cervantes very much wanted to write successfully. Second,
it also afforded the opportunity for a degree of psychological
penetration in the characters' introspective laments.
After publishing La Galatea at thirty-eight years of age, Cervantes published nothing further until 1605, when Don Quixote appeared. Yet, extraordinarily, this book, published when he was fifty-eight, was only the beginning of his real literary legacy. In 1613 his Exemplary Novels appeared, establishing Cervantes as the founder of the modern Spanish short story. Although the influence of the Italian novellieri can be seem in some of these stories, the best of the collection, «Rinconete and Cortadillo», «The Deceitful Marriage», «The Colloquy of the Dogs», are entirely original in content, conception, and style. «Rinconete and Cortadillo» and «The Colloquy of the Dogs» each share some characteristics with the picaresque novel, though neither falls entirely within the genre. Another of the stories in this group, «The Man of Glass», reflects the interest in madness and delusion which is so important in the creation of Don Quixote. There are twelve stories in all, which critics tend to divide roughly in half, one group of realistic stories contrasting with another of romantic, Italianate tales.
In 1615 both Don Quixote II and Eight Comedies and Eight Interludes appeared. The eight plays, never produced, reveal Cervantes' attempt to come to terms with the new conditions which Lope de Vega's outstanding talent and prolificness had imposed upon the theater. The plays in this volume are all of the Lopean, three-act construction, as opposed to Cervantes' earlier predilection for four or five acts. They are quite overshadowed by the interludes published with them. These are brief, farcical pieces in prose or verse which were presented between the acts of fulllength Golden Age plays, and Cervantes is the acknowledged master of the genre. His interludes are often presented even today.
Cervantes' last prose work, The Hardships of Persiles and Sigismunda, published posthumously in 1617, presents another enigma for the critics. Why, after creating the modern realistic novel, did Cervantes turn again to a stylized and artificial genre, this time the so —42→ called Byzantine novel of Heliodorus, a Greek author of the fourth century, A. D., whose work was popular in Spanish translation? Some critics, unable to accept this dramatic change or reversal of aesthetic orientation, have talked of the rapid onset of senility, or suggested that Persiles is a work written much earlier, and published in the wake of the fame of Don Quixote, but most have seen Cervantes' last work as an ambitious, through flawed, effort to write the prose epic which he had mentioned in Don Quixote (I, 47), in the symbolic adventures of his pair of idealized lovers. The most recent criticism has emphasized the unresolved dilemma which the book reflects between the canons of Aristotelian criticism and Cervantes' instinctive advocacy of unrestricted freedom for the creative writer, and the symbolic interpretation of the movement of the plot.
The problem of the reader's attitude toward Don Quixote is
perhaps unparalleled in the history of literature, both in duration
and in extent. Cervantes' first public saw in Don Quixote only a
book of entertainment, a parody of the novel of chivalry. The
second stage seems to have been one of identification with Don
Quixote in his folly. Motteux could say, in 1700, that «every man
has something of Don Quixote in his Humour, some darling Dulcinea
of his thoughts, that sets him very often upon mad adventures»
.
Dr. Johnson remarked, in 1750, that «very few readers,
amidst their mirth or pity can deny that they have admitted
visions of the same kind... When we pity him, we reflect on our
own disappointments; and when we laugh, our hearts inform us
that he is not more ridiculous than ourselves, except that he tells
what we have only thought»
. At about the same time, other commentary
in England indicates that the shift to the idealization of
Don Quixote had already begun. In 1739, a friend of Pope's seemed
to him «so very a child in true Simplicity of Heart, that I love
him; as he loves Don Quixote, for the most Moral and Reasoning
—43→
Madman in the world»
. In 1754, finally, Sarah Fielding could say:
«To travel through a whole work only to laugh at the chief
companion allotted us, is an unsupportable burthen. And we
should imagine that the reading of that incomparable piece of
humor left us by Cervantes, can give but little pleasure to those
persons who can extract no other entertainment or emolument
from it than laughing at Don Quixote's reveries, and sympathizing
in the malicious joy of his tormentors... That strong and beautiful
representation of human nature, exhibited in Don Quixote's
madness in one point, and extraordinary good sense in every
other, is indeed very much thrown away on such readers as
consider him only as the object of their mirth»
.
These notes of pity and admiration constitute the seeds of the Romantic interpretation of Don Quixote which was to dominate 19th-century criticism. Don Quixote is increasingly seen as the «knight of the faith» who embodies the spiritual force of human aspirations, being «superior in moral fibre to the people who flout him». This is perhaps still the popular view of the book, through 20th-century criticism has tended increasingly to return to earlier points of view which see the knight, in spite of his nobility, as the butt of Cervantes' satire.
The range of viewpoints has indeed been broad in this century. Cervantes has been seen as a reactionary (Cesare de Lollis), a nonconformist (Américo Castro), a relativist (Jean Cassou), a revolutionary (Pavel Novitsky, A. Gerchunoff), an Erasmian (Ludwig Pfandl), man of the middle Ages (Mario Casella), Baroque man (Marcel Bataillon), counter-reformationist (Helmut Hatzfeld), and iconoclast (Arthur Efron). This enormous diversity of opinion testifies to the extreme complexity of Don Quixote, and to its propensity to suggest much more than it actually says. This situation obviously argues persuasively against attempting a judgment of the novel based upon anything less than a full and careful reading of the complete text.
Another aspect of twentieth-century criticism has been its increasing tendency to examine the structure, narrative technique, and style of the novel as new methods of the analysis of fiction —44→ have been developed. These kinds of investigation have been aided by the publication of excellent critical editions by Francisco Rodríguez Marín and Rudolph Schevill.
Finally, it can be said as Helmut Hatzfeld has pointed out, that the most recent criticism tends to emphasize the pitfalls of the Romantic identification of Cervantes with his protagonist, and to take seriously the implications of Cervantes' statement that he is the «stepfather» of Don Quixote, and not the father (I, Prologue).
1. Cervantes' portrayal of contemporary Spanish society.
2. An appraisal of English translations of Don Quixote.
3. The incorporation of contemporary historical, cultural, and political events into Don Quixote.
4. Autobiographical elements in Don Quixote.
5. Literary theory in Don Quixote and its relation to Cervantes' practice.
6. Time in Don Quixote.
7. Authorial commentary in Don Quixote.
8. Description in Don Quixote.
9. The interpolated stories in Part I.
10. Man of La Mancha and Don Quixote: comparison and contrast.
Allen, John J. Don Quixote: Hero or Fool? Gainesville, FL: U Florida P, 1969. A study in narrative technique, attempting to indicate the bases for conflicting interpretations of the work and to elucidate Cervantes' ethical orientation of the reader.
Auden, W. H. See under Nelson.
Auerbach, Erich. See under Barbera.
Barbera, Raymond E., ed. Cervantes: A Critical Trajectory. Boston: Mirage, 1971. A collection of translations of critical articles, —45→ including the following:
«Hamlet and Don Quixote», by Ivan Turgenev. One of the classic essays in Quixote criticism. Turgenev sees the contrasting figures of Hamlet and Don Quixote as exemplars of two fundamental aspects of human nature: the rational skeptical, haughty, indecisive, aesthetically oriented and ultimately egocentric Hamlet, as opposed to the man of faith, commitment, altruism, and perseverance embodied in Don Quixote.
«The Enchanted Dulcinea», by Erich Auerbach. An interpretation of the novel as «a comedy in which well-founded reality holds madness up to ridicule», based upon a detailed examination of Chapter 10, Part II, the «enchantment» of Dulcinea by Sancho.
The collection includes articles by Coleridge, Heine, Unamuno (q.v.), Ortega y Gasset (q.v.), Pirandello, Madariaga (q.v.), W. P. Ker, Mario Casella, Américo Castro (q.v.), Pedro Salinas, and Wyndham Lewis.
Benardete, M. J., and Ángel Flores, eds. The Anatomy of Don Quixote. A Symposium. 1932. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1969. A collection of translations of critical articles including the following:
«The Genesis», by Ramón Menéndez Pidal. The exposition of the thesis that Don Quixote's first sally, and thus the initial intent of the novel, is based upon an obscure anonymous dramatic interlude: «The Interlude of the Ballads», written about 1597, and an examination of the direction and significance of Cervantes' subsequent change in intention.
«The Style», by Helmut Hatzfeld. Stressing the rich stylistic variety of Don Quixote, Hatzfeld identifies central motifs and examines their embodiment in a series of dominant stylistic devices such as antithesis, contrary-to-fact conditional constructions, puns and word-plan, and hyperbole. The article sketches the central points of the author's book Don Quixote als Wortkunstwerk.
The collection also includes articles by A. Morel-Fatio and Turgenev (q.v.)
—46→——. Cervantes Across the Centuries. New York: Dryden, 1947. A collection of translations of critical articles, including the following:
«The Composition of Don Quixote», by Joaquín Casalduero. A detailed exposition of Casalduero's thesis of the Baroque circular structure of Don Quixote, identifying leitmotifs and themes around which the book is organized, the article presents the central points of the author's book: Sentido y forma del Quijote.
«Incarnation in Don Quixote», by Américo Castro. Through
Castro's profoundly provocative El pensamiento de Cervantes has
not been translated into English, this combination of translations
of two of his subsequent articles offers a sample of the
thought of this very influential critic. Castro delineates the development
of the principal characters in Cervantes' masterpiece
as embodying individualizing responses to outside «incitements»
which change both their goals and their conduct. He
also stresses the «elusive» technique of Cervantes, with his
many conscious omissions, and an «extremist» style which
focuses on heights and depths, rather then a middle ground.
Finally, he explores in detail the significance of the written
word for Cervantes (the novels of chivalry, for Don Quixote),
and affirms that, for Cervantes, «reality is always an aspect of
the experience of the person who is living it»
.
«Don Quixote and Moby Dick», by Harry Levin. After tracing the influence of Don Quixote in America, Mr. Levin explores the relationship of Melville's thought to that of Cervantes.
The collection also includes sixteen other articles, among them a series on Cervantes' influence in England, France, Germany, and Russia.
Blanco Aguinaga, Carlos. See under Nelson.
Brenan, Gerald. «Cervantes», in The Literature of the Spanish People. New York: Meridian, 1957. A central element in this essay is the examination and interpretation of the episode of the Cave of Montesinos (II, 23). Brenan also offers original insight into the nature of the relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho.
—47→Casalduero, Joaquín. See under Benardete.
Castro, Américo. See under Benardete.
Efron, Arthur. Don Quixote and the Dulcineated World. Austin: U of
Texas P, 1971. Probably the most radical interpretation of Don
Quixote ever, this book attempts to show that Cervantes not
only «laughed Spain's chivalry away»
, as Byron claimed, but
that he mounted an attack on marriage, chastity, and other
ideals of this time. «Dulcineism means the living of life in
accord with the prescribed ideals of the received culture»
. The
hardest of the «hard» critics.
Girard, René. Deceit, Desire and the Novel, trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1965. Girard's concept of «triangular» or «mediated» desire is proposed as central to understanding the fiction of Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Dostoyevsky. The seeds of the study by Efron (q.v.) are here, since desire mediated artificially through some model (Amadis of Gaul, for Don Quixote) is shown by all these novelists, in Girard's view, to have replaced the direct, spontaneous desire which should rightly animate human activity.
Haley, George. «The Narrator in Don Quixote». MLN 80 (1965): 145-65. An illuminating exposition of the fundamental relationships between the author, his intermediaries Cid Hamete and the Moorish translator, and the characters, through an analysis of the analogous relationships in Master Pedro's puppet show (II, 22).
Hatzfeld, Helmut. See under Benardete.
Levin, Harry. See under Nelson.
Madariaga, Salvador de. Don Quixote. An Introductory Essay in Psychology. Oxford: Clarendon, 1935. A small but important book which has suggested much that later critics have elaborated upon, especially the Sanchification of Don Quixote, and the Quixotizaton of Sancho.
Mandel, Oscar. «The Function of the Norm in Don Quixote». Modern Philology 55 (1958): 154-63. The «Gentleman in the Green Overcoat» (II, 16) is proposed as an ethical norm for the novel, —48→ against which Don Quixote's deviations are to be measured and judged.
Mann, Thomas. See under Nelson.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón. See under Benardete.
Nelson, Lowry, Jr., ed. Cervantes. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1969. A collection of critical articles, including the following:
«The Example of Cervantes», by Harry Levin. Professor Levin identifies the critical achievement of Cervantes in Don Quixote as the presentation of «the pattern of art embarrassed by confrontation with nature». «Parody, explicitly criticizing a mode of literature [the chivalric novels], developed into satire, implicitly criticizing a way of life».
«Voyage with Don Quixote», by Thomas Mann. The novelist's random comments on re-reading Don Quixote during a sea voyage. He deals in some detail with the adventure of the Lions («the climax of the novel»), Camacho's wedding, the adventure of the Braying Aldermen, and the ending, which he finds unsatisfying. He sees the novel as a marvelous reflection of Cervantes' time, and an anticipation of the Romantic's fruitful thoughts about «the weird depths, the trick mirrors and false bottoms of artistic illusion».
«The Ironic Hero: Some Reflections on Don Quixote», by W. H. Auden. In an essay in outline form, Auden characterizes Don Quixote as a Christian Saint, as distinguished from the Epic Hero and the Comic Hero.
«Cervantes and the Picaresque Mode: Notes on Two Kinds of Realism», by Carlos Blanco Aguinaga. A convincing differentiation between the «objective» realism of Cervantes, open and prismatic, and the «dogmatic or disillusionist realism» of the picaresque, with its single, limited point of view which issues in a closed, didactic novel.
Ortega y Gasset, José. Meditations on Quixote, trans. Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marín. New York: W. W. Norton, 1961. The Spanish philosopher wrote only the «Preliminary» and «First» of his projected «meditations». He discusses the fundamental differences —49→ between Don Quixote and the epic, the question of the nature of reality as posed by Cervantes, and other basic issues.
Predmore, Richard L. The World of Don Quixote. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1967. Contains chapters on the interplay between literature and life in Don Quixote and on the question of appearance versus reality. Predmore seeks to establish that Cervantes shows that although reality is often deceptive, the phenomenal word in which the characters live and move is rational and consistent.
——. Cervantes. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1973. A readable, magnificently illustrated biography which incorporates the essential contributions of all recent work on the life of Cervantes.
Riley, Edward C. Cervantes's Theory of the Novel. Oxford: Clarendon, 1962. A major attempt to establish Cervantes' ideas on the novel through an examination of the critical comments of characters in his novels, of contemporary theorists such as the Aristotelian López Pinciano, and of Cervantes' own practice.
——. «Three Versions of Don Quixote». Modern Language Review
68 (1973): 807-19. Professor Riley's latest contribution to the
study of Cervantes' novelistic technique is an examination of
the interrelationships among Cid Hamete Benengeli's version
of Don Quixote's activities («historical»), the apocryphal Part II,
by Avellaneda (spurious), and the flattering, romanticized account
which Don Quixote believes is being written about him
(«poetic»). These three «versions» are related to what other
critics have called Cervantes' «perspectivism», that is, to his fictional
exemplification of the fact that, in the words of Jorge
Luis Borges, «historical truth...is not what happened; it is what
we judge has happened»
.
Russell, P. E. «Don Quixote as a Funny Book». Modern Language Review 64 (1969): 312-26. A review of pre-romantic European reactions to Don Quixote and of the attitudes of Cervantes' contemporaries toward insanity, on the one hand, and toward humor and the comic in literature, on the other. Russell concludes that given the almost unanimous reception of the novel as a comic masterpiece in its first 200 years of existence, and the —50→ prevailing attitudes toward and characterizations of the madman, it is difficult not to accept at face value Cervantes' indications that Don Quixote is indeed the butt of his humor.
Schevill, Rodolfo. Cervantes. 1919. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966. A sound, readable biography.
Serrano Plaja, Arturo. «Magic» Realism in Cervantes: Don Quixote as
Seen Through Tom Sawyer and The Idiot, trans. Robert S.
Rudder, Berkeley: U of California P, 1970. An exploration of the
commonality between Myshkin, Dostoevsky's «Idiot», who
«takes everything seriously»
, Tom Sawyer, who lives a game,
and Don Quixote, who shares something of both Myshkin's
«pure soul» and Tom's role and game playing, and is, in a
sense, the father of both.
Spitzer, Leo. «Linguistic Perspectivism in the [sic] Don Quixote». In Linguistics and Literary History. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1948. 41-85. Spitzer examines the great variety and instability of names in Don Quixote, and related phenomena, to substantiate what he sees as Cervantes' desire to highlight the different aspects under which a character may appear to others. Allied to this «perspectivism» of the novel is Cervantes' glorification of the author as a kind of God-like fixed point which comprehends of the partial perspectives of the participants in the fictional world.
Turgenev, Ivan. See under Barbera.
Unamuno, Miguel de. Life of Don Quijote and Sancho according to Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra expounded with comment by Miguel de Unamuno. Trans. Homer P. Earle. New York: Knopf, 1927. A chapter by chapter commentary in which Unamuno develops his concept of Don Quixote as the Knight of the Faith, whose stance toward the world must be emulated by those who would lead Spain to a renewal of its former greatness, coupled with a disdain for Cervantes, whom the author presents as inferior to his creation.
Van Doren, Mark. Don Quixote's Profession. New York: Columbia UP, 1957. Van Doren's thesis in this series of lectures is that Don Quixote's real profession is that of actor, not knight-errant. —51→ The author stresses, as does Serrano-Plaja (q.v.), the indications of Don Quixote's consciousness of his falsification of reality, and sees the question of what reality really is as central to the novel.
Willis, Raymond S., Jr. The Phantom Chapters of the Quixote. New York: Hispanic Institute, 1953. A study of the chapter divisions of Don Quixote which proposes that Cervantes' technique is to deliberately overflow and obliterate his own arbitrary division into chapters to highlight the flow of life which he sees as violated by any serious attempt to force it into divisible chronological segments.