3
Invention

"Pass through, oh rare inventor . . ."

Having contemplated the birth of what was later to be called the novel as a process taking place in Cervantes during the composition of Part I of the Quijote , let us now look back through the centuries and try to comprehend "historically" how the parent understood his own parentage. To begin with, although Stendhal's "fiddle bow" comparison is profoundly Cervantine, Cervantes, as an intellectual disciple of neo-Aristotelian theorists of poetics, probably would have rejected it. The noxious way Montalvo, Lope de Vega, and their followers were playing on the "souls" of his countrymen was precisely what he hoped to put an end to when he set out to write a short and exemplary comic romance.

It all comes down to what is meant by "playing" and what is meant by "soul." And to determine those meanings in the context of the Quijote , we must try to reconstruct what Cervantes thought about himself as a writer and what he thought about his writing. He tells us repeatedly that his only intention is to "destroy the ill-founded máquina [apparatus?]" of the romances of chivalry, but the reader soon realizes that, as a satire, his book has a far wider firing range. It even aims intermittently at itself. From this point of view the ahistorical notion of narrativity is no longer serviceable. What we need to do now is to scrutinize not Don Quijote's library but Cervantes's criticism of himself as a writer both in the course of his fictional creation and in his reflective prose and poetry—for example, in the Prologues and, most important of all, in the long versified meditation on his own place in the literary panorama of his old age entitled El viaje del Parnaso (The voyage to Parnassus, 1614).

Cervantes, who confesses that he is as avid a reader as Alonso Quijano ("even of scraps of paper in the streets," I.9), was also an ardent reader of himself. The pose of fellow bookworm (which, as we saw, is the humorous external manifestation of the Quijote 's profound narrative revolution) corresponds to the way he watched himself—listened to his own silent voice—while at work. As his own best critic, he enjoyed to the full all the provocation, indirection, mockery, posturing, and ambiguity enabled by that role. Yet in the midst of the repeated challenge to the reader to play hideand-seek with him, there is one emphatic and proud assertion, which we hear in many contexts. If not as a musician playing on his reader's soul, Cervantes does present himself as a literary Edison, an inventor who has devised an admirably clever trap for his reader's imagination. At least at the beginning the notion of exploring personal experience was still rudimentary and undefined, but if he could find a way to bring his Spaniards' wildly adventurous imagination to heel, he might be able to tame it.

Let us begin by considering Cervantes's portrait of the artist as an old man in El viaje del Parnaso . Ostensibly, this essay in criticism, divided into eight chapters with a prose epilogue, was a contribution to an adulatory subgenre typical of Cervantes's time: a catalogue in verse of favorite authors praised with suitable epithets. In this case, however, the writer was first of all interested in himself, in his lack of natural poetic endowment ("the gift that heaven chose not to give him," chapter 50) and in the capacity for invention that was his compensation. A poorly dressed and crippled veteran, he is accosted by Mercury while on a pilgrimage to Parnassus, and he humbly prostrates himself. However, the messenger god, bidding him rise, greets him:

"I know that father Apollo did not
endow in vain your breast
with the instinct of a rare inventor.

"Your works have reached the comers of the earth
carried on the crupper of Rocinante
and have incited envy to declare war on you.

"Pass through, oh rare inventor, press ahead
With your subtle designs, and help
Apollo, for your assistance matters much to him."^[1] (chapter 1)

Cervantes, of course, obeys and later presents his credentials for admission to Parnassus to Apollo himself—mentioning first his pastoral novel, La Galatea , then his plays, and finally the Quijote and the Exemplary Novellas . These last prove that he is "one who in invention / is superior to most, and those inferior therein / must perforce be bereft of fame" (chapter 4).

In the similar but more wry self-portrait contained in the Prologue to the Exemplary Novellas , we hear again the same self-satisfied litany: "Some of my readers would like to see the face and figure of a man who dares to present himself in the marketplace of the world with so many inventions" (italics mine; we shall see why later). More ironical and indirect but at the same time more telling is the judgment attributed to the Priest in Part I, chapter 6, of the Quijote (the Scrutiny of the Books) concerning La Galatea:

I've been a good friend of that Cervantes fellow for many years now, and I know that he is better versed in misfortune than in versification. His book has some claim to merit as far as invention goes; it proposes interesting things but concludes none. We must wait, therefore, for the second part which the author has promised; and perhaps with that repentance, he may be granted the pardon which we now deny him.

The writer of these lines is already on his way to becoming the author of the Quijote; and having suddenly discovered how marvelously inventive he can be, he looks back with affectionate irony at an earlier self-experimenting for the first time with narrative fiction.^[2] The meaning of these lines is not

[1] In my translation I have rendered in English the double meaning of the verb pasar as used here: "Pasa, raro inventor, pasa adelante / con tu sutil designio."

[2] A discussion of this crucial aspect of novelistic consciousness may be found in my essay on Galdós: "The Fifth Series of Episodios nacionales: Memories of Remembering," Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 63 (1986), pp. 47–52.

arcane. It is simply this: as an inventor, how much he has improved with age!

"The posterity of the Quijote "

What did Cervantes mean when he called himself an inventor? Let us begin by avoiding the fatal, fascinating, and almost irresistible temptation offered perhaps most eloquently in 1930 by Manuel Azaña (who in the following year was to become prime minister of the second Spanish republic) in a lecture entitled "Cervantes y la invención del Quijote ."^[3] Therein the intellectual statesman was primarily concerned with the relation of biography to creation. The novelist was a dreamer (in a sense comparable to Azaña himself!) who "invented" his novel by projecting his fantasies into the exaltation of his characters. However, that process, as Stendhal observed, was not a solitary operation, not a lonely mirror perambulating erratically along a haphazard road back and forth from Argamasilla^[4] to Sierra Morena and Barcelona. As a true novel, it is performed in its readers with the result that it changes them permanently: "As the posterity of the Quijote , we are debtors to it for a part of our spiritual life: we are Cervantes's children [or creations—somos criaturas cervantinas ]."^[5]

In so saying, Azaña refers to something far more lasting than the immediate comic prophylaxis ("pastime for the melancholy and moody breast"^[6] ), which, if we possess suitable

[3] Manuel Azaña, Obras completas , ed. Juan Marichal (Mexico City: Ediciones Oasis, 1966), 1: 1097–1114.

[4] Although Cervantes begins by saying he has "no desire to recollect" the name of Alonso Quijano's Manchegan abode, he cunningly attributes the satirical verses appended at the end of Part I to imaginary members of the grotesque "academy" of a one-horse village called Argamasilla, "lugar de la Mancha." The epithet is a direct echo of the first sentence of the Quijote . The suffix -illa is a diminutive, and argamasa literally means "mortar." The name, which could loosely be translated as "Mudville," clearly had amused him during his perambulation as a tax collector.

[5] Azaña, Obras Completas , 1: 1100.

[6] Cervantes, El viaje del Parnaso , chapter 4.

"souls," we may experience as freshly as did those who purchased or borrowed the Quijote in 1605. To be specific, Azaña, like many other readers on this side of the watershed of sensibility known as the French Revolution, was deeply impressed by the modernity of the book. After the publication in 1814 of the first nineteenth-century best-seller, Sir Walter Scott's Waverley (a serious historical novel with a rueful Cervantine beginning), readers increasingly began to observe their own lives, as well as life in general, novelistically. Indeed, our immediate forebears often behaved as if they were novelists looking at themselves as characters or, conversely, as if they were characters searching for a novelist to look at them—and into them.

Hence the conclusion of Ortega's Meditations , in which, as we saw, Cervantes is presented as two centuries ahead of his time—in contrast with Stendhal, who predicted rescue from oblivion as soon as 1880. The protonovelist's vision of life as a process of day-to-day exposure to careless circumstance might not have taught all members of his seventeenthcentury public all that he had hoped to teach them: first how to read, and then how to live; or, as he might have said, how, through receptive reading and therapeutic laughter, to exchange social irrationality (for which Don Quijote's delusions provided a recognizable caricature) for personal sanity. But Cervantes's strange book undeniably has provided undreamt-of generations of future novelist-writers and novelistreaders with patterned comprehension of their alienated lives in societies submitted to unceasing mutation.

Such is also the thesis of one of the most influential twentieth-century theorists of the novel, Georg Lukács. In his Theorie des Romans (which he began to write in the same year Ortega published his Meditations ) Lukács defines the genre as the literary portrait of a world bereft of value—as Don Quijote discovered for himself in the course of the Third Sally. Cervantes thus is supposed to have invented the novel in the sense that his ruefully humorous narrative experiment was the precursor of a ruefully serious genre that emerged two centuries later when historical consciousness itself was in the

process of becoming obsessive. As Lukács tells us, it was the disaster of World War I that impelled him to write his Theorie . However, let us give the last word to the greatest nineteenthcentury novelist. Ostensibly judging sub specie aeternitatis , in these lines from his Diary of a Writer Dostoevsky speaks profoundly from within his times:

In the whole world there is no deeper, no mightier literary work. This is, so far, the last and greatest expression of human thought; this is the bitterest irony which man was capable of conceiving. And if the world were to come to an end, and people were asked there somewhere: "Did you understand your life on earth, and what conclusions have you drawn from it?"—man could silently hand over Don Quijote ."^[7]

The proposition that the invention of the Quijote brought with it the invention of the novel (insofar as Cervantes anticipated a crucial variety of future consciousness) is at once tempting and patently anachronistic. Since by definition an invention (whether one of Cicero's or one of Edison's) must be consciously contrived, neither Azaña nor Lukács can help us to understand exactly what Cervantes meant when he called himself a raro inventor . Posterity might be said to have invented itself (in the etymological sense of invenire , "to come upon") in reading the Quijote ; or, conversely and more sensibly, the Quijote itself might be said to have invented the novel in the readings of Fielding, Sterne, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dickens, Clemens, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Melville, and even Scott and Balzac.^[8] We must, therefore, return to the past and

[7] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Diary of a Writer , trans. Boris Brasol (New York: George Braziller, 1954), p. 260.

[8] Although one does not normally think of Scott and Balzac as novelists in the Cervantine tradition (the others clearly are), it is noteworthy that both Waverley (the first of the series bearing this name) and La maison du Chat-quipelote (the first work of fiction to be included in La comédie humaine ) are concerned with misguidedly avid readers. Young Waverley "drove through a sea of books like a pilot without a rudder" and suffered the adventurous consequences thereof, while young Augustine Guillaume's undesirable marriage resulted from reading such romances as Hyppolyte, comte de Douglas . In spite of their reverence for archaeological history and social realism (both of which Cervantes scorned) the Quijote was a shared point of novelistic departure for Scott and Balzac. Nor was it completely forgotten afterward, as such novels as The Fortunes of Nigel and La recherche de l'absolu indicate.

to the systematic prevalence of rhetoric in the century during which Cervantes lived most of his life in order to comprehend his self-assertion as an inventor.

"De Inventione Poetica"

Originally, in Cicero's De inventione poetica and in the long tradition it relied on, the term inventio was forensic: the art of finding convincing arguments for orators or of pleading a case and winning. It is, Cicero maintains, the most important (princeps in omnium partem ) of the five traditional divisions of the discipline (the others being dispositio, elocutio, memoria , and pronuntiatio ). Thus, in "Renaissance" Spain,^[9] Luis de Lucena, author of the burlesque academic lecture Repetición de amores (1497), is praised for being a "very prudent and subtle inventor,"^[10] and the Marqués de Villena in 1422 castigates bad orators who do not know how "to help themselves through invention."^[11] So, too, Alonso de Proaza, professor, editor (of La Celestina , among other texts), and humanist, was admired

[9] The word Renaissance is enclosed in quotation marks because of its problematical application to a nation and a culture (represented by Alonso Quijano and his fellows, devoted not only to chivalry but also to anachronistic history plays and ballads celebrating the national past) that refused even to conceive of a "Middle Ages." The long centuries of Christian reconquest were sacred not only to the mass of the people but also to such selfproclaimed humanists as Nebrija and Pulgar. Américo Castro, long before he became aware of this aspect of Spanish peculiarity, did present Cervantes as a Renaissance author, in his El pensamiento de Cervantes (Madrid: Hernando, 1925). And even now he might conceivably have presented him as a Renaissance mind comically and intensely concerned with the resistance of his compatriots to historical truth. For further summary and bibliography, see my "The Problem of the Spanish Renaissance," Folio 10 (1977), "Studies in the Literature of Spain," ed. Michael J. Ruggerio, pp. 37–54.

[10] In the "bachiller Villoslada's" prefatory encomium to Luis de Lucena, Repetición de amores , ed. J. Ornstein (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954).

[11] Marqués de Villena, Tratado de la consolación , ed. R. Foulché Delbosc, in Revue Hispanique 41 (1917), p. 123.

as an inventor or master of discourse.^[12] All of them excelled in the exploitation of the Aristotelian topika , or topics, where arguments are "located": analogy, enumeration, differentiation, etc.^[13]

Cervantes, of course, was neither an advocate nor a prosecutor; unlike Don Quijote, he much preferred ironical insinuation to oratorical display and dispute. The case of the Barber's basin in chapters 44 and 45 is a mockery of such procedures, just as the discourse on the Golden Age in the presence of the open-mouthed goatherds is a beloved travesty that nonetheless "might well have been dispensed with" (I.11). However, as we shall see, the restricted Ciceronian definition of invention—the seeking and finding of effective oral arguments—was adapted easily for poetic use during the sixteenth century. That is to say, it was transformed into literary terms that Cervantes could apply to himself as an author and to his printed narrative rhetoric. As a matter of fact, his selfpraise as an inventor is an echo of the doctrine of his mentor in poetics, Alonso López Pinciano: "And so I am of the opinion that the poet should be new and rare in invention."^[14]

What exactly did Cervantes do as a poetic inventor that is comparable to what forensic inventors do? As we shall see later, Cervantes, using the conventions of other fictional genres as his topika , set out methodically to compose not an

[12] See Hernando de Castillo, Cancionero general (1511), ed. J. A. de Balenchana (Madrid: Sociedad de Bibliófilos Españoles, 1882), 1: 662. Cited in D. W. McPheeters, El humanista español, Alonso de Proaza , (Madrid: Castalia, 1961), p. 112.

[13] The point is that the term invention was derived from a complex neoCiceronian tradition that antedated El viaje del Parnaso by at least two centuries. Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, the father of Hispanism (against whom we frequently rebel in spite of—or because of—our indebtedness to him), studies the matter at length in chapters 9 and 10 of his Historia de las ideas estéticas en España , ed. E. Sánchez Reyes, vol. 2 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1962).

[14] Alonso López Pinciano, Filosofía antigua poética (Madrid, 1596), p. 193 (my translation). It is curious to note that a few pages later López Pinciano contradicts Cervantes's Priest (who would have burned his own father if he had encountered him in that romance) by praising the Amadís de Grecia as written by an author who does not "imitate" but rather "invents."

oration or a brief but his own new kind of narrative—a narrative destined to be recognized as the father (or mother) of the novel. Furthermore, because afterward he knew he had done it so well, because he knew he was such a superb inventor of prose, he even dared to demand entry into Parnassus as a major "poet." As Juan de la Cueva (a dramatist and critic who was roughly Cervantes's contemporary) enunciates in a manifesto comparable in its self-serving intention to the Viaje del Parnaso: "Those who in their poetry strayed from inventiveness are historians, and genuine poets those who knew how to invent."^[15] This distinction between the inventor (who exploits the past for new creation) and the chronicler (who merely compiles what happened when) necessarily locates prose fiction within the larger realm of poetry. An author who can invent in prose (instead of merely copy as did those who continued the Amadís ), in spite of all shortcomings, has every right to demand from Apollo recognition that he, too, is what in German is called a Dichter .

In any case, Cervantes, in the critical excursus that concludes Part I of the Quijote , has no hesitation in claiming for a skilled inventor's prose all of the virtues and perquisites of the classical genres of poetry. If a fictional narrator knows how to compose with

agreeable style, ingenious invention, and as truthfully as possible, he will weave a cloth out of various beautiful skeins. . . . Because the free composition of such works allows the writer to show himself as a master of the epic, the lyric, the tragic, and the comic, with all the rhetorical qualities which are contained in the sweet and agreeable sciences of poetry and oratory; for the epic can as easily and properly be written in prose as well as verse.
(I.47)

With this assertion Cervantes initiated a critical tradition. Although he could not know that his falsely modest "dry legend" was the world's first novel, those who began to follow

[15] Juan de la Cueva, Ejemplar poético , ed. F. de Icaza (Madrid: Clásicos Castellanos, 1941), p. 124.

in his footsteps were to justify their still suspect metier in identical terms. Specifically, both Fielding and Gogol defended the originality and the respectability of their narrative innovations by clothing them in the mantle of the epic. This, then, is the primordial meaning of Cervantes's eulogy of himself as a raro inventor . "Despite my admitted failings in verse," he says loudly and dearly in El viaje del Parnaso , "in my prose I seek and find and weave at least as cleverly as Ariosto."^[16] As a narrator, therefore, he should not be confused with those fictioneers and adventuremongers who confine themselves to repeating the Amadís over and over again. So, too, Fielding denied all responsibility for a derivative romance entitled The Adventures of David Simple .^[17] Genuine inventors are poets, and they should be treated with the admiration they deserve.

[16] As was pointed out to me by a singularly alert graduate student, Beth Tremallo, Ariosto frequently uses the comparison. For example, in II, 30, we find the following (Orlando Furioso , trans. Barbara Reynolds [New York: Penguin Classics, 1977], p. 145):

Or a poppa, or all'orza hann'il crudele,
che mai no cessa, e vien più oguor crescendo:
essi di qua di là con umil vele
vansi aggirando, e l'alto mar scorrendo.
Ma perchè varie fila a varie tele
uopo mi son, che tutte ordire intendo,
lascio Rinaldo e l'agitata prua,
a torno a dir di Bradamante sua.

Veering from stem to stern, the cruel gale
Grows ever stronger, granting no release.
Now here, now there, they whirl with shortened sail,
At the storm's mercy tossed on angry seas.
But many threads are needed for my tale
And so, to weave my canvas as I please,
I leave Rinaldo and the plunging prow,
And turn to talk of Bradamante now.

See also VII, 2; XIII, 81; and XXXIV, 90. However, from my colleague Jules Brody's book on Montaigne, Lectures de Montaigne (Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, 1982), I learned the extent to which the metaphor was topical. It has also penetrated idiomatic English, as in the phrase "spinning a yarn."

[17] Introduction to Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple (London, 1774), p. iv.

"If in the mechanical arts it is licit to invent . . ."

In order to understand the context of Cervantes's emphasis on his own inventiveness and on the importance of invention, we must once again pause for a moment to glance at the historical and literary circumstances of the century in which he was born. From our late twentieth-century vantage point, the contribution of pedantic Renaissance poetics to the making of a strange new narrative, which, in its turn, was to invent a major genre of modern literature, constitutes a mystery that needs abundant clarification. Let us begin by turning our minds back some fifty years before Cervantes's birth in 1547, and let us try to comprehend the almost incomprehensible ebullition of Spain's crucial decades, those that ended the fifteenth century and began the sixteenth. Starting with the union of Castile and Aragon under Ferdinand and Isabella and the establishment of the Inquisition, this period was a time of change in every aspect of personal and collective life. Even the public baths were closed for good. In the year 1492 alone (an annus mirabilis , if there ever was one), in addition to what was discovered on October 12, Granada was taken, ending the remnant of Moorish sovereignty in the peninsula, the Jews were expelled, the first play in Castilian was performed, the first grammar of a modern language appeared, and a book of fiction for the first time was written expressly for the printing press. Everything seemed to be beginning all at once.

Although the tidal wave of political and social change that accompanied the reigns of the Catholic Monarchs and Charles V was what held most people's attention, the sudden doubling and tripling in size of the known world was a more lasting and profound challenge to consciousness. And one of the most curious symptoms of this was the return of the notion of invention to its preforensic etymological origins. Thus, for example, in 1512 a chronicler speaks of the "invention and conquest of those Indies which we now call Portuguese."^[18] Cervantes, in other words, was born into a time

[18] Martín Fernández de Figueroa, Conquista de las Indias de Persia e Arabia (Salamanca, 1512), in A Spaniard in the Portuguese Indies , ed. J. B. McKenna (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 20. In his commentary McKenna remarks on the fact that in a 1494 papal bull, "Inter caetera," the new lands are described as "inventas et inveniendas," p. 161. Edmundo O'Gorman in La invención de América; el universalismo de la cultura de Occidente (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958) uses the word in our sense of new conception, meaning that if Columbus "discovered" America, Amerigo Vespucci "invented" it; hence it was quite properly named after him. O'Gorman revised his book in English under the title The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961).

when invention and inventiveness were laden with new prestige, when men who knew how to "come upon" or "come into" what they were looking for (or even marvels they were not looking for) were deservedly famous.

More familiar to our ears than the "invention of the Indies" (since we normally think that one cannot invent what was already there) was the comparable redefinition of the word in the context of literary discovery and innovation. In the year that Columbus "came into" San Salvador, Juan del Encina performed the same feat for the theater and Diego de San Pedro for an intended fictional best-seller.^[19] Quite possibly in the same year, the anonymous author of Act I of La Celestina discovered how to use rhetorical conventions and Stoic commonplaces as topika in order to explore the temporality of consciousness in dialogue, an invention perfected in 1497 by Fernando de Rojas. And that was only the beginning. The literature of the century to follow (like the industry of the English industrial revolution) was a case history of sheer mutability: chivalresque, pastoral, and picaresque romances; the naturalization of eleven-syllable Italian versification; unprecedented stanzas; a unique national drama; and, by the end of the Golden Age, a variety of personal genres such as Quevedo's Dreams , Góngora's Solitudes , and the one-of-a-kind prose narratives of Cervantes and Gracián. A new geographic world and a new poetic world, each in its own fashion, returned to the etymology of the word invent , and de-

[19] See my The Spain of Fernando de Rojas , p. 327.

rived new meaning from it. Poets devised and explorers discovered with the same verb.

Comparison of the torrent of literary change in Castilian that began in the 1490s (and continued to flow until the death of Calderón almost two centuries later) to the Industrial Revolution may appear farfetched, but it is justified literally by critics of the time. For example, Alfonso Sánchez, a professor of Hebrew at the new University of Alcalá (who was, like Juan de la Cueva, concerned with defending Lope de Vega as a "modern"), asked those who espoused what were thought to be the classical rules for drama: "If in the mechanical arts it is licit to add new things to what has already been invented—and if every day we see something new in that domain—why cannot the same thing be done in the domain of letters? Why should not Lope invent a new art of poetry?"^[20] Lope himself praises Vicente Espinel, on the one hand, as "the suave inventor" of a fifth string for the vigüela and, on the other, as the inventor of the ten-verse stanza called décimas .^[21]

As for Cervantes, acute awareness of the resemblance of mechanical and literary change is apparent in the Prologue to the Ocho comedias . These eight plays, Cervantes tells us, were never performed; indeed, they had apparently been refused in a rather humiliating fashion by professional directors after his invincible rival, Lope, had usurped "the monarchy of the drama." They remained in a drawer and were eventually published as a "book" at the end of Cervantes's career, in 1615—apparently in order to exploit the success of the Quijote and to provide him some much needed funds. The Prologue—it can therefore be assumed with due com-

[20] In an appendix to the Expostulatio Spongiae (1618), a collective defense of Lope's dramatic art. Cited by Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo in his Historia de las ideas estéticas en España , 2: 306.

[21] The vigüela quotation is from El laurel de Apolo (a poem generically similar to El viaje del Parnaso ), in Biblioteca de Autores Españoles , vol. 38, ed., Cayetano Rosell (Madrid, 1898), p. 191. Lope also mentions the same invention in La Dorotea and elsewhere. As for the ten-verse stanza, Lope goes on to say, "and the sweet, sonorous espinelas," which should not be called "décimas."

passion—was an attempt to compensate for his past chagrin with a miniature history of the theater designed to emphasize his role as an inventor who had contributed to its evolution. One Navarro, Cervantes tells us, had initiated elaborate stage effects by "inventing clouds, thunderstorms, and battles on stage." However, he himself in earlier and more successful plays had taken the decisive step of reducing the awkward five-act classical form to three acts. He had thus invented on his own what was commonly thought to be one of Lope's major innovations.

The most significant thing about the Prologue from our present point of view is not Cervantes's self-serving thumbnail history of the theater but the fact that he does not distinguish that external "coming into" or "coming upon," which corresponds to our technological notion of what inventors do, from poetic insight. In the same sentence and without transition he goes on to claim that he "was the first to represent on stage the imagination and hidden thoughts of the soul, thereby creating moral figures." We shall return to this assertion later because of its relevance for the narrative art of the Quijote . Its mention now is only intended to suggest that Cervantes as a creator-critic quite properly does not distinguish form from content. The introduction of a theatrical machine, the structural reinforcement or improvement of a genre, and the exploration of a soul were all alike—conscious literary achievements of which the inventor might be equally proud.

Thus, although Cervantes might have appeared to be caduco ("over the hill" or "worn out") to "a certain kid whose profession is poetry" (mentioned in the Viaje del Parnaso , chapter 8), he was no reactionary in the sense of only wishing to preserve tradition. Already in the Prologue to La Galatea he attacks "those narrow-minded souls who, in order to conserve the brevity of our antique language, wish to eliminate the abundance of present Castilian,"^[22] that is, those who

[22] Cervantes is apparently referring to the traditionalist Cristóbal de Castillejo and his followers, who were engaged in a bitter polemic (in the concluding chapter we shall gauge its cruel extent) against innovation— meaning "Italianization"—in versification and vocabulary. However, sixtyfour years after Castillejo's death, Cervantes in the Viaje del Parnaso expressed his own pessimism regarding new tendencies. For him Castillejo was what might now be termed a premature Jeremiah.

do not "understand" nor wish to exploit the marvelous literary "freedom" of that "fortunate age." Let them, Cervantes says, realize the advantages of the "open, fertile, and spacious field" that is now before us and that offers new "facility and sweetness" combined with "gravity and eloquence" as well as a "diversity of sharp, grave, subtle, and elevated conceits."

In conclusion, it is evident in these prologues as elsewhere that Cervantes as an inventor was concerned above all to assert that he knew what he was doing—that his innovations were conscious and intentional. Lope and his generation, as we shall see, had presented themselves as naturals, ingenios capable of producing without ratiocination all the lush variety of versification, forms, and genres of their hothouse Golden Century, but Cervantes was determined to continue the calculated creative experimentation of earlier decades. And once he got started, he proved his point: he changed the shape and function of chapters; he incorporated dramatic techniques into narration (as Fielding, Stendhal, and Gogol were to do in his wake);^[23] he played ironically with his own simultaneous presence and absence as an author; and, above all, redefining the forensic definition, he wove the traditional story "skeins" at his disposal into an unprecedented tapestry. In other words, without forewarned awareness of the selfconsciousness of its art, the marvel of the Quijote will seem merely miraculous. The terms Renaissance and Baroque ,

[23] F. W. J. von Schelling in his Philosophie der Kunst (1802) observes: "In dieser Beziehung könnte man den Roman auch als eine Mischung des Epos und des Drama beschreiben" (Sämmtliche Werke , ed. K. F. A. Schelling, Part I [Stuttgart und Augsberg, 1859], 5: 674). ("In this connection one could describe the novel as a mixture of epic and drama.") Jill Syverson further develops this perception in connection with the Quijote in an excellent doctoral dissertation at Harvard University (1980), Theatrical Aspects of Cervantes's Prose , which will shortly be published. In the meantime see her "Theatrical Aspects of the Novel: Don Quijote, Joseph Andrews , and the Example of Cervantes," Revista de Estudios Hispanicos 9 (1982), pp. 241–48.

though useful in certain contexts, are misleading in this one: by transferring authorship to the Zeitgeist, they cover up what was actually going on. We are quite simply dealing with an old man's well-meditated choice of Daedalus over Orpheus. If not as a singer, as an inventor he claims mythological welcome.

"To overthrow the poorly made machine . . ."

Having launched this ex-post-facto manifesto, we are now ready to scrutinize, as Cervantes would have said, the initial versions or experimental models of the invention that we began by calling a clever trap for the reader's imagination. In the introductory essay we mentioned briefly the silent, voluptuous, and unprecedented symbiosis of author, hero, and reader initiated in 1506 when a mechanical invention (the printing press) transformed a medieval genre, the romance of chivalry. What we did not stress sufficiently and what matters now was the concomitant transformation of the reader into a member of a public.

In the oral or semioral world prior to the printing press, what we now call "literature" was transmitted directly from one person to another, although others, of course, were invited to benefit tangentially. One sang to a lady in order to win her favors or at least to show off one's skill; one wrote treatises in order to provide a friend with philosophical consolation or a future monarch with lessons in wise government; one composed satirical verses in order to insult an enemy; one confessed one's sins in writing to a priest in order to be absolved; and one addressed letters to anyone, from a fellow scholar to a dead celebrity, in order to show off one's erudition. At the most, when mimicking the voices of La Celestina , singing a ballad, or reading aloud from a chivalric romance or saint's vita, a group might be summoned to listen, limited in its immediate size by the range of the human voice. But now Spaniards, united in faith and nascent patriotism by Ferdinand and Isabella and in fictional adventure-escape by the printing press, came to constitute a public. Being Amadís

together, and at the same time belonging together fervently to a paradoxically "medieval" nation-state, provided a collective identity—with all the consolation for daily misery or boredom therewith made possible.

That primordial collectivity of readers—despite the prevalence of illiteracy—constituted a national market larger and more homogeneous than markets of other European nations, far more fragmented into classes and dialectal regions. As such, it literally demanded and was supplied with the stories of Amadís's children and grandchildren as well as those of new rivals and such ancient predecessors as the fellowship of the Round Table. The book created a public, and the public, avid for more of the same, converted the book into a genre or subgenre. Then some fifty years later, readers who were beginning to be surfeited with chivalric deeds (particularly the increasing number of shut-in women readers) welcomed another subgenre, the pastoral romance initiated by Jorge de Montemayor in La Diana . Alongside tapeworm or express-train narratives of ever more incredible deeds of arms, there appeared on the market lyrically decelerated fiction combining idealized "green worlds" with printed love songs and stilted dialogues and monologues. Violence did not disappear completely (insofar as the two varieties of literate pleasure existed in a state of voluptuous osmosis), but at the center of the glade the inaction was primarily in the past. Instead of swordblows the performers each in turn exchanged amorous tales of woe designed for the sentimental participation of both the auditors and the readers.

Then after another five decades (although the anonymous novella called Lazarillo de Tormes , published in 1554, had been a precursor) there appeared the genre of the picaresque antiromance, that is to say, strings of antiadventures designed to provoke the laughter of Schadenfreude from ignorantly cruel readers and awareness of social hypocrisy from those whose marginal lives attuned them to bitter irony.^[24] The date was 1599, and the book, Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache , was

[24] See chapter 1, n. 61.

to have a crucial role in the history of the novel, insofar as its enormous success and its perverse portrayal of all that was (and still is) shameful in human existence was the "necessity" that led to Cervantes's "invention." Cervantes, having read and disliked Guzmán de Alfarache as much as Fielding disliked Pamela , set out to write a work of fiction that not only would restore humanity to our laughter but also would present life with the profundity and multiplicity admired therein by Dostoevsky. E. C. Riley explains Cervantes's innovation in terms of decorum:

The narrow literary dogmas of decorum and style reflect a now obsolete world-view arranged on hierarchical lines. Don Quixote is an ironic vision in which the old world-view is compounded with one that is essentially modern, with the ideally exalted and the basely material coexisting as distinct but separate parts of human experience. In that novel Cervantes served up not a slice of life, but, more nearly than anyone had done in a work of fiction before, the whole cake.^[25]

Riley's description of what we find in the Quijote cannot be faulted, but the implied explanation (anticipation of nineteenth-century Hugoesque and Balzacian rupture of neoclassical levels of style) seems to me to be erroneous. Riley does not take fully into account the fact that in Spain medieval mimesis (as presented by Auerbach) was never abandoned—not only in La Celestina (the corrosively ironic audition of which anticipates the humorously ironic reading of the Quijote ) but even in the exquisite neo-Virgilian and neoPetrarchan eclogues of Cervantes's favorite poet, Garcilaso de la Vega. The inevitable result of that oversight is that Riley imposes on Cervantes's inventiveness criteria that are alien to it. Decorum as such does not take into account what the present essay is intended to establish: that these three sixteenthcentury genres of printed fiction—the chivalresque, the picaresque, and the pastoral—constitute the primordial poetic topika (later there would be many others including his own

[25] Riley, Cervantes' Theory of the Novel , p. 145.

Part I) where Cervantes seeks and finds threads for his increasingly "sutil designio." Although when read in terms of prescriptive rhetorical rules these genres seem to represent different levels of style, they certainly do not correspond to an "old world-view" that Cervantes was concerned to surpass.^[26] Rather, it was their very modernity (their printed condition and public appeal) that he was concerned to utilize.

However, in order to understand how these three species of romance contribute to the art of the Quijote , we must first examine Cervantes's criticism of them. The trouble with Mateo Alemán, for example, was not just that he presented a one-sided worm's-eye view of life that needed correction but, more important, that his initial invention satisfied him and his readers. Just as Montalvo and Montemayor and their readers had been satisfied. Cervantes, too, as he himself confesses, was fond of individual works belonging to the chivalresque and the pastoral (while feeling that the Guzmán , the literary success of the moment, was structureless in its autobiographical imitation of life), but he was critical precisely of their generic quality. Each is a "machine," a closed narrative pattern, sent from press to public full-grown but half-baked. They were, in other words, sudden inventions, insufficiently perfected and thoughtlessly enjoyed and admired, which ought to be "overthrown," as the imaginary friend who helps him with the Prologue advises. Yet the very fact that the Amadís , the Diana , and the Guzmán possess a potential assembly-line quality provided Cervantes with a chance to use and improve on his narrative inheritance. Faced with the revolutionary standardization that McLuhan attributes to Gutenberg's invention and the resultant standardization of its literary offspring, Cervantes realized—in what must have been a sun-burst of marvelous illumination—what a better and more conscientious inventor could make out of those three rudimentary narrative contraptions or, as he termed them, máquinas . In their case the medium had indeed gov-

[26] Today, of course, instead of levels of style, they would be called (more revealingly) codes, or, as Bakhtin would have it, languages.

erned the message, a lamentable form of determinism he intended to put in reverse.

Leaving the Prologue and entering the text of the Quijote , we find these conclusions supported explicitly in Part I, chapter 6, the "scrutiny" and immolation of Alonso Quijano's library (Don Quijote, once having invented his role, no longer needs to read!), which we shall examine from another point of view in the essay to follow. During that literary Inquisition, Cervantes's Priest-critic observes to the Barber-critic that Montalvo's "was the first romance of chivalry to be printed in Spain and that all the others took their origin and inspiration from it." Therefore, it deserved to be burned. Not so, replies his friend, because it is "unique in its art it ought to be pardoned." Similarly, the Priest remarks later, "it is the honor of La Diana to have been the first of such books." Alonso Quijano, given his literary tastes, had purchased no picaresque fiction, but as Claudio Guillén has pointed out, Cervantes clearly foresaw that the Guzmén de Alfarache , too, would become the patriarch of a future genre, or género —a term at once mercantile and literary in Cervantes's ironic usage^[27] —unless he could persuade booksellers and buyers that his own purposefully ageneric (and so radically unpredictable and infinitely more profound) version of the comedy of life exposed to a careless world full of both kind and hardhearted inhabitants was the superior product.^[28]

[27] The much discussed passage occurs in I.22, while Don Quijote is engaged in interrogating those condemned to the galleys. One of them, Ginés de Pasamonte, a malicious caricature of Guzmán (who ends as a galley slave), is engaged in writing his autobiography. When the knight asks him if it is finished, he replies that it cannot be finished until he is finished. This, of course, questions the verisimilitude of the pretense of Erzählung , or first-person narration. Ginés also predicts boastfully that his book will eclipse the Lazarillo de Tormes and any others of that "género" that in the future might presume to compete with it. See Claudio Guillén's essay entitled "Genre and Countergenre: The Discovery of the Picaresque," in his Literature as System (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 135–58.

[28] "We have already said that the novel gets on poorly with other genres. There can be no talk of a harmony deriving from mutual limitation and complementariness. The novel parodies other genres (precisely in their role as genres); it exposes the conventionality of their forms and their language; it squeezes out some genres and incorporates others into its own peculiar structure, reformulating and re-accentuating them" (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination , p. 5).

How would Cervantes accomplish that aim? Quite simply, by taking advantage of what was wrong with the chivalresque, the picaresque, and the pastoral: the fact that they had been (or would be) produced en masse for a mass public whose collective mind was habituated to—and, indeed, saturated with—the simple patterns of their fiction. By cleverly and mischievously bringing them together in a single narrative, he would "invent" not only "in" the innumerable printed romances he himself had read but, more importantly, "in" the very minds of his readers. Then as each reader came to appreciate and to laugh at Cervantes's play with generic rigidity—his delightful tangle of fictional expectations—mass identification would no longer be possible. The public would disintegrate, and the individual would once again be alone and, to the extent of his capacity, in ironical communication with the author. And the most extraordinary thing is that what might well have been a parody relevant only to its own times (like Fieldings Shamela ) should still work for twentieth-century readers who have never opened a single one of those primitive romances! Cervantes's genius was able to communicate across the centuries not only the foolishness and conventionality of avid sixteenth-century reading but also its savor and fervor.

"A cloth woven from various and beautiful skeins"

The Scrutiny was a pause for literary assessment placed at the end of the initial five chapters of primitive invention customarily referred to as the First Sally. As readers of the time were immediately aware, that initial portion of the Quijote consists of a juxtaposition of chivalresque and picaresque motifs, or "skeins." To say it more directly, it portrays a headon collision of a fantasy castle with a sordid inn, prostitutes

with damsels, trout with codfish, a rascally innkeeper with a noble seneschal. Like a stand-up comic "orator," Cervantes invented those first chapters by finding (or "coming into") patterns from fiction already familiar to his readers and pitting them against each other.

Recognition of this parodical technique allows us to draw two preliminary conclusions. First, although Cervantes's primary intention may well be that which he proclaimed—to wreak havoc with the romances of chivalry—the world of Mateo Alemán is also submitted to caricature. As we remarked earlier (and as critics generally agree), it was the appearance and success of the Guzmán de Alfarache in 1599 that was the initial catalyst of Cervantes's new narrative. Evidently, that narrative must have been undertaken shortly thereafter.

The second conclusion is more important for our present purposes: as the author soon realized, this direct clash of antitheses was self-destructive. The brutality of picaresque cynicism (which, as we shall see, is not at all the same as realism) would overwhelm chivalric folly and lead to Don Quijote's definitive defeat. Accordingly, the First Sally is brought to an abrupt ending with the hero's complete derangement. The sardonic merchants have dared to make fun of his Lady's beauty; his trusty steed has dumped him ignominiously on the ground; and he has been beaten mercilessly by the most unworthy of all possible opponents, an adolescent muleteer. The result is that by the ironclad logic of his delusion the erstwhile hidalgo can no longer sustain his assumed identity as a knight-errant. If Amadís was invincible, by definition he is to be no less so. His only recourse, therefore, is to change roles and to believe himself to be first the treacherously defeated hero of an absurd neo-Carolingian ballad.^[29] And then

[29] As Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Spain's greatest medievalist, has shown, the initial stimulus of the Quijote was an anonymous comic interlude entitled El entremés de los romances ("romances" in Spanish are oral ballads), in which a deluded man identifies himself with his interlocutors. See Un aspecto en la elaboración del "Quijote" (Madrid: Ciudad Lineal, 1924). As is evident here and elsewhere in the Quijote (above all in the Cave of Montesinos episode), Cervantes, unlike Lope, perceived as comic this and other manifestations of Spain's marvelous oral tradition, such as Sancho's proverbs. That is to say, he perceived them as just as ridiculous and grotesque a falsification of history as the romances of chivalry—and without the solace offered by reading.

(after having been rescued and taken home astride a donkey by a kindly peasant neighbor) there is the episode of Abinderráez, a young and handsome Moorish lover taken prisoner by Christians whose interpolated story is told in La Diana . The literary satire of the First Sally, perhaps originally conceived of as an independent novella, comes to its inevitable ending. All that remained for Cervantes to do was to arrange for the Barber and the Priest to draw the proper critical conclusions and preside over the atrocious "fé" of the library.

The problem was now sharply delineated. If the book was to continue—if Cervantes was to show readers and writers of fiction what a conscientious inventor could make out of popular generic raw material—Don Quijote had to be better defended. Means would have to be found for him, if not to conquer (although that was to happen once in a while, too), at least to survive and retain his adopted identity. As Cervantes himself might have said, Don Quijote would have to be protected from the excesses of his mad ingenio by the author's gift for invention. The first step, of course, was fundamental: the creation of Sancho as a sort of human buffer state between his master and the stony implacability of what was out there in the world. The kind peasant neighbor, who shows up with his donkey and tactfully brings the brutally beaten hidalgo home at night in order to avoid scandal, is replaced in the Second Sally by Sancho Panza, who is institutionalized in chivalric terms as a squire. Both share the same social class, both ride the same beast of burden, and both speak with good sense and good humor.^[30] Don Quijote's

[30] As when in I.5, Sancho mimics Don Quijote's chivalric jargon upon bringing him home.

first rustic savior, thus, is dearly a precursor of Sancho—a signpost toward an immense novelistic future.

But what about the occasions (and there are quite a few of them) when knight and squire are both laid low? In addition to providing a more prudent companion with comforting saddlebags, purse, and provisions, some way would have to be found to lessen the implacability of the novelistic world, to soften the granite hardness and careless cruelty Don Quijote inevitably encounters in his headlong assaults. Fortunately, a third skein, the pastoral romance (perhaps suggested by Don Quijote's self-transformation into the gentle captive Abinderráez and by a number of titles in his library), was at hand to be woven in for this very purpose. Increasingly during the Second Sally the novel would rest on a comforting background of shady groves, green meadows, clear streams, and quiet intervals for song and story—all readymade for the rest and recuperation of warrior and squire. Admittedly, these were artificial and highly stylized topika , which our inventor had first "come into" in La Diana and which he did not hesitate to criticize in The Colloquy of the Dogs .^[31] At the same time, it was an absolutely indispensable thread if the Quijote was to grow into a novel.

However, aside from both the narrative utility of the pastoral and Cervantes's occasional criticism of its lack of verisimilitude, we should also remember that of the three printingpress genres of fiction it was the one he preferred ("books dreamed but well written," as one of the dogs remarks) and to which he himself had contributed in La Galatea . In fact, one whole episode of the Quijote —that of Marcela and Grisóstomo—seems to represent the "enmienda" (the aesthetic penitence or self-correction) that was promised for that romance in the Scrutiny. There the knight and squire, after the speech on the Golden Age, fade into the background and

[31] In The Colloquy Berganza recalls his service as a sheepdog, remarking that his thievish masters, unlike literary shepherds, sang with hoarse voices and, instead of devoting their time to amorous pursuits, only scratched at their fleas and mended their wooden sandals.

become observers—allowing Cervantes to show us, as if he were Louis Armstrong playing a waltz, what he can do with the pastoral climax of his earlier romance within the new context of the Quijote . The contradictory pastoral exigencies of passion and freedom are now explored with sympathy, irony, twenty-twenty binocular vision (a personal perspective that is absent from the stylized and conventional stories and poems of La Diana and its successors), and the characteristically imperceptible blending of literature and life Cervantes shared with Lope and Velázquez.^[32]

Nevertheless, in addition to the calculated charm and the noncommittal profundity of this miniature masterpiece, the importance of the episode of Marcela and Grisóstomo to the novel as a whole is to have introduced the pastoral skein. And it was that that kept the mirror moving along the road. After Don Quijote's picaresque lapidation by the ungrateful galley slaves he neither loses his identity entirely nor does he have to go home. Instead, prudently advised by Sancho, he retreats from the forces of law and order to a pastoral locus amoenus in the protective fastnesses of the Sierra Morena.

But the pastoral had much more to offer than an asylum for the mad knight or a chance for him to explain rhetorically and experience "personally" the Golden Age. It also imported into the previously slim text what novels have to have in order to fulfill their destiny: a narrative world. As Cervantes soon discovered, what had begun as an experimental variation—at once playful and functional—provided him with an unsuspected treasure: three-dimensional space replete not just with soft grass and restful glades and groves but also with mountain ranges, rivers, lagoons, caves, and seashores; in short, what we described earlier as a typology of adventurous settings. This sudden spaciousness is in di-

[32] For Lope see Leo Spitzer's classic essay on La Dorotea, Die Literarisierung des Lebens in Lopes' "Dorotea" (Bonn and Cologne: Kölner Romanische Arbeiten, 1932). As for Velázquez, one only has to remember visually such paintings as that in which the transition from mythology (Bacchus) to contemporary rusticity (the grizzled peasant topers) resembles the reception of the Golden Age speech by its audience of goatherds.

rect contrast to the empty scenes of the First Sally, where a two-dimensional series of comic cartoons take place on the "ancient and celebrated" but featureless plain of Montiel. It is curious to note the difference in the enchanting but romantically anachronistic illustrations of Gustave Doré. At the beginning Doré confines himself to interiors, postures, pratfalls, and folkloric sketches, whereas later Don Quijote and Sancho (so immense in their dialogue) are made to resemble Saint Jerome in Manneristic paintings. They are almost swallowed up by the lavishness of the strange landscape. However, within our text the pastoral scene is no longer conventional: it is an environment which enables myriad possibilities for narrative maneuver and creative play.

Equally important is the immense amplification of the cast of characters, many of whom are incited by erotic compulsions and reluctances. Just prior to the First Sally, Alonso Quijano only glances occasionally at Aldonza Lorenzo from a distance, and later, when in his still unrehearsed role as Don Quijote he takes the "draggled and loose" prostitutes at the inn for "illustrious ladies" of the castle, he feels neither attracted nor threatened. As Caroll Johnson has pointed out convincingly, although we may disagree with his psychoanalytical approach on the grounds that literature is not life, sexual consciousness and amorous dilemmas of many kinds do pervade the Second and Third Sallies.^[33] As in both La Diana and La Galatea , the web of intrigue that surrounds the doings and dialogue of the two protagonists is mostly made up of a series of casos de amor (case histories of love). The first symptom of the change occurs when Don Quijote and Sancho enjoy the rude hospitality of the goatherds. As we recite mentally the knight's oration on the Golden Age, we can almost hear his titillation when he contemplates in his mind's eye the scanty vegetable attire of the innocent and unmolested zagalejas (rustic maidens).

The scene, the speech, and the chaste maidens all lead

[33] Caroll Johnson, Madness and Lust (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).

necessarily to the Marcela and Grisóstomo episode,^[34] centered on a romantic suicide amidst a horde of artificial shepherds driven mad by Eros. Then, by way of comic contrast, even Rocinante catches the "plague of love" when with disastrous results he smells the Galician mares. And so it goes throughout the rest of the book, from Maritornes through the tangle of love affairs in Sierra Morena to the elaborate goingson at the Duke's palace, where the climax is the immensely comic and somehow touching bedroom encounter of Don Quijote and Doña Rodríguez. This alternately comic and serious (sometimes both at once) aspect of the Quijote Henry Fielding perceived—"received"—and recreated with remarkable sensitivity and Mark Twain found scandalous and uninteresting.^[35] And though profoundly Cervantine in its elaboration, it was made possible by the weaving in of the pastoral romance.

Finally and crucially, the introduction of the pastoral, with its limitless fictional space and its complex variety of erotic relationships, enabled Cervantes to explore what Leo Spitzer in a fundamental essay was to christen "perspectivism." In the First Sally, as Aristotle would have it, things either are or are not: the castle is not a castle; the inn is an inn. However,

[34] Johnson reveals the hidden cunning of Cervantes's play with nomenclature in this episode. Grisóstomo is an Hispanicized version of Chrysostom, and the fourth-century saint who bore that name was well known for a treatise entitled De virginitate , translated from Greek into Latin by Erasmus. As for his friend Ambrosio, his namesake is Saint Ambrose, who composed a treatise recommending virginity directed to his sister Marcellina, De virginibus, ad Marcellinam sororem libri tres . See Johnson, Madness and Lust , pp. 97–99.

[35] Mark Twain's attitude is evident in the sexlessness of his utilization of the Quijote in Huckleberry Finn . In a well-known passage from a letter to Livy dated March 1, 1869, he "seriously advised [her] not to finish the book until he could censor it for her: 'Don Quixote is one of the most exquisite books that was ever written and to lose it from the world's literature would be as the wresting of a constellation from the symmetry and perfection of the firmament,' but 'neither it nor Shakespeare are proper books for virgins to read until some hand culled them of their grossness'" (Alan Gribben, Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction [Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1980], p. 76; the interior quotation is from The Love Letters of Mark Twain , ed. Dixon Wecter [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949] P. 76).

after chapter 9 the soothing intervention of the pastoral provides a literary world in which all sorts of unexpected combinations, ambivalences, and syntheses are possible, depending on the point of view. Or perhaps I should say depending on the point of desire . One looks from near or far and, as we shall see, judges and interprets in terms of who one is and what one seeks—that is to say, in terms of one's private (and often amorous) incitement. For the disinterested goatherd, Marcela is modest and virtuous; for the suffering Grisóstomo, she is cruel; for Ambrosio, who hates her for making his friend suffer, she is a "fiery basilisk"; and for Don Quijote, who is always alert to incitement in others and who is characteristically extreme in his enthusiasm, "she should be honored and esteemed by all good men in the world, for she has proved that she is the only woman living with such pure intentions" (I.14).

The variety of ways in which these conflicting views are expressed is also significant. As we listen to the speakers, we hear first a story, then a poem read aloud, then two antithetical harangues (Vivaldo's "j'accuse" and Marcela's "I was born free"), and finally Don Quijote's challenge and the poetic epitaph. From now on events, objects, and people will not be what they are (or are not) but as they seem to somebody who tells them and shapes them verbally in the act of telling. In La Celestina perspectivism was based on prejudiced preconception (for Calisto, Melibea is a goddess, while for Elicia, she is physically repulsive), but in the Quijote , as Spitzer points out, it is also linguistic.^[36] Thus, Sancho's comic fusion of basin (bacía ) and helmet (yelmo ) into "baciyelmo." It may look like a basin, but he learned from experience its utility as a helmet when the stones thrown by the galley slaves were flying thick and fast. Without it, Sancho says, his master "would have had a hard time." We shall return to this hybrid noun later. At this point I only wish to present the death of Grisóstomo and its aftermath as evidence that the perspectiv-

[36] Leo Spitzer, "Linguistic Perspectivism in Don Quijote ," in his Linguistic and Literary History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1948), pp. 41–73.

ism that differentiates the Second and Third Sallies from the First Sally was initiated by the introduction of pastoral topika . Along with comfortable seating and pleasant scenery, the incessant interchange of experiences and points of view in story and song was a decisive contribution of the pastoral.

A major critic has proposed that Cervantes really wrote two very different novels: the Quijote of 1605 and the Quijote of 1615.^[37] This is, as I see it, a foreshortened description of the process of invention that takes place before our very eyes as we read from chapter to chapter. The truth is that each of the three sallies has its own peculiar anatomy, which despite previous gestation is a spectacular innovation. We are talking about nothing less than an almost incredible process of literary growth. After the initial dash of the picaresque and the chivalresque, the pastoral skein functioned as a shock absorber and prepared the way (as we shall see in the final essay) for the introduction of recognizable patterns taken from the theater, from Ariosto, from comic interludes (Cervantes's most successful and appealing plays), and, at the end of the Second Sally, from the Byzantine tale.^[38] Then, at the beginning of the Third Sally, we are treated to the most unexpected and "daring" (as Cervantes remarks wryly and proudly in the Prologue to the Exemplary Novellas ) invention of them all: utilization of the previous two sallies themselves as a source of topika , thereby freeing Don Quijote and Sancho from servitude to their creator-enchanter. But it was when the pastoral was added in chapter 9 that the tapestry began to acquire the narrative richness we adore.

"You have an untutored ingenio"

Both the Cervantine metaphor of the narrator as a weaver-inventor unwinding and recombining skeins drawn from the

[37] Joaquín Casalduero, Sentido y forma del "Quijote" (1605–1615) (Madrid: Insula, 1949).

[38] In the so-called Captive's Tale, which comprises chapters 39–45, the Byzantine pattern of Mediterranean wanderings, escapes, adventures, and eventual reunion in perfect love is subtly combined in Cervantes's own memories of combat and captivity.

generic expectations of the reading public and the Stendhalian metaphor of the novelist as a musician drawing a melody from the soul of the individual reader challenge the familiar Romantic interpretation of the Quijote as a conflict of the real with the ideal. Indeed, since this view is based on a facile and mistaken identification of the chivalresque with the ideal and the picaresque with the real during the First Sally (and in such individual adventures in the Second Sally as that of the windmills), it is dearly misleading. As we shall see, if Cervantes himself had been asked to explain what the Quijote was about thematically, he would have replied (along with Mark Twain and every novelist in the tradition about their own works): the immediacy of its truth amidst falsehood. And now on our own initiative (leaving truth enclosed within parentheses) we may subdivide novelistic falsehood into illusion, delusion, outright prevarication, and the hypocritical commonplace beliefs and assertions of society.

Even these varieties of falsehood, however, are still abstract and ahistorical. In order to grasp the way Cervantes himself, as a man of arms and letters personally and patriotically concerned with the nexus of literature and life, understood the literary errors of his time, we must submit ourselves to a brief lesson in seventeenth-century critical theory. Specifically, we must venture to make a perhaps too rigid distinction between the two closely related (and often confused) notions of inventiva and ingenio , as Cervantes understood them. We must ask, What is the difference between the Quijote , as a cunning product of Cervantes's inventive skill, and the imitation romance of chivalry which flows automatically and without impediment from the fervid fantasy of the "ingenious hidalgo"? What does the adjective ingenioso mean? On becoming acquainted with Don Quijote, we soon realize that the usual English translation of the title, "ingenious gentleman," is incorrect.^[39] Rather, according to the Dictionary

[39] Otis H. Green, in his "El ingenioso hidalgo" (Hispanic Review 25 [1957], pp. 175–93), having examined past English translations of the word, concludes that Robinson Smith's "the imaginative gentleman" (1910) is the most accurate. I, of course, agree. He then proceeds to explain Don Quijote's madness in terms of the theory of humors as presented by Dr. Juan Huarte de San Juan in his Examen de ingenios (Baeza, 1575). The matter has been discussed at length by scholars and seems to me more interesting and fruitful than the many anachronistic psychological and psychiatric treatments of the subject. However, it, too, is ultimately extraliterary and ignores the development of the living imagination and experience, which emerges from reading and which is our reading.

of the Spanish Royal Academy, it refers to "the faculty in man for prompt and effortless discourse and invention." The "gentleman," in other words, is ingenioso because he has a natural and spontaneous gift for making things up—and, by extension, for falsehood.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, el ingenio and la invención were often used to signify two phases of the creative process. Ingenio engenders or generates (engendra) , while invención , governed by the understanding (entendimiento) , slowly and conscientiously gives artistic form and coherence to whatever was engendered.^[40] Thus, Cervantes's

[40] As those who have read Examen de ingenios know, Huarte de San Juan uses the term ingenio to refer to human mental ability and capacity in general and then subdivides it (causal humors aside) into categories corresponding to imagination, memory, and understanding (chapter 8), all of which are indispensable for "invention," understood in the postrhetorical sense. As a result, he does not confirm the above distinction between the two terms. However, if for our purposes we may confine ingenio (as it was used by the poets of the time) to the imaginative variety, the Examen is helpful. The initial problem posed is not unlike that of Cervantes: why do men "make so many different and particular judgements?" Why are there "so many different kinds of madnesses and follies?" If the world really seems to be an enormous "madhouse," what is the cause? The answer offered is, of course, the book itself, with its theory of humors affected by human ages, regions, climates, and (since the author was a traditional male chauvinist) gender. However, as we suggested in the previous note, the proffered explanation is less important than the notion of imaginative imbalance, which recurs time and again during the discussion. For example: "When a man of very vivid imagination comes to exercise his understanding, he appears to be ready for the straitjacket [loco de atar ]" (chapter 1). Or again: "From heat imagination is born [and thus] everything that is said by delirious patients belongs to the imagination and not to understanding or memory" (chapter 8). And finally, in relation to poetry: "Aristotle tells us that [a certain poet] was better when he was out of his mind. And that is because the imagination peculiar to poetry needs so much intense heat that it vitiates understanding" (chapter 11). Is Don Quijote, then, ready for the straitjacket? Not at all, because he is one of those exceedingly rare ingenios who combine "much memory and much imagination" (chapter 8). As for Cervantes, he is one of those equally rare ingenios who "up to the age of sixty" should be "writers of books" (chapter 3) because they use their "memory to retain images for the moment when the understanding wishes to contemplate them"; that is to say, they use it "to infer, distinguish, and elect" (chapter 8).

fellow pioneer as a pre-Lope dramatist, Juan de la Cueva, in 1588 defines ingenio as "the soul and source of invention."^[41] As for Cervantes himself, we have already heard him praise indirectly (via the Canon of Toledo, 1.47), his talent for ingeniosa invención . And in the Prologue to the Exemplary Novellas he boasts in the first person that his ingenio engendered them, after which "his pen gave birth to them." In other words, it is indispensable to possess the gift of ingenio , but it must be guided and shaped by invention. Only in tandem can they produce the "subtle design" Mercury had praised when Cervantes approached Parnassus.

However, when, as in Don Quijote's mad romance of himself ingenio is divorced from invention and allowed to run wild, only bizarre and arbitrary apparitions can be expected. Windmills will become giants, and herds of sheep, strange armies. In this sense the Quijote as a whole might validly have been understood by its contemporary readers as an immense and hilarious dialogue between the knight's unbridled ingenio (which, it goes without saying, was also that of Cervantes as an equally avid reader of romances of chivalry) and his author's inventive meditation.

As we detected from his remarks on La Galatea twenty

[41] Juan de la Cueva, Ejemplar poético , p. 127. Elsewhere he admits that "although it is true we know some / who only with their ingenio have merited fame . . ., excellent judgement" is also indispensable for lasting "grandeur," pp. 120–21. Here he seems more in accord with Juan de Valdés, Spain's first self-made Renaissance literary critic, who contrasts ingenio and invention, which "discover what to say," to judgment and composition, which choose the best of what is discovered and put it into its proper place (Diálogo de la lengua , ed. J. F. Montesinos [Madrid: Clásicos castellanos, 1928], p. 165). In any case, if the terminology is not consistent, the duality is—which is what matters for understanding the dialogue between Cervantes as "inventor" and Don Quijote as "ingenioso ."

years afterward, Cervantes, like other novelists (Fielding, Stendhal, Galdós, and Virginia Woolf at once come to mind), was engaged in a lifelong dialogue with himself and with his creations. Thus, when in 1605 he looked back over Part I of the Quijote , he realized that its humorous critique of the special category of ingenio classified by Dr. Juan Huarte de San Juan in his Examen de ingenios (1575) as imaginative could also be used to castigate the overprolific younger generations of poets and playwrights. The very fact that they referred to themselves as ingenios (not writers, but human incarnations of ingenio ) resembled Alonso Quijano's mad self-reincarnation as Don Quijote. The result was El viaje del Parnaso (not only an at once rueful and complacent self-portrait but also a scathing continuation of the Scrutiny and the dialogue of the Canon of Toledo with the Priest), much of which consists of an attack on the literary inflation of those who followed in the footsteps of Lope de Vega, the so-called Phoenix of ingenios . Proud of their naturalness and facile spontaneity, these poetic upstarts irritated the deliberate inventor-weaver, who had finished Part I of his self-conscious and ironical tapestry.

Not only were these young pseudocelebrities brash and self-assured; they were also transient. They recited and published with "ligera consideración,"^[42] that is to say, with careless ingenio and without inventive meditation. They prated of lasting fame, but in their impatience they were really more concerned with showing off to each other and with impressing their contemporary fans. The Quijote , on the contrary, was written with entendimiento (brains, or understanding), as Cervantes proudly informed the anonymous author of the apocryphal continuation in the Prologue to Part II. As a result, its future would be endless and limitless: "There would be no nation nor language in which it would not be translated" (II.3). This and similar predictions are, as usual, ironical and not to be taken seriously. As we shall see, Cervantes ruefully and hesitantly seems to have staked his immortality

[42] Cervantes, Prologue to La Galatea .

as a poet on a very different sort of "epic in prose," the serious neo-Byzantine allegory (often funny in spite of itself) Persiles y Sigismunda . But even in the case of the Quijote , composed with such ingratiating pleasure, he would have objected strongly to Sir Philip Sidney's definition of invention as "Nature's childe, . . . fleeing stepdame Studie's blowes."^[43] For him the only conceivable path through time was the meeting of minds.

The point is that in the Spain of Cervantes's late middle age the notion of the poet as a "natural" was carried to extremes unheard of in Sir Philip Sidney's England. Beginning roughly in the 1580s, Castilian society underwent—or produced—what can best be described as a volcanic eruption. Poets wrote copiously, recited implacably, and begat incessantly more and more of their kind (Cervantes describes them as swarming like bees^[44] ), and all taken together, they trace a steeply ascending curve of composition, recitation, and—though less vertiginous than in our own century because of the limitations of the handpress—publication. When compared to the exquisitely parsimonious poets who preceded them (Fernando de Rojas, Juan del Encina, Saint John of the Cross, Garcilaso de la Vega, Fernando de Herrera, and their fellows), these later generations of ingenios seemed literally to have become poetic machines dedicated to mass production. Just as in the case of the continuations of the Amadís , the initial patterns of rhetoric had been endlessly reproduced, and to a certain extent the same thing is true of the comedia and other Golden Age genres. But a far deeper preoccupation for Cervantes was the substitution of deceptively enchanting virtuosity for the search for genuine insight into the human condition that had characterized Spanish letters earlier in the century. It was to that quest that he was still deeply committed.

[43] Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella , ed. Mona Wilson (London: Nonesuch Press, 1931), p. 1.

[44] The phrase from El viaje contains a hybrid term: "¡Cuerpo de mí con tanta poetambre! " (chapter 2), from poeta and enjambre , meaning "swarm."

Accordingly, when in the Viaje del Parnaso Cervantes stops talking about himself and turns his attention to his younger colleagues, he describes them as "absorbed" in their mad verbal "dreams" (chapter 1). Conversely, as Quevedo pointed out bitterly, at a time when Imperial preeminence was becoming more and more phantasmagoric, a world of empty words gradually was replacing the world of things.^[45] The new poets thought of themselves as unique and marvelous fountains of ingenio , but for Cervantes, who had survived his wound and his captivity, who had failed as a writer and a bureaucrat, who foresaw the bleak literary and political future (for him they were not distinct) of his nation, and who was burdened with an accumulation of years, debts, and infirmities, they were a pack of born liars. Their substitution of irresponsible ingenio for conscientious invention was so spiritually poisonous that (like the prevarications of the foolish hero of La verdad sospechosa , a play by Cervantes's friend Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, adapted by Corneille in Le menteur ) it "left truths themselves without credibility" (chapter 8).

This summary review of the well-known historical, biographical, and literary circumstances that contributed to what we would now call Cervantes's alienation is intended to suggest not only how he initially conceived of the "ingenioso hidalgo" (as a satirical representation of a special kind of national aptness for delusion) but also why as a playful "author" he alternately praises and pretends to denigrate himself. For example, when in the Viaje Cervantes calls himself an "ingenio lego" (chapter 6), the intention is not to confess lack of awareness of what he was up to or ignorance of rhetoric (as certain past critics believed) but rather to separate himself from the rest of the pack. In the Prologue to Part I of the Quijote we find the same false modesty: "What could my sterile and uncultivated ingenio engender but the history of a

[45] See one of Quevedo's last letters, dated August 21, 1645, and addressed to Don Francisco de Oviedo, in Epistolario completo de d. Francisco de Quevedo-Villegas , ed. L. Astrana Marín (Madrid: Instituto Editorial Reus, 1946), p. 503.

parched, wrinkled, and capricious child?" And in the following paragraph: "After having spent so many years sleeping, forgotten by all, in the silence of oblivion, I now emerge to tell a story as dry as straw and foreign to invention."

At first, we are puzzled: why does our inventor, so proud of himself elsewhere, pretend at this point in the Prologue to be so humble? Evidently, irony is intended since, as we have seen, he was not at all dissatisfied either with his ingenio or with the capacity for invention that transformed it into art. The tip-off is the sly attack on the canned erudition of Lope de Vega, which was perceived by the first readers. But more important than literary in-fighting was the combination of facile pomposity (rather than genuine learning) with effortless effusion (rather than careful craftsmanship) that was blighting not only the lyric poetry but also the drama and prose of the period. Cervantes did admire Lope as a "monster of nature,"^[46] but he scorned "the more than twenty thousand prematurely hatched" songbirds who followed in his wake.^[47] His own poetry, as we have heard him admit, may have been lacking in certain respects, but these were "vain and hollow apparitions" only comparable in the vegetable kingdom to "gourds" (chapter 5). As for the Quijote , he knew how good it was but not how it would be received. Later he would proclaim its success and remark complacently that it had "incited envy to declare war on him." But now when an utterly unprecedented book was on the verge of meeting the public, he sought to protect it with an ironical preemptive strike. You may not like my stuff, the message reads, but let me tell you, I am not a fake like so many others; nor am I in a feverish delirium, like the person remarked on by Huarte de San Juan, all of whose ravings emerged in rhyme (chapter 7).

There is a complementary passage within the text of Part I

[46] In the Prologue to Ocho comedias . In the Viaje del Parnaso , however, because of Lope's manifest jealousy of the Quijote 's success, he reverses the compliment ironically by terming envy a monster of nature (chapter 8).

[47] The term used is "veinte mil sietemesinos" (chapter 1), or "born in the seventh month."

of the Quijote , which reverses the irony of the Prologue and thereby reveals dearly how proud its ostensible modesty really is. As is not infrequent in that gallery of mirrors, a character refers to the author hypothetically—in this case as an ingenio so superbly gifted that his real existence taxes belief even more than the fictional variety of Don Quijote. We are in chapter 30, and the Curate is asking Cardenio (in one of his sane intervals) what he thinks of Don Quijote's madness:

"Isn't it a strange thing to see with what ease this unfortunate hidalgo believes [Dorotea's] inventions [her unskillful lies while pretending to be the Princess Micomicona] only because they imitate the style and manner of his books?"

"It is indeed so rare and unheard of," answered Cardenio, "that I can't imagine how there could exist an ingenio so cunning as to be capable of inventing such a thing on purpose and fabricating such a lie out of whole cloth." (italics mine)

Once again invención and ingenio have been joined but with an added twist. Taken together in context, they question the supposedly absurd (but true!) proposition that there could possibly exist a flesh-and-blood author-liar so accomplished that he could make us believe in a believer sufficiently mad and naive as to swallow Dorotea's clumsy impersonation of an African princess in distress. And since in fact as readers we are used to believing in heroes far more unlikely than Don Quijote (indeed, we would believe in him all the more if such passages as this did not interrupt the process of identification), the sly suggestion is that the book might well be interpreted as a prodigious product of irresponsible and mendacious seventeenth-century ingenio . The reader who ignores the inventive skill of the "epic in prose" is the butt—not Cardenio or the Priest. The writer here knows and wants us to realize that if we read the text as a prevarication so enchanting that it cannot be disbelieved, we are as gullible as Alonso Quijano. Cervantes does not deny (as he has done in the Prologue) his undeniable gift for the kind of spontaneity that derives from ingenio . But, at the same time, he suggests that his inventive exploitation of it is far better than Dorotea's (not

to mention the poetic "gourds") and that, therefore, we should not be as eager to believe as his hero. To fabricate a lie out of whole cloth and to fool candid dupes may take a lot of gall and a certain amount of rudimentary imagination, but it is not the same thing as genuine artistry. The nimbus of irony, which in the title surrounds the notion of ingenio , is here once again quite apparent.

"He who flees from verisimilitude cannot achieve these things"

So much for the curious literary variety of seventeenth-century falsehood that Cervantes intended primarily to confound. It is now time, if not yet to free truth from its parentheses, at least to try to comprehend Cervantes's carefully devised literary remedy. If the Scrutiny had been the only critical excursus in the text of Part I of the Quijote , we would only know from its fragmentary observations that in addition to parody and satire of the romances of chivalry; Cervantes proposed to "reform" the assembly-line fiction of the last hundred years and, at the same time, to salvage and reuse whatever was meritorious therein. Thus, for example, he praises Tirante el Blanco because, like Don Quijote, its hero eats and sleeps, but he also implies that inventively it is naive.^[48] And although he thinks La Diana may be spared because it is written with "understanding" (entendimiento again!), he recommends amputation of its magical conclusion. Fiction as such may be a lie—that is the implication—

[48] The reference is to what has been called the most obscure phrase of the Quijote: "Con todo eso, os digo que merecía el que lo compuso, pues no hizo tantas necedades de industria, que le echaran a galeras por todos los días de su vida" (I.6). Translated more or less literally, it means: "In conclusion, I declare to you that he who composed it, since he did not perpetrate so many follies cunningly, deserved to be sent to the galleys for all the days of his life." The wordplay with galeras (galley slave, galley proofs) is obvious in the forensic context of the Scrutiny; the real puzzle is presented by necedades and de industria . If necedades means "smut" and not "foolishness," as Riley proposes, Cervantes's comment may be interpreted as excusing with benevolent superiority the author's candor and lack of the ironical malice with which such matters are treated in the Quijote .

but it works better when it is a convincing, artistic lie, which is precisely what he intended to tell.

The Scrutiny, however, is not our only textual window into Cervantes's self-contemplation and self-congratulation as an inventor. At the end of the Second Sally the pattern of the First is repeated with a concluding section of meditation (chapters 47 through 50) on the nature of narration and the grandeurs et misères of literature as an institution. And this time—as becomes a writer, not on the verge of writing what would later be recognized as the world's first novel, but who has just accomplished that feat—Cervantes is far more explicit and confident. He now abandons all feigned self-deprecation and semijocular allusions to rivals and predecessors. Instead, in a dialogue between our old friend the Priest and a learned Canon (who meet on the road while the Priest is bringing the caged Don Quijote back to Argamasilla for the second time), he gives, among other literary judgments, an explicit (although incomplete, as we shall see) statement of his views on the poetics of prose fiction. Even though he could not foresee the immense influence his way of telling a story would have in the far future, the doctrine emergent from his recent creative experience has much to communicate to modern readers and students of the novel.

What does Cervantes conclude about what he had accomplished in Part I perhaps a week or so before he finished writing it? To begin with, he reaffirms that it is intended as an antidote to the narcotic habits for those addicted to daily doses of romances of chivalry. "I have read the beginnings of almost all that have been printed," says the discriminating Canon, "but I have never managed to read one right through. For they all seem to me more or less the same, and there is no more in one than in the other" (I.47). It is a confession that at this point tacitly amounts to advertisement of the Quijote 's uniqueness. But what is even worse—according to this canonical rhetorician—is pseudochivalric violation of the rule of resemblance to truth, or verisimilitude, which was fundamental to Renaissance theories of composition: "And even though the principal aim of these books is to delight and not

to teach, I do not know how they can succeed in doing so, seeing the monstrous absurdities with which they are filled." He then goes on to exemplify and elaborate:

When they want to describe a battle, first they tell us that there are a million fighting men on the enemy's side. But, if the hero of the book is against them, inevitably, whether we like it or not, we have to believe that such and such a knight won the victory by the valor of his strong arm alone. . . . If you reply that the men who compose such books write them as fiction, and so are not obliged to look into fine points or truths, I should reply the more it resembles the truth, the better the lie, and yet at the same time the more provocatively doubtful or barely possible it is the better it pleases. Mendacious fables ought to match the "entendimiento" of their readers.^[49] (italics mine)
(I.47)

These remarks are not as ambiguous as they may sound today. Rather, they reinforce our previous contention that while certain episodes seem to justify the romantic opposition of the real and the ideal, Cervantes himself was primarily concerned with the effectiveness of fiction. When in the next sentence he equates verisimilitude with "imitation," he does not mean description of recognizable sensory data but rather the congruence (the "marriage," in Spanish) of the "lying fable" with the "mind" of a discriminating reader. Cunning combination of the adventurous marvel of the remotely possible with harmony and proportion was what was needed to entice a person such as the Canon "to read the book right through." Only the ignorant (the Innkeeper, his family, and the circle of open-mouthed reapers—of whom more later) and the hopelessly addicted (Alonso Quijano, Dorotea, and Cardenio) can create imaginary truth in the

[49] A writer as concerned as we have seen Cervantes to be with his own entendimiento and with the lack of it in his colleagues naturally sought this quality in his unknown readers. It is the Cervantine version of Stendhal's "Happy Few." As early as the Prologue to La Galatea he proclaims that work was "composed" by his entendimiento for others, and at the end of the last chapter he promises a second part, which "will be seen and judged by the eyes and entendimiento " of the public.

process of identifying themselves with a hero or a lady during one totally absurd and disconnected episode after another. Entranced with the joy of naive belief, they do not demand that the narratives they adore possess borderline credibility or organic consequence.

The readers sought by Cervantes, on the contrary were either those conceivably capable of education or those already gloomily overeducated—that is to say those who, like himself, were or had been avid gourmands of the printed page but somehow found the diet unsatisfactory. The Canon begins by confessing to the Priest that he had "read, induced by idleness and perverted taste," the beginnings of almost all the romances of chivalry that had ever been printed. But he could not bring himself to believe that a single knight could rout an army nor could he proceed from one adventure to another without some sense of the "shape of the whole." As a result, sooner or later he would inevitably find himself stranded on the shore of his discriminating but boring here and now. Any writer naturally embraces every possible reader, but he also must have in mind his personal answer to Sartre's "Pour qui écrit-on?" That of Cervantes is unambiguous: silent readers, at once satiated and addicted, who had been waiting, without being fully aware they were doing so, for what he was concerned to contrive.

The reading public was a century old. Among its members there had to be (as indeed there were) individuals capable of comprehending Cervantes's immensely daring and ambitious invention: a new, sophisticated form of fiction, in which skeins drawn from the three genres of their habitual reading could through a process of mutual interruption (thus the metaphor of weaving) compensate for each other's inherent unbelievability. The picaresque could bring the chivalresque and pastoral down to earth; the chivalresque could elevate the sights of the picaresque; and the pastoral, as we have seen, could allow the whole to take "harmonious" shape by providing a comforting narrative world in which the other two might at least partially coexist. The process of rhetorical invention, in other words, resulted in an invention: the Qui -

jote , itself, an exemplary literary lesson for an age of stampeding ingenio and farfetched falsehood.

Verisimilitude is, thus, not an end in itself. It is not a censorious or melancholy substitution of the real for the ideal, of the psychological for the typical, and, above all, of the humdrum for the outlandish. Cervantes did not propose to write Eugénie Grandet, La princesse de Clèves , or that pathetic novel entitled Mr. Bailey, Grocer , to which one of George Gissing's characters devoted his entire creative life. Verisimilitude—according to the prescription of Cervantes's surrogate and his well-known sources—has nothing to do with description of recognizable milieus, with psychological analysis, or with socalled real life. It is rather an invented sham credibility, which through malicious selection and cunning juxtaposition preserves the admiration, savor, and joy of old reading from its inherent generic foolishness and repetition.^[50] Its aim is to enable mature readers to reexperience the pleasure of past surrender to their favorite romances without having to revert to second childhood. Like many of the greatest novels—Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, La Chartreuse de Parme, Bleak House, Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, Don Segundo Sombra, Cien años de soledad, War and Peace , to mention but a few—the Quijote , with its intricate game of possibility and probability, with its engaging confluence of adventure and experience, is a juvenile classic for grown-ups—or, conversely, a grown-up classic for such exceptional children as Heinrich Heine, Gustave Flaubert, and Henri Beyle.

"Your grace will see how . . . these books . . . will improve your disposition . . ."

After the Canon and the Priest finish their academic discussion, Cervantes uses a third interlocutor to pose a crucial

[50] Don Quijote stresses admiration and suspense ("admiran" and "suspenden") in his defense of the romances of chivalry. Both constitute the rhetorical effects sought by Ariosto—as contrasted to the verisimilitude of the theorists—which he enjoyed teasing (see, for example, XXXVIII.33 and 34). For further cogent discussion, see Daniel Javitch, "Cantus interruptus in the Orlando Furioso," Modern Language Notes 85 (1980), pp. 66–80.

question to which the Quijote as a whole constitutes the implicit answer. This new critic is the caged knight, and the question is simply: how can self-conscious, make-believe believability be used to preserve a delight that depends on unquestioning acceptance of everything that is on the page? Don Quijote's splendidly moving defense of the sheer elation and the spiritual therapy of reading had not been taken seriously by critics prior to Alban Forcione, who interprets Don Quijote's "sensuous pleasure" in the "disordered order" of his fanciful account of the adventure of the lake as a Baroque reply to the Canon's Renaissance poetics.^[51] The stylistic analysis on which the interpretation is based is acute, but the conclusion fails to illuminate what seems to me to be the real subject of the debate: the relation of reading to living.

As far as the romances of chivalry are concerned, the Canon finds himself at a vital impasse. His mind and his imagination are hopelessly at odds. Although he reproaches Don Quijote (referring to him as "señor hidalgo," the status that society had conferred on him, not the status that he had conferred on himself) for succumbing to a "disgusting and idle" genre, he confesses for the second time that he, too, had read such books with pleasure. It is only when he "realizes" that their ability to infect lives with fake identities resembles heresy that he throws them against the wall or into the nearest fire. The Inquisitional solution is, of course, not a solution at all but rather an abolition of the problem, which Cervantes, as we shall see in the next essay, was far from advocating. The Canon had earlier tried to write a new romance restrained in the straitjacket of formal harmony and verisimilitude, but, he informs the Priest, it had not worked out:

For my part I have been somewhat tempted to write a book of chivalry observing all the points I have mentioned. To tell you the truth, I have written more than a hundred pages. And to see if they corresponded to my estimation of them, I have

[51] Alban Forcione, Cervantes' Aristotle and the "Persiles" (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 107–24.

shown them to those who are passionate devotees of that kind of reading—both to those who are learned and possess good judgement and to those whose pleasure comes from absurdities, and from all of them I received welcome approval; but, for all that, I have not continued.
(I.48)

The Canon's explanation of his lack of perseverance is unconvincing in view of his complacency and his professorial pleasure at the sound of his own voice. In the first place, he says, it was a task unfitting to his profession, and in the second place, "because I found that the ignorant were more numerous than the wise, and, although it is worthwhile to be praised by the wise, to be misunderstood by a crowd of fools is not.^[52] I do not wish to subject myself to the muddled judgement of the empty-minded populace who are generally given to reading such books." In the context of the Quijote , however, a more imperative reason is apparent. As Cervantes knew, and as any fool of an innkeeper could have told the wise Canon, verisimilitude thoughtfully and artistically transplanted into the organism of a romance of chivalry could be liable to speedy rejection.^[53] To insist on believability for such tales might well result in a lack of appeal and eventual disbelief. Indeed, as the case of Alonso Quijano demonstrates, the less lifelike the fictional event, the more one enjoys believing it and the more one needs to believe it.

The Canon makes this very point ("we have to believe that

[52] The Canon uses the past participle of the semantically equivocal verb burlar: he does not wish to be "burlado de los muchos necios." Most translators render this as "to have given fools the pleasure of reading nonsense," or as something similar. This translation, I think, is mistaken, first because the Canon surely would not refer to his reformed romance as "nonsense," and second because burlar usually means "to make fun" or "to fool" someone (as does the burlador of Seville, Don Juan) rather than "to have fun." Thus, J. M. Cohen has the Canon "mocked" by fools who presumably do not understand his art. My own choice would be "misinterpreted by fools," since burlar also means "to copy" or "to reproduce" more or less exactly. That is to say, the Canon does not wish to be reproduced inadequately in their reading.

[53] The author of Tirante el Blanco gets away with it, from Cervantes's point of view, precisely because, unlike the Canon, he is both naive and funny.

such and such a knight won the victory"), but without realizing what he has really said. Indeed, the more one thinks of his discourse in its Quixotesque context, the more his literary doctrine seems incomplete. He has not given us a clue either to Cervantes's inventive (today we would say intertextual) play with printed genres or to what we shall see to be his ironical reassignment of responsibility for verisimilitude. The Canon is academic, even slightly pompous, and it is precisely his lack of irony that disqualifies him as the official spokesman of his author. It is, in fact, his bloodless solemnity that opens the way both for Don Quijote's insanely funny disquisition on the historicity of chivalry and for his eloquent discourse on the joys of believing the impossible in chapter 1. He who in reading identifies himself with a fictional knight "finds himself in flowery fields . . . where the sky is more transparent and the sun shines with new radiance. . . . Oh, sir," he concludes, "believe me; read these books and you will see how they will send into exile whatever melancholy may afflict you and how they will improve your disposition if it should perchance be in bad straits" (I.50).

The significance of Don Quijote's rebuttal can only be comprehended in terms of the speaker—an inveterate reader defending what he loves best of all. The rhetorical strictures of the Canon do indeed constitute the doctrine Cervantes had learned, accepted, and applied in the Quijote —insofar as in it he eliminates the utterly incredible and skillfully weaves its pattern of episodes into an artistic whole. Yet at the same time Cervantes knew that he had created a strange, buoyant, life-giving book that Renaissance critical theory could not possibly account for. He had preserved and immeasurably enhanced that century-old joy called reading. As a devotee of the printed page, he had banished our melancholy and improved our disposition, and in a way far more profound than chivalresque submersion (Don Quijote's anticipation of Ortega's metaphor is no coincidence!) in the "flowering fields" beneath the "fearful lake." In the Quijote learned literary prescription not only confronts and frowns pedantically on the new practice of unregenerate silent reading but

also, and in spite of itself, enables those addicted to such reading to experience a vital self-renewal that humanists could only describe. Theory and practice, neoantique ratiocination and moderna voluptas , in these chapters encounter each other in the same fashion as wrestlers embrace. What one meditates on critically and what the other creates imaginatively are at once independent and interdependent, and the result is nothing less than a book christened Don Quijote de la Mancha .

The Canon had only proposed to "match" the minds of discriminating and sophisticated readers who were "learned and possessed good judgement." Cervantes, however, knowing, from personal surrender to print, the literate vulnerability (and, from personal experience, the social predicaments^[54] ) of all those who might purchase or borrow his book, intended to commune ironically with each one in the course of overhearing together how Don Quijote and Sancho speak their minds in what George Bernard Shaw would have termed the endlessly entertaining continuity of dialogue that consoles their odd and homeless domesticity. The mad reader and his illiterate companion would—without know-

[54] Most biographers either are not aware of or prefer to ignore the not too remote "stains" in Cervantes's lineage. The evidence is circumstantial but abundant. To begin with, the ciervo , or "deer," in his name is a variant on the animal nomenclature that along with place and saintly names was often used at the moment of conversion and baptism—for example, the surname Cerf in France. Then there are the five physicians (as is well known, a typical profession of Spanish Jews and conversos ) in his family. But most important are the sardonic references in the Quijote and elsewhere to the national myth of cleanliness of blood. He may have loved Sancho, but he was merciless with Old Christianity as such, and those who claimed that variety of social preeminence were equally (and more dangerously) merciless with those whom they suspected of being ex illis . For further discussion and evidence see Castro's Cervantes y los casticismos , cited previously. These origins, of course, mean nothing in themselves, although they did lead Salvador de Madariaga, who was the first to discuss the matter, to propose foolishly that Cervantes was a Sephardic Jew ("Cervantes y su tiempo," Cuadernos 40, 1960). What is important is to comprehend the social situation of an educated man who was above all a patriotic Spaniard, who on his return from the Mediterranean wars, where soldiers were judged by their prowess, found an ingrown genealogy-crazed society, which made no worthy place for him and which he perforce contemplated from an ironical distance.

ing it, for such is the nature of irony—serve as a superconductor between the author and each one of us. Cervantes's reading, Alonso Quijano's reading, and our reading do indeed coalesce in such a way as to improve our disposition immeasurably. To say the same thing in another way, what Cervantine irony does, and was intended to do (as against the mass catharsis of Sophoclean irony or the elite pessimism of La Celestina ), is to convert a collective public unhealthily avid for naive escape into individuals who not merely would learn good judgement in his company but, far more important, would experience the spiritual therapy both of adventure and of laughter at adventure. A brand new internalized version of Horace's antique ridendo castigat mores!

But what is it exactly that we commune ironically about? Countless books and articles have been written to explore the widely varying reactions to the Quijote of successive centuries, foreign societies, and such individual readers as Fielding, Dickens, and Mark Twain. But from the elementary standpoint of literary satire, all of us have one thing in common with Cervantes's contemporaries. In the First Sally we laugh along with the narrator at the folly of his fiction-prone, addle-pated knight-errant. In the Second, however, when, as we have seen, the addition of the pastoral skein makes us increasingly aware that the process of fictional invention involves us directly as readers, we—and Cervantes, too—begin also to laugh at ourselves.

We are led to remember all of the absurd printed fiction (whether chivalresque, picaresque, and pastoral or their latter-day descendants that swarm in drugstores and airports) we have swallowed whole without gagging. As habitual readers, we, too, have been miniature replicas of Alonso Quijano. But it is not only a question of self-criticism and literate therapy. Our very amusement at our role in the fictional process not only recaptures and excuses lost transport but also adds to it an increment of consciousness and distance that makes it all the more exquisite. Cervantine invention, with its ironical play with conventional literary patterns, has provided us with that "conscience dans le mal" that Baudelaire

felt to be the essence of pleasure. Or, as Cervantes phrased it less perversely, what began as literary satire has been transformed into a marvelous "pastime for the melancholy or moody breast."

In prescribing the Quijote for any "melancholy or moody breast" (in the Viaje del Parnaso ) and any romance of chivalry as a remedy for the Canon's ailing disposition (in Don Quijote's rebuttal), Cervantes sends us a disguised but simple message. In indirect confrontation with Renaissance pedantry he tells us that we really need not worry ourselves about details of verisimilitude and harmony—that, accordingly, we should relax and enjoy his gift of good reading as much as Alonso Quijano had enjoyed his flawed reading. It would be wrong to call it bad, because reading as such is good, and even better if we know what we are about. The Canon had only wanted to reach the entendimiento of the ex-future readers of his unfinished novel, whereas Cervantes demands not only their understanding but their "disposition."

In other words, what centuries later would still be called the rhetoric of fiction is none of our business. Cervantes has taken care of it in the act of composition. Therefore, we do not need to worry about the probability, the possibility, or the facilitated impossibility of the Quijote . As in the case of Dead Souls, La Chartreuse de Parme, Moby-Dick, Misericordia, Cien años de soledad , or Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes , the act of reading frees us from that irksome responsibility. Our very awareness of the fictitious quality of the narrative keeps us from having to throw it against the wall or into the fire. And to the question, Why, then, chapters 48 and 49, with all their insistence on how properly to write a romance? I should have to answer, first, that Cervantes as a critic was deeply concerned with methods he was trying out for the first time in prose fiction; and second, that verisimilitude is not only a rhetorical recipe for composition (which, of course, it is) but Cervantes's principal subject. Unlike the lives we relive in the nineteenth-century novels just mentioned (in which the "reality" of self and world is usually taken for granted), the peculiarity of Don Quijote and Sancho is their constant preoc-

cupation with their own novelistic condition: the probability, the possibility, and the facilitated impossibility of themselves and all that they encounter.

"Those shapes which appear over there"

The reader's unremitting and delighted awareness of the tictionality of the Quijote (exacerbated by Cervantes's constant tickling of that awareness) has an until then unprecedented effect on the two protagonists. They, of course, do not think of themselves as fictional but as alive and real: "'I know who I am,' replied Don Quijote, 'and I know who I can be'" (I.5), while Sancho, whose identity is resolutely singular ("Sancho I was born, and Sancho I intend to die") is equally proud of the unambiguous layers of Old Christian fat that cover his panza .^[55] And yet, for all that confidence, the chemin of their lives is traced quite maliciously through one of the strangest artificial habitats ever to have been created: a basin-helmet world in which nothing is certain and all those things a realistic novelist would call vrai (windmills, cruel farmers, rural manor houses) serve only as the webbing for the varied literary skeins of the tapestry. If Don Quijote and Sancho had been creatures of the Canon's aborted romance, they would have known where they stood and how to handle his domesticated adventures, but in the world invented by Cervantes it is they who must "see and make out" the ceaseless kaleidoscope of questionable "shapes which appear over there" (I.7), wonder together what they portend, and cope with them as best they can. Cervantes has turned over the problem of verisimilitude to the knight and squire, as if they were their own authors.

Critics have noticed this transformation in connection with such key adventures as Don Quijote's descent into the Cave

[55] Panza , of course, means "paunch." Cervantes maliciously converts the commonplace reverence for cleanliness of blood into deanliness of fat when Sancho boasts about the "four fingers of Old Christian blubber" protecting his midriff (II.4).

of Montesinos or Sancho's ascent to the heavens on Clavileño (after which each doubts the verisimilitude of the other's tall story). But I would maintain that this constant and imperative need of interpretation is precisely what makes the Quijote a novel from the beginning of the Second Sally until the end of the book. It was this need that the future genre was to adapt in ever new ways. Don Quijote and Sancho are heroes (meaning extreme human examples) confronting the day-today challenge of a world of far more deceptive novelties, appearances, and ambiguities than that in which we ourselves live and which we believe to be real. As readers submitted to more or less humdrum circumstances, we nevertheless recognize in their lives an intensified (Castro would say "incited") representation of the process of our own daily encountering, wondering, concluding tentatively, and coping hopefully. Verisimilitude has been used not only to match the demand of our minds for harmony and proportion and to facilitate our belief; more importantly, doubt and interrogation are the substance of the unprecedented Quixotesque and Sanchesque dialogue that increasingly enchants us as we read from page to page and from episode to episode. All of this amounts to a tacit declaration of independence, of which the first article is a guarantee of free speech.

In chapter 1, "Definition," we described the language of the novel as resulting from the fusion of speech with print, of silent reading with the otherness that is expressed in the words, rhythm, and intonation of spoken language. It was precisely this revolutionary rapprochement that Cervantes "came upon" when he transferred the responsibility for verisimilitude from himself as the author to the two protagonists in their novel-long continuity of dialogue. Let us again look back briefly and consider the traditions available to Cervantes before he began. On the one hand, there were the Amadís and its successors, which had enthralled and bemused Alonso Quijano with their unadulterated adventure, with the capacity of the printed page to narrate silently the breathless "and then . . . and then . . ." of sheer marvel. As for the dialogue therein, it was sparse and as stilted and conventional

as that of pastoral monologues. On the other hand, there were El Corbacho (1438) and La Celestina (1499), which had inaugurated self-conscious exploration of the creative possibilities of writing spoken Spanish in prose.^[56] As we pointed out earlier, these are books designed for reading aloud, books that demand skilled oral imitation of the accents and intonation of the speakers on the page.^[57] Thus, if Amadís is the printed and programmed prisoner of the impatient narrative of his sorrows, challenges, and triumphs, Celestina, Melibea, and the rest of the cast are the tragicomic victims of their own decelerated elocution. In the Quijote , however, where the two are synthesized and genuine speech is read silently, interpretation of the world and self-discovery (on the part of both the speakers and the readers) are expressed in kaleidoscopic dialogue. We and the two immortal clowns live and experience together in oral freedom.

Freedom of speech has as its inevitable corollary freedom of choice. The endless problem of reconciling illusion with impossibility, possibility with probability, has the gift of liberating Don Quijote and Sancho both from the narrative control of the author and, little by little, from the tyranny of their own roles. The solitary knight of the First Sally is doubly enslaved: on the one hand, by the tale in the third person and the past tense ("he did this"; "he thought that"); and on the

[56] Previously, spoken Spanish (as in the case of other modern languages) had been the vehicle for a wide variety of oral poems (epics and ballads) as well as for other poems written in verse for reading aloud (for example, the thirteenth-century miracles and saints' lives of Gonzalo de Berceo), while prose was primarily a more or less syntactically developed code for imparting information (chronicles, laws, how-to texts) or dispensing moral advice (apologues, fables, epistles). There was even a fictional history of an exemplary knight, "el caballero Cifar," whose Sancho-like squire, "el Ribaldo," eventually ascends in rank and becomes an equally exemplary chivalric companion-in-arms. What is crucial to the possibility of the Quijote , however, is not this presumptive antecedent but rather the prior existence of a tradition of written dialogue and monologue—exclaimed from the heart or directed to an auditor—on every level of decorum from Umgangsprache to high-flown rhetoric. Almost a century before Rabelais, Spanish writers were preparing the way for the novel by experimenting with ironically "overheard" aural realism.

[57] See chapter 1, note 9.

other hand, as we remember, by having to speak and act exactly like Amadís. But with the development of the process of invention in the course of the Second Sally, both characters increasingly live in the apparently free, spoken present of their comic arguments and rueful reconciliations. At the same time, the constant necessity of making sense or finding meaning in a half-and-half world, where peasant goatherds commingle with shepherds from pastoral romance and where more or less unfamiliar new inventions for exploiting natural energy either look like giants or convert gentle darkness into dreadful night,^[58] infects them with its ambiguity. The more they are forced to interpret, the more the simpleton begins to seem unaccountably wise and the madman unaccountably reasonable. Here is the really unprecedented capability of the invention: the literary self-consciousness that the author induces in the reader gives birth to the independent and ever-changing self-consciousness of the two protagonists.

Much critical meditation has been devoted to the paradoxical freedom of fictional characters both in this novel and in others.^[59] It is a commonplace of Cervantine criticism to explain how the author of the Quijote was the first to create—or contrive—what are called autonomous characters, in two giant steps. The first is, of course, the step taken in chapter 9 of Part I: Cervantes's abdication of his responsibility for his own inventiveness by returning that proud passport to Parnassus to its etymology. As we have seen, the text of the "first author" comes to an abrupt end because of a lack of "sources," and the "second author," adopting the role of fel-

[58] Cervantes clearly enjoyed the juxtaposition of his own process of literary invention with the mechanical inventions of the time. Later the pair will encounter water mills (II.29), and Don Quijote will visit a printing establishment (II.62).

[59] The classic essay for Hispanists is J. E. Gillet's "The Autonomous Character in Spanish and European Literatures," Hispanic Review 24 (1956), pp. 279–90. Further bibliography may be found in the revised edition of Américo Castro's Pensamiento de Cervantes , ed. J. Rodríguez Puertolas (Madrid: Noguer, 1972), p. 108. Castro himself has a provocative essay, "Cervantes and Pirandello," in An Idea of History , pp. 15–22.

low reader (which, of course, he is), literally comes upon (and then enters into) the rest of the text by chance in the street. Aside from the multiple possibilities for creative interruption thereby provided, what matters to our present discussion is the fact that the new-old author, Cide Hamete, is vehemently suspected of lying, which is in itself a means of liberation. Don Quijote and Sancho (along with the reader) from now on will have to rely on themselves for determination of the truth.

The second, and equally noteworthy, act of emancipation occurs when the two—by this time old friends—discover as they are preparing to set out on their Third Sally (Part II, published ten years later) that mysteriously a book has already been written about their past adventures. Cervantes and his readers, as we said, together convert their best beloved reading (Part I) into a new topikon and thereby further intensify Don Quijote's and Sancho's sense of the reality of their life together in contrast with the fictitiousness of its story. They now are more convinced than ever that they are free to determine whatever it is they wish to do: for example, to go to Barcelona instead of to the jousts at Zaragoza as they had planned and as Cervantes had intended.^[60] Don Quijote had begun by freeing himself from the monotonous role of village hidalgo; then the supposed unreliability of Cide Hamete freed him in our minds from subservience to his author; and

[60] At the end of Part I "the author of this history" hints at things to come in Part II by remarking that while he cannot find any "authentic facts" about the Third Sally, "fame has left a tradition in La Mancha that Don Quijote . . . went to Zaragoza and was present in a famous tournament in that city and there he met challenges worthy of his valor and excellent entendimiento " (I.52). However, when the knight learns in II.60 that his unworthy double (a spurious Don Quijote created by Cervantes's unidentifiable rival in an apocryphal Part II that appeared in 1614) did compete in those jousts, he avails himself of his "autonomy." In order to prove "to the world" that he is the only authentic version of himself, he decides on his own to go to Barcelona instead. Not only does Part I exist in the minds of the characters and readers of Part II but also its malicious imitation. For a brief comparison in English of the two Part IIs see my "The Apocryphal Quijote ," in Cervantes Across the Centuries , ed. Angel Flores and M. J. Benardete (New York: Dryden, 1947), pp. 246–53.

now even the door to his cage of print has been unlocked. He and Sancho now can be themselves in any way they choose—and their behavior as a result often seems to come as a surprise, as when the translator judges Sancho's speech to his wife to be apocryphal, or when Cide Hamete puzzles over the truth or falsehood of Don Quijote's adventures in the Cave of Montesinos.

Such ironical play with autonomy has diverted readers over the centuries; in Spain it was imitated by two of the Quijote 's most fervent admirers—by Galdós in El amigo Manso and by Unamuno in Niebla . There is a difference, however. Both Galdós and Unamuno employ the device in order to meditate novelistically on free will and determinism, whereas Cervantes uses these two overt proclamations of emancipation to call our attention to the genuine freedom that is inherent in his narrative invention. Once verisimilitude is transformed from a rhetorical recipe into the central problem for the inhabitants of the fiction, they are necessarily on their own. In this sense the Quijote may be thought of as not only the first but also one of the most subversive novels ever written. Mickey Mouse was banned first by Hitler and then by Stalin as an impudent symbol of defiant freedom, but had they read it and understood it, both dictators would have found the Quijote far more menacing. To relive the lives of Don Quijote and Sancho (as did Samuel Clemens and Henri Beyle) is to accept the challenge to break our own chains, the enmeshment of our biographies with the fictions imposed on them by society: honors, promotions, medals, bank accounts, superstitions, conventions, commonplace beliefs, class distinctions, and the rest. As Virginia Woolf implied, the ultimate justification of the genre invented by Cervantes is that it may enable us "to work ourselves free."^[61]

[61] See chapter 1, note 45. Castro and others have stressed that one of the principal themes of the book is its celebration of freedom—not the idea of liberty, but the quest for personal liberation engaged in by those who matter: Don Quijote, Marcela, Don Diego's son, etc. See, for example, Américo Castro, "An Introduction to the Quijote ," in An Idea of History , p. 96.

"I, although I may seem to be the father, am the stepfather of Don Quijote"

If the benefits of this invention include the release of both the readers and the characters from temporal and social captivity, what advantage does it bring to the inventor? Is he only a great emancipator, or does he, too, participate in the Quijote 's heady access to freedom? The Canon, as we remember, answers these questions by pointing out that once the strait-jackets of the Amadís , the Diana , and the Guzmán are ripped apart at the seams, the narrator can alternate their several generic points of view, "because the free composition of such works allows the writer to show himself as a master of the epic, the lyric, the tragic, and the comic" (I.47). The Canon seems to mean that the author not only can tell his "epic" story but also, by adapting the dialogue form of the drama, can reach lyrically into what Cervantes called in the Prologue to the Ocho comedias "the imagination and hidden thoughts of the soul."

In pastoral romances such so-called moral figures express themselves directly in stilted monologues, but in the kind of reconstituted narratives we now call novels, they come alive in print as they speak to each other. The typical chivalresque romance was mostly a third-person narration of one stereotypical adventure after another; the picaresque was a sordid and seemingly endless Erzählung ; but now all three, cunningly compounded and leavened with paired dialogue (Don Quijote and Sancho, Cipión and Berganza, Rinconete and Cortadillo^[62] ), offer hitherto unsuspected creative freedom.

[62] The last two pairs are included in order to suggest that the invention of Sancho not only provided the possibility of the Second Sally but also dialogic leavening for those Exemplary Novellas that were written during or after the composition of Part I. Carriazo and Avendaño, the two aristocratic picaros of "La ilustre fregona," are a third example. These two "incited" young men of high station find freedom in social descent, in contrast to the village hidalgo, who is regarded as bumptious by the local caballeros for seeking his own freedom in a fictitiously noble incarnation of their own degenerate rank. Even more than the myths of cleanliness of blood and peasant honor, the presumptuous pride and power of the so-called grandees (who had nothing to show for themselves but their clothes, their possessions, and their lineage) was, as indicated earlier, the major target of the book's criticism of society. As Castro points out in Cervantes y los casticismos , these, along with certain sectors of the ecclesiastical establishment, were Cervantes's own "giants" (p. 177).

Diderot, Fielding, and Wieland^[63] were to play with the same pattern with illustrated irony, but until Samuel Clemens lost and found himself in the dialogue of Huck and Jim, nobody (not even Dickens in The Pickwick Papers ) came close to Cervantes's gift for pairing and revealing lives in speech.

An additional freedom particularly stressed by the Canon is the seemingly limitless choice of subject matter suddenly available to the author's imitation divinity. In an earlier portion of his discourse to the Priest, it appears (as has been noticed by the critics) as if the Canon were writing a book-jacket blurb not for the Quijote but for Cervantes's last major narrative creation, the strange and pretentious Byzantine allegory entitled The Toils of Persiles and Sigismunda (Historia de los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda ):

Yet—he continued—in spite of all he had said against such books, he found one good thing in them: the fact they offered a good intellect [that entendimiento Cervantes found lacking in the author of the spurious Part II] a chance to display itself. For they offered a broad and spacious field through which the pen could run without hindrance describing shipwrecks, tempests, encounters and battles, now painting a brave captain with all the features necessary for the part, . . . now a beautiful lady chaste, intelligent, and modest. . . . Sometimes the writer might show off his knowledge of astrology or his excellence at cosmography or music, or his wisdom in affairs of state, and he might even have the opportunity of showing his skill in necromancy.
(I.47)

[63] We have already mentioned the first two. Christoph Martin Wieland's Don Sylvio von Rosaura , in which fairy tales (as in Michael Ende's Die unendliche Geschichte ) substitute themselves Germanically for romances of chivalry, is a pleasing imitation not of the "manner" of Cervantes but directly of the Quijote .

Here, just as in the case of verisimilitude, the Canon's poetics of the novel is at once enlightening and incomplete. His breathlessly enthusiastic paean to narrative freedom is in its own way an anticipation of the creative scope of such novels as Fortunata y Jacinta, War and Peace, Nostromo, Os Maias , and Moby-Dick , not to mention such more recent epics in prose as Terra nostra, U.S.A. and The Flounder . Albert Thibaudet in his brilliant Le liseur de romans gives the impression that he has just finished reading chapter 47: "The novel is like a drawer into which the contents of the pocket can be emptied. . . . Tragedy, comedy, political pamphleteering, history, . . . tears, laughter, everything can and should be present in a novel."^[64]

Yet this is only half or a quarter of the story. As against the Persiles , in which the characters are bound to a "moral" allegory from which autonomous "hidden thoughts" are excluded, in the Quijote , as we have just seen, the knight and the squire possess their own complementary—however painful—freedom to wander across "broad and spacious fields" trying to comprehend all they encounter. As Américo Castro concluded almost half a century after writing the book that initiated his serious concern with Cervantes's achievement, "Novelistic characters, up till that time entirely programmed, shed their programs and launched themselves into the liberty of fields open to all, each one in his own way and according to his particular incitement."^[65]

Thus it was that the Quijote , which Cervantes feared might be considered merely an "entertainment," and not the Persiles on which he wagered his immortality,^[66] became the world's

[64] Thibaudet, Le liseur de romans , p. 25.

[65] The citation is from a personal letter to me from Castro. In "Cómo veo ahora al Quijote ," the marvelous preface to the "Editorial magisterio español" edition (Madrid, 1971), he remarks even more incisively: "In literary works prior to the Quijote the literary personage met all sorts of obstacles and adversities, but we know of none in which the central theme consists of the convention of someone who has chosen his own identity and those who are determined to deprive him of it" (p. 65).

[66] In the Prologue to the Exemplary Novellas Cervantes announces the forthcoming publication of that strange narrative with his customary rueful mixture of skepticism and pride: "If my life does not abandon me, I shall present to you The Toils of Persiles , a book that dares to compete with Heliodorus, unless, because of its sheer daring, it be shooed out of doors with its hand on its head." Once again, the book is a person who may be rejected by the reader like a drunk being thrown out of a tavern.

first and most durable novel. And thus it is that those of us who still read novels are still "Cervantine creatures." Just as in the case of verisimilitude, in that of narrative freedom the discrepancy between the Canon's theory and Cervantes's practice is due quite clearly to the understandable limitations of literary theory at the time. The achievement of the Quijote —as its author knew intuitively but not with critical complacency—is the everlasting possibility it offers of reliving immensely enhanced human lives in all their simplicity and complexity. "Death," Don Quijote's enemy and virtual assassin, Sansón Carrasco, has to admit at the very end, "did not triumph over his life with his death."^[67]

As far as a theory of the novel as a genre is concerned, the Canon's hybrid formulation "epic in prose" was repeated by most critics (including Schelling and Friedrich von Schlegel) until about three generations ago, when Hermann Cohen, Georg Lukács, and others began to meditate seriously on such reading. However, Cervantes, who probably would have been surprised if he had been told that what was for him a unique invention would, like the Amadís , propagate its kind indefinitely, seems to have sensed its insufficiency. As a result, in the Prologue to Part I he proposes a metaphor of his own, which is suggestive from our present point of view: "I, although I may seem to be the father, am the stepfather of Don Quijote."

Here is an assertion Cervantes surely would not have made about Persiles and Segismunda. In their allegorical neo-Byzantine romance (in which, as suggested, he only exploits the Canon's external freedom) all the characters, like good children, obey paternal rhetoric. Precisely because they

[67] In the epitaph in verse, II.74.

were created by the rules and for a didactic purpose, he expected a great deal more of them than do skeptical and cruel stepfathers. But what did Cervantes mean exactly in so describing his relationship with the knight who was eventually to be the indispensable visa on his passport to Parnassus? Ostensibly, he is continuing that mock-modest mockery of himself as an inventor which begins in the Prologue and culminates in chapter 9 when he tells us he "came upon" the rest of the book in an Arabic manuscript. Cide Hamete is the author-father in truth and in falsehood, and Cervantes is only the stepfather. Whatever is wrong or untrue about the book—he goes on to say in the Prologue—is not his fault, and he has no need to beg the reader's indulgence "with tears in my eyes, as others do."

In the world of the Quijote , however, it is safe to say that whatever is ostensible is by definition untrustworthy. Therefore, it is licit to suspect that this curious kinship metaphor also alludes to that expulsion into a shelterless and hostile world that in remote homage to the myth of Genesis constitutes the core of epic, romance, and novel—in Spanish, from the Poema del Cid through the Amadís and Lazarillo de Tormes to Martín Fierro, Don Segundo Sombra , and, most recently, Juan Goytisolo's Juan sin tierra and Carlos Fuentes's El gringo viejo , the titular hero of which carries the Quijote in his knapsack.

Cervantes hints at this further meaning at the end of the Second Sally in the Captive's Tale. The Captive (a wish-persona who represents Cervantes's years in Algerian captivity) recalls a statement by his father just before sharing his fortune with his children and sending them with that protection out into the world: "From now on I wish you to understand that I love you like a father and have no wish to destroy you like a stepfather" (I.39). The verb destruir seems significant in the case of the Quijote . Not only is the liberation of the knight and squire a matter of ironical abdication of authority and of ironical emergence from a previous book, but far more painfully it is the work of a hidden author who challenges his stepchild's incitation (the illusory vocation that impels him to carry his mirror along the road) with all sorts of apparently

arbitrary mistreatment—practical jokes, pitfalls, barriers, beatings, and every other sort of mental and physical discomfort.

Fathers—particularly the literary fathers of the time, such as the ones remembered by the Captive, Don Diego de Miranda, and Don Beltrán in Alarcón's La verdad sospechosa —are supposed to attempt solicitously to direct the footsteps of their offspring into safe paths leading toward honor and fortune. But the stepfather (like Lazarillo's blind first master) contrives liberty through daily mistreatment, the kind of mistreatment that made the Quijote seem so pointlessly brutal to—of all possible writers!—the author of Candide: "One is interested in Roland, but nobody is interested in Don Quijote, who is felt to be a senseless fellow upon whom malicious tricks are continually played."^[68]

What Voltaire (like Nabokov) failed to understand is that Cervantes's apparently unrelenting malice (in the long run we realize how much he secretly loved his brainchildren) enhanced Don Quijote's and Sancho's freedom to react in everchanging ways. The ability to cope with increasing patience, to interpret with increasing wisdom, and to comment with increasingly untrammeled dialogue emerged not only from the ambiguity of the Cervantine world but also from its relentless challenge. Even the more relaxed pastoral intervals, which allow the second two sallies to reach book length, can often be the scenes of cunning deception (the Wedding of Camacho), provocative mystery (Cardenio in Sierra Morena), or stark fear (the Adventure of the Fulling Mills). In such a world one really is on one's own.

Ortega in The Dehumanization of Art portrays the true artist as painting "at a maximum of distance and with a minimum of sentimental intervention."^[69] This may or may not be the case in the plastic arts (what's wrong with Murillo or Eakins, after all?), but it certainly does not describe the special

[68] Voltaire, "Epopée," in Dictionnaire philosophique (1764).

[69] Ortega y Gasset, Obras completas , 3: 362.

irony—at once implacable and affectionate—of novelists in the Cervantine tradition. Beyond the limits of the Spanishspeaking world, Stendhal in Le rouge et le noir , Fielding in Joseph Andrews , Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn , Dostoevsky in The Idiot , Gogol in Dead Souls , Dickens in The Pickwick Papers , Flaubert in Madame Bovary and L'education sentimentale , Balzac in Les illusions perdues (as in the previous lists, my reader is invited to continue this one on his or her own) are all—each in his own new and original fashion—stepfathers.

Thus, in the Quijote Cervantes has, as it were, divided his entendimiento (meaning now not only his critical understanding but his consciousness as an inventor) into two parts. On the one hand, he constructs a threatening and uncertain world where strange appearances and brutal passers-by represent a continuity of challenge. On the other, he watches how those two detached portions of his own existence named Don Quijote and Sancho respond—attacking, fleeing, coping, interpreting, suffering, and always trying in speech to reconcile their antithetical or complementary notions of verisimilitude. The writer lived, and readers have ever since lived, this book as an intensified—at times even caricaturesque—representation of the daily tragicomedy of the human condition.

What is it that we and they have in common? The question has already been answered. Christened by Friedrich von Schlegel romantic irony (with God as our ironical author), by Lukács Obdachlosigkeit , and by Heidegger, taking even greater advantage of the German language, Inderweltgeworfenheit (thrust-into-the-worldness), the meaning is roughly the same. The author smiles maliciously and tenderly, and the characters sally and stumble and get up and interpret as best they can. And if we accept Lactantius's "Naturam non matrem esse humani generis sed novercam" ("Nature is not the mother of the human race but its stepmother") in terms of our innate superstitious belief in Her consciousness (acting as if She were also an enchanter), then Don Quijote and Sancho are our brothers in fiction.

"A history which derives its force from truth"

We cannot remain with the complementary interpretations of the Quijote suggested thus far—literary satire, heroic salvation of the joy of reading, fictional representation of, and consolation for, the enigmatic human condition—because however valid each may be on its own terms, Cervantes in his role as critic resurfaces well inside the Third Sally with a comment on his invention that is far more profound and daring: the Quijote is really true. This apparently paradoxical assertion (echoed by Fielding, Mark Twain and Thornton Wilder, as we have heard) is attributed with intentional irony to the Morisco translator whose voice has been silent for some time. As we remember, he, like the "author" Cide Hamete, belongs to a caste and culture that was traditionally believed to be addicted to lying, a belief that allows Cervantes to tease contemporary neo-Aristotelian concern with the opposition or collaboration of historical truth and fiction.^[70] There are some questionable details (is Sancho's last name Panza or Zancas?) in the manuscript, "but they are of little importance and do not affect the true narration of the history and no history is bad if it is true. If doubt may be cast on the truth of this one, it can only be because its author is Arabian" (I.9).

Both Cervantes and his characters (as soon as they become aware of the printed existence of Part I) express from time to time similar doubts about the exaggerations or omissions of Cide Hamete. However, by the time he had finished writing the Adventure of the Lions (an adventure so unequivocally devoid of enchantment that it causes the hero to change his chivalric designation from Knight of the Rueful Countenance to Knight of the Lions), Cervantes became aware that out of fiction and out of play with verisimilitude he had created a new form of truth. After Don Quijote, armed only with his dull sword and rusty shield, has defied the bored maneaters, he and Sancho are about to enter the restful shelter of the rural manor house belonging to Don Diego de Miranda, an

[70] See Castro, El pensamiento de Cervantes , chapter 1.

individual who is himself sheltered warmly in the garment of his epithet, the Knight of the Green Overcoat. At this juncture "Cervantes," in his role as fellow reader of the translation, interrupts:

Here the author paints in exhaustive detail the house of Don Diego, painting for us everything that the house of a rich gentleman farmer contains, but the translator of this history thought it better to pass over in silence these and other minutiae, because they did not further the principal purpose of the history—a history which derives its force from truth and not from frigid digressions.
(II.18)

At first glance this may seem to be one more whimsical reminder of the fictiveness of what we are reading, or it may perhaps be interpreted as a tacit confession that the translator has grown tired of his interminable task. However, aside from echoing past ironical play, the extraordinary thing about this aside is its explicit distinguishing of the "true" from the "real." Incredibly, Cervantes has foreseen the marriage of the future genre (which he could not have known he had invented) first with local color and romantic historicism, afterward with positivistic realism, and finally with scientific naturalism. Then in the same sentence he rejects those as yet undreamt-of isms as alien to his own narrative art. Why this ostensible aversion to description?^[71] The semiconcealed answer lies, I think, in the present participle painting and in the adjective frigid (meaning frozen)—both of which signify lethal paralysis of the enchanting movement forward of narrative time. The romances of chivalry had exploited that voluptuous progression candidly and unartistically. Nevertheless Cervantes did not propose to trade it in for the moralistic

[71] As Alban Forcione points out, after this disavowal Cervantes goes on to describe Don Diego's milieu in much greater detail than he had previously employed for setting such scenes as Alonso Quijano's abode or the inn. Thus, he at once predicts and rejects future fictional emphasis on the relationship of experience to environment. See Forcione, Cervantes' Aristotle and the "Perciles," p. 163.

interruptions of Mateo Alemán or the static caricatures of Quevedo. Rather, as we have seen, he intended to reform and save the art of writing for entranced reading. In the hands of an expert narrative enchanter what had customarily produced arrant falsehood could be used to conjure not just a likely story (as the Canon recommends) but the one truth that is self-evidently true, that of consciousness in time.

It is not that the lions are truly dangerous with "true" claws "seen" by Sancho (Cervantes or Cide Hamete made them up), nor even, as Unamuno maintains, that Don Quijote invents himself in authentic courage. Rather, that comic "moment of truth" (which significantly follows the doubts raised by the disconcerting discovery that the vanquished Knight of the Mirrors is an exact copy of Sansón Carrasco) raises the issue once again with an urgency that is no longer merely facetious. After facing the lions, Don Quijote's vocational self-confidence soars again: "How does this seem to thee, Sancho? Are there any enchanters who can prevail against true valor?" (II.17). This stress on the words truth and true is further emphasized in the magniloquent interruption of Cide Hamete, who is described once again as the "author of this true history," and by Don Quijote when he allows the keeper to close the cage: "My devoir is fulfilled, and away with enchantments, and may God save reason and truth!" After the mirror play invented by that archliar Sansón Carrasco, Cervantes, Cide Hamete, the translator, and the characters—each in his own way, but as if in secret collaboration—cry the same cry: Truth!

If Sancho had been the only witness and interlocutor, there the episode would have ended: one more profoundly ironical and superficially clever variation on the interchange-ability of truth and lie as the two sides of the coin of humanity. But he is not. As Américo Castro was the first to observe, the inevitable result of an adventure in which truth and madness merge completely is intensification of the mutual awareness of Don Quijote and Don Diego. Each is conscious of his own variety of consciousness (madly incited or sanely pru-

dent and humdrum) in terms of that of his interlocutor.^[72] On their first meeting, the two had been struck by each other's appearance and antithetical ways of life. It is not made explicit, but the text suggests that it is Don Diego's doubts about knight-errantry ("Is it possible that there exist histories about true deeds of chivalry?"), as well as Don Quijote's jealousy of Sancho's worship of this "saint on horseback," that motivates his most perilous feat of arms.

After the adventure is over, each of the two continues to contemplate the other and himself, the one with augmented pride and the other with augmented stupefaction. Both are Spaniards of more or less the same age, both are called caballeros, but nevertheless they are alien species. Don Diego "said nothing, being absorbed in observing Don Quijote and in taking careful note of his deeds and words, which seemed to him those of a sane madman and of a madman gravitating towards sanity." Don Quijote then addresses him: "Who can doubt but that your grace should not be of the opinion that I am an eccentric madman? And no wonder, if such should be your thoughts, for my actions indicate no less. Nevertheless, I would have your grace know that I am not quite as mad or witless as I may have appeared to you" (II.17). To prove it, he goes on to compare quite reasonably (and quite maliciously on Cervantes's part!) the socially accepted and celebrated

[72] See "Incarnation in Don Quijote ," (in An Idea of History , p. 34) for Castro's illuminating remarks on this encounter of exaltation with prudence. My colleague Francisco Márquez Villanueva, taking Castro as a point of departure, meditates further on Cervantes's ironical portrait of Don Diego. Ostensibly, the domestic knight is an example of Erasmus's "Christian" variety, but his choice of clothing belies this generally accepted typification. His green coat adorned with colored ribbons, his gaudy saddle and green spurs, his fancy hat, and even his token scimitar (useless for combat) all identify him as a fool, a personification of folly. Excessive and complacent prudence, Cervantes implies, can be an even more foolish way of life than that driven by incitement to explore the frontiers of impossibility. The interpretation is as daring as Cervantes thought his Persiles to be, but I cannot disagree with it. Cervantes, as Márquez points out, has exploited (invented in) the fundamental paradoxicality of Erasmus. See Márquez, Personajes y temas del "Quijote" (Madrid: Taurus, 1975), pp. 219–27.

folly of bullfighting, indulged in by vain "knights of the court," with his own lonely lion-baiting.

Aside from the audible echo of Erasmus's Moriae encomium , however, what matters from the point of view of the final perfection of the invention is the face-to-face and mind-to-mind encounter of errant and domestic knighthood. Don Quijote's three sallies, or chemins , are composed, in addition to acts of violence, of a succession of intense meetings of disparate individuals. Who can forget, for example, the occasion when the cowardly lunacy of Cardenio and the exalted delusion of Don Quijote embrace and stare?^[73] But among them all, this is the most self-evidently "true," the one that invites us most peremptorily to project our own humanity—the sheer experience of our being alive, of having felt ourselves exalted by exposure to danger and comforted by shelter—into the thoughts, words, and actions of the heretofore fictional participants. As we said of Huck Finn's thunderstorm, exposure and shelter, danger and security, and adventure and order constitute the polarity of experience that is central not only to the Quijote but to the novel as a genre. Accordingly, it is in this episode that we are most aware of the music drawn forth from our "soul" in the process of reading. And Cervantes knew this at least intuitively, which is why he pauses to remind us that it is not the lions, not the whey dripping ridiculously into the heroic beard from under the helmet, and, above all, not the artifacts of domesticity that are true; rather, it is the time-fraught and time-fragile interlocking of self-awarenesses that he has invented in our consciousness and in our accumulated experience.

In other words, what the Morisco suggests is that narratives are true "narratively" and not, as latter-day novel readers came to believe, because of faithful description. We re-

[73] Schelling was particularly struck by this embrace of disparate madnesses—the one genuine but momentarily concealed beneath an apparently sane facade, the other a literary facade concealing underlying sanity. Two chapters later, when Don Quijote self-consciously rejects Orlando's madness and feigns the desperate alienation of Amadís, the game becomes even more complex.

marked in the initial essay that when the novel works for us and in us, as it is supposed to, it is because it presents its fictional world in the same temporal fashion with which we experience our own. It was this apparently spurious miracle—this making stories "true" and not just verisimilar—offered by the printed page that Cervantes realized he had consecrated and authenticated. Whatever suspense the ridiculous adventure itself may awaken quickly disappears when the lion turns into a giant cat, yawns, washes its face, and turns its backside toward its challenger. What remains and what is true are the two knights and their two ways of life in intimate relation with ours. The human "frame" has become the meaning of the whole—and in a fashion far more subtle than in chapter 20 of Part I.

This particular transition from adventure to experience is accompanied by the marked deceleration that has increasingly become the hallmark of the genre. I refer not only to the nouveau roman , which overdoes it, but to Fabrice immobile in the Farnèse tower, to Mrs. Dalloway strolling through St. James's park, to Carlos Maia waiting patiently for patients,^[74] and to a thousand and one other favorite "passages," in the literal sense of the word. What is remarkable about the Quijote , however, is that we can see the change in the process of taking place. Cervantes had begun by inventing in "lying fables" and in the greedy assimilation of their accelerated time by their newly addicted public, and now he realized how he had transformed habitual surrender to the temptations of fiction not only in order to savor and preserve its flavor but also in order to slow it down and to verify it in our lives; not to stun our consciousness on the roller coaster of adventure or to coddle it in the never-never land of unrequited pastoral passion but rather to tap it in its own tempo. The contrast in velocity between the aftermath of the Adventure of the Windmills and of the Adventure of the Lions is a

[74] In Eça de Queiroz's fascinating amalgamation of adventure and experience entitled Os Maias , a book that offers endless delight to "Cervantine creatures."

gauge of the transition from verisimilitude to truth—truth more true than that which each of us contributes because of its ability to survive history, as Balzac was to proclaim for what he called "le vrai" in his Avant-propos .

Immortality aside, however, it is precisely because Cervantes was conscious of the deceleration (or at least the contrived impression of deceleration) of his narrative that he warns us against descriptive stasis. With what clarity the writer of Part II foresaw the future perils of a genre he could not know he had invented!

"If it hadn't been for this basin-helmet, he would have had a hard time"

Cervantes's agreement with Stendhal that first of all "le roman doit raconter" returns us, in conclusion, to the Romantic interpretation of the Quijote , for which Schelling's Philosophie der Kunst (1802) is the locus classicus . As we have just seen, for Cervantes the "true" has as little to do with the "real" or the realistic as it has to do with the "ideal" or the idealistic. Rather, he has discovered in the act of writing fiction the single certainty that underlies both the undependable external appearances (a windmill, a gentleman in a green overcoat, his house) of the post-Tridentine, or Baroque, world and the rampant ingeniosidad that was its literary expression. And, strangely enough, that primordial novelistic truth—conscious experience in its temporal course—is no different from that offered by the nineteenth-century authors whom Cervantes would have scrutinized caustically because of their self-proclaimed historicism, realism, and naturalism. Indeed, one suspects that he (or his Morisco translator) might have appreciated more those of his descendants who in the early twentieth century further "internalized" and thereby "derealized" the genre: James, Virginia Woolf, Proust, Joyce, Azorín.

It is on these terms that we may answer those who insist on asking such obvious but justifiable questions as, What about the windmills? Are they not real? How else to explain

Cervantes's marvelous gift for oral characterization? In contrast to Quevedo's superlatively grotesque Dómine Cabra, do not the individual galley slaves resemble Sevillian jailbirds Cervantes might have known rather than picaresque caricatures? Is not the Velázquez-like realism of the goatherds around their campfire a means of accentuating the morbid artificiality of Grisóstomo's pastoral passion? The truth is that Cervantes invented from or in everything he knew, both the books he had read and the life he had lived. His experience of Spain and, above all, of Spaniards is a topikon that served him as a springboard for his adventurous imagination. The truth of the lions does not depend on their nonliterary origin or behavior but on their contribution to the novel's ongoing communion of consciousness. They are no more or less real than Marcela, Grisóstomo, or Maritornes. Not the windmills, but the baciyelmo is the proper emblem of the whole.

It was, of course, only to be expected that nineteenth-century readers of the Quijote out of their own deep submersion in novelistic experience should have gone on inventing it. And the result was that Cervantes's virtual, narrative Spain, "where it never rains" (as Flaubert noted with surprise), was replaced by an imaginary and picturesque romantic Spain à la Gustave Doré. But Cervantes, who was writing neither a fictional biography (unlike Guzmán, Don Quijote is born in his fifties) nor a disguised autobiography, chooses not to describe the tranquil and semicultured^[75] dwelling of Don Diego de Miranda for the same reason he wishes not to remember the name (and the grotesquely ignorant milieu) of Argamasilla. Instead, as we have seen, he was concerned first with matching the minds and dispositions of his readers, and then, once that intimacy was achieved, with inventing them and inventing in them. He would draw from each of them in each reading (whether in 1605 or 2005) the infinite variety of Stendhalian sounds that in silent chorus constitute its ulti-

[75] As exemplified by his preference for the "books of honest entertainment" among the "six dozen" in his library, as well as by his dislike of poetry as such, Don Diego is not a "reader."

mate truth. If I may be permitted a final metaphor (borrowed from Américo Castro), his book would succeed more than any of its kind in its irresistibly seductive search across future history for "dancing partners."^[76]

The Quijote's carnet de bal reached encyclopedic proportions in the nineteenth century when the novel came into its own and when each man's experience (even that of Mr. Bailey, the grocer) was revered as a meaningful "cell" of history.^[77] But in its own age it was a unique and magnificent exception. How remarkable that, in a world so obsessed with temporal erosion that its two primordial poetic isms were dedicated either to the evasion of time or to grim delight in its grotesque acceleration,^[78] this single novel should have staked its claim to truth on the evanescent duration of human experience. A valid argument can be made that the Quijote is a Baroque (or Manneristic) work insofar as it is rooted in critical scrutiny of the Spain in which Cervantes lived, as well as of the books into which he escaped. In its own way it portrays a world as cruel, as illusory, and as deceptive as those of Calderón or Quevedo. The difference, and the reason the Quijote can work in us in a way their writings cannot, is that Cervantes invented a way to transform our laughter at his crazy and foolish clowns into a rejuvenating and liberating participation in their errant and erratic existences. Their "truth" is our "truth," and vice versa!

[76] This phrase is taken from the titular essay of An Idea of History , p. 296.

[77] See Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesämmelte Schriften , ed. B. Groethuysen (Leipzig: Teubner, 1923–36), 7: 246.

[78] The reference is to the two opposed but complementary literary "sects" called culteranismo (typified by Góngora) and conceptismo (typified by Quevedo). The former transformed or evaded the temporal world in elaborate metaphorical play and Latinate syntax and vocabulary, while the latter emphasized evanescence (le néant of human existence) in vicious verbal caricature. See Andrée Collard, Nueva poesía: Conceptismo, Culteranismo en la crítica española (Madrid: Castalia, 1967), pp. 73–76, and my own "The Ideology of the Baroque in Spain," Symposium 1 (1946), pp. 82–107.