"A cloth woven from various and beautiful skeins"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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