"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.