2
Birth
It is now time to reread the Quijote and to examine what recent critics might term its peculiar narrativity. In so doing, we may be privileged to observe clinically the future novel in the process of its delivery from the womb of comic romance. That is to say, we shall try to comprehend and describe exactly how the hermetic frontiers of adventure were first perforated by what we now call experience. As we proceed, we must keep in mind the tentative distinction just made between the novelistic irony of Mark Twain and that of Cervantes and Fielding. The former's voice—we said—was paradoxically audible and yet disguised by those of Huck, Jim, and all the other inhabitants of the river to whom we listen. In contrast to the Quijote and Joseph Andrews (and in accord with what Erich Kahler termed the gradual Verinnerung , or inwardness, of the genre[1] ), the ironies of Huckleberry Finn flow beneath the surface of the story. The novelist does communicate with us; we are fully aware that we share the same secret understanding that we share with Flaubert, Proust, Virginia Woolf, and others who lead us even more deeply into the "transparent minds" of their creatures.[2] But that awareness is unobtrusive.
Cervantine irony, on the contrary, as his eighteenthcentury readers perceived, is outspoken and can be heard
[1] Erich Kahler, "Die Verinnerung des Erzählungs," Die Neue Rundschau 68 (1957), pp. 501–46, and 70 (1959), PP. 1–54 and 177–220. Translated by Richard and Clara Wilson in The Inward Turn of Narrative (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973).
[2] Transparent Minds is the title of Dorrit Cohn's perceptive exploration of the various ways novelists have exploited that Verinnerung in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978).
directly in the text. As a result, the Quijote 's narrativity (as well as that of some of the exemplary novellas, such as The Colloquy of the Dogs ) can best be described as a complex play of incessant interruption. In the final essay we shall discuss what Cervantes learned from Ariosto, his mentor in the art of tale spinning and thread cutting. However, Ariosto's intention was to expose for our amusement the guiding strings of his marionette-like knights, while Cervantes not only severed the narrative thread whenever it suited him but also, as we shall see, those threads that controlled his creatures. Orlando and his colleagues ended up in the Sicilian puppet theater, but Don Quijote and Sancho in the autonomy of their personal experience have been reincarnated in one major novel after another.
Actually, as readers soon realize, Part I of the Quijote is composed of two antithetical modes of narration, each designed to make us aware of the peculiarity of the other. I refer, in the first place, to such interpolations as "El curioso impertinente" ("The Novella of the Curious Impertinent") and the life stories of Cardenio and Dorotea. The second, of course, is that of Cervantes himself telling us about the doings and recording the sayings of his knight and squire. As in the distinction often made by critics between the two kinds of exemplary novellas (The Spanish English Lady as opposed to Rinconete and Cortadillo ), it has been customary to explain the difference in modes of narration in terms of style and decorum. Cervantes's narration is ironical and comic, mixing all levels of expression—from the rural sayings of Sancho and the picaresque language of the innkeeper and the galley slaves to chivalric pastiches and pastoral refinement. The interpolated stories, on the other hand, are confined to a single level of decorum, and because of their somewhat cloying rhetoric, they are difficult to justify to our students. As we shall see, even certain seventeenth-century readers seem to have regretted their distracting presence.
Although this distinction of Cervantes's voice from that of his surrogates (who seem to be listening complacently to
themselves as they speak) is not without validity, it does not address our concerns. From the point of view of narrativity, the most significant thing about these interpolations is that they are ostensibly oral, presented as tales either told directly or read aloud. As a result, they are premised on a built-m antipathy to interruption; and if they are interrupted, violence is either a cause or an effect. Cardenio's fight with Don Quijote and the slaughter of the wineskins in the middle of the novella of Lotario and Anselmo are examples of each. The latter tale is, in fact, so densely composed that it seems to be aware of its own cohesion: when Anselmo explains his "impertinent" scheme, Lotario "did not open his lips until he had finished." Then Lotario in his turn demands equal time: "Listen, Anselmo my friend, and be patient enough not to interrupt me until I finish telling you what I think about what your desire impels you to propose" (I.33). As a veteran auditor of La Celestina , I am reminded of the least convincing passage of the entire tragicomedia —that in which Pleberio obeys his daughter's command not to interrupt her until she finishes explaining why she intends to commit suicide.
Different but comparable is Cardenio's warning to his curious audience that he will not finish his tale of woe if he is interrupted: "You must promise me that you will not cut the thread [interrumpir el hilo ] of my sad story with questions or anything else, because at that very moment whatever I shall be telling you will come to an immediate end" (I.24). This is, of course, exactly what occurs when he happens to mention the Amadís and he and Don Quijote begin to argue—the one nobly and the other with characteristic lack of faith—about the chastity of the fictional Queen Madásima, just as if she and it were real. It should also be noted that later, when the Priest and the Barber encounter Cardenio "free of his furious alienation [furioso accidente ]" and prevail on him to repeat his story, he does so with "almost the same words" and goes on to "tie up the thread broken" by the earlier interruption (I.27). His yarn is what it is (and, as we shall see, what he is), and there is no other way he can spin it. When Anselmo and
Lotario speak to each other, their narrative threads are steel wires, while Cardenio's is gossamer. But in both cases sheer continuity is what matters.
In this connection we may also note that Dorotea's complementary account of her betrayal by the same villainous grandee who had betrayed Cardenio is as uninterruptible as her character is strong. Cardenio not only is afraid of being interrupted (or of interrupting on his own, as when he fails to stop the enforced wedding of his beloved Luscinda) but also seems to be interruption-prone. He even halts his own story to apologize for his digressions. Dorotea has no such problems. When she first mentions the name of Cardenio's abducted fiancée, he goes into a spasm—making faces, biting his lips, shedding tears—"but not for that reason did Dorotea desist from going on with her story" (I.28).
The contrast of these interpolations with the printed prose of that master contriver of interruptions called Cervantes is, as we said, patent and intentional. Long before he transported Orlando Furioso into Sierra Morena, he had displayed his aptitude for strategic intervention. The apprentice novelist who years earlier had published La Galatea (1585) found in the device an indispensable form of leavening. The long and glutinous songs and narratives of amorous desperation, which are generically obligatory for pastoral characters, are made bearable in La Galatea by such abrupt butting-in as the following: "Teolinda had arrived at this point in the story of her love, when the shepherdesses heard a loud clamor [grandísimo estruendo ] of shouting shepherds and barking dogs"; and: "The shepherds listened with great attention to what Silerio was telling them, when the thread of his story was interrupted by the voice of a mournful shepherd singing inside the grove."[3]
[3] La Galatea is divided into "books," which do not serve for easy reference. The original Spanish of these quotations is to be found in Miguel de Cervantes, Obras completas , ed. Angel Valbuena Prat (Madrid: Aguilar, 1946), pp. 674 and 711.
These and the many other instances that resemble them have their counterparts in the Quijote , where they are used for the same reason. Again two examples will suffice. At the inn, when Don Quijote and Don Fernando are trying to outdo each other in lengthy courtesy ("comedimiento y muchos ofrecimientos"), "the arrival of a traveller dressed as a Christian who had recently arrived from the land of Moors imposed silence" (I.37). Similarly, Cervantes interrupts his own overlong explanatory narrations: "The Canon remained dumbfounded at the well-reasoned nonsense which Don Quijote had uttered. . . . And while they were eating they suddenly heard a loud noise [recio estruendo ] and a sound of a little bell in the bramble bushes, and at the same moment there ran out a beautiful goat" (I.50). For a moment it seems as if we have reentered La Galatea , but when the owner of the errant animal compares its behavior to that of Leandra and the strutting soldier, Vicente de la Roca, we are relieved to find ourselves back in La Mancha with all its enchanting ambivalence—that delta world where literature is silted with history, where history is eroded by literature, and where adventure and experience flow side by side like salt water and fresh water.
Aside from its frequency, there is nothing specifically Cervantine about this sort of lateral interruption. Narratives "of over 50,000 words" intended for reading, whether silently or aloud (as opposed to brief oral tales), must perforce be broken into from time to time, if only by chapter headings. However, in Part I of the Quijote there is introduced a new possibility of interruption, which I shall term vertical—that of authorial voices, which intervene from above with all kinds of ironical messages. In chapter 8 we become aware of the first pangs of nascent experience, and curiously enough, it is not so much an experience of Don Quijote's as that of our own engagement in reading. It is then that Cervantes, having introduced Sancho, first seems to realize that he is involved in something quite different from the parodical exemplary novella that at the beginning he probably had intended to
write. He is about to make an abrupt change in narrative course, and to prepare us for it, he contrives a stupendous practical joke.
Don Quijote and the bellicose Basque hidalgo are about to have at each other (apparently one more comic adventure, like that of the windmills at the beginning of the same chapter), when their narrator begins deliberately to decelerate the tempo of his narration. He interjects comments of his own; he emphasizes unnecessary details, thereby increasing our "mock suspense"[4] and leaving the onlookers, as if they too were readers, hanging on breathlessly ("temerosos y colgados") to the narrative thread. And then at the climax, when the swords of the two paladins are held high and they are about to chop each other in half, Cervantes suddenly chops the thread in half and goes on to comment ironically about the coincidence: "At that critical moment the tasty history stopped and was amputated [quedó destroncada ]" (I.8).
This interruption is both unprecedented in prose fiction and crucial to the rest of the Second Sally—but not because of its surprise or because the conversion of the combatants into a woodcut is comic by Bergsonian definition.[5] Rather, its significance for the narrativity of the text is that it converts the author into a reader. "Cervantes" (who must now be named within quotation marks) is one of us; he is just as anxious as we are to find out what will happen next; and by pretending to share our annoyance, he provokes our awareness of being readers. That is to say, he is engaged in the inane pastime of believing something he made up to be real.
Chapters 8 and 9 have been discussed endlessly—and de-
[4] I so described the narration at this point before reading Wilder's Journals and discovering that he used the identical wording (p. 98).
[5] Similar interruptions are, of course, frequent in Orlando Furioso , but as Raimundo Lida pointed out to me, the direct source was Alonso de Ercilla's "epic" on the conquest of Chile, La Araucana , written "in imitation of the manner" of Ariosto. At the transition from canto XXIX to canto XXX the two furious Indian chiefs, Rengo and Tucapel, remain during nine stanzas with a blow suspended in the air, while the poet discourses on the legitimacy of single combat. He then apologizes—exactly like Cervantes—for leaving the history destroncada (amputated).
servedly so—but nevertheless I should like to comment briefly on the structural complexity they introduce into the hitherto more or less straightforward narrative. To begin with, we discover that the First Sally, which we have just finished reading, had two authors: the original chronicler, who claims that he cannot find any more documents concerning Don Quijote (and who is therefore responsible for the interruption) and the so-called second author, who, speaking in the first person, tells us how he found the rest of the text written in Arabic by the "historian" Cide Hamete Benengeli and how he had it translated, and from then on he reads with us. In fact, it is almost as if he were reading it to us.
The result is a triple possibility of intervention from above: first, by Cide Hamete, who, because he is a Moor, is suspected of lying; second, by the translator, who, as a Morisco (a Moorish native of Spain who knows both Spanish and Arabic), is naturally suspicious of his own kind; and third, by the Cervantine persona, who, as an equally avid bookworm, becomes our "fellow traveler." Thus, in addition to lateral interruptions as in La Galatea , there have been added multiple possibilities of vertical interruption. To say the same thing in another way, from the fractured adventure of the Basque there radiates through the rest of the text a network of narrative fissures waiting to be exploited ironically.
Coinciding with these intrusive voices are the impertinent chapter divisions and titles. As Raymond S. Willis has pointed out, unlike the chapters of previous fiction, they are not conceived of as genuine segments or separate episodes. Rather, the manifestly arbitrary nature of the fragmentation (attributable to Cervantes?) and the ironical rhetoric of such titles as "Donde se ponen los versos desesperados del difunto pastor, con otros no esperados sucesos" (I.14)[6] (attrib-
[6] The translators have generally been unable to render the echo of desesperados (despairing) in no esperados (unexpected). The former (which is the origin of the English desperado ) is a participle that refers specifically to Grisóstomo's suicidal "self-interruption," an event communicated obliquely in the poem in the words torcida soga and duro lazo , meaning "rope" and "noose." The celebration that attended the pagan funeral demanded cautious treatment of the cause of his death in mortal sin.
utable to Cide Hamete?) achieves a double effect. On the one hand, we are drawn up short, propelled out of the story. Just as in the case of the amputated duel with the Basque and the other interruptions that follow the same pattern, we are reminded that we are readers, reminded by the author (as we observed in the case of Sterne) that we should not read his book in the same way that Alonso Quijano read the Amadís . That is to say, we have been warned that when we laugh at Don Quijote and Sancho as if they were real, we are also laughing at ourselves for believing them to be real.
On the other hand, as Willis demonstrates, both the vertical interruptions and the maliciously segmented and titled "phantom chapters" reveal by contrast the seamless continuity of the lives we relive in our reading. The rest of the Second Sally may indeed appear to be "spasmodic," "punctiform," and "exempt from today and tomorrow," as Ortega said. But that is only an appearance. The truth is that as adventures remembered afterward, each episode grows out of those preceding it and thereby corresponds to the uninterrupted processes of our reading and of Alonso Quijano's cumulative awareness, his "self-reading" as Don Quijote. The chapter segmentation and the incessant interruptions of Cide Hamete and of our fellow readers, the translator and the "second author," push us out of the book by forcing us to maintain an ironical distance. And in so doing, they make possible, not yet the game of autonomy and selfdetermination that is the point of departure of Part II (the Third Sally), but something simpler and more essential. They make it possible for Don Quijote and Sancho to experience their successive adventures as their own and thereby to draw on our experience.
Chapters 8 and 9 thus are more than just a narrative joke designed to initiate an ostensible abdication of authoritative responsibility on the part of the flesh-and-blood author, who,
as we shall see, later will claim to be only the "stepfather" of Don Quijote. They are also a point of departure for a fundamental narrative revolution. The writer who "hears" the stories of Cardenio and Dorotea presents them as either fearing interruptions or resolutely ignoring them. But the ironist who at the climax of the single combat with the Basque created the self-conscious novel by, in the words of Bakhtin, "separating the event that is narrated in the work [from] the event of narration itself"[7] revels in unprecedented interruptions of all sorts. Certain previous narratives (for example, Diego de San Pedro's Cárcel de Amor , mentioned earlier) admitted the author into the action as if he were a character—"authoritative" because present on the scene. But here, on the contrary, he withdraws in order to be able to intervene vocally whenever he pleases and in whatever guise he pleases and thereby to allow fictional experience to validate itself. The author is now the enchanter, who forces his characters to cope with the painful aftermath of each successive adventure.[8]
To the question why , at this point I should have to answer that unlike nineteenth-century novelists, who worshiped experience (and who wrote novels with such revealing titles as The Personal History and Experience of David Copperfield the Younger ), Cervantes comprehended that attribute of consciousness as the unexpected by-product of abandonment and exposure—or, in Lukács's term, of Obdachlosigkeit . Experience was for him a dimension of existence that was at once virtually unexplored and pathetically vulnerable. Appealing, comic, and forlorn, it was the conscious precipitate of violent
[7] Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination , p. 255.
[8] In II.3 the identification is explicit: " 'I assure thee, Sancho—said Don Quijote—that the author of our history must be some learned enchanter.'" However, earlier he posits the existence of a benevolent "necromancer who is aware of my affairs and is my friend, because there's got to be one, or I wouldn't be a good knight errant" (I.31). At that point he is referring to the apparently supernatural speed of Sancho's trip to El Toboso, but the very proposition of a protective enchanter (as against those who transformed the giants into windmills or made his library vanish) is the seed of his future autonomy. He is beginning to be aware of his author.
interruption, the rueful result of trying to live meaningfully and not conventionally in a century and a society that revered conventionality and were prone to cut short deviant behavior with a rock, a club, or a torch. The Quijote itself is nothing less than an ironical two-volume interruption of the heroic version of national history that Spaniards were persistently engaged in telling themselves.
Thus, we are confronted with a form of narrativity based, on the one hand, on the endless spinning out of the hilo , or thread, of two intertwined, utterly unique lives and, on the other, on constant intrusion from without. So understood, it reflects not only what Ortega would call Cervantes's "posture toward life" (meaning the theme) but also the two major interruptions that are common to both his biography and his book. The first is the coincidence of the hiatus of his captivity in Algiers (and perhaps also in the prison mentioned in the Prologue as the place where the book was "engendered"[9] ) and that of Don Quijote in the oxcart at the end of Part I. The second is, of course, the ultimate authorial intervention, known as death: the death of both comedy and the clown at the end of the Third Sally, an event which clearly foreshadows Cervantes's own. A year later, when writing his last words (in the Prologue to the Persiles ), the echo of Alonso Quijano's final resignation is audible in appropriately narrative terms. In taking leave of his readers, Cervantes says: "Perhaps a time will come when, tying up this broken thread, I can continue what is missing now. . . . Farewell, humor, farewell, donaires ,[10] farewell, my well-entertained companions."
[9] Although we know Cervantes was imprisoned in Seville in 1597 (after his earlier captivity in Algiers from 1575 to 1580), scholars wonder whether this version of the book's "engendering" is a factual assertion of an age-old topos. In either case, however, the reference is to biographical interruption.
[10] The word donaire (with which both Cervantes and Lope de Vega were enchanted) is untranslatable. Literally "gift" plus "air," its merged connotations of gracefulness, wit, timing, ease, and sparkle can only be learned by direct experience. In this case, for the overburdened old man who took such a splendid farewell to life, it refers to the expressions of long-practiced spiritual and verbal dexterity.
So far, so good. We have contemplated the narrativity of the Quijote in terms of the duality—interruptive and antiinterruptive—of its structure. Yet in spite of this up-to-date, or almost up-to-date, terminology, we have accomplished little more than to observe from a new angle aspects of Cervantes's art that have been amply discussed by earlier critics. However, our next step may be more pioneering. If we take into account the observation of Jonathan Culler cited earlier—"the crucial reorientation [of these new approaches] is to restate propositions about poetic or novelistic discourse as procedures of reading"—it follows that we should not distinguish the configuration of the story (the structure of happening) from the techniques of narration (the structure of words). This means simply that insofar as they both are "received" in the process of reading, the ironical interruptions of the "authors" (so frequently discussed in the past) are not in any way different (except in intention) from the naive, mad, or slyly self-interested interruptions of the characters. If we relinquish for the moment our time-honored efforts to comprehend what Cervantes had in mind and how he went about achieving it and contemplate instead our own reading, the two kinds of interruptions merge.
Let us turn, therefore, to the lives inside the work, all of which have a penchant for what we may call headlong interruptions as opposed to the vertical or lateral variety just described. For example, when Marcela halts Grisóstomo's funeral, Don Quijote in his turn stops the shepherds who would have pursued her with "loud and intelligible" threats. As the hero, he is appropriately as much a champion of interruption as his author. He halts the rotation of the vanes of the windmill, prevents the beating of Andrés, stops Maritornes in search of her Morisco lover (by "grasping her wrist strongly"), challenges all processions and passersby, implacably corrects the oral malapropisms of Sancho in midsentence (as well as those of the irritated goatherd in midstory), frees the galley slaves, silences Cardenio, and breaks up the puppet show. The fact is that the would-be knight interrupts everything that can possibly be interrupted, except,
of course, the blanket tossing. The inevitable result is a rudimentary variety of experience communicated afterward in rueful dialogue usually accompanied by physical injury and attributed to hostile enchanters. This is what Max Scheler terms "the primary experience of resistance which is the root of experiencing what is called 'reality.'"[11] Amadís de Gaula has been treated as if he were Lazarillo de Tormes!
However, in chapter 20 during the unprecedented ("jamás vista ni oída") adventure of the fulling mills, Don Quijote's headlong incitement is itself interrupted when Sancho, who is afraid of being left alone (without his master's protection or conversation), slyly tethers Rocinante's forelegs. The result is the first exploration of how "a person feels himself existing in the happening" in fiction, Actually, nothing "happens," as both Thornton Wilder and the author of the chapter title point out,[12] but the darkness of the episode is as comic and pitch-black as Huck's thunderstorm is nostalgic and explosively bright. In this crucial adventure-experience the novel was "born"—became forever after possible—and accordingly I must request that my reader take the time to read (or reread) this chapter and the preceding chapter of the Quijote . It will save both of us from tiresome résumé.
This is the fourth night that Don Quijote and Sancho have spent together on the road. The first was under a grove of trees after the attack on the windmill; the second was with the goatherds in their rustic replica of the Golden Age; and the third was spent in the picaresque confusion of the "enchanted" castle-inn. The fourth night begins when dusk interrupts them laterally ("les tomó la noche") while they are
[11] Max Scheler, Man's Place in Nature , translated by Hans Meyerhoff (New York: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 14.
[12] My free translation of the title of chapter 20 would begin: "Concerning the unheard of and unseen adventure which no other famous knight ever achieved with less danger . . ." Thornton Wilder adds cogently, in relation to his notion of experience: "It is not the external event which justifies the narration but the life within the mind of the protagonists—as is shown by the Adventure of the Fulling Mills where precisely nothing happens" (Journals , p. 96).
lamenting the loss of their provisions and teeth in the battle with the custodians of the armies of sheep. Darkness is first communicated (in chapter 19) by the contrast of the eerie torches of the funeral procession, which in their slow approach build suspense and (as in the case of the preliminaries to the combat with the Basque) decelerate the rhythm of narration:
They saw coming towards them a great number of lights which looked like moving stars. Sancho was stunned by the sight, nor was Don Quijote easy in his mind. The one pulled on the halter of his ass, the other on his nag's reins, and they stayed stock still,[13] attentively looking trying to make out what was going on. They saw that the lights were all the time coming nearer, and the nearer they got, the bigger they seemed. As they watched Sancho was shaking like someone who had had a dose of mercury, and Don Quijote's hair was standing on end.[14] (I.19)
As we can sense, the night is made darker not just by the contrasting light but also by being infiltrated with fear. "Can these hooded figures be ghosts?" Sancho asks his master, and the latter, while not denying that possibility, plucks up his courage and prepares for his most successful interruption.
The victory is famous, and the edible spoils most welcome. Indeed, it may well be Don Quijote's leftover exaltation at having dared to confront such an uncanny challenge that impels him in chapter 20 to take on the even more frightening fulling mills; just as it seems to be Sancho's leftover fear of the phantom torch-bearers that impels him to do all in his power to hold his master back when they hear the grim pounding. In any case, the two adventures are subtly intertwined in that the visual horror of the first prepares for the audible horror of the second. This is not a night of rural
[13] Notice how the complete stasis of the next chapter is slyly prepared for here in chapter 19.
[14] As has been noticed by several critics, in book 3, chapter 2, of Joseph Andrews the use of lights and superstition in the "night scene" indicates Fielding's appreciation of the technique of this adventure.
peace, rustic firelight, or picaresque hurly-burly but of cowardice and courage, daring and dread in the teeth of threats that the two understandably interpret as supernatural. It is a night of high adventure awaiting full metamorphosis into experience.
Once the lights and the hoods have fled ignominiously, master and man find themselves again alone in a darkness communicated not by adjectival description (as a romantic or a realist would have done) but by the heightened perceptivity of the remaining senses. To begin with, there is taste. When they have consumed their stolen supper, they find they have nothing to wash it down with—neither wine nor water—a discomfort that seems worse than their previous hunger. Touch, however, promises a remedy. Sancho, as the reader will learn later in the chapter, has been a shepherd boy. He knows about pastures, and the tender freshness of the grass underfoot leads him to suggest that they look about for a nearby source of water. Don Quijote agrees, and because of the total darkness, they dismount and feel their way slowly until stopped short by their sense of hearing.
We all remember what it is they hear, but before commenting on their reactions, we should stress (as Cervantes did in chapters 8 and 9) the extent to which a narrative structure based on continuity and interruption involves a corollary attention to gait—creeping forward (as they do now), charging and hanging back (as they usually do), leaping (both Don Quijote and Cardenio in Sierra Morena), plodding (the oxen)—and to posture—riding high, knocked down, slumped over, sitting up in bed. Among many other lessons, it was this precise novelistic observation of movement and stasis that Henry Fielding and Stendhal were later to learn directly from Cervantes. When Balzac in his curious Théorie de la démarche tells us that one morning he "sat down on a chair on Boulevard de Gand with the purpose of studying the gait of all the Parisians who, unluckily for them, would pass by during the whole day," he implies that such observation would reveal their secrets. And when he concludes that "facial expression, voice, respiration, and gait are identical," he
implies that the inwardness of novelistic experience is revealed most effectively when accompanied by a "physiognomy."[15]
When Don Quijote hears the rushing water, the smashing hammers, and the clanking chains of the mill combined with the gentle but no less spooky murmur of the wind in the leaves of invisible trees, he is reminded of his own oratorical rapprochement of the leafy myth of the Golden Age with the altruistic mission of heavily armored knight-errantry.[16] The rustle of pastoral darkness (capable of making even Lope de Vega's valiant Knight of Olmedo nervous) is blended with the chivalric challenge of the pounding iron—almost as if they were allegorical sound effects for the speech.
As a result, Don Quijote builds up his courage by reciting the speech again in the form of a pep talk ostensibly directed to Sancho but really to himself:
Friend Sancho, thou must know that, by the will of Heaven, I was born in this iron age of ours to revive the age of gold or,
[15] Honoré de Balzac, Oeuvres complètes , vol. 20 (Paris: C. Levy, 1882), pp. 581–86.
[16] Cervantes's profound assimilation of Orlando Furioso (of which more later) is evident in his amusement at the rapprochement of the same odd myth-couple (steel-clad chivalry and leaf-clad primitivism) in Merlin's prophecy to Bradamante (an Aristotelian topikon , or topic, used in a different way in the Cave of Montesinos) in III, 18 (Orlando Furioso , trans. Barbara Reynolds [New York: Penguin Classics, 1977], p. 162):
I capitani e i cavalier robusti
Quindi usciran, che col ferro e col senno
Ricuperar tutti gli onor vetusti
Dell'arme invitte alia sua Italia denno.
Quindi terran lo scettro i signor giusti,
Chè, come il savio Augusto e Numa fênno,
Sotto il benigno e buon governo loro
Ritorneran la prima etá de l'oro.
Thence will come forth the mighty cavaliers
And captains, by whose strategy and sword
The pride and glory of her former years
To valiant Italy will be restored;
Thence princes, whose just rule the world reveres,
As when the wise Octavius was lord,
Or Numa reigned. Beneath the sway they'll hold
Mankind will see renewed the age of gold.
as it is generally called, the Golden Age. It is for me that are reserved perils, mighty feats, and valorous exploits. It is I, I say once more, who must revive the order of the Table Round. . . . Note well, loyal and faithful squire, the shadow of the night, its uncanny silence, the muted and mingled sighing of the trees, the fearful sound of the water we came here to seek—which seems to be hurtling itself down from the highest mountains of the moon—and the endless thumping which wounds and afflicts our ears; which things, taken all together and each by itself, would be enough to infuse fear, terror, and dread into the breast of Mars himself. . . . Yet all this that I am describing so vividly for thee constitutes an incentive and clarion call to my courage and has the effect of making my heart swell with desire to attempt this adventure—however arduous it may prove to be. Therefore, tighten Rocinante's girths a little, and God be with thee.
(I.20)
Sancho's reaction to the sonorous challenge resembles that of his master in that he, too, retreats into the past. The difference is that the former, being illiterate, has no access to the apocryphal printed memories that fortify the latter. He has never identified himself with Amadís (nor even with Amadís's valiant squire, Gandalín), and as a result he lacks a fictional conviction of invincibility to fall back on. Instead, losing his habitual impertinence, he reverts to childhood and begs Don Quijote not to spur forward and abandon him: "And if what I have said should not move or soften [your Grace's] hard heart, let it be moved by thinking and believing that scarcely will your Grace be gone from this spot when from sheer fright I shall surrender my soul to anyone willing to carry it off" (I.20). It is almost as if he were the young Marcel being put to bed without a kiss or a night-light. The more Don Quijote rehearses his well-memorized role as invulnerable knight-errant, the more Sancho confesses shamelessly to infantile vulnerability. The one shows off and the other whimpers in the interaction of their dialogue. The novel has just been born. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the fledgling is pecking its way out of the hermetic egg of adventure into the vast time-space of personal experience. Just as we became aware of ourselves as interrupted
readers in chapter 9, so, too, Don Quijote and Sancho, interrupted in their search for water by the sound of the fulling mill, become aware of their lives and roles as emergent from a past peculiar to each of them.
Sancho's next appeal to his master is to wait at least until dawn, which he says cannot be more than three hours away. How does he know? Because he remembers the "science" he had learned during long nights long ago when he was a shepherd boy out with his flock looking up at the constellations: "The muzzle of the Little Bear is now at the top of his head, whereas at midnight it is in line with the left paw" (I.20). Not only has he reverted to childhood, but memories therefrom return "en foule," as Stendhal phrased it. But they are only memories, for, as Don Quijote points out, the night is so dark that there is not a single star to be seen. In a marvelous ironical reversal, Sancho's fear of the noise-haunted darkness operates in exactly the same way as his master's chivalresque incitement. Sancho sees what is not there ("terror has many eyes") and now it is Don Quijote's turn to set him straight. The pattern of dialogue to which we have become accustomed has been turned inside out. With consummate narrative skill Cervantes has communicated exactly how it felt to exist in the adventurous obscurity of a night that sets the all-time record for dark nights in novels.
Having for once demonstrated that he can be a better judge of situations than his squire, Don Quijote once again prepares to go forward and undertake "esta tan no vista y tan temerosa aventura." Jarvis and others translate no vista as "unprecedented," while Smollett reveals the other edge of Cervantes's intentional ambiguity with the adjective "unseen." In any case, it is then that Sancho, taking advantage of his invisibility, contrives the second and definitive interruption. While tightening Rocinante's saddle girth as he had been ordered, he also slyly ties together the nag's forelegs with the halter of his donkey. The result is that all four, riders and beasts, are brought to a collective standstill lasting till daybreak. Mounted they remain—like equestrian statues or like the comic woodcut in chapter 9—with Sancho, again like
a frightened child, clinging to his master's thigh. As just observed, interruption by its very nature calls attention to posture and gait.
What follows is unforgettable. Two more senses further accentuate the experience of blind helplessness and at the same time lead us to laugh as much at ourselves (insofar as we provide memories of having been afraid of the dark or of having been embarrassed by the exigencies of our bodies in inconvenient circumstances) as at the comic apprehension and misapprehension of the immobile pair. The first of these senses is not one of the familiar five: the sense of time, a sense naturally forgotten during the contained excitement of adventure but by definition present when one feels oneself "existing within the happening." And all the more so if that "happening" involves nothing more than waiting in the dark, during which past experience merges with the seemingly endless passage of one elastic minute after another. Along with Sancho's fear of what the dawn may reveal, Don Quijote's impatience (his "presurosa dilación," or zealous dilation, as Jorge Guillén phrases it in a poem dedicated to this episode, "La noche del caballero") creates acute temporal awareness. And here, too, those of us who have been pulled out of the action by a mother or a coach have experience to contribute.
The classic antidote for waiting is storytelling. The primitive raconteur clothes what E. M. Forster calls distastefully "the naked worm of time" in adventures. Hence Sancho's absurdly paratactical account of the pursuit of Lope Ruiz by the shepherdess Torralba (the dreaded alba , or dawn, in her name is implacably on its way but is kept from arriving by the strategy of the teller), with its endless thread of repetition:
I say, then, that in a village in Extremadura, there lived a certain goat shepherd—I mean one who tended goats—and this shepherd or goatherd as I say in my story was called Lope Ruiz; and this Lope Ruiz was in love with a shepherdess who was called Torralba, which shepherdess called Torralba was the daughter of a wealthy cattle raiser, and this wealthy cattle raiser . . .
(I.20)
Sancho, to the irritation of Don Quijote, who interrupts at this point, dresses his story-time in a minimum of syntactical clothing, and he continues it appropriately with the embarkation of Lope's goats one by one—just as if each were a minute ticking by.
To the question, What kind of a dock is supposed to measure this post-Edenic form of scantily clad time? the answer is self-evident. The impatient chronometer is Don Quijote himself, who, when he fails to keep track of the minutes (meaning the exact number of goats who have made it to the other side of the river), cuts Sancho's thread and, to our immense regret, interrupts the story forever. It is as if the mainspring of his temporal endurance has suddenly snapped. As a folk parable of sheer narrative continuity, Sancho's tale, like that of Cardenio later on,[17] brings out by contrast the nature and structure of a novel premised on interruption. And, at the same time, it makes the interminable night seem all the longer and darker.
Cervantes, however, still has his own story to tell. Unlike Sancho, he provides a comic climax at the end: the dialogue occasioned by Sancho's cunning solution to his pressing need to empty his bowels and by Don Quijote's acute sense of smell. Who can forget Sancho's lame pretense of ignorance, "I would be willing to bet that your Grace thinks I have done something I ought not to have done with my person," and Don Quijote's untranslatably comic reply, "Peor es meneallo, amigo Sancho"?[18] It should also be noticed that all the while time has been running on (Torralba has been catching up with Lope Ruiz!) and that the chill of darkness just before dawn may have been partially responsible for Sancho's loss of self-control. Shortly thereafter they begin to discern the dim shapes of the trees, "the muted mingling and sighing" of which has been so unnerving.
[17] When Cardenio threatens to stop if interrupted, it brings "to Don Quijote's memory the story his squire had told him, when he wasn't able to remember the number of goats that had crossed the river, and the account was left unfinished" (I.24, italics mine).
[18] The phrase means figuratively, "The less said, the better," but literally, "Don't stir it around."
Full daylight brings discovery of the prosaic truth and full humanity to the downs when for the first time they laugh at themselves. It is not now we who are amused by them, but rather it is they—when they can at last look into each other's eyes—who break into mutually infectious laughter. It is as if our previous mockery of their marvelous foolishness had been absorbed into their book and their lives, if only momentarily.[19] Immediately afterward we laugh at both again when Sancho goes too far and mimics with the uncanny accuracy of oral memory the Golden Age speech and is chastised physically for his impertinence.
Yet despite the by now familiar burlesque conclusion, this episode stands out as something entirely unprecedented both in Part I of the Quijote and in the previous history of prose fiction. As an adventure infiltrated by experience, what happens and what does not happen in chapter 20 prepare us for such profound episodes in Part II as the pacific encounter with the lions and with Don Diego de Miranda, the Knight of the Green Overcoat, or the frustrated pilgrimage to Toboso when "media noche era por filo, poco más o menos" ("it was on the cutting edge of midnight, more or less," II.9). The situation, the postures, and the five senses plus one interact and bring together the lives of the author, the reader, and the two participants in such a way that all four breathe in unison. We deceive and are deceived together. The adventure of the fulling mills is the very first of what Ortega calls the countless multiplications of our existence, which the strange new genre has offered us with unstinting generosity during almost four centuries.
In conclusion, the intimate relationship of interruption and experience in this chapter and in the rest of the Quijote —the professional interruptor interrupted and so forced to contemplate himself in his immediate situation—confirms our
[19] After the lecture this essay is based on was given at the University of Washington, Professor George Shipley (to whom I am indebted for much, much more) suggested this reversal so crucial for the nascent autonomy of the pair.
earlier suspicion that Goethe's description (in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship ) of the protagonists of novels as opposed to those of drama is incomplete. In other words, they are, or at least should be, "retarding personages" highly sensitive and passively prey to "chance."[20] Cervantes's stress on Don Quijote's acute olfactory and auditory sensibility as he waits passively for morning is undeniable. But that is not the same thing as a sensitive and perceptive soul dedicated to a novellong apprenticeship (or Bildung ) in the craft of living. Rather, the kind of intensified experience the novel demands is better provided by lives in that state of usually frustrated exaltation that Castro terms incitement.
If we review our previous sampler of Don Quijote's innumerable avatars—Julien Sorel, Vautrin, Dmitri Karamazov, Captain Ahab, and Fortunata—we may observe that all of them, each in his own way, are prevented by their own cleverly tied ropes from moving forward to the fulfillment of their heart's desire. Adventures vary, and times change. The rope will be transformed into imprisonment, shipwreck, failure in business, membership in a lost generation, a catastrophic marriage, sexual constraints, an invasion from Mars, or simply bad weather on sea or land. The list of misfortunes could be endless, but worst of all and most frequent of all is questionable social identity and consequent exclusion from the massive yet intangible fortress of nineteenth-century society.
In so saying, we must affirm again: for these incited and impeded lives, it is their aspiration emergent from their private past and bound for their inviting future (as Guillén said of chapter 20, "tanto invita el peligro"—"it so invites danger") that produces what Dickens called personal experience. We may, and indeed should, share in the "history of the love" of Don Quijote and Sancho and of many of their fellows. But we should not identify ourselves with them and so fail to recognize their uniqueness. What we call all too facilely the
[20] Book V, chapter 7; the translation is by Thomas Carlyle (1824).
rhetoric of the novel really amounts to this: the fascinating history of all the ways novelists have found to prevent their readers from reading in the way Alonso Quijano read. Only by relishing otherness can we discover our own uniqueness and thereby allow strange fictional lives to feed on our "souls"—meaning both all we can remember and all we can imagine. Only then will the blanket of the dark achieve its full obscurity and the thunderstorm attain the plenitude of its time-fraught, yet timeless, beauty.
Each novelist has his own score, but Cervantes's primordial rhetoric—his way of saving the souls of all the Alonso Quijanos who might open his book—was double in nature. Two kinds of drastic interruption were designed for his utterly untrained and adventure-avid public. By interrupting their reading from above with various voices, he hoped to make them keep their distance so that they might read with a smile of comprehension and self-recognition instead of hard breathing. And by creating the caricature of a professional interruptor who is himself interrupted within the story—first by darkness and then by guile—he opened the hermeticism of successive adventures to experience in time. It took just ten chapters of profoundly "happy" gestation, and then all of a sudden the newborn, as yet unnamed, and seemingly miraculous infant uttered its first tentative cry.