"You have an untutored ingenio"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As we detected from his remarks on La Galatea twenty

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

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

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

[42] Cervantes, Prologue to La Galatea .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is a complementary passage within the text of Part I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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