1
Definition

"I define the novel as the kind of literature which produces this effect"

Definitions constrict by definition, and definitions of the novel asphyxiate. That is to say, to propose an answer to the question "What is the novel?" is to predetermine a course of meditation that should be free. If we think of that genre (as did Cervantes, Fielding, and Gogol) as an epic in prose or, alternatively, as a new form of fictional entertainment that became significant when it mocked and chastised the "manners" of the eighteenth century and of major importance when it proudly and profoundly explored the Zeitgeist of the nineteenth, we close all other doors. These familiar definitions—the one rhetorical and the other historical—are respectable and serviceable. But in the American academic shorthand of a few years ago, they demand a choice between Wayne Booth and Ian Watt. Let us instead ask two other questions: "What do novels do to their readers?" and "How do they do it?"—questions that preoccupied three of the most sophisticated minds ever to think novelistically. I refer, of course, to Cervantes and his most eminent nineteenthcentury disciples, Stendhal and Flaubert.

Theories of "reception" based on the notion (in the words of Jonathan Culler) that all "propositions about poetic or novelistic discourse" should be redefined in terms of "procedures of reading" have proliferated recently.^[1] However, since I grew up in a world mostly inhabited by nineteenth-century

[1] Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), P. 128.

people, and since the novel attained its apogee in that century, I propose that we go back six decades and listen to one of the most lucid readers the Quijote ever found for itself. In Ortega y Gasset's Ideas sobre la novela (1925) there is a preliminary answer to the first of the questions just posed:

Let us observe ourselves at the moment we finish reading a great novel. It seems to us as if we are emerging from another existence, that we have escaped from a world out of communication with our authentic world. This lack of communication is shown by the fact that transition from one to another is imperceptible. An instant ago we found ourselves in Parma with Count Mosca, Clélia, and Fabrice; we were living with them, immersed in their air, their space, their time. Now suddenly, without any intermission, we find ourselves in our chamber, in our city, in our date; already our habitual preoccupations begin to awaken at the nerve ends. There is, of course, an interval of indecision, of uncertainty. Perhaps a brusque wing stroke of memory will suddenly submerge us again in the universe of the novel, and then with an effort, as if struggling in a liquid element, we try to swim to the shore of our own existence. If someone should observe us then, he would see the dilation of eyelids which characterizes those who have been shipwrecked.

I define the novel as the kind of literature which produces this effect . Such is the enormous, unique, glorious, and magic power of this sovereign of modern literary forms. And the novel that lacks it is a failure whatever its other merits. Oh sublime, benign power which multiplies our existence, which frees us and pluralizes us, which enriches us with generous transmigration!^[2] (italics mine)

In spite of the buoyancy of Ortega's closing exclamation, his celebration of novel reading points more to the elimination of our existence than to its multiplication. As Cervantes discovered, and as Flaubert rediscovered, immersion in fiction is a peril to identity. Both the Quijote and Madame Bovary are novels about addicted readers: a desperately bored hidalgo and a desperately dissatisfied housewife who cannot

[2] José Ortega y Gasset, Ideas sobre la novela , in Obras completas , 3: 410 (translation mine).

swim to the shore of their provincial existences. They and others like them are hooked on one of the two varieties of "volupté" that, according to Albert Thibaudet, were unknown to the ancients. The other—at that time—was tobacco, as Pierre Louys had pointed out.^[3]

"Cervantes confronted typographic man in the figure of Don Quixote"

Now for the second question: how do "fictitious prose works of over 50,000 words" produce these strange and interesting effects? How does the novel (a designation that at this point still includes both the Quijote and the Areadís ) differ from other forms of literature? Here the late Marshall McLuhan's highly suggestive and engagingly arbitrary Gutenberg Galaxy will be of assistance. We have not noticeably done so, but those of us who are professionally concerned with the sudden and seemingly miraculous "publishing event" of 1605 should have welcomed enthusiastically McLuhan's observation that the novel is the characteristic literary expression of "print culture."^[4] From our point of view, he redefines and refreshens what we already knew about the development of fiction in Spain prior to Cervantes.

In 1508—so our familiar lesson goes—a now lost medieval romance (a narrative in prose recounting the fantastic adventures and the exemplary love and courtesy of an ostensibly

[3] See Albert Thibaudet, Le liseur de romans (Paris: G. Crés, 1925), pp. i–ii.

[4] Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), p. 214. Both Bakhtin and Thibaudet allude in passing to this congruence of "medium" and "message." The latter merely remarks, "C'est avec l'imprimerie que la volupté nouvelle s'incorpore solidement aux habitudes humains" (Thibaudet, Liseur , p. 25). ("It's with printing that the new voluptuousness is solidly incorporated into human habits.") The former's realization that "the printing of books . . . served to shift discourse into a mute mode of perception, a shift decisive to the novel as a genre" (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination , p. 379), is not followed up perhaps because of his search—to my mind misguided—for the origins of the modern genre in Byzantine romance.

fictional perfect knight named Amadís of Gaul^[5] ) was revised and published by one Garcí Rodríguez (or Ordóñez) de Montalvo, who had taken part in the Conquest of Granada in 1492. An instant best-seller, it provided welcome escape for its Spanish readers (barbers, priests, canons, young gentlemen, lawyers, and, most important of all, village hidalgos condemned by their privileged status to idleness and marginal poverty), readers who, like Montalvo, remembered vividly (or had heard about from their elders) that last flourish of chivalric prowess in the peninsula. The popularity of the Amadís thus resembled that of western romances shortly after the disappearance of our own frontier. The printing press was no longer a device for producing cheaply and in larger quantities hard-to-get medieval and classical texts; in addition, it had created overnight what we now call a national reading public.^[6] And the result was, as Cervantes notes, that the Amadís was "the origin and beginning" of a flood of imitations and continuations. Exactly like best-sellers today, it engendered a subgenre: "los libros de caballería," or romances of chivalry.^[7]

Reading with increasing speed and more and more silently (a kind of reading that was extremely rare in the era of the manuscript),^[8] the newly constituted and insatiable public consumed ream after ream of ersatz adventures. And the more it read and was provided with reading, the better it learned how to immerse itself in the printed page and to derive therefrom unprecedented "volupté." Diego de San Pedro's sentimental and semiepistolary Cárcel de Amor (The

[5] Bakhtin calls our attention to the fact that the Amadís was used as a guide to deportment, "how to converse in society, how to write letters and so on" (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination , p. 384). Alonso Quijano can be thought of as taking this aspect to an extreme degree.

[6] In widely circulated translations it performed a similar function abroad.

[7] As was to be expected, the older Arthurian romances were absorbed into the genre, thanks to the printing press.

[8] For further discussion, including St. Augustine's remarks on the amazement caused by St. Ambrose's miraculous ability to read silently, see McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy .

Prison of Love, 1492), the first fictional narrative in Spanish to have been written expressly for publication, was apparently (like a manuscript) intended for reading aloud.^[9] That is to say, it was intoned word for word for the enjoyment of a rapt circle of listeners.

But by 1605 an Alonso Quijano and others who shared his addiction were devouring silently (perhaps their lips still moved and their hands made gestures) all by themselves at least a volume a day: "from twilight to daybreak and from dawn to dark." Not only the regularization of type (stressed by McLuhan) but also, as just noted, the capacity of the ever more numerous presses to supply and stimulate demand resuited in the revolution in reading that made the Quijote possible and that is its point of departure. In addition to being silent, it was a self-accelerating process, comparable in the avidity of its absorption to the effect "of blood on a vampire" (as W. C. Fields described his first morning drink).

Surely nobody today reacts to fiction with the intoxication of such sixteenth-century Spaniards as Bernal Díaz del Castillo and his comrades, Teresa of Avila and her nuns, Ignatius of Loyola and his trainees, or Miguel de Cervantes and his creatures.^[10] Only we diminishing few, fortunate enough to

[9] The second edition of La Celestina (1500) contains instructions for reading aloud appended by the editor. Its nonnovelistic dialogue in fact demands careful oral intonation. See my "Entonación y motivación en La Celestina ," in Homenaje a Horst Baader , ed. Frauke Gewecke (Barcelona: Hogar del Libro, 1984), pp. 29–36.

[10] These examples are well known. Bernal Díaz in his Historia verdadera tells how the first sight of Tenochtitlan reminded the conquistadores of the "enchantments that are told in the book of Amadís." For further discussion, see my "Bernal Díaz del Castillo and Amadís de Gaula ," in Homenaje a Dámaso Alonso , vol. 2 (Madrid: Gredos, 1961), pp. 99–114. As for Saint Teresa, she recounts in her spiritual autobiography, El libro de su vida (1588), the Quixotic incitement derived from such reading. And according to Pedro de Ribadeneyra's biography of Saint Ignatius (published in Latin in 1572 and in Spanish, as Vida del padre Ignacio de Loyola , in 1583), the sudden illumination that led to the founding of the Society of Jesus was derived from similar experiences. Miguel de Unamuno in chapter 2 of his Life of Don Quixote and Sancho has a vivid discussion of the matter. The mention of Saint Ignatius's "trainees" refers to the fact that the Spiritual Exercises were designed as if they were chapters of a divine romance. Silent reading with a visual imagination as acute as that of Alonso Quijano was supposed to transform those who undertook the exercises.

have lived in a world free of television (and in a house full of books), may have in our childhood been blessed with an experience of literacy remotely comparable to theirs. Eudora Welty's remarks on her early reading in One Writer's Beginnings indicate that she may well have come closest.^[11] As for me, I was struck by the description in To Kill a Mockingbird of the rapt circle of children immersed collectively in a Tom Swift book, each attending primarily to the individual character with which he or she was identified by prior definition. Why? Because it evoked vividly a forgotten memory of similar sessions in my own childhood and of the two-dimensional personifications who so entranced us. My flesh-and-blood companions in immersion are by now dim to the point of vanishing, but Tom, Ned, Mr. Damon, and Rad still possess for me a remnant of the kind of reality that Amadís had for Alonso Quijano. In any case, at least partly because that kind of reading was, and still is, the indispensable first step for adult surrender to those special novels (the Quijote, La Chartreuse de Parme, Huckleberry Finn, The Idiot ) on which we have traditionally depended for self-renovation, we have cause to fear that the genre may be in for trouble.

All of which amounts to saying: if not "the novel" (we must continue to evade Forster's unanswerable challenge!), then those novels we love the best and that love us the longest need us. Their "greatness" is not as self-evident as that of a tragedy, insofar as they depend on our capacity for what A. W. von Schlegel scornfully termed Leserei , meaning roughly "readingitis."^[12] They depend, in short, on a disease

[11] Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).

[12] "Man Iobt den jetzt allgemeiner verbreiteten Geschmack am Lesen, aber hilf Himmel! Welch eine Leserei ist das! Sie verdammt sich selbst schon dadurch, daß sie so rastlos nach dem neuen greift was doch kein wirklich neues ist. Nur die leidigste Passivität kann zu dieser Liebhaberei führen, die weder denken noch handeln mag; ja nicht einmal zu träumen müssen solche Menschen verstehen, denn sonst würden sie sich welt etwas besseres imaginieren können als in ihren Romanen steht. Ihr eignes Leben ist unbedeutend und leer" (A. W. von Schlegel, Vorlesungen über schöne Litteratur und Kunst [Heilbronn: B. Behr, 1884], pp. 19–20, italics mine). ("One praises the taste for reading that is widespread now, but good Lord! What a mess and excess of reading that is! It damns itself through the very fact that it seizes so restlessly at the new , though it may not be new at all. Only the clumsiest of passivities can lead to this addiction, that can neither think nor act, and such people are not able to even have regular dreams, or they would otherwise be capable of imagining much better things than those that can be found in their novels . Their own life is insignificant and empty.") Schlegel clearly refers here to the kind of reader I term later in this essay the "adventure addict"—not realizing, as Cervantes realized, that it is through such addiction that one learns to read in the way all novels, including the greatest, should be read.

the symptoms of which are feverish scanning, compulsion to turn pages, greediness for artificial time (as against the measured tempo of pronunciation), and mad, imaginative fervor. Just now, while correcting my text, I have read five brilliant paragraphs by Susan Sontag in which she describes the Quijote as "the first and greatest epic about addiction."^[13]

In so saying, we have appended a qualification to McLuhan's notion of "typographic man." Although McLuhan does remark on the relation of the novel to the printing press (observing that the latter places the reader "in the hands" of the author^[14] ) and thereby comments perceptively on the Quijote , his major stress is on the linear, abstract, and rationally ordered mindset of the new readers. Here, on the contrary, we are concerned with fervid imagination shared nationwide, a mental epidemic capable of producing a literary miracle—or, as Bakhtin would say, the creation of a new and extravagant kind of generic "language" spoken in one way by the author and in other ways by the characters.

To be specific, three stages of fictional reception may be distinguished, although admittedly they can and do overlap. First, there is the invocative, oral, "truth-making," verbal magic of epics, ballads, and folktales, magic that still worked

[13] Of all places, in the book section of The Boston Globe , March 9, 1986.

[14] McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy , p. 125.

in attenuated form in manuscripts (for example, the stillbelieved-in Arthurian romances) written for reading aloud. In the latter, a legendary "this was so" replaced the mythical "this is so" of the former. Second, there are printed and frankly fictional narratives such as the Amadís and its progeny as well as the pastorals, which were (and are in their latter-day counterparts) the training pool for silent, communal immersion. And finally, in the Quijote Cervantes learned how to exploit fully (gave birth to, invented, discovered) the miraculous possibilities inherent in this new kind of reading—that is to say, how to enable us to augment our identity and to refresh our stale store of experience in the act of surrendering to fictional lives far more intensely and significantly alive than we are.

"The novel is like a fiddle bow . . ."

But we must not get ahead of ourselves. Ortega's definition—so convenient for evading the rhetorical trap set by Forster—may tell us something about what novels do to their readers. And Marshall McLuhan may provide elementary insight into how they do it. However, the latter's notion of the reader being "put into the hands" of the author and our own mention of Cervantes "learning how" to exploit that power indicate that our preliminary questions and answers were indeed preliminary. Even the most rudimentary story, whether oral, handwritten, or printed, has a teller, whether collective, anonymous, or a recipient of royalties. And it is equally obvious—the intentional fallacy notwithstanding—that the act of telling a story effectively presupposes a chosen beginning and ending as well as a calculated endeavor to stimulate and maintain interest between the two.

Percy Lubbock is in accord with Lukács and Thibaudet in defining novel reading as first of all a "process" or "passage of experience," but he also recognizes that the whole possesses a "size and shape."^[15] He means not just a plot divided

[15] Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (New York: Viking, 1957), p. 15.

into chapters but more significantly a predetermined "game" of communication with the author, which must be played from beginning to end, either subliminally or with critical awareness, by all readers or listeners. Even more unsatisfactory than Ortega's disregard of Stendhal as an artist and the Chartreuse as a work of art (for him it is only an experience) is the corollary implication that all works of fiction that effectively provide underwater escape are novels. Is our reading of the Quijote vitally more stimulating (as Ortega would have phrased it) and spiritually more illuminating than our reading of detective fiction? If so, why? Precisely because we are reluctant to relinquish Ortega's antidefinition of the novel as a special kind of reading that multiplies our existence,^[16] we are faced with two far more demanding questions. How do novelists make their novels into a whole? What makes reading a novel worthwhile instead of a waste of time?

Since Ortega emphasized his gratitude for the happiness he had derived from immersion in the Chartreuse , it is fitting to try to amend his definition by examining two Stendhalian metaphors that take the role of the novelist into account. Furthermore, in order to prepare ourselves to comprehend what Cervantes has to say about his art, our most convenient introduction may be meditation on what his equally ironical nineteenth-century avatar has to tell us about his. Both novelists were ostensible failures, and both were at odds with iniquitous societies. Yet the Frenchman "malgré lui," because of the intensity of his historical experience (the Revolution, the Imperial campaigns, and their depressing aftermath), may serve as an intermediary for introducing the critical and

[16] As a reader, Proust shares Ortega's experience of novelistic immersion. Thus he speaks with tacit regret of "la réalité qu'on retrouve en levant les yeux de dessus le livre qu'on était en train de lire et qui vous décrivait un milieu dans lequel on avait fini par se croire effectivement transporté" (Marcel Proust, A l' ombres des jeunes filles en fleurs [Paris: Gallimard, 1954], p. 353). (". . . the reality which one recaptures on raising one's eyes from the book which one has been reading and which describes an environment into which one has come to believe that one has been bodily transported" [Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove , trans. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Modern Library, 1924), p. 20].)

creative preoccupations of the marginal Spaniard.^[17] Although as their insatiable "lecteurs" we are the "semblables" and "frères" of both, the novels we are used to today are almost without exception far more overtly historical than the Quijote .

The Stendhalian metaphor we know by heart is, of course, the "miroir" that the author "promène au long d'un chemin." However, the later realists and naturalists who were fond of repeating it failed to realize that the crucial word therein is not miroir but chemin . It is a miniature manifesto of open form and not of descriptive accuracy Stendhal does not state that novels are better when they reflect people and places faithfully (like almost every major novelist from Cervantes to Joyce, he adored caricature); what he does pretend is that "size and shape" can take care of themselves. As a child—he tells us—his first memory of laughing was at the Quijote , and as a grown-up novelist the seemingly random road of the knight and squire (continued and perfected in the narratives of Lesage and Fielding) offered a means of communicating directly (that is, without the intrusive archaeology of Scott) the new historical consciousness of his century.

To be specific, both Le rouge et le noir and, in disguised form, La Chartreuse are composed of wayside adventures in which the wayside is Restoration France instead of the eternal and literal (read moral and brutal) wayside of Gil Blas, Tom Jones and Don Quijote. Balzac and Dickens viewed contemporary history as a temptingly delicious sociological layer cake ready to be sliced, admired, and consumed. Stendhal, however, experienced it as a rosary of ironical encounters between what John Stuart Mill called old and new kinds of human beings.^[18] His novels, as a result, are "chemins" of generational incongruity along which both Julien and Fabrice in

[17] The relationship of nineteenth-century historical consciousness to the evolution of the novel is most strikingly announced in the "Avant propos" of Balzac's La comédie humaine . Further bibliography may be found in chapter 1 of my Galdós and the Art of the European Novel: 1867–1887 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981).

[18] John Stuart Mill, The Spirit of the Age , ed. F. A. yon Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), p. 1.

their very youthfulness and openness represent in reverse the naive obsolescence of Cervantes's fifty-year-old hidalgo. It is precisely this that Erich Auerbach failed to comprehend when he found the protagonist's age to be lacking in verisimilitude.^[19]

The mirror and road comparison thus expresses perfectly Stendhal's mastery of the art of apparent spontaneity, the keen joy he shared with Cervantes in arranging ostensibly haphazard encounters. But it does not tell all the truth, and he knew it. Like the Quijote and like any novel worth our sustained attention, Stendhal's novels possess their own unique wholeness, which he cunningly contrived and perversely denied.^[20] Yet since self-revelation is the obverse of self-concealment, while writing the autobiographical striptease entitled La vie de Henri Brûlard, he proposed a second metaphor, at once more revealing for our purposes and more challenging to conventional criticism. The first had presented composition as a game of solitaire. The lonely writer—in the guise of the protagonist—directs his mirror with calculated irony (but apparently at random) at the passage of history within the lives of the other characters. However, the very act of publishing as well as the longed-for possibility of future editions invalidates the self-centered definition. In order to understand his own metier, Stendhal—like Ortega—would have to let the reader into the game.

Stendhal was painfully preoccupied with readers because of their extreme scarcity during his lifetime. Novelists who were blessed with a ready-made public might take them for granted or even—like Cervantes and Sterne—play tricks on them. But the semiexiled Frenchman was tormented with the fear that his irony—at least as cutting as theirs and far more self-consciously secretive—might never be understood.^[21] Al-

[19] Erich Auerbach, Mimesis , trans. W. R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953), chapter 14.

[20] See my The Tower as Emblem: Chapters VIII, IX, XIX and XX of the "Chartreuse de Parme" (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1967).

[21] Although Kierkegaard's notion that the fruit of irony is the freedom derived from self-discovery (the ultimate ironist, like God, rejects understanding) would have appealed to Stendhal's radically solitary soul, it would have been unsatisfactory to him as a novelist. Rather, he felt an equal need for communication, a need to convert his possible reader into himself. In his case, as Vladimir Jankélévitch remarks, "L'ironie ne veut pas être crue , elle veut être comprise " (L'ironie ou la bonne conscience [Paris: Alcan, 1950], p. 51). ("Irony does not want to be believed , it wants to be understood .") Or as José Ferrater Mora puts it, "The ironical attitude is directed towards someone . . .. . .. . . Irony may occur in solitude. But it does occur most often in company" (Cuestiones disputadas [Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1955], p. 31).

ways intellectually preoccupied with the otherness of others, he wondered if anyone worthy would ever adopt his spiritual offspring. Could he on his own found and populate the exclusive society of the "Happy Few" with consciousnesses trained by reading to resemble his own?

More simply stated, would there come to exist by 1880 or 1935 a historically experienced public prepared—unlike Stendhal's contemporaries—to participate in the special kind of suprahistorical exaltation (or "Happyness") he was concerned to offer? Continuing worry about these—for him—really desperate questions resulted in the following marvel of wishful thinking: "Un roman est comme un archet; la caisse du violon qui rend les sons, c'est l'âme du lecteur."^[22]

It goes without saying that the imaginative collaboration of the apprehender (observer, listener, or reader) is an essential factor in what used to be called the aesthetic equation. But what Stendhal and Ortega propose is that fiction (printed fiction, though neither makes that point), because it takes place in our minds, is the art form that involves us most intimately. Nor is it necessary to be as singularly susceptible as

[22] La vie de Henri Brûlard (Paris: Le Divan, 1949), p. 227. ("The novel is like a fiddle bow; the violin that gives forth the sounds is the soul of the reader.") Without mentioning Stendhal, Harold Brodkey recently verged on the same metaphor: "Reading is an intimate act, perhaps more intimate than any other human act. I say that because of the prolonged (or intense) exposure of one mind to another that is involved in it. . . . One settles one's body to some varying degree, and then one enters on the altered tempos of reading, the subjection of being played upon " ("Reading, the Most Dangerous Game," New York Times Book Review , November 24, 1985, pp. 1 and 44–45, italics mine).

Alonso Quijano or Emma Bovary to have had the uncanny experience of having been taken over—spiritually infiltrated—by a work of fiction. Who among us has not revered rafts and tree houses without quite knowing why after having read Huckleberry Finn or The Swiss Family Robinson? And for those who no longer read, the descendants of fiction called motion pictures can have comparable (though perhaps less durable) effects.

There is, however, a crucial difference between Ortega's description of reading and Stendhal's. The former's immersion is a metaphorical extension of the commonplace "Soand-so is deep in a book," while the latter's soul melody recognizes the obvious truth that it is the book that is deep in us. And the corollary is that it is the author who "renews our life" and "takes away our gray hair" (both phrases, as we shall see, are from the Quijote ) by calculated arrangement of the whole. Just as the violinist has his score, so too the writer, by means of symbols and emblems, allusive and elusive chapter titles and epigraphs, ironical overstatement and understatement, dreams and premonitions, and a thousand and one other forms of intervention, teaches us to remember what we have read and to anticipate what we are going to read in the very act of surrendering ourselves voluptuously to the printed page. Because prose fiction is habitually received as a process of spontaneous reading, the individual author must also take the self-conscious role of critic and teacher. At times surreptitiously (Stendhal and Mark Twain) and at times overtly (Fielding and Thomas Mann), with all deliberate speed the author trains his readers, in the words of Virginia Woolf, to "climb on his shoulders and look through his eyes" in order that they may "understand in what order he ranges the large common objects upon which novelists are fated to gaze: man and men, behind them nature, and above them that power which for convenience and brevity we may call God."^[23] Meaning clearly: while absorbed

[23] Virginia Woolf, The Second Common Reader (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), p. 51.

in the entrancing flow of narration, to take the configuration of the whole into account.

This, too, is the worthy task of my own profession. The author in his secondary role as teacher is necessarily limited by the historical moment in which he lives. He prepares his lesson in reading for a public to which he himself belongs. We, on the other hand, are aware that readers living in later centuries or conditioned by foreign cultures are apt to go astray. Therefore, we try to preserve as well as we can, if not a single correct meaning, at least a sense of the unique aliveness of novelistic time gone by. It is obvious that lectures and footnotes cannot by themselves teach students how to surrender themselves to forgotten and alien varieties of "happiness" or "magic power." But without them, without a responsible tradition of academic custody, how much would be lost! Even such straightforward novels as Old Mortality and The Heart of Midlothian need the annotation that Scott himself provided with admirable foresight for their resuscitation.

Unfortunately, not all teachers are to be trusted, and at this point two deplorable cases of misreading (or antireading) may be illustrative. The first is Vladimir Nabokov's notorious and almost nauseated rejection not of Cervantes (the Harvard lectures are no more than an academic spoof and have deservedly been remaindered) but of Dostoevsky. Biographically and academically, Nabokov was surely better prepared than almost anybody to lend his "soul" to the master. Nevertheless, not just in his lectures but in his conversation he was obsessively hostile. The repeated boutade that the author of The Brothers Karamazov was the Biasco Ibáñez of Russia is an odious comparison which is also unfair to the Spaniard. What Nabokov is saying in Stendhalian terms is that he is not attuned to Dostoevsky. And readers attuned to Bend Sinister and Lolita should not find it hard to comprehend his lack of response. For him and for Henry James, who reacted in much the same way, confession of their manifest failure as readers was out of the question. Rather, they justify themselves with destructive criticism: Dostoevsky's style is murky and crude;

his command of the shape of the whole, shaky; and his plots, melodramatic.^[24]

At the opposite extreme there is the Spanish philosopherphilologist-poet-novelist-mystic Miguel de Unamuno, who believed himself to be so personally attuned to the Quijote that his commentary amounts only to an expression of passionate immersion and exaltation. Disdainful of Cervantes (like Nabokov, Unamuno was a professional poseur), unconcerned with his intricate artistry, and uninterested in his generic innovation, he preferred (or at least he so proclaimed) to read the national masterpiece in translation. The result is at best a pseudonovel, La vida de don Quijote y Sancho (1905), about novelistic experience. Despite its occasional insights and frequent eloquence, it is more interesting for students of Unamuno than for those who wish to bring the Quijote back alive.

Such estimative catastrophes are worth mentioning, if only to underline the peculiarity of the genre. If Nabokov had said about Aeschylus, Dante, or Shakespeare what he said about Dostoevsky, his opinions would not be worth a paragraph. As it is, we cannot be absolutely certain that he and Henry James are totally wrong. Like it or not, our intellects descend from Aristotle, and a novel performed as Stendhal would have it performed is manifestly non-Aristotelian. The author of the Poetics was able to snare tragedy in his intellectual net and then to subdivide it into five components by first defining it as an imitation of an action. However, if we accept the premise that the novel is an action taking place in the soul of the reader and that its primary demand is entranced violin-like submission, we must revise our modes of critical judgment. The "active" aspect of Oedipus Rex was relegated by the philosopher to the more or less indefinable notion of

[24] Jean-Jacques Demorest, who was kind enough to read a preliminary version of this essay, informs me that Nabokov, while at Cornell, repeatedly expressed his antipathy to Stendhal. Could it have been the Cervantine tradition itself that he disliked?

mass catharsis. We, on the contrary, read the Quijote or The Idiot all by ourselves—whether in rebellion against the dictatorial violinist or submissively within the limits of our individual capacities.

"How that person feels himself existing in the happening"

Our belief that Nabokov (who stayed on shore) and Unamuno (who drowned) have indulged themselves in improper conduct—novelistically speaking—cannot be proved. But at least we can try to understand what they seem not to have understood. What is it, we asked earlier, that makes reading the Quijote and The Idiot worthwhile and not a waste of time or, even worse, an occasion for arrogant self-display? The answer is not to be found in effective style, in profound ideas, in psychological truth to life, or in Paul Bourget's demand for coherent composition, so devastatingly refuted by Albert Thibaudet.^[25] A given novel may attract us because of the presence of some or all of these qualities, but none of them corresponds to what novels are really about. At this point a definition proposed by my teacher, Américo Castro, after decades of meditating on the Quijote , may lead us in the right direction: "The novel does not consist in telling what happens to a person, but instead in communicating how that person feels himself existing in the happening."^[26] Admittedly, this definition sounds so simplistic that E. M. Forster would probably have waved it away with a condescending smile. Fortunately, though, Castro is not alone. Thornton Wilder phrases it differently, but, as a novelist, his agreement helps save the definition from Forster's skepticism: "Art does not record what the outside world is like, but what it is like to contemplate and experience the outside world."^[27]

[25] Albert Thibaudet, Réflexions sur le roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), chapter 1.

[26] Américo Castro, De la edad conflictiva (Madrid: Taurus, 1961), p. 202.

[27] The Journals of Thornton Wilder , ed. Donald Gallup (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 4. After long and learned meditations on Cervantes's theory of the novel, E. C. Riley reaches this luminous conclusion: "The Quijote offers an extraordinary illusion of human experience, which is not a shadow or distortion of human experience, but an illumination of its nature" (Cervantes's Theory of the Novel [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962], p. 245).

What makes the Quijote "the exemplary novel of all time," and what led Wilder later to conclude that "before Cervantes wrote this book, there was no novel,"^[28] is precisely this: the birth, infancy, and maturity of experience in its pages. Not experience recollected lyrically in tranquillity; or intensified dramatically with rhetoric, self-conscious acting, and tense confrontation; or elevated epically on an exemplary heroic pedestal; or denigrated satirically from a worm's-eye view; but just the way experience was and is now—was "felt" and still "feels"—here on the page in the course of its happening. Those other kinds of fiction on Forster's list—allegories, fables, parodies, documentaries, and romances—tell us for their several purposes what happened or took place. But the novel wants its lives to accompany ours in experiencing the taking place.

Once again, how did this begin? My far-from-original argument will be that the metamorphosis gradually comes about after the initial six chapters, which comprise Don Quijote's lonely First Sally—that is to say, during the rest of Part I (the Second Sally), when the acquisition of Sancho provides his master with someone with whom to talk.^[29] Thereafter each "happening" or discrete adventure becomes increasingly self-conscious. The two men, because they are together, feel themselves "existing" in what is going on and fully communicate that feeling to the reader. Admitting moments of regression to farce or of padding with sentimental artificiality,

[28] Wilder, Journals , p. 95. The sentence continues:" . . . there was the récit' . . . which permitted by mere convention thoughts, prayers, secret motivation, but at most that was a mere rhetorical device; it was not there that the interest lay."

[29] Conventionally cervantistas divide the novel into three "sallies" (the first two in Part I and the second comprising all of Part II) because of their fundamentally different varieties of narration. The difference will be clarified in the course of the essays to follow.

the rapid and schematic sequence of antiadventures often surprises us by revealing unexpectedly an underlying continuum of decelerated novelistic experience ruefully savored in the act of sharing. Thornton Wilder perhaps exaggerates Cervantes's self-consciousness in the pages of his Journal , written at Harvard while he gave the 1950–51 Norton Lectures,^[30] but his testimony as a fellow novelist is invaluable:

To read the first half of the First Part of Don Quixote , then, is to watch Cervantes discovering that the interest of fiction does not have to depend on any external importance offered by its happening—neither on surprise nor on suspense, nor novelty, nor complicated intrigue—the long consecrated structural rhetoric of narration.^[31]

Wilder goes on to say that while reading, the reader can almost sense physically how Cervantes "pinched himself" in the act of writing these chapters.

The obvious objection to our rephrasing of Castro's distinction in terms of Wilder's "experience" is that in both Spanish and English the word is used in various ways. Saint Teresa writes about her mystical "experiences" in a way that seems to correspond to her childhood addiction to reading. Cervantes, on the other hand, seems to understand the word in terms of empirical testing. When Alonso Quijano finds that his makeshift visor does not withstand a swordblow, he repairs it "sin querer hacer nueva experiencia de ello" ("without caring to make another trial of it," I.1).^[32] For our purposes two distinct but related temporal meanings are all that count. The first is present experience, the "now" of the happening,

[30] Wilder prepared the lectures on the Quijote for the second semester (1951) of Humanities 2, a course devoted to the epic and the novel, which he offered, with characteristic generosity, in addition to the Norton Lectures.

[31] Wilder, Journals , p. 96.

[32] For convenience, citations from the Quijote are identified parenthetically by part and chapter in my text. I have borrowed shamelessly from a number of translations with such modifications as seemed necessary, mostly restoration of the indispensable "thee" and "thou" in Don Quijote's conversation with Sancho.

as in "What an experience!" The second is cumulative experience, the accretion of such "nows" in the course of living, which results in mature wisdom or disillusion, as in "a man of experience." German expresses it better with two words: Erlebnis , immediately lived experience (from leben , "to live"), and Erfahrung , traveled experience (from fahren , "to travel"). As we shall see, both constitute the very stuff of the Quijote as well as of every novel worth rereading.

Worth rereading? Before attempting to distinguish between kinds of reading in terms of value, let us practice with a passage that is an irrefutable example of what the novel can do at its best. It is the re-creation (not description) of the thunderstorm over Jackson's island in a narrative clearly bearing the Quijote 's watermark. As a lived experience in the present, it communicates the immediacy of time with singular vividness:

We spread our blankets inside for a carpet, and eat our dinner in there. We put all the other things handy at the back of the cavern. Pretty soon it darkened up and begun to thunder and lighten, so the birds were right about it. Directly it begun to rain, and it rained like all fury, too, and I never see the wind blow so. It was one of these regular summer storms. It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and, next , when it was just about its bluest and blackest—fst! it was bright as glory, and you'd have a little glimpse of treetops a-plunging about, away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second , and now you'd hear the thunder let go with an awful crash and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling down the sky towards the underside of the world, like roiling empty barrels down stairs—where it's a long stairs and they bounce a good deal you know .^[33] (italics mine)

[33] Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , chapter 9.

Read aloud, this splendid passage might not incorrectly be received as a prose poem that preserves a past storm in lasting beauty—meditation in tranquillity, reinforced orally by the onomatopoetic "rumbling, grumbling, tumbling." However, read silently, the way most of us have read it (the way I believe it should be read), it preys on the visual and auditory memories of the best storms of our lives. Storm-time ("pretty soon," "directly," " next," "fst!," "now," " then") is one with seen-and-heard-time—which remind us that time and weather are significantly synonymous in the Romance languages. And together they invoke life-time. Who experiences this novelistic thunderstorm, and when was (or is) its happening? Of course, it is an intense "now" for Huck and Jim, but it is also fusion of "thens," first for Samuel Clemens and afterwards for us. Even more, it will also provide a perfected version of experiences—more exactly, Erlebnisse —for our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Ultimately, it happens in the strange and consoling (were it not for another kind of fusion!) duration of humankind, which Huck addresses in the vast plural of the second person—"you'd hear," "you know," "you'd have."

Obviously, each of these you 's is also a single you , and as such it draws on and revivifies each reader's more or less tenuous memories of just how it did feel to exist in such a happening—camping out, comradeship, the special savor of a meal in the open, in addition to the spectacle of the storm itself. However, beneath the level of anecdotal recollection there are the primary experiences of exposure and shelter, hunger and its satisfaction, which can be shared by readers who unfortunately have never left the city or the desert. According to Lukács (who, two years after Ortega, also began by meditating on the Quijote ), Obdachlosigkeit , the condition of rooflessness, at once physical and cosmic, is the primordial situation of the "heroes" of novels. And so, too, of their readers. To say the same thing in another way, each reading is unique and at the same time communal. Depending on the state of the individual soul and what is stored in the private storehouse of memory, the melody changes its tone, inten-

sity, and quality, and yet it always remains within frontiers traced by the score and the possibilities and necessities of being human. My boyhood reading of Huckleberry Finn is not the same as last year's, and I suspect that new sounds await my older age. But all three readings, along with those of my grandfather, my grandchildren, and the rest of literate mankind, rather than contradict each other, reinforce each other.

Stendhal and Castro thus complement one another and, in so doing, suggest an answer to the question, What makes reading the Quijote and The Idiot worthwhile and not a waste of time? The challenge is to progress from reading books to being read by books. Those of us who greedily consume fiction in print remain content more often than we would like to admit with self-substitution—the voluptuous transferral of identity (described sensuously by Thibaudet), immersion in another hic et nunc (described intellectually by Ortega), the "restless" grasping of fictional suspense to the accelerated heartbeat of one's own temporal bosom (described scornfully by A. W. von Schlegel). But we need not merely aspire to the temporary solace of escape, or even to that more expansive and exhilarating happiness Proust describes in a phrase that reminds us of the metaphors of both Ortega and Stendhal: "cette multiplication possible de même, qui est le bonheur."^[34]

Proust said this on observing novelistically a "jeune fille en fleur" riding a bicycle, but by the time we have arrived at Le temps retrouvé , we are asked to esteem a happiness more profound and more lasting. The most precious blessing a text can offer is that of drawing on our experience and concentrating it into a storm far more stormy than any we can remember living through. We are then nothing less than the "lecteurs de mêmes."^[35] Or as Henri Bergson remarked, surely after experiencing Marcel's loss and the recapturing of

[34] Proust, A l'ombre , p. 444. (". . . that possible multiplication of oneself which is happiness" [Within a Budding Grove , p. 130].)

[35] Marcel Proust, Oeuvres complètes , vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, La Pleiade, 1954), P. 1033.

time, great novels bring us back into "our own presence."^[36] The essence is restored to our existence, or perhaps it is distilled from it.

The prerequisite remains, however, that before we can find ourselves (or read ourselves), we must first learn to lose ourselves. Cervantes's law is the opposite of Gresham's law in that addiction to an abundance of romances enabled the creation of what used to be called "the best of the good reading."^[37] Or perhaps I should call it Saint Teresa's law, since she was the first, as far as I know, to formulate it explicitly. A novice whom she observed reading "books of chivalry and others of the same sort" remembered her saying that that habit "did not disturb her, because from them I might be brought to read good ones and that I would profit from my inclination, because the same thing had happened to her."^[38]

"An adventure . . . is like an island in life"

In so relating novelistic experience to our own, we must be vigilantly aware that everything depends on such specialized vessels of experience as Huck and Jim, Parson Adams and Joseph Andrews, Frédéric Moreau and Rosanette, Ishmael and Queequeg, Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller, or Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom—to mention only some pairs in the tradition of Don Quijote and Sancho. Admittedly, they

[36] Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (New York: Harper, 1960), p. 134. Cited in Robert Penn Warren, Democracy and Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 7.

[37] The phrase is the title of an extensive section of volume 8 of Our Wonder World (Chicago: George L. Shuman, 1914). The ten-volume set is not a juvenile encyclopedia but rather an enchanting compendium of fact and fiction. This particular section, with its enticing illustrations and selections, provoked the imagination of Eudora Welty and constituted my own introduction to silent reading on a more elevated level than that offered by "Victor Appleton." The editor-in-chief of the whole set was Howard Benjamin Grose, but the subeditor who compiled "The Best of the Good Reading" is not credited by name.

[38] Cited by Francisco Márquez Villanueva, "La vocación literaria de Santa Teresa," Nueva Revista de Filología Hispanica 32 (1983), p. 357 n. 6.

are unequal in sensitivity, but in sharing their shared confrontation with Wilder's "outside world," we as readers learn from within ourselves just what it is like for them—according to their varieties and levels of consciousness—"to contemplate and experience" it. Story people, such as Amadís and his squire Gandalín, Pantagruel and Panurge, Cervantes's own Persiles and Segismunda, Candide and Doctor Pangloss, or Jacques and his "maître," only can communicate what happens to them and what they think about it—meaning what we should (or should not) think about it—which is a very different matter. Why? Leaving satire and allegory aside, it is time to make explicit the distinction between novel and romance that was implicit in our suspicion that a "good read" (Ortega's immersion) is as spongy a category as "good eats." In other words, some works of fiction are more novelistic than others.

What exactly is the difference between Don Quijote and Sancho exposed to the world they live in and Amadís and Gandalín encased unproblematically in theirs? Without wishing to belabor notions the meaning of which we all know intuitively, I propose an answer based on the distinction between adventure and experience suggested in an essay of the Austrian philosopher, sociologist, and source for Ortega, Georg Simmel. Entitled simply "The Adventure," it proposes that the least common denominator of happenings called adventures is not danger, excitement, or even suspense, but rather hermeticism. An adventure is a special sort of event and awareness of an event that seems cut out from (cut apart from) the ongoing flow of consciousness:

The most general form of adventure is its dropping out of the continuity of life. . . . An adventure is certainly part of our existence, directly contiguous with other parts which precede or follow it; at the same time, however, in its deeper meaning, it occurs outside the usual continuity of this life. . . . We ascribe to an adventure a beginning and end much sharper than those to be discovered in other forms of experience. . . . The adventure lacks that reciprocal interpenetration with adjacent parts of life which constitute "life-as-a-whole." It is like an is-

land in life which determines its beginning and end according to its own formative powers.^[39]

What surprises us in this definition is its replacement of our customary notion of adventures as dangerous happenings, from which we fortunately escape, with temporal delimitation. If we translate that into spatial terms, as does Simmel with his island comparison, we realize that it is not the accessories—shipwrecks, pirates, cannibals—that constitute the adventure, but the liquid frontier of the encircling shore. The very word island carries the connotation. And from that we may extrapolate a typology of adventurous settings: dungeons and caves, towers and tree houses, balloons and submarines, "wuthering heights" and secret passages, loci amoeni within impenetrable forests, green oases surrounded by impassable deserts, and many more, including the summit of Everest and the North and South poles.

Simmel surely would not deny (though he does not mention) that danger is the boon companion of adventure insofar as it carves out a discrete and more intense portion of experience. But it is not in itself adventurous any more than is

[39] Georg Simmel , ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1959), pp. 243–44. Again Proust and Bakhtin provide suggestive corroboration. Proust's discussion of the effects of alcohol is almost identical to Simmel's discussion of adventure: "L'alcool, en tendant exceptionellement mes nerfs, avait donné aux minutes actuelles une qualité, un charme qui n'avaient pas eu pour effet de me rendre plus apte ni même plus résolu à défendre; car en me les faisant préférer mille fois au reste de ma vie, mon exaltation les isolait, j'étais enfermé dans le present, comme les héros . . .; momentanément éclipsé, mon passé ne projetait plus devant moi cette ombre de lui même que nous appelons notre avenir" (Proust, A l'ombre , pp. 468–69, italics mine). ("The alcohol that I had drunk, by unduly straining my nerves, gave to the minutes as they came a quality, a charm which did not have the result of leaving me more ready, or indeed more resolute to inhibit them, prevent their coming; for while it made me prefer them a thousand times to anything else in my life, my exaltation made me isolate them from everything else; I was confined to the present, as heroes are . . .; eclipsed for the moment, my past no longer projected before me that shadow of itself which we call our future" [Within a Budding Grove , p. 159].) As for Bakhtin, his discussion of "adventure-time" as a distinct temporal phenomenon is equally pertinent. See The Dialogic Imagination , pp. 88–89.

love, despite our perception that sudden and tempestuous affairs (for example, the transitory but sharply outlined "shadow" of Proust's jeunes filles ) perform the same operation. The Spanish poet Pedro Salinas, translator of the first two volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu , further illustrates the point when he compares his evanescent beloved—here today and always on the verge of disappearance—to "an island/escaped from the map,/who passed by my side/ dressed as a girl / with fur of foam / on a green coat and a vast / spray of adventures."^[40] Conversely, how ironical it is that Sancho's insula should be on dry land where he can walk away when he pleases. Once again Cervantes, who had so many genuine adventures in galleys and prisons, is engaged in teasing the fictional variety.

Although Simmel seems to be referring to actual adventures of the sort we may have had and are happy to have survived, his perception of them as essentially hermetic enables us to comprehend in a new way the episodic structure of Alonso Quijano's favorite fiction. For as Alonso Quijano read romances of chivalry, so too we read mysteries, westerns, erotic romances, and sci-fi. All of us, not without an obscure sense of guilt, from time to time join the undiscriminating public in its addiction to accelerated and compartmentalized adventures—adventures finished and already hazy as soon as consumed. Such reading resembles nothing so much as the passing of a freight train, an adventurous spectacle by its very nature. Furthermore, as the Marxist critic André Würmser points out, if we wait a few years we can escape into them again almost without remembering the first time or even the second.^[41] It is easy to criticize this form of literacy as mind pollution; and instead of excusing it as indispensable training (as did Saint Teresa), certain exquisite

[40] Pedro Salinas, La voz a ti debida (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1949), p. 17, translation mine.

[41] See the prologue to André Würmser, L'assassin est mort le 1 (Paris: P. Dupont, 1960).

or self-righteous critics have used it to belabor all of prose fiction.^[42] "What, you are reading a novel?" one of my older relatives used to ask, unaware that she was echoing A. W. von Schlegel. What she also did not realize was that the book she fastidiously called a novel, if it really was a novel, was not a waste of time but a salvation of time.

". . . he said he didn't want no more adventures"

At this point we seem to have arrived at a conveniently neat set of antitheses: adventure versus experience, shallow skimming versus profound perusal, romance versus novel, escape versus self-discovery, "dropping out" versus "life as a whole," or even Tom's absurd make-believe versus Huck's pathetically novelistic and usually believable lies.^[43] However, precisely because these contrasts are so neat, we should remember Mark Twain's prefatory warning to readers of Huckleberry Finn: "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." For the novelistic "Chief of Ordnance," motives, morals, and plots (who knows what penalties he might have devised for persons attempting to find themes, myths,

[42] E. Noulet, in "Problèmes de lettres" (Diogène 14 [1956], pp. 127–44), includes a curious sampling of recent expressions of this disesteem.

[43] As noted, the oral epic depends on the myth—the believed truth—of what is said. The word is the thing (as in popular etymologies), and therefore to pronounce is to create. It is the villains—Ganelon, Infantes de Carrión, Mordred, Paris—who lie. In the novel, on the other hand, printed words no longer possess oral certainty. Hence the prevalent concern of novelists with perspectivism, illusion, delusion, hypocrisy, rumor, and out-and-out prevarication. Mark Twain goes one step further, insofar as his narrator's superb gift of oral truth-telling makes him into such a convincing, inveterate, and appealing liar—appealing in contrast to the shoddy and unconscious lies society tells to itself in the language of commonplaces. Dickens, Stendhal, and Galdós, as well as Virginia Woolf and Joyce, all share the same interest in the contrast of the truth toward which their protagonists strive with the mendacious Umgangssprache (local speech) of their milieus. But Cervantes, with his madman, and Mark Twain, with his unrepentant liar, accentuate the contrast by putting it in reverse.

or structures?) are abstractions—that is to say, lies—whereas this novel, like the Quijote and all true novels, has as its only claim to merit the immediacy of its truth. As Huck says about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (out of which he emerged autonomously in the same way the Don Quijote of Part II emerged from Part I): "That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth mainly. There were things which he stretched"—thereby, as we shall see, meeting the requirements of verisimilitude—"but mainly he told the truth" (chapter 1). And his new narrative persona, Huckleberry Finn, proposes to go on doing the same.

We have been warned, so let us hasten to confess that the antithesis of fictional adventure and fictional experience (the first inferior insofar as it flattens life and the second superior insofar as it enhances life) is as much of an abstraction as the three that our "Chief" has forbidden. It may be useful for correcting Ortega's notion that any fictional narrative is a novel if its "magic power" works. That is, it may be useful for defining the qualitative difference between Alonso Quijano's reading of the Amadís and our reading of the Quijote , or for that matter between reading the boyhood romance of Tom Sawyer and the novel supposedly written by his friend. But if we go on to interpret it as delineating a rigid and impenetrable generic frontier, it is an arrant falsehood. When Huck, after the perilous excursion aboard the Sir Walter Scott , explains to Jim that "these kind of things was adventures," Jim, who has just lived through it as a hair-raising experience, replies that "he didn't want no more adventures" (chapter 14). Similarly, when Don Quijote, after hearing Sansón Carrasco's armor Homerically clatter on the ground, wakes up Sancho and informs him in a tremulous voice, "Brother Sancho, we have an adventure," the latter replies, "But how do you know that this is an adventure?" (II.12). In both cases it is a matter of prior definition, the kind of vue de l'esprit we have been trying to avoid.

Therefore, in order to avoid whatever punishment this overgeneralization might deserve, I hasten to confess that adventure is a variety of experience and that every experience,

perceived and remembered as set apart from others, has an element of adventure. This confession, once made, allows us to ask and answer the obvious question posed by Simmel's definition: why is the storm scene in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn not just one more hermetic adventure? An island, a cave, and a storm taken together seem to fit all the requirements perfectly. Even more, the river chapters taken as a whole—centered on the raft and the wigwam and composed of such discrete episodes as the floating house, the wreck, the feud, the lynch party, and the swindles—seem fully to justify the word adventures in the title. The truth, of course, is that they are adventures, splendid adventures, but, as we have seen, they are nonetheless experienced in ongoing time, lived, remembered, and recounted temporally—not only as they happen ("now," "then," "next," "fst!") but also as coming from the past and going toward the future. The thunder that doses the passage cited from chapter 9—"like rolling empty barrels down stairs—where it's a long stairs and they bounce a good deal you know"—joins the entranced immediate experience of the narrative strangeling to the remembered mischief of his lost boyhood.^[44] As for the future, the shared companionship with Jim and the nascent project of his liberation begin right here.

However, it is not just in the memory and imagination of Huck and Don Quijote that novelistic passage of time is perceptible. Both narratives carry within each of their episodes all that was told in the past and all that is to be told—or might be told—in the future. In the Quijote Argamasilla sends forth its emissaries (the Priest, the Barber, and Sansón Carrasco) in order to effect the capture and return of the errant hidalgo, and up ahead are the Insula, the tournament at Zaragoza, and the final homecoming. It is the same in Huckleberry Finn .

[44] In spite of Huck's repeated assertion that he is "only a boy," the reader, after intimacy with his consciousness and capacity for experience, realizes that that, too, is a lie. For a more detailed discussion see my "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Experience of Samuel Clemens," in One Hundred Years of "Huckleberry Finn ," ed. Robert Sattelmeyer and J. Donald Crowley (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1985), pp. 15–25.

The gloomy exigencies of the "sivilizers" of Saint Petersburg provide a lasting contrast with the freedom of the river and make necessary the concluding act of disappearance. But what is even worse is our perception that Pap's world (which refutes "sivilization") comes creeping along the ever more squalid banks in pace with the drifting raft. In both books the characters aspire heroically to "work themselves free," in the words of Virginia Woolf, and the novel as such aspires to work its readers free.^[45] Admittedly, both endings are inevitably melancholy, and the consciousness of Huck (and, refracted through it, that of Jim longing for his family and prey to remorse for his mistreatment of his deaf child) is as forlorn as that of Don Quijote during and after his sojourn in the Duke's palace. Nevertheless, their consciousness does possess the magic power to transform romance into novel, to infuse adventure with experience. Time goes on being conquered through time, until Tom Sawyer (Huck's Amadís or paladin of adventure) reappears and subjects him once again to the slavery of comic squiredom.

Thus, adventure and experience are not mutually exclusive but rather complement each other. As Cervantes discovered and the novelists who have read us—or who have enabled us to read ourselves more profoundly—have known ever since, it is the intimate collaboration of the two that glues us to the printed page. In our best-loved romances—the endlessly revivable adventure classics of our childhood—the element of personal experience, whether that of Jim Hawkins hiding in the apple barrel or Tom and Becky lost in the cave, makes what "happens" all the more vivid and credible. Conversely, experience in novels is heightened and in-

[45] Actually, Virginia Woolf is talking novelistically about herself. In A Writer's Diary she says that writing Jacob's Room "was a necessary step, for me, in working free," but the turn of the thought is peculiarly relevant to what novels in the Cervantine tradition are all about. As Américo Castro points out in his introduction to the 1960 Porrúa edition of the Quijote (p. xxv), the inhabitants of the book spend all their time either in "freeing their own lives" or in "prying into [i.e., "interrupting," as we shall see] those of everybody else" (translated by Gilman and King in An Idea of History , p. 99).

tensified when framed adventurously. The interminable ongoingness of life in time, the depiction of which makes so many recent succès d'estime unreadable, needs segmentation for its appreciation. Without experience, novels are not novels; without adventure, they are oppressive and stagnant. Proust, who observed himself in the process of novelizing perhaps even more attentively than Cervantes or Stendhal (if that is possible), explains the conjunction of the two as intense moments of "entry," which it would be "regrettable" to ignore: "L'existence n'a guère d'intérêt que dans les journées où la poussière des réalités est mêlée de sable magique, où quelque vulgaire incident devient un ressort romanesque."^[46]

Here is the enchanting frontier zone that we, as inveterate readers, adore—whether in the Quijote , in Huckleberry Finn , in Typhoon , in La Chartreuse , in Splendeurs et misères de courtisanes , in War and Peace , in Our Mutual Friend , or in A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs . Realism in such novels as these is derived from the way we experience outside reality (Lubbock's unfolding temporal "process"), and at the same time it is intensified and composed artistically within successive frames of adventure. For those who have learned how, such reading submits them to far more marvelous possibilities, coincidences, emotions, and milieus, as well as to far more dreadful encounters and melancholy disappointments than they might expect to experience "in all the days of their lives" (II.73). With these words Don Quijote takes leave of his adventures and foresees the rest of his sad journey homeward, to sanity and death. If he is never to see Dulcinea, adventures dissipate and the novel fades away.

"The novel begins when love seeks to know its own history"

Comprehension of novelistic life as a rosary of adventures strung on the unbroken thread of the hours, days, and weeks

[46] Proust, A l'ombre , p. 527. ("Existence to us is hardly interesting save on the days on which the dust of realities is shot with magic sand, on which some trivial incident of life becomes a spring of romance" [Within a Budding Grove , p. 230].)

of biographical time effectively supplements immediate experience (the storm) with that other kind, which we referred to as cumulative, the gathering up of "nows" into the account of a whole life seen as a journey (hence the German Erfahrung ). Accordingly, let us now follow the young Ortega to Marburg where (along with Boris Pasternak) he studied under the neo-Kantian aesthetician and philosopher Hermann Cohen. In his Aesthetik des reinen Gefühls (1912) Cohen was concerned, among other things, to disrupt Goethe's overly neat classification of Dichtung into its three "natural forms" (epic, lyric, and dramatic); and in his effort to distinguish the novel from other kinds of narration, he emphasizes the importance of Erfahrung . The special kind of compartmentalized adventures we call love affairs, says Cohen, can on occasion be so meaningful that they are transformed into lasting love. And the novel comes into being—is born, invented, discovered—"when love seeks to know its own history."^[47]

Although this may sound as if Cohen intended to derive the whole of the genre from the tradition of pastoral romances (a notion not without a certain validity, as we shall see), I think his perception can be extended in the light of our tentative conclusions: novelistic reading begins and voluptuous identification comes to an end whenever a protagonist turns to the past for self-understanding. However apparently episodic a given work of fiction may be, if the characters (a Fabrice, a Huck, or Cervantes's pair) remember and are concerned with remembering—that is, if they begin to wonder where their freight train came from and to whom the freight will be delivered—the hermeticism of isolated adventures is over and the novel is in the wings. Don Quijote, as we shall see, is even concerned with the identity of the engineer. If an adventure is experienced rather than just "had," the ad-

[47] Hermann Cohen, System der Philosophie , Dritter Teil, Aestetik des reinen Gefühls , Erster Band, Zweiter Teil (Berlin: Bruno Cassirier, 1912), p. 122. For Cohen the Quijote is the Grundform of the novel (p. 121) because in it love is an Erlebnis (adventure, experience) and not, as in the epic, a Kampfpreis (struggle) (p. 122).

venturer inevitably begins to delve into recollection and, in so doing, projects what he finds there into a vocation. Or to say it more simply, if love feels the need to be aware of its own history, it is because it wants to go on having a history.

Let us return for a moment to the stories of the bad boy and the outcast. In both we accompany Tom and Huck through the series of adventures that are explicit in the titles. Yet Tom is the hero of a boyhood romance, and Huck inhabits and recounts our nation's greatest novel. In the case of Tom, just as in that of Amadís, one adventure follows another—glade, graveyard, trial, haunted house, island, and finally the cave—with ever-increasing peril and excitement. Tom is a born adventurer whose life is (as Ortega wrote in an essay clearly derived from Simmel's) "punctiform," "spasmodic," and "exempt from today and tomorrow."^[48] Aunt Polly more charitably describes him as "giddy" and "like a young colt."

Furthermore, in accord with Simmel's intuition that adventures tend to take on the quality of a dream and seem to have been experienced by another person, Tom, "as he lay in the early morning recalling the incidents of his great adventure [the treasure glimpsed perilously in the haunted house] . . . noticed that they seemed curiously subdued and far away—somewhat as if they had happened in another world or in a time long gone by." "It must have been a dream," Tom concludes.^[49] And then afterward, at the beginning and at the ending of the sequel to his own personal romance, Tom loses our interest and acquires his author's disdain by going professional, inventing his dreams and rehearsing his alter egos. Loss of spontaneity—giddiness or coltishness—is the adventurer's spiritual death. One suspects that it was precisely this that Samuel Clemens feared had happened to him when he became Mark Twain.

In any case, the contrast between the artificial adventures

[48] José Ortega y Gasset, "Aventuras del Capitán Alonso de Contreras," Obras Completas , 3: 505–6.

[49] Mark Twain, Adventures of Tom Sawyer , chapter 27.

invented by Tom and those of Huck is both intentional and crucial to Huckleberry Finn . In reading both, we perceive vividly how Huck's adventures are infused with the time of his life, which in turn explores, enriches, and beckons to the time of our lives. Having just seen and heard the thunderstorm in its time, let us now reread the climactic paragraph when Huck steps on shore for good and his narrative reaches its true ending. Huck has just finished a letter to Miss Watson telling her where she can find Jim and fetch him back into slavery. But then: "I laid the paper down and set there . . . thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing . . ." (chapter 31). Huck's decision, based on the mine of living he shares with us—time remembered as time passing, Erlebnisse that are now Erfahrungen —is to abandon conscience (which insists that Jim be returned) and to stick to his project of emancipation, even if he has to "go to hell." His life is his. It is neither the collected adventures of another person nor is it enslaved to society.

Finally, as far as Cohen's history of love is concerned, it is here patent, just as it is in the relationship of Don Quijote and Sancho, that novelistic love need not be sexual. Indeed, in such novels as these I dare say it is also shared by the author and the reader.

"Those who seek nourishment in the manna of an incitement"

Having unraveled definitions of the novel as ruthlessly as I can (and perhaps more than I should), it is now time to compensate by considering the score of the violinist. What kind of people, what kind of language, and what kind of lessons in reading have novelists in the Cervantine tradition been wont to employ in order to bring adventure and experience into incandescent fusion? As Percy Lubbock reminded us, each novel is not only a process; it is also shaped as a "whole." It has a style and, if not necessarily a plot, at least an implicit structure. It is there on our table waiting for us to

pick it up, to read it again, to ponder its purpose, and to scrutinize the artistic means employed to achieve that purpose. Furthermore, although we have refused to draw frontiers between novels and nonnovels, it is clear to apt readers that, as we remarked at the outset, some works of fiction are more novelistic than others. The questions now are how and why .

These queries will be answered at much more length and in greater detail in the essays to follow. But for now, as far as the characters (or lives) are concerned, comparison of Huck with Robinson Crusoe, Marcel, Werther, Alyosha, or Yossarian (names chosen more or less at random) indicates not surprisingly that they all have a special openness, receptivity, and even vulnerability to experience, as well as excellent memories. The frequently advanced notion of antiheroism is negative in its implications. If lives such as these can be termed antiheroic, it is not because the characters are less than heroes but because they are more. They are immensely more sensitive and sentient than any self-conscious and bemedaled hero would permit himself to be. Goethe was hinting at this truth when he spoke of the passivity of the new protagonists, but he would have been closer to the mark had he recognized that vulnerability and spiritual impetus, as in the case of Don Quijote, are not mutually exclusive. Cervantes designed a hero who would seek adventures and, like poor Jim after the horror of boarding the Sir Walter Scott , experience the consequences.

As Américo Castro has insisted in a fundamental essay, many of the most appealing novelistic existences combine an extraordinary ability to register and recall with indomitable self-propulsion. As against the excitement of a chance adventure, "they seek nourishment in the manna of an incitement."^[50] Sometimes this may be an obsession, sometimes it may be the noblest of vocations; but it is always a source of forward movement along the chosen chemin .

[50] Américo Castro, "Incarnation in Don Quijote ," in An Idea of History , p. 27.

At first glance Huck Finn hardly seems to fit Castro's description. He is a drifter, not a charger, and, like Sancho, he is concerned most of the time with being comfortable. On the other hand, despite the acute mental discomfort of his aching conscience, he never abandons the quest for Jim's freedom. We shall return to the notion of incitement when we begin to explore the Quijote from within, but at this point we may observe how Castro's term illuminates the lives engendered by Stendhal, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Melville, Conrad, and Galdós:

This is the significance of Cervantes' strange predilection for the unbalanced (for the "incited") of all types and his open disesteem for the Knight of Green Greatcoat, or for the Duke's private priest, insulated against any untoward draft that might ruffle their paralytic, generic existences. Contrast those limited lives with the inner richness of Don Quijote, in whom is incarnated the dual process of achieving the plenitude of his existence, incited by an illusion, and of being himself the creator of Dulcinea. Passing from illusion to illusion, his is an existence that finds justification and completeness in itself.^[51]

All of this is a way of saying that Don Quijote and his descendants are far more intensely alive in both the active and the passive voices than we are—hence their magnetism for our lives.

Having admired both the radical otherness and the alluring aliveness of these strange beings who enhance our lives in the process of feeding on them, we should be all the more wary of imputing to them psychological verisimilitude. Admittedly, certain novels do resemble case histories, but that is not a prerequisite of the genre. The stages of our personal growth have nothing to do with the incited individuals who inhabit novels belonging to the Cervantine mainstream. If we stop to think about it, how incongruous it is that the Huck of Tom Sawyer or the Huck who confesses his resistance to education in the initial chapters of his own novel (he could read and write "a little") should so suddenly have expanded the range and depth of his awareness and so superbly have com-

[51] Castro, "Incarnation," p. 27.

municated the Mississippi adventure-experience! There is intentionally no resemblance at all to calculated Bildung or Entwicklung in the change that occurs explosively when he is caught by Pap and taken away from Tom.

At the beginning Huck is still a boy who wants to belong to the gang and who, when alone, is afraid of the dark: "I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead" (chapter 2). Only the familiar "twelve licks" of the town clock and Tom's "me-yow" bring consolation. But just six chapters later the flow of nocturnal time becomes the habitat—the music—of his soul and of ours:

When I woke up I didn't know where I was for a minute. I set up and looked around, a little scared. Then I remembered. The river looked miles and miles across. The moon was so bright I could 'a' counted the drift logs that went a-slipping along, black and still, hundreds of yards out from shore. Everything was dead quiet, and it looked late and smelt late. You know what I mean—I don't know the words to put it in.
(chapter 7)

And then at the end, when he submits meekly to Tom's play adventures at the Phelps's, we are just as nonplussed. Although other fictional lives may speak from the couch of the author-analyst, that kind of coherence is not essential to the fusion of adventure and experience. What has happened is something else. Huck has entranced us with the naive sensitivity of his wondering awareness; we have revived him once again with eye-to-eye and ear-to-ear resuscitation. We are not one—we do not identify ourselves with his adventures (they could never be ours!)—yet each of us exists in the other with a symbiotic intimacy that is strange both to psychology and to other kinds of novels.

Thus, although intensely alive, neither Huck and Jim nor Fabrice and Gina nor Don Quijote and Sancho should be understood as if they were real people or made to resemble real people. Rather, they are caricatures suddenly temporalized—that is to say, suddenly made conscious. Those recent critics who speak of the novel as the genre of passing time or as portraiture of life in time often attend primarily either to

the days and years of chronicled waxing and waning—the time of diapers, crutches, spring evenings, and autumn days—or to the nexus of collective history with personal history.^[52] But beneath this epidermis the novel at its best can offer something more magical: self-propelled, incited duration capable of invigorating our own. If adventure fiction is voluptuous and psychological fiction is interesting, the novel in full flower offers a far more intense and lasting form of happiness: that of encountering our best living, cleansed of daily compromise and impurity, nourished with new life, once again free and eager to search for meaning along the uncertain chemin .

"I have always trusted this voice"

Recognition that caricatures can be intensely conscious immediately confronts us with the problem of the language—or, rather, languages—of the novel. As readers, we know that the caricaturesque depiction of Don Quijote and Sancho, Parson Adams and Joseph Andrews, and Huck and Jim is not visual but rather oral. Granted, Cervantes amused himself (in chapter 9) with conversion of his hero into a grotesque woodcut, and Mark Twain was very much concerned with the accompanying illustrations. But what was even more important to them was to bring their creatures to life in speech—or, to be more precise, in the interplay between a character's speech and the writer's speech, both of them silent and both of them heard in the process of reading.

As we said earlier, realism is real in such novels as these not because of accurate Scottian or Balzacian description but because they present reality in the same way we know it in our lives, as an unfolding process. As a result, novel readers are trained to submit not to more or less solemnly intoned phrases (whether lyric, epic, or dramatic) but to clusters of

[52] Further comments and bibliography are to be found in my Galdós and the Art of the European Novel: 1867–1887 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981).

unpronounced, immediately assimilated speech, printed speech that draws on the latent vocabulary of our mind and rearranges it into new sequences. This is, as we shall see, what Cervantes's Canon from Toledo condemned (his criticism is far more profound than he intended it to be!) as a heretical "nuevo modo de vida"—a novel kind of life.

As for us, we are too busy to think such thoughts. We are reading, and, as Ortega pointed out, when we are thus engaged, the here and now of lamp and chair, as well as the page itself, all disappear. They submerge into a silent voice—really a chorus of silent voices that guide us down a fiver or across "the ancient and renowned plain of Montiel." These are not geographical settings, like the Bay of Naples described in a guidebook, nor are they myths. Rather, in the process of telling, they become a continuing symphony of experiential music punctuated with the rhythm of adventure. As Stendhal remarked simply in his marginalia, "Le roman doit raconter."^[53]

The language of the novel, as distinguished from the styles of individual novelists, has been described from various points of view by Albert Thibaudet, Stephen Ullmann, Ktähe Hamburger, David Lodge, Dorrit Cohn, and others. But the question suggested by the notion of the narrative voice as a form of caricature remains: how does printed speech communicate the indispensable otherness of novelistic experience? How does it turn our experience into somebody else's experience? For our answer we had best turn to a practitioner, Eudora Welty:

Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear . As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches

[53] In the manuscript of Stendhal's Lucien Leuwen , cited in S. de Sacy, "Le miroir sur la grande route," Mercure de France (May 1949), p. 69.

me through the reader-voice. I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers—to read as listeners—and with all writers, to write as listeners. It may be part of the desire to write. The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth, for me. Whether I am right to trust so far I don't know. By now I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.

My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make my changes. I have always trusted this voice.^[54]

The tongue is ours—English, French, or Spanish, as the case may be—but it is spoken differently, both by the author and by his characters. In its uniquely personal rhythms, vocabulary and intonations it conveys in immediate intimacy what I can only term Huck's Huckness or Don Quijote's Quixotism. We know them and live them in their voices, precisely because those voices are the novelist's score. In short, the language of the novel is a strange species of transformed speech—accelerated and silenced, personalized and intensified, printed but retaining its ancient creative magic when played in our souls. It was this speech that the great masters of the nineteenth-century novel all learned from Cervantes. Even as I write, I can hear the voice of Conrad's Marlow, although I have never listened to a single one of those novels read aloud. On the other hand, the voices of Amadís and Montalvo are so flat and stilted, so lacking in caricature, that aural retention is fleeting.

This seemingly paradoxical notion of silent speech is so essential to the present argument that it will be necessary to call additional witnesses to the stand. To begin with, Bakhtin, who, as every up-to-date critic knows, explains the phenomenon of the novel as a dialogue of "languages," has this to say:

But this material of the work is not dead, it is speaking, signifying (it involves signs); we not only see it and perceive it but in it we can always hear voices (even while reading silently to

[54] Welty, One Writer's Beginnings , p. 11.

ourselves). . . . Beginning with any text we always arrive, in the final analysis, at the human voice, which is to say we come up against the human being. But the text is always imprisoned in dead material of some sort. . . . In the completely real-life time-space where the work resonates . . . we find as well a real person—one who originates spoken speech as well as the inscription and the book—and real people who are hearing or reading the text.^[55]

Along with Bakhtin, two practicing novelists, Proust and Wilder, provide corroborative testimony. Proust discusses voice as a form of characterization: "Quand je causais avec une de mes amies, je m'apercevais que le tableau original, unique de son individualité, m'était ingénieusement dessiné, tyraniquement imposé, aussi bien par les inflexions de sa voix que par celles de son visage."^[56] Wilder is even more helpful (in part because he is reflecting on reading the Quijote in Spanish): "The whole experience has renewed the realization that all books live by the voice of their author, that all books are personality."^[57]

This brings up the problem of oral reproduction, that social reading to an assembled group that began with writing itself and lasted into the twentieth century. Obviously, novels can be read aloud, and many of us remember our first experience of silent literacy as resulting from our impatience with parental tempo. In any case, it is a matter of record that both Dickens and Mark Twain enjoyed reading aloud enormously on their grand tours. And so must Cervantes have done, since Avellaneda (the author of the apocryphal continuation) seems to have caught wind of certain episodes in Part II from those who had heard portions of it read to others while it was still a work in progress.^[58] However, it is my belief that such

[55] Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination , pp. 252–53.

[56] Proust, A l'ombre , p. 579. ("When I talked with any one of my friends I was conscious that the original, the unique portrait of her individuality had been skilfully traced, tyranically imposed on my mind as much by the inflections of her voice as by those of her face" [Within a Budding Grove , pp. 289–90].)

[57] Wilder, Journals , p. 110.

[58] I see no other reasonable way to account for such similarities as the interruption of Maese Pedro's puppet show and the interruption of a comedia in Avellaneda, the conversion of Don Quijote into a fool at the Duke's palace and his treatment at the hands of Don Alvaro and his friends, and others.

performances, because of their accentuation of suspense and their search for immediate laughter, have a tendency to convert novels written for silent reading into comic romances.^[59] When I recently read to my grandchildren the story told by Huck, it was received by them as a sequel to the story of Tom. Furthermore, if we listen closely and silently, say, to the voice of Jim, we realize that the comic fortune-telling in chapter 4, where everything depends on real or imaginary pronunciation of a typical dialect, by chapter 15 is replaced with personal rhythm and command of intonation. It is then that the oral experience of Jim's reproach of Huck for having played a sorry practical joke causes the latter to humble himself. Jim's voice has become his own.

To sum up, although Mark Twain comments at the beginning on the number and the accuracy of the dialects he reproduces, Huckleberry Finn is not a dialect novel. As a narrative it is characterized by its careful control of spelling, syntax, and punctuation, as is apparent in the passages here cited. Not the narrator (who wouldn't have known how, or how far, to go) but the author needs these forms of conventional assistance in order to direct the novel not to our vocal chords, palate, tongue, and lips but directly into our souls. There is probably no one left alive capable of reading Huck's prose correctly, but it works novelistically, all the same.

"That grave irony which 'Cervantes' only has inviolably preserv'd"

Audition of the interplay of the author's (or of his persona's) narrative voice with the characters' dialogic voices allows us

[59] One of the objections raised by several scholars who listened to the lecture on which this chapter is based at the English Institute had to do with Mark Twains oral performances of his book. However, others pointed out that the passages he preferred to read were taken from the final chapters, when the novel (under the implacable direction of Tom) reverts to comic romance.

to comprehend Alberto Moravia's explanation of how the Quijote was possible: "la capacitá di Cervantes di essere al tempo stesso dentro e fuori del suo mondo."^[60] In other words, the author from within the work (a fellow reader, as we shall see) communicates ironically with his public over the characters' heads. One can only surmise, more or less intelligently, how (or whether) in the seventeenth century the general public, attuned as it was to fictions lacking in irony—the chivalric and pastoral romances—heard Cervantes's voice.^[61] Admittedly, there was a minority of dissident readers (disbelievers and persons of questionable lineage) who received with perverse pleasure the secreted and secretive gall that exudes from every line of La Celestina, Lazarillo de Tormes , and Guzmán de Alfarache .^[62] But these, too, might have ignored

[60] ". . . the capacity of Cervantes to be at the same time inside and outside his own world." Corriere della Sera , Sept. 29, 1963.

[61] Obviously they did hear Cervantes when he regaled them with pastiches of their favorite reading, but that is not the same as listening to his own personal voice.

[62] The social background of the Quijote obviously requires book-length, rather than footnote, discussion. But it cannot be entirely ignored even in a treatment of the aesthetic genesis of the Quijote . Ever since the expulsion of the Jews and the founding of the Inquisition, there had existed in Spain a marginalized caste composed of the descendants of those who in 1492 preferred baptism to exile. These people were subjected to constant observation and systematic discrimination. Various organizations (resident colleges, guilds, Knights of Saint James, cathedral chapters) required more or less exhaustive genealogical investigations for admittance to membership. It is significant that Cervantes, who was undoubtedly a good Catholic (and like other so-called New Christians was influenced by the ideas of Erasmus), never subjected himself to such an investigation. However, far more annoying than exclusion was the atmosphere of suspicion, malicious gossip, and dangerous slander prevalent in the day-to-day existence of an honor-crazed society where tongues could be more fatal than swords. Within this situation reactions ranged from fervent adhesion to bitter alienation. As an example of both extremes, Queen Isabella's confessor, the saintly Fray Hernando de Talavera, specifically warned his fellow New Christians against their prevalent "sin of irony." In any case, Cervantes, instead of expressing the resentment characteristic of his literary predecessors, treated the whole matter with a humor more reminiscent of Fielding's reference to the equally self-righteous (but less pious) horrors of eighteenth-century England. That humor was blessedly his human triumph over the society that rejected him in spite of his heroism at Lepanto and his suffering in Algerian captivity. Américo Castro has discussed the Quijote in these terms in Cervantes y los casticismos (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1966) and De la edad confiictiva (Madrid: Taurus, 1961), neither of which has yet been translated. Further discussion in English and a general bibliography may be found in my The Spain of Fernando de Rojas (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972). What then is humor ("grave," as opposed to embittered, irony) and from what self-destructive follies does it preserve us? The answer is to be found in the Quijote , in Joseph Andrews , and in Huckleberry Finn , as well as in certain classic motion pictures. I certainly cannot define it verbally, but when Woody Allen is saved from despair by the Marx Brothers in Hannah and Her Sisters , this occurs with visual cogency. As much as La Celestina has meant to me, I nevertheless understand perfectly Cervantes's stricture of it: "a book in my opinion divine, if it only had veiled human depravity somewhat more."

an irony intentionally muted by the Quijote 's overtly comic narrative surface.

The author of that most painfully méchant of novels, Bend Sinister , like the author of Candide , professed to be shocked both by the cruelty of Cervantes's treatment of his hero and by the gales of laughter that that cruelty supposedly provoked. As evidence, Nabokov mentions a widely circulated anecdote concerning Philip III, who

upon looking from the balcony of his palace was struck by the singular behavior of a young student who was sitting on a bench in the shade of a cork oak (quercus suber) with a book and frantically clapping his thigh and giving vent to wild shrieks of laughter. The king remarked that the fellow was either crazy or was reading Don Quixote . A rapid courtier ran out to find the answer. The fellow, as you have guessed, was reading Don Quixote .^[63]

The implication, of course, is that Cervantes's public was as deaf to his narrative voice as were Nabokov and Unamuno.

The anecdote is possibly apocryphal and surely exaggerated, but the fact that the reader was a "young student" may be significant. When Sansón Carrasco informs Don Quijote and Sancho that "those who are most given to reading [Part I]" are "pages" and that "there are no lordly antechambers where one can't find a copy of Don Quijote " (II.4), he implies

[63] Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on "Don Quixote " (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), p. 53.

that these mischievous inferiors understood very well Cervantes's muted criticism of the pseudogreatness of the caballeros (knights of the court) and grandees of the time. The student, in other words, may have also been laughing at his neighbors, Philip III and his band of obsequious courtiers (pseudogiants all!), and not just at the beatings and the rueful dialogue they occasion. He could have heard the voice of Cervantes and could have understood how the actions and reactions of his two supremely naive protagonists are used in order to illuminate ironically a society, swollen with self-importance, that refused to make a place for him despite his past heroism.^[64]

This is at best a reasonable supposition, but what is certain is that in the more or less irrepressibly satirical climate of eighteenth-century England (so different from the vicious, but blessedly stupid, vigilance of seventeenth-century Spain) the "grave irony" of Cervantes's voice was amplified and became dearly audible to a host of witty readers: Peter Anthony Motteux (1693), Alexander Pope (1728), Walter Harte (1730), Charles Jarvis (1742), William Dodd (1751), Richard Owen Cambridge (from whom the epigraph to this part of the essay is taken) (1752), and Joseph Warton (1806), among others.^[65] It was precisely within such a relatively open, orally attentive, and, in certain milieus, self-consciously irreverent society that it was possible for Henry Fielding to write Joseph Andrews "in the manner of Cervantes." After listening with amused adoration to his master's voice, Fielding experimented in projecting his own more emphatically. He would engage his readers with facetious and worldly-wise comments, which would be validated by the often painful adventure-experiences and the naive reactions to them of Parson Adams and Joseph. And since silent reception could now be taken for granted, his intention was to capture minds one by one

[64] Rabelais, Bakhtin reminds us, was even harder on those hierarchies. See The Dialogic Imagination , p. 240.

[65] See Norman Knox, The Word "Irony" and Its Contexts, 1500–1755 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1961), pp. 167–71.

and so to free them from social foreshortening: from inhibitions, prejudices, "affectations," hypocrisy, and, worst of all, habitually condoned cruelty and injustice; or, as he says it himself, "to hold the glass to thousands in their closets , that they may contemplate their deformity and endeavor to reduce it" (italics mine).^[66] They might, thanks to him, just possibly work themselves at least partially free!

It was in this programmatic formulation of the basic scheme of Cervantine irony that Fielding might be said to have invented the novel. In his reading of the Quijote and his writing of Joseph Andrews he transformed what for Cervantes (as we shall see) was not only an ageneric but an antigeneric fictional experiment into a genre, which is what Stendhal recognized when he perceptively anticipated Ortega: "Ce roman [he was referring not to Joseph Andrews but to Tom Jones ] est aux autres ce que L'Iliade est aux poèmes épiques."^[67] There are other important things to be said, particularly the compounding of Quixotesque and Sanchesque traits in the characterization of Parson Adams around a core of absentmindedness and within the carapace of an invulnerable and unquestioned religious incitement. But it was Fielding's conscious adaptation of Cervantine irony that opened the way to the future of the novel.

There is, however, another function of novelistic irony, perceived dearly by a fellow inventor, Lawrence Sterne, that

[66] Introduction to Joseph Andrews . Perhaps I am taking Fielding's perspicacity too much for granted. Marcel Proust, in Du côté de chez Swann , is still amazed at the solitary intimacy within which novels operate: "Qu'importe des lors que les actions, les émotions de ces êtres d'un nouveau genre nous apparaissent comme vraies, puisque nous les avons faites nôtres, puisque c'est en nous qu'elles se produisent . . . tandis que nous tournons fiévreusement les pages du livre, la rapidité de nôtre respiration, et l'intensité de notre régard?" ([Paris: Gallimard, 1954], p. 105). ("After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening . . . while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes" [Marcel Proust, Swann's Way , trans. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Modern Library, 1928), p. 106].)

[67] Stendhal, Memoires d'un touriste , vol. 1 (Paris: Le Divan, 1929), p. 52. ("This novel is to the other novels what The Iliad is to epic poems.")

is even more crucial. When we read in Tristram Shandy that that novel in reverse was intended "to rebuke a vicious taste which has crept into thousands . . . reading straightforward in quest of adventures . . .,"^[68] we realize that it is precisely the ironical intervention of the author's voice that prevents us from reading the Quijote in the fashion that Alonso Quijano read the Amadís . The rhythmic beat of adventure, at once comic and fearful, that is so audible in the Quijote and its offspring (and not entirely absent in any novel) entices the youthful or the unprepared seventeenth-century reader to receive it as a parody of romance. J. B. Cohen inexcusably mistranslates the title as The Adventures of Don Quixote , thus ignoring Cervantes's ironical equation of the name with the book itself. That is, Cervantes presents us not with a story but with a living person.

As we know and as we shall presently observe in greater detail, Cervantes was so intent on preventing this kind of elementary immersion that he added the oratorical voice of Cide Hamete and the skeptically amused voice of the anonymous Morisco translator to his own. Moreover, the oral caricature of which we have spoken and the cruel absurdity of individual episodes also prevent identification with the protagonists. We are not Don Quijote; we are not allowed to be Don Quijote; and we gradually learn that not being him allows him to identify with us, to revive in his dialogue all that we have experienced. Don Quijote comes alive with poignant intensity because he assimilates and gives new and sharply caricaturesque form both to the ongoing present of our lives and to all that we have lived through. And the more that we have lived through, the more abundant will be the cornucopia.

When Thackeray shocks us by referring ironically to his characters as puppets at their moments of most intense liv-

[68] Volume 1, chapter 20. Ten chapters earlier, he names directly the origin of the notion—"the peerless knight of La Mancha, whom, by the by, I love more and would have gone farther to have paid a visit to, than the greatest hero of antiquity."

ing, it is not only because he wants us to wonder whether we, too, may have attached strings. In addition, he wants us to be aware of the strange vital duplication, the observation of ourselves in somebody else, that novels can provide at their best. Before rejecting this paradox—the paradox of at once being ourselves and recognizing a purified, intensified, and sanctified incarnation of our personal experiences in another life—let my reader reread Huck's reflection on the brightness of the thunderstorm over Jackson's Island or Cervantes's creation of darkness in chapters 19 and 20 of Part I, which will be the subject of the essay to follow. He will then, I trust, realize how much those novels have taken from him and have done to him, as well as how important it is that it should have been taken and done.

Before concluding, I should like to meditate on a question that is implicit in these remarks. What about Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ? How is irony conveyed in first-person narratives from which the intrusive, authorial voice is rigorously excluded? My answer is tentative but not complicated. The voice of Huck, like the voice of Lazarillo de Tormes, is also the voice of the author listening to himself, as he writes. We hear them both, and what we hear is the "history" of the author's love for his character in the very act of submitting him to the challenges of the adventures. Huck is not beaten, except by Pap at the beginning, but in his naiveté he is exposed just as cruelly as Don Quijote, Lazarillo, and Parson Adams to the most sordid, corrupt, inane, and violent experiences Middle America had to offer. It is this combination of deep affection and ruthless Obdachlosigkeit that fuses adventure with experience and that constitutes the pervasive irony of the novel.

As we know, there are not a few estimable novelists who, instead of listening to their characters as they "work themselves" free (and in so doing free us from the "and then . . . and then" of Forster's "naked worm" of time), bind them to evil or trap them in naturalistic determinism. We admire, experience, and teach such novels (they are not romances), although in so doing, we relinquish our own freedom and

magnify our miseries. Yet definition aside, we must not ignore the miraculous potentiality of the novel to give birth to Don Quijote, Prince Myshkin, Huck Finn, Fabrice del Dongo, Parson Adams, and others—the eccentric latter-day saviors of an age, the values of which, as Lukács announced and Cervantes first discovered, are in a state of abject devaluation.