4
Discovery

"My sole object has been to arouse men's contempt for all fabulous and absurd stories . . ."

Among other conclusions, our discussion of Cervantes as an inventor demonstrates that his ambivalent assessment of his own talents cannot be separated from his generally acerbic estimation of the literature of his time. What now remains to be done is to change course and to examine the positive contribution of overt literary criticism to the creation of the Quijote , a book made from books and about books. Why did Cervantes entitle it simply El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha and not The History of . . . or The Adventures of . . ., as J. M. Cohen begins the title of his translation? The answer already suggested is that its hero is a book just as we saw Cardenio to be his own story. Or conversely, the book is a person named Don Quijote, whom many of the inhabitants of Part II have already "read"! In other words, we shall now be concerned with comprehending the Quijote 's symbiosis of literature and life, not just in the simplistically comic First Sally, but with all the deadly serious implications discovered critically during the course of the Second.

As we have seen, when Cervantes speaks about his reasons for writing the Quijote , he is uncharacteristically unambiguous. And not just in the Prologue to Part I. At the end of Part II he is equally outspoken: "My sole object has been to arouse men's contempt for all fabulous and absurd stories of knight-errantry" (I.74). Is this just an elementary form of moral camouflage designed to deceive the narrow minds of self-righteously censorious readers? Possibly or in part. However, no less an authority than Vicente Llorens recom-

mends that we take these statements seriously as a point of critical departure.^[1] The Quijote began and begins as a satire of the Amadís and its progeny, just as Joseph Andrews began and begins as a satire of Pamela written "in the manner of Cervantes." Without taking that initial intention into account, we cannot hope to delve more deeply into what Augusto Centeno termed its "intent"^[2] —the underlying thematic complexity beneath the satirical thesis.

But why did Cervantes begin in this way? As is well known (at least among Hispanists), by the year 1600 the romance of chivalry was about as moribund as the western is today, and it seems absurd to have spent so much time and effort in order to "arouse men's contempt" for it. It is as if Saul Bellow were to pick Zane Grey as his literary target. This is a classic question for students of Cervantes, and in order to answer it, let us replace the interrogative why with what . What was Cervantes trying to communicate to his readers with his persistent assertion of such a simplistic excuse for writing? An initial answer might be that that was his way of calling attention to the unprecedented interpenetration and interdependence of criticism and creation in his art of composition. As we have seen, this novel, perhaps more than any other before or since, was conceived as a systematic, calculated, carefully woven fabric, of which the woof was creative invention and the warp was critical meditation. In it fiction—somewhat as in the art of Picasso after 1914—is created in the act of destroying fiction. Understood in this way, the paradox of erecting such an enormous màquina (as Cervantes would have called it) for such a futile task is no longer paradoxical. Rather, these unambiguous assertions communicate forcefully the unprecedented importance of literary criticism and critical theory in the making of the Quijote .

Cervantine bibliography is replete with cogent and well-

[1] Vicente Llorens, "La intención del Quijote ," in Literatura, historia, política (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1967), pp. 205–27.

[2] Augusto Centeno, The Intent of the Artist (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941), Introduction.

informed studies of the novelist as a critic.^[3] However, those that I have read attempt to abstract (and then to reformulate) a coherent critical doctrine from the treatises of Cervantes's neo-Aristotelian mentors, from the pertinent chapters of Part I of the Quijote , from the Viaje del Parnaso , from the Persiles , and from the prologues to his works. Here, on the contrary, relying on our previous discussion of the novel as representing a process of growth and realization, we shall proceed differently. Instead of trying to reconstruct Cervantes's definite poetics—the fossilized skeleton of his rhetorical "philosophy"—we shall try to trace the gradual development of his critical engagement with his own work and with those of his colleagues during the composition of the Second Sally. As he began to exploit untried sources for invention, Cervantes became increasingly aware of a more pernicious and pervasive form of identification of literature and life than that represented by Alonso Quijano's comic delusion. In so doing, as we shall see, he discovered critically the innate potentialities of his own accomplishment.

Obviously, we, too, must schematize and foreshorten (otherwise we would be repeating the strange experiment of Pierre Menard alluded to earlier), but we shall try to do so in a way that is not tangential to our experience as readers and to Cervantes's experience as a writer. Taking as our point of departure the language of his overt criticism, we shall begin by examining its puzzling and repeated use of Inquisitional comparisons and jargon. This is first apparent in the Scrutiny of the Books, undertaken by the Priest and the Barber, in Part I, chapter 6. Then, at the very end of the Second Sally, we are surprised to find the same conceits repeated in a greatly modified, almost antithetical, fashion. Between these two moments of explicit critical commentary, the invention of Part I is further elaborated in Sierra Morena (chapters 23–25), so that instead of proceeding directly from the Scrutiny to the

[3] The basic studies have already been cited: in Spanish, Castro's El pensamiento de Cervantes ; in English, Riley's Cervantes's Theory of the Novel and Forcione's Cervantes, Aristotle, and the "Persiles ."

dialogue of the Priest and the Canon, we shall pause once again in that pre-Romantic hideaway in order to take the pulse of the literary lives—the literature-infused lives—that encounter each other there. It was in telling us about what went on in those protective fastnesses that Cervantes discovered (and hoped to lead his readers to discover) what was profoundly wrong with the literature and culture of his time.

"We must condemn it to the flames without any mercy . . ."

The battered Don Quijote of the First Sally is now sound asleep, and the Priest and the Barber have invaded his library in order to purge it of the guilty books. As they begin to speak, translators, whether in the seventeenth century or in the twentieth, begin to run into grave difficulties:

The first volume that Master Nicholas handed the Priest was The Four Books of Amadís de Gaula . "This is very curious," said the Priest, "for as I have heard tell, this was the first book of chivalry printed in Spain, and all the others took their origin and beginning from it. So it seems to me that, as the first preacher of so pernicious a sect, we must condemn it to the flames without considering mitigating circumstances [sin excusa ]."
(I.6)

The Cohen translation, among other lapses, fails entirely when it converts the Priest's initial comment, "Parece cosa de misterio esta," into "This is very curious." What the Priest is commenting on is not the mere curiosity of the book but rather its mysterious generative power, the fact that it was the "origin and beginning" of a "género." And since it is a "cosa de misterio," it awakens ecclesiastical suspicion, almost as if it were a witch or an enchanter. The Amadís had, in fact, such a strange capacity to propagate itself in continuations and imitations that the Priest compares it to a "dogmatizador" (dogmatist or doctrine giver, not "first preacher") of a new heretical sect. His awareness of its literary "mystery" justifies the Priest's acceptance of the Niece's earlier demand for an fé at 451 degrees Fahrenheit. He speaks like

an Inquisitor and judges with the implacability of an Inquisitor. Cervantes, as usual, has expressed himself ironically, but the concealed message is necessarily elusive to readers unfamiliar with his century and culture.

The obvious explications de texte are dearly erroneous. One might be that the whole chapter is a spoof of the Holy Office and its procedures, comparable to Fielding's burlesque of the professional behavior of English justices of the peace. Yet even in an age accustomed to its presence (in 1605 the Inquisition was almost 130 years old), familiarity could not conceivably have bred so much contempt. The prestige of the Inquisition was too immense, its power too overwhelming, its threat too grim, and its feelings too easily hurt to allow for persiflage.^[4] Cervantes, like Fernando de Rojas before him, did indeed relieve his feelings with covert verbal thrusts at the dreaded institution (as we shall see, there are at least two in the passage just cited), but this is hardly the same as poking overt fun at its vocabulary and methods. The puzzling thing (for those of us who have worked with Inquisition documents) about this sustained metaphor for literary criticism is that it appears to express a dangerously inappropriate humor.

A second possibility—that Cervantes was using the Priest as a surrogate in order to attack the cruelty and intolerance of that sanctified FBI cum Supreme Court—is for the same reason even more unlikely. Furthermore, although the Priest does say later that he would burn his own father at the stake

[4] In H. C. Lea's exhaustive four-volume History of the Inquisition in Spain (New York: Macmillan, 1906–07) we find a variety of cases of "disrespect for the Inquisition," many of which concern petty matters of protocol and precedence. The Inquisitors were particularly concerned with their seating at public functions: location, pillows, canopies, carpets (1: 358). Invidious remarks reported to them about the institution and its personnel were investigated and punished with fines, various forms of public humiliation (including whipping), and exile. Even the personal servants of the Inquisitors enjoyed the same protection. For example, after a verbal quarrel with such an individual about the quality of his meat, a Murcian butcher was banished (1: 369–70). One simply did not tease or criticize the Inquisition in any way it could understand!

if he found him dressed as a knight-errant in the company of the absurd characters of the Amadís de Grecia , we know him as a well-meaning individual genuinely concerned for his errant parishioner. Finally, we must take into account the fact that his judgements—including the hyperbolical remark about his father—clearly represent, however ironically, Cervantes's own opinions. In the Scrutiny both the Priest and the Barber proceed hastily and ruthlessly (they end by condemning an indefinite number of books they have not read or examined), but their individual critical verdicts are those of their author. We cannot, as a result, automatically absolve Cervantes of responsibility for the literary Inquisition.

If neither teasing nor overt satire can account for the language of the Scrutiny, must we then interpret it literally and include Cervantes in the disreputable company of Savonarola, Hitler, and the rest of history's fanatical book burners? Before reaching such a drastic conclusion, we should remember that the Priest's description of the Amadís as a "dogmatizador de una secta" echoes the rhetoric of the then current polemic against the elaborately metaphorical culterano poetry of Góngora and his followers. The old-fashioned, patriotic versifier Cristóbal de Castillejo had earlier demanded nothing less than the resurrection of the monstrous Lucero, the most irresponsible and bloodthirsty of all past Inquisitors, in order that the new "secta de poetas" (comparable in his view to that of Luther) might be extirpated. Just as in the viciously aggressive style of Quevedo, who also denounced the "false sect of vain and empty poets,"^[5] such remarks allow us to overhear the oral violence of literary life in that so-called Golden Century.

Unlike Cervantes, these word warriors sound as if they mean it. They would be happy to see not just the poems but also the poets go up in smoke! In view of this, we may ten-

[5] See chapter 3, note 22. Castillejo was concerned to extirpate the use of eleven-syllable Italianate verse forms, but the tradition of referring to literary schools as heretical sects continued through the culteranismo polemic right down to that concerning the introduction of naturalism into the peninsula. A deep structure?

tatively propose that, at least in part, the Scrutiny refers to a prevalent variety of criticism that in its ferocity could not distinguish—or chose not to distinguish—between aesthetic and dogmatic evaluation. Rather than the Inquisition, Cervantes's primary target could well have been those of his colleagues who advocated inquisitorial methods in a realm for which they were wholly unsuited.

This interpretation is confirmed by the Barber's reply to the Priest's accusation and summary conviction of the Amadís: " 'No, sir,' said the Barber, 'for I have heard that it is the best of all books of this kind [género ] ever written. So, since it is unique in its art, it ought to be pardoned' " (I.6). The Barber, in accord with his modish profession, is interested in styles and innovations. Acting as the defense attorney in the miniature trial, he manages to get his client acquitted for the time being: " 'True enough,' " replies the Priest, agreeing reluctantly to a stay of execution. For the Priest the Amadís is an open wound of moral infection and should be cauterized, but for the Barber it is the model for a genre (or subgenre) and deserves to be pardoned. Its mysterious generative capacity marks it as "the best of its kind," "unique in its art."

By the same criteria, one might admire Góngora and Lope as innovators and at the same time condemn the excesses of their followers. But whether or not Cervantes's own readers might have agreed with the Barber, it is clear that the borrowed conceit of inquisitorial judgement is a parable designed to illustrate the proper and improper concerns of criticism. Others—a Fray Pedro Malón de Chaide, a Mateo Alemán, an Avellaneda, or even a Luis Vives—might attack romances of chivalry as sinful or scandalous, but Cervantes in chapter 6 was concerned with their questionable merit as works of literature.

However, as we remarked earlier, the Inquisition does not emerge entirely unscathed. For example, we are told explicitly that neither the Priest nor the Barber really know what they are talking about. They surely had read the Amadís (all literate Spaniards had done so), but, like the Inquisitors they

imitate, they both judge on the basis of hearsay: "según he oído decir." And when the accused is saved from the flames, the sentence is not revoked but only suspended: "se le otorga la vida por ahora" (literally, "life is granted to him for the time being"). Not only is the phraseology properly official but also the state of mortal uncertainty in which the book-person must go on living resembles that of the flesh-and-blood victims of the Holy Office. Once denounced, always on file, was the practice of those pious bureaucrats for whom full absolution, although occasionally granted, nevertheless seemed to be a defeat for the system.

If this seems perhaps too ingenious an "explication," Cervantes's contemporary readers (and ironical collaborators) surely caught on when he comments on the critical opinions of the manifestly illiterate Housekeeper and Niece. As we remember, it was the latter who originally proposed the "auto púiblico," and when the Priest and the Barber set about separating the sheep from the goats (as good Inquisitors should), she objects strongly. Speaking with the voice of the people, she demands that because they are books, they should all be burned without discrimination. This portion of the dialogue begins when the Housekeeper, as superstitious as her master is mad, asks the Priest to exorcise the library of the enchanters who still might be haunting it:

The Priest laughed at the Housekeeper's simplicity, and bade the Barber hand him the books one by one, so he could see what they were about; for he might find some of them that did not deserve punishment by fire.

"No," said the Niece, "there is no reason to pardon any of them, for they have all of them caused the trouble. Better throw them out of the window into the courtyard, and make a pile of them, and set them on fire; or else take them out into the backyard and have the bonfire there where the smoke won't be a nuisance."

The Housekeeper agreed, so anxious were they both for the massacre of those innocents; but the Priest would not consent without at least reading the titles first.
(I.6)

In this context it is appropriate that this same Housekeeper should be chosen for the role of brazo seglar (the so-called secular arm of the state), which punished condemned heretics because it was not thought fitting for the Church to shed blood. As for the savage Niece, it is equally appropriate that she should designate the "backyard" (corral ) for the bonfire (a reference to the custom of locating the quemaderos outside of town because of air pollution) and that later she should insist that the few volumes spared from the flames wear sambenitos (the traditional garments of public shame worn by penitents) as jackets (II.6). These sly details, along with the narrator's description of the collection as "innocents" pursued relentlessly by popular ignorance and prejudice, indicate, to say the least, that Cervantes was not in favor of book or person burning. Rather, he would have agreed with Montaigne that "c'est mettre ses conjectures à bien haut prix que d'en faire cuire un homme tout vif."^[6]

Thus, while using the Scrutiny as a familiar and humorous means of communicating his opinions about literature and its criticism, Cervantes nonetheless deplored the scrutinizers and their illiterate supporters. It is also quite probable that in addition to satirizing the violent rhetoric of the culteranismo polemic, he intended to allude tacitly to the general examination of public and private libraries undertaken by the Holy Office in 1558 and continued, according to H. C. Lea, until the suppression of the Inquisition (see note 4). "All heretical, suspicious, and scandalous books," including those printed abroad and not on the Index, were to be sequestered, examined, and in some cases "publically burnt."^[7] As Francis Thompson, the author of The Hound of Heaven , warned us, the double edge of Cervantine irony cuts both ways, and it is not surprising that he should have combined aesthetic judge-

[6] Montaigne, Essais , ed. A. Thibaudet (Paris: La Pléiade, 1950), p. 1149. "After all it is rating one's conjectures at a very high price, to roast a man alive on the strength of them" (Essays of Montaigne , trans. E. J. Trechmann [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953], 1: 505).

[7] Lea, History of the Inquisition , 3: 446, 448, and 575.

ment of contemporary books with a veiled satire of those who would abolish ("they have all of them caused the trouble") or limit freedom to read.

The remarks on Cervantes's own La Galatea (to which we referred in the previous essay) demonstrate the cunning of his ambivalence. Again translation is unsatisfactory, but, as we remember, the Priest describes the author as an old friend "better versed in misfortunes than in versification" and then condemns the book to secluded enmienda —solitary confinement and self-imposed penitence, or self-correction, imposed by the Holy Office for minor or unproven offenses. La Galatea , he goes on to say, "has something of skilled invention," but unfortunately "it proposes something and comes to no conclusion." However, it might be saved by rethinking and reworking—which, as we saw, is precisely what Cervantes partially accomplished in the Marcela and Grisóstomo episode. But what concerns us now is the way the Inquisitional comparison is remodeled. Solitary confinement, instead of being a punishment, is an image for the agonizing but ultimately beneficial solitude of the creator's entendimiento . Reclusión and enmienda , exploited aesthetically, are the indispensable prerequisites, if one is to save oneself as an artist. Instead of arrogantly condemning fiction as such and as a whole, one must learn to distinguish the good from the bad and then through a process of painful self-mortification learn how to create the good.

Aesthetic repentance and creative self-contemplation, in conclusion, constitute the "moral" of Cervantes's art and are everywhere apparent in his works. All that we talked about in the preceding essay—the need of the ingenio for the guidance of invention, the importance of surpassing facile genetic standardization, the mediating function of the pastoral—merge in the confessional manifesto of chapters 47–50 at the end of Part I. There Cervantes tells us as clearly as he can what he has learned both from current theory—the virtue of verisimilitude and the delight of harmony and proportion—and from creative practice. On his own he had realized (in fecund opposition to theoretical strictures) that at their best,

narration and reading are processes of liberation and spiritual therapy. Nevertheless, alongside these much discussed aesthetic conclusions there are a number of passages not yet examined that indicate a profound change in critical engagement. As we shall see, a sociological preoccupation—a preoccupation with the deleterious effects of literature on society—has been added.

As a result of this change, Cervantes's earlier use of inquisitorial imagery is reshaped in a fashion that at first glance seems to contradict that of the Scrutiny. The Canon remarks, for example, that the romances of chivalry, like unassimilated population groups, "deserve to be banished from a Christian commonwealth as a useless tribe" (I.47). They are indeed heretical in that their authors are "inventors of new sects" that corrupt innocent minds. The point is not to determine whether Cervantes in his heart of hearts approved or disapproved of the expulsion of the Jews and Moriscos (the good Morisco, Ricote, partially justifies his own fate) but rather to observe how Cervantes now seems to espouse the critical ferocity he had seemed to chastise at the beginning. Similarly, when the Priest attacks the "new art"^[8] of the national theater as offering only mirrors of insanity, examples of folly, and images of lasciviousness, he goes on with all apparent seriousness to propose censorship by "a wise and intelligent person" (I.47). What has happened to the initial fé parody of arbitrary criticism? And why did Cervantes change his tactics? In order to answer these questions, we must return to the stories told by Cardenio and Dorotea in Sierra Morena and consider them as further elaborations of the inventive process.

"In order to imitate . . . brave Sir Roland"

The liberation of the galley slaves in chapter 22 constitutes the narrative watershed of Part I for several reasons. In the

[8] The reference, of course, is to the title of Lope's apologetically defiant and ironically humble Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo (1609).

first place, up until that point, aside from a tangential glance at the pastoral follies of Marcela and Grisóstomo, Cervantes and his readers have mainly attended to a single and manifestly extravagant case of symbiosis of literature and life. But afterward, as we shall see, two other cases offer themselves for inspection at center stage. In the second place, as in chapter 4 when Don Quijote's belief in his own invincibility was shattered by the merchants' adolescent muleteer, he is obliged again to superimpose a new fictional identity on that invented in Argamasilla. The obsolete knight now is confronted not with a single antagonist nor with a group of malandrines (scoundrels)—picaros, herdsmen, galley slaves, traveling players, or contentious villagers—but with organized society itself in the form of the Santa Hermandad, or Holy Brotherhood, as the state police of the time was called. As Hegel remarked in the section of his Aestetik entitled "Das Ende der romantische Kunstform," the aspirations of the heroes of both romance and novel would be untenable (are untenable!) in a nation blessed or cursed with really efficient law enforcement—apparently meaning that they are fundamentally antisocial. It is curious, therefore, that elsewhere he points to this episode as particularly significant. In any case, Sancho warns his master that the liberation of the galley slaves will not be overlooked, and Don Quijote reluctantly heeds his recommendation that they retreat into the wilderness of nearby Sierra Morena. However, since flight in any form is contrary to his code, he is perplexed, and a few chapters later we find him trying to justify himself by recalling from his past reading a suitable role model.

Who shall he be now? On the one hand, there is "brave Sir Roland," who, "when he discovered in a fountain the signs that Angelica the Beautiful had committed a villainy with Medoro," ran about the countryside where he "went mad, tore up trees, muddied the waters of clear running springs, slew shepherds, set fire to huts, tore down houses, dragged mares along after him, and did a hundred thousand other outrageous deeds [insolencias ] worthy of eternal renown and written record" (I.25). But Sancho demurs: "What evidence is

there that my Lady Dulcinea del Toboso has been trifling with Moor or Christian?" Don Quijote's answer—"That is precisely my point, . . . and therein resides the exquisiteness of my plan, for . . . if I do this much in cold blood, how would I behave in the heat of passion?"—is far more comic in Spanish than in English.^[9] Nevertheless, Sancho's objection (like everything else in this intricate compendium of memories) remains in Don Quijote's mind. In the next chapter we hear him meditating: "I will venture to swear that my Dulcinea del Toboso has never seen a Moor as he really is dressed in his native garb and that today she is as intact as the mother who bore her."^[10] Imitation of Orlando's fury would therefore be a form of chivalresque slander, a consideration that leads him to choose a more suitable alternative—Amadís, who after being rejected by Oriana also retreated into the wilderness. There, "without losing his senses and without committing mad extravagances, he won no less fame as a lover." There-

[9] "Si en seco hago esto, ¿que haría en mojado?" The expression en seco corresponds roughly to our army's "dry run," and the humor consists in the knight's coining of an unexpected variation: en mojado , or "wet run" (under fire?).

[10] Apparently the phrase was a vulgar and nonsensical oral Spanish commonplace, which Cervantes here relates (in the context of Dulcinea's possible Arabian lover) to Ariosto's remark concerning Angelica in Orlando Furioso (I, 55): "E che'l fior virginal così havea salvo / come se lo portò del materno alvo." ("And how she was, in fact / As when she left her mother's womb, intact" [Ariosto, Orlando Furioso , translated by Barbara Reynolds, p. 130; all translations of Orlando Furioso in this chapter are from this version].) The Cervantine version has confused overlogical translators, who have reverted to Ariosto's commonsensical commonplace; for example, Samuel Putnam's "She is today what she was when her mother bore her." As far as the phrase "dressed in his native garb" is concerned, it is well known that El Toboso was at the time a village of Moriscos, meaning more or less acculturated descendants of the Moors. Thus, Aldonza Lorenzo, although of Moorish descent, has never seen a genuine (or literary) Muhammadan dressed as such, like Medoro or Cervantes's own Algerian captors. The hidden point is that the more or less well situated Jewish converts returned the disdain of their Old Christian peasant neighbors by pointing out that since they were totally unaware of their own lineage, they were probably "tainted" with Morisco blood. In this sentence Cervantes teases the whole business, which, as we have said, he found utterly ridiculous. The glorious lineages of El Toboso are to the grandee Mendozas and Guevaras of Castile what Don Quijote is to Amadís of Gaul.

fore, Don Quijote concludes: "Now to business! Oh memory bring to mind the doings of Amadís, and teach me how to begin imitating them."

Aside from its comic juxtaposition of the two lovelorn fictional heroes Orlando and Amadís—the one grotesque (no matter what Voltaire thought!) and the other exemplary—Don Quijote's discourse reveals what his author-enchanter has been up to surreptitiously all along. As we remember, in chapter 23 the knight and the squire enter Sierra Morena by night, and at dawn they discover, in addition to the theft of the donkey, a valise the padlock of which was so ruptured ("roto") that its contents could easily be inspected. The ensuing inventory includes gold coins, fine clothing, and a notebook containing a poem about love and death addressed to Fili (a pastoral pseudonym) along with the rough draft of a desperate letter apparently intended for the same lady. The wordplay here is once again infernal for conscientious translators. Sancho, like other Castilian illiterates of the time, substitutes h for all f 's with the result that he hears Fili as hilo and interprets it to mean the "thread" of the still unknown story suggested by the mysterious valise.^[11] When, at the end of the same chapter, the participle used for the padlock (roto , from romper , meaning "to break" or "to sever") is used in Cardenio's mock-chivalric epithet "El Roto de la Mala Figura" (The Ragged—or Amputated—One of the Shameful Countenance), the careful rereader realizes that Cervantes has been engaged in subtle verbal allusion to, and continuation of, the

[11] As is well known, Castilian underwent a whole series of phonetic changes in the fifteenth century, one of the most conspicuous of which was the conversion of f to h , which was at first aspirated and later became unaspirated. Falcón , for example, became halcón , and Don Quijote imitates the language of his belovedly antiquated texts by pronouncing hermosura as "fermosura." The oral speech of the mass of the population was the source of the change, with the result that Sancho simply cannot hear the f of the pastoral name Fili . Cervantes adored the interplay of the written with the oral just as he did that of commonplaces (whether popular or courtly) with the outlandish variations and extensions he and his characters could come up with spontaneously.

narrative play with interruption and sequence we discussed in chapter 2, "Birth."

After the finding of the valise, two more discoveries follow immediately and augment the suspense both of the reader and of the discoverers. First a hirsute individual clad in velvet tatters is seen on high "leaping from crag to crag with marvelous agility" (I.23), and then the body of a mule that had apparently been driven to death is encountered.^[12] Neither Don Quijote nor Sancho know what to make of these mysteries, but our suspicion that this wild man may be a calculated reincarnation of Orlando (who, according to Don Quijote, "dragged mares after him") is confirmed by a passing shepherd. He and his companions—he informs the curious knight and squire—have been attacked by this mad desperado during the accesses of "furia" that alternate with intervals of courteous and rational behavior.^[13] He might even have "killed" one of them with his fists and teeth, if they hadn't subdued him. It only remains for Don Quijote to recall in chapter 25 that Ariosto's Italianate Roland "slew shepherds" for us to be certain wherein Cervantes has now ventured to "invent."

The shepherd has just finished his account when "el Roto" himself suddenly appears on the immediate scene. He and Don Quijote, as we remember, exchange embraces and gaze into each other's eyes in wonder at their divergent varieties of eccentricity. However, in arranging the meeting with such care, Cervantes had something more in mind than to provoke laughter at comparative madness. As we have said, his narrative course has veered sharply, and he is now concerned—

[12] According to the critics, Cervantes invented both in Ariosto's epic and in a lyrical (meaning artistic rather than popular and oral) ballad of Juan del Encina, "Por unos puertos arriba," in which a similarly clad figure appears on high dressed in mourning beside his dead horse. Cervantes's inventiveness, as usual, is plural.

[13] The goatherd uses the rather high-flown word furia (instead of locura ), and later Cervantes terms Cardenio's temporary alienation a "furioso accidente," in order to suggest to readers this more unfamiliar ingredient of his intertextual play.

with the help of Ariosto—with guiding his presumably spellbound readers toward certain discoveries about their national literature that he has already made and that he wants them to make on their own. He is concerned with employing suspense positively (as opposed to its mockery in the fractured single combat with the Basque) by means of both mystery and a subtly orchestrated sequence of generic variations.

The careful development and the final oratorical confrontation of the Marcela and Grisóstomo episode have not been forgotten. Once again, a lyric poem and a shepherd's tale prepare us for not just one but two dramatic encounters: first, the courtly embrace, and afterward, the abrupt physical combat of the two extravagantly costumed actors. The narrative die has been cast. Nothing is now excluded except for the outrageous but sophisticated inverisimilitude that Ariosto adored. Nevertheless, the elaborate comic mystification of Orlando Furioso will be a means of engaging us during the whole of the Sierra Morena sojourn with unlikely encounters, with every kind of disguise, and with incessant role-playing by all the actors except Sancho and the shepherds. They—and we—make up the amused and bemused audience of a wilderness masque, an improvised and self-conscious comedia that ends, as we shall see, with a climactic denouement at the centripetal inn. When Shakespeare selected this portion of the Skelton translation (1610) for his lost Cardenio play, he understood perfectly what his contemporary had up his sleeve.^[14]

But for this purpose why invent in Orlando Furioso? How could a seemingly endless comic epic in verse contribute to the change from sequential to dramatically structured narration? To begin with, it enabled the quasitheatrical confronta-

[14] Guillén de Castro (who was the author of the source for Corneille's Le Cid ) also used this episode as the plot for his Don Quijote de la Mancha "comedia." Therein he presents Cardenio as being of peasant origin, includes references to Ariosto, and, like Shakespeare, resolves the conflict through the intervention of the noble father. For an idea of the content of Shakespeare's Cardenio play, see Lewis Theobald's "revised" version, Double Falsehood (London: Lowndes, 1767).

tion of the two madmen. Obviously, the allusions to Ariosto we have just detected were not as immediately familiar to the general public as were chivalresque, picaresque, and pastoral topika . But once they realized what was up, those preterit common readers were just as entertained as we are by the meeting, the dialogue, and the conflict of the supposedly flesh-and-blood actors Cardenio and Don Quijote, each representing in his own way—the one desperately and the other playfully—Orlando and Amadís, two antithetical archetypes of fictional heroism at moments of extreme erotic distress.

In addition, Ariosto provided his devotee, Cervantes, with a model for a new kind of narrative sophistication. As we remember, the latter had imitated—at second hand—the characteristic thread cutting of the former when he interrupted the single combat with the Basque. And now the Spaniard, in direct rapport with his favorite poem, could go on to weave skeins that suddenly appear out of the blue (the still anonymous ragged acrobat seen leaping like a goat), that are just as suddenly interrupted (Cardenio mute and "furioso"), that reappear when least expected (the story recommenced with "almost the same words"), and that intertwine with others (that of Dorotea). Ariosto, to the amusement of the cynical "knights of the court" to whom he read his poem aloud, was a superb manipulator of the comedy and theatricality that are inherent in chivalry as a self-conscious social show. A consummate puppetmaster, he taught Cervantes how to vary episodic sequence with plotted sequence. Dialogue and memory aside, prior to chapter 22 the Quijote 's narrative form had been essentially that of Amadís ; in Sierra Morena it is that of Orlando Furioso .

In Ariosto's poem the drawn-out suspense—an essential ingredient of Stendhal's "happiness"—seemingly could have lasted for a thousand and one cantos. But for Cervantes, at once a theorist of the drama and in his own opinion an unfairly neglected playwright, plots were by definition Aristotelian. They had to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, as indeed they do, first in Sierra Morena and afterward at the inn—just as Sancho surmised proverbially, when he heard

the name Fili in the poem, that hilo (strand) might lead to the ovillo (the whole ball of yarn or the heart of the matter).^[15] And when Cervantes, using the same topical image, describes his new narrative tack as a "rastrillado, torcido y aspado hilo," he does not mean tangled up, as unprepared readers might assume, but rather "cleansed, twisted, and reeled-up" (I.28).^[16] Like Sancho in chapter 20, Cardenio and Dorotea can only spin their yarns (with or without interruption) in a straight line. Cervantes, however, thanks to Ariosto, can convert their lives and stories into a "reeled-up" dramatic plot and thereby save them at the end of "Act III" from the apparently inevitable results of their follies—which is what traditional comedy on stage, as contrasted to Don Quijote's tragicomic or comitragic novel, is all about.

But this is by no means all there is to it. The presence of Orlando Furioso in Sierra Morena acts as a catalyst that reveals aspects of Spanish life of far more concern to Cervantes than the comic confrontation of two madmen (each of whom lives his own mad story in his own mad fashion) or than the increment of narrative sophistication. Although Cardenio's wretched and antiheroic account of loss of nerve in a small-town Andalusian ambiance may seem antithetical to the only too justifiable fury of Orlando, a fantasy hero in a fantasy demesne, they do have one thing in common. Both are "knights" who, having reason to believe their ladies have betrayed them, fail to live up to the exigencies of their knighthood. In concocting this essay in comparative chivalry, Cervantes is as subtle as ever. Orlando's furious alienation, maliciously arranged by that super-stepfather Ariosto, needs

[15] "Por el hilo se saca el ovillo" (I.23). Cervantes's constant play with the notion of the narrative thread led him inevitably to this proverb as an image for plot.

[16] In this collection of verbs having to do with the preparation of yarn (for weaving a story), cardar is conspicuously absent. However, Beth Tremallo, who is equally competent in both Spanish and Italian literatures and who suggested the relevance of Ariosto's verbal play with weaving and thread cutting to the narrativity of the Quijote , pointed out to me that it is audible in Cardenio's name. To card the wool is the first step in the process, and he is the initiator of the new story sequence.

no further comment here, but the caso (a socioliterary case history) of Cardenio is far more complex. Told in the first person instead of the third, it reflects Cervantes's awareness of a curious congruence in the Italian poem, which the poet had suggested but did not emphasize—that of the severed narrative threads with the severed identity of Orlando.^[17] We have seen the results. Cardenio is his story, and when it is interrupted, he interrupts himself. Ariosto's gleeful narrative malice is Cardenio's unbearable burden.

On the face of it, it would appear that this change in point of view (from third-person "epic" insouciance in the historical present to anguished Erzählung in the autobiographical past) should impede or render impossible the transition from lyric lament and oral tale of woe to the theatrical denouement that here concerns us. However, that appearance is misleading insofar as it ignores two pertinent factors: the ambivalence of the designation caballero (at once gentleman and knight) in the Spain of the time, and the reflection of that ambivalence in the drama of honor that prevailed on the stage. As far as the first is concerned, Cardenio is a gentleman "of noble lineage and wealth," a native of one of the

[17] When the shepherd shows Orlando the bracelet the latter had bestowed on Angelica as a token of his adoration (and she in turn had given to the former in gratitude for having saved Medoro's life), that piece of evidence is "la secure / che'l capo a un colpo gli levò dal collo" (XXIII, 121) ("the axe which at one final blow / His head then severed from Orlando's neck" [p. 723]). Seven octaves later he concludes: "Non son, non son io quel che paio in viso: / quel ch'era Orlando, è motto ed è sottera" ("I am not he, I am not he I seem / He who Orlando was is dead and gone" [p. 725]). From then on Orlando will not have the "lucid intervals" that Don Quijote, also desperately in love, shares with Cardenio (XXIV, 3), but, curiously enough, after emerging from his madness, Orlando does share with the latter a phantom recollection of his previous mad behavior. In Cervantes's version "the bout which he had with Don Quijote came to his memory as if out of dreams" (I.29), whereas Ariosto's hero, having swallowed the magic potion, awakes as if from a "noioso e grave sonno" (XXXIX, 58). Flaubert, who began his literary experience by listening to the Quijote read aloud, exaggerated the connection when he remarked, "Cervantes plus grave et plus pur refit l'oeuvre de l'Arioste" (cited in Jean Bruneau, Les debuts litteraires de Gustave Flaubert: 1831–1845 [Paris: Armand Colin, 1962], p. 161). But he does indicate his awareness of the intricate ties, of which a few have concerned us here.

most "illustrious" birthplaces in all Andalusia. Because of his membership in this social class, he is honor-bound to play the role of chivalric knight when called on to do so, a role for which he knows all the proper rhetoric and vocabulary. He promises Dorotea later on:

I swear to you as a Christian caballero that I will not forsake you until I see you don Fernando's wife; and if my arguments cannot bring him to acknowledge his duty to you, I shall invoke the right which my rank as a caballero confers on me and with just cause challenge him on account of the injury [en razón de la sinrazón ] which he has done to you—without remembering the wrongs he has done to me which I shall leave Heaven to avenge while I take yours in my charge here on Earth.
(I.29)

When first heard, this speech sounds worthy of Don Quijote himself.^[18] We are not surprised to learn in the course of his story that both Cardenio and his lady, Luscinda, are (like Dorotea) avid readers of romances of chivalry, or that, like Alonso Quijano and the Innkeeper, he believes their characters to be historically real. The role of caballero is ready-made and not questioned, but, as his story reveals, he cannot perform it. Not only does he hesitate to interrupt the wedding, but even in the defiant speech we have just heard he proposes to begin with pleading. We have been well prepared for the theatrical climax at the inn, during which he first hides in Don Quijote's room and then behind his offender's back in order to avoid recognition. However, to explain Cardenio's behavior in psychological terms—alienation as the resuit of inhibition—as is often done, amounts to reading him in the same way he read the Amadís or to guessing the number of Lady Macbeth's offspring. Like everybody else in the Quijote , Cardenio is born and lives verbally—if not from

[18] In addition, there is an echo of the second paragraph of the book, which no Spanish reader can fail to notice. Alonso Quijano is there described as being particularly titillated by such chivalresque conceits as "La razón de la sinrazón que a mi razón se hace . . ."

books, then as a failed incarnation of the most painfully problematical words of the national theater: caballero and honor . His is an abject and Hispanicized replica of Orlando's heroic undoing.

At this point English readers of Cervantes may well have reservations. Obviously, Cardenio's furia is antithetical to Don Quijote's idée fixe. Instead of being a simultaneous "cuerdo loco" (II.17),^[19] he is alternately mad or sane and so does not conceal beneath a chosen role a sentient self, the "profession" of which (according to Mark van Doren) is acting.^[20] From what he tells us about himself and his background (small-town middle-class nobility), there is no reason to suppose that he has ever heard of Ariosto's epic, let alone that he has read it and been incited as a result. His "furia" is entirely his and stems from his excruciating awareness that he has been, and still is, "a coward and a fool" (I.27). However, as we have suggested and as perceptive readers of the first edition surely realized, Cervantes has not abandoned literary satire. The big game he now intends to hunt is no longer the romances of chivalry (already deliquescent as a genre, as we noted) and certainly not Orlando Furioso (which

[19] This crucial descriptive paradox was designed expressly by Cervantes to avoid what Castro termed the "programming" of his character, meaning any kind of fixed, stereotyped, generic or causal explanations of Alonso Quijano's unique life as Don Quijote. Here, as elsewhere, his intent is to leave everything up in the air (the author, the characterizations, the narrative world, the possible reactions of readers) except the immediate truth of experience emergent from adventure. The expression has been rendered in many ways by translators in many languages; for example, "a mixture of good sense and extravagance," "a sensible madman," "tantôt pour un homme fou, tantôt pour un homme sensé," "einen gescheiten Kopf, der ein Narr sei." As we can see, the temptation is to convert a living paradox into syntactical sense.

[20] The readers I seek are surely familiar with Mark van Doren's admirable study, Don Quijote's Profession (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), and if they have followed the general tenor of this one (reiterated in the penultimate sentence of the preceding note), they will understand the reasons for my partial disagreement with Professor van Doren. Don Quijote often puts on an act, but he is not a professional, and he slips from posturing and oratory into profound authenticity as imperceptibly, continuously, and unsurveyably as do his adventures into experience.

he adored) but instead the overwhelmingly popular "new comedy" of Lope de Vega and his followers. Precisely because the Amaíds and its progeny extolled the same irrationally heroic exaltation as the comedia with a comparable lack of verisimilitude, the former provided Cervantes with a perfect straw genre for the purpose of "arousing men's contempt" for the latter.

Cardenio, socially speaking, is a caballero, but in accord with his century he does not wear armor, mount a charger, or joust with skeptics in defense of the perfection of his lady's eyebrows.^[21] Rather, on foot with cape and sword he courts her—arranging trysts, smuggling in missives and poems, contending with treacherous rivals. In short, the role he plays—and fails to play at the moment of truth—is that of

[21] Tournaments (such as the one in Zaragoza in which Don Quijote planned to compete) continued to be held in the seventeenth century, but after the middle of the sixteenth the participating caballeros de la corte (whom Cervantes as an old soldier despised) became increasingly aware of their artificiality and historical obsolescence. As a result, in contrast to the fierce prearranged battles of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, tournaments took on a marked burlesque character. Comedy, at once sophisticated and gross, became the dominant note of the mottos, pseudonyms, outfits, stentorian announcements, and general pomp and circumstance of the festivity. It was precisely this attitude toward the institution of chivalry—a refusal to abandon it combined with the kind of mockery employed by Quevedo in his portrait of the Cid—that Cervantes exploits when he has Don Quijote present himself with deadly seriousness as a "caballero andante." With this in mind, we may better understand the ambivalent reactions to the comic hero—acceptance and ridicule—both by the readers of the time and by those whom he encounters along the road. In any case, the Quijote did not laugh Spain's chivalry away, as Lord Byron believed; courtly society was taking care of that task on its own. What it did do was to transform that very laughter into salvation of all that had been admirable and noble in chivairy's mad institutionalization of heroism. It was this that Nabokov and Unamuno, each of whom in his own way revered the knight and disdained his author, failed to understand.
Two more tangential observations may be in order. First, as Don Quijote observed to the Knight of the Green Overcoat, the really dangerous—but stupid—antagonists of the seventeenth-century caballeros were not their human rivals but bulls. Second, if it had not been for that really execrable admirer of Lope who hid behind the name of Avellaneda, what a marvellous mockery of such decadent mockery would have been in store for us! What an opportunity (only partially realized in the joust with Tosilos) for Don Quijote to exhibit his "true" valor!

those typical galanes who, during the performance of countless comedias, were concerned with surpassing each other in valor, in amorous conquest, in intrigue, in conceits (in both the moral and poetic senses of the term), and in maintenance of honor. These were the new "knights," as stereotyped as their chivalric predecessors and, in Cervantes's opinion, fictionally far more deleterious. Why? Not only because beneath the masque of honor their behavior was often ignoble but also because the stage on which they strutted and fretted was perceived by its audience as an exemplary mirror of social behavior. Cardenio, in other words, before retreating in shame into Sierra Morena, has lived as if he were a hero of a comedia, and then he is forced to realize he is neither brave nor shrewd. As a result, he loses both his lady and his honor and is reduced to a nonentity. He is literally a broken man "who is not who he is," in the parlance of the time.^[22]

Thus, Cervantes is deeply concerned with the latest and, for him, peculiarly sinister literary rage—the comedia; not only because of the aesthetic objections that were expressed surreptitiously in the Scrutiny but, more important, because of the theater's toxic effects on Spanish society and on the individual's self-image as a member thereof. Cardenio's is an extreme case—a well-calculated parable of inability to cope with the Literarisierung des Lebens imposed by the increasingly self-conscious theatricality of interpersonal relations.^[23] In this

[22] See Leo Spitzer's article, "Soy quien soy," Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 2 (1947), p. 275. Self-affirmation is endemically Hispanic, and to open up one's interior self (see Octavio Paz's explication of rajarse , in El laberinto de la soledad ) is what Jalisco should avoid above all according to the mariachis. The point is that Cardenio's is a case of self-negation. What Américo Castro has referred to as the "imperative dimension" of Spaniards (possessed in exemplary fashion by Don Quijote) has been fractured beyond repair.

[23] At a recent (autumn 1985) gathering at Ohio State University dedicated to discussion of Shakespeare's history plays, this aspect of seventeenth-century European consciousness was mentioned by many of the assembled scholars, often in connection with Essex's use of Richard II as political propaganda. As a student of Romance languages, I found it curious that they uniformly ascribed it to the Renaissance. Although I no longer find the generalizations of Geistesgeschichte as illuminating as I did years ago, this seems mistaken. I would suggest that my colleagues in English literature take the time to read Richard Alewyn's Das grosse Welttheater (Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1959) or the French translation of it by Danièle Bohler, entitled L'Univers du Baroque (Geneva: Gonthier, 1964).

connection we should remember Lope's dictum that "cases of honor" (in which a character loses and regains his or hers) provided the kind of plot that most "forcefully moved" the national public.^[24] Such suspense, neatly resolved at the end by the playwright's ingenio , relieved individual theatergoers of the tensions of problematical existence in an honorobsessed society that demanded more of its members than fragile human nature can usually provide. This is precisely why Cervantes arranged Cardenio's happy ending in a fashion so contrived as to be caricaturesque. If society has turned you into a puppet, Ariosto may save you by revealing the strings that connect you with that collective puppeteer.

"A voice reached his ears which suspended his senses. . ."

The only possible ending of Cardenio's story (as such a story and not as narrative preparation for an unbelievable theatrical denouement) is that which he himself predicts just prior to the interruption by an unknown "voice": no ending at all, but "only sorrow and suffering without surcease even in death" (I.27). He knows no more about himself and his situation than he has told us until the voice begins to speak and completes his awareness (and ours) of what an abject creature he is. Dorotea's account of victimization at the hands of the same ignoble grandee has generally been interpreted as an exercise in parallel narration, an echo-play of rhetoric and situations.^[25] Yet it ends in a significantly different way: "I implore Heaven to take pity on me and grant me favor and in-

[24] For a discussion of the importance of this phrase from Lope's Arte nuevo to the mass reception of the comedia, see the initial chapter of Américo Castro's De la edad conflictiva , already cited.

[25] Cardenio begins his tale by saying that his native town is one of the best in "esta Andalucía," and Dorotea, who has not heard him, begins: "En esta Andalucía . . ." Later on, when they speak of Don Fernando, both stress the terms grande and grandeza , and both compare him to a topical list of famous traitors. However, whereas Ariosto's Merlin only mentions classical examples in speaking of Ezzellino da Romano (III, 33), Cardenio adds names from the ballad tradition, as well as Judas and the Count Julian, who supposedly was responsible for the Moorish invasion; Dorotea, less educated, can only remember the two ballad miscreants. This is exactly the point. Cervantes uses these parallelisms as a way of bringing out the profound differences between the stories and their tellers.

genuity so that I may either escape from my misfortunes or else abandon my life among these solitudes, leaving no memory of an unhappy being who, by no fault of hers, has furnished matter for talk and scandal at home and abroad" (I.38). In other words, unlike Cardenio, she is not desperate, and she continues to hope that her characteristic ingenuity may yet win through; unlike Cardenio, who is utterly frank, she rationalizes her past folly and considers herself an innocent victim; and finally, unlike Cardenio, she is socially conscious and hence concerned above all with her reputation—that is, not with her actions but with the scandal arising from her actions.

Taking these points in order, let me begin by saying that those professional and amateur readers who find in Dorotea the most admirable and attractive woman in the entire Quijote —indeed the only admirable and attractive woman therein—are entranced not just by her beauty but also by her resolution and acumen. Precisely! Because she is every inch a heroine (in contrast with Cardenio), they should go on to ask themselves how she could have possibly arrived at the wretched state in which we first encounter her. The topic of maidens exposed in the wilderness had first been broached in the discourse on the Golden Age, which prepares us both for Marcela's behavior and for that of her pursuers. In that "happy" time, Don Quijote asserts, "Maidens and modesty wandered at will, alone and unattended, without fearing brazen importunities or lascivious assaults, and, if they were undone, it was of their own will and pleasure" (I.11).^[26] Dorotea,

[26] Ariosto seems more skeptical than Don Quijote:

Delle lor donne e delle lor donzelle
si fidâr molto a quella antica etade.
Senz'altra scorta andar lasciano quelle
Per piani e monti e per strane contrade;
ed al ritorno l'han per buone e belle,
nè mai tra lor suspizïone accade.

Fiordiligi narrò quivi al suo amante,
che fatto stolto era il signor d'Anglante.
(XXXI, 61)

In olden days they seemed to place great trust
In women whether middle-aged or young;
Permitted to indulge their wander-lust,
They travelled unaccompanied along
Strange roads, up hill, down dale, from coast to coast,
But those at home suspected nothing wrong.
Fair Fiordiligi started to relate
What she had witnessed of Orlando's state.
(Orlando Furioso , p. 238.)

These remarks refer to Fiordiligi, who, wandering on a quest similar to that of Dorotea, shows up exactly at the moment when Orlando's madness is discovered (XXIV, 56). However, although her honor is still intact, Angelica in exile (before meeting Medoro) is as worried as Dorotea about her reputation:

Ma che me possi nuocere non veggio,
più di quel che sin qui nociuto m'hai.
Per te cacciata son del real seggio,
dove pitiù ritornar non spero mai:
ho perduto l'onor, ch'è stato peggio;
chè, sebben con effetto io non peccai,
io do però materia ch'ognun dica,
ch'essendo vagabonda, io sia impudica.
(VIII, 41)

I do not see what ill can more be done,
So greatly have you wronged me before now.
By you I'm exiled from my royal throne,
And no return to it will you allow;
And, what is worse, my honour's lost and gone,
For though I have not sinned, and this I vow,
Because I wander homeless, men make haste
To slander me and say I am unchaste.
(Orlando Furioso , p. 273.)

in other words, who has already been undone of her own will (and hopefully pleasure) and who fears nothing more in the world than village gossip, is as naively Quixotesque as the speaker of the words just quoted. It is as if entirely unwittingly she has just emerged from her own private version of the Golden Age into the Iron Age.

Dorotea's description of her previous life provides the nec-

essary explanation. The only daughter of a wealthy peasant family she has never known rural poverty but rather has been nourished abundantly at "the broad fertile bosom of Mother Earth" (1.28); she has returned parental adoration with complacent and efficient assumption of administrative responsibilities ("as I was mistress of their hearts, I was also mistress of their possessions . . . with a diligence on my part and a satisfaction on theirs which I cannot well describe"); and her leisure time has been spent, not in the manner of Aldonza Lorenzo (flinging crowbars with the village lads), but in such genteel occupations as sewing, embroidering, playing the harp, and reading devotional books. Here she seems purposefully to omit what we later learn from her dialogue—her even greater devotion to romances of chivalry!

Most crucial, however, is the fact that, like other young women in her milieu, Dorotea has been brought up in a state of virtual and virtuous isolation:

It is thus the case that, passing my time with these occupations, and living in a state of retirement which only could be compared to that of a convent, I was never observed (as I believed) by anybody but the servants, because on the days I went to Mass it was so early in the morning and I was so closely accompanied by my mother and maidservants and I was so thickly veiled and circumspect that my own eyes could scarcely see the ground I trod on.
(I.28)

As a result of such an upbringing (for which, of course, she is not personally responsible) she is as rashly self-confident and as abysmally ignorant of the outside world (the Iron Age with its cynical, violent, and concupiscent male inhabitants) as Alonso Quijano in his library. Like his makeshift armor, her flowing hair (which she should have cut) and her dress and jewels (poorly hidden in a pillowcase) are the costume for the role of heroine, which she still hopes to play triumphantly. Alonso Quijano has himself "armed" as a caballero in an ignoble time; she falls into those of the first ignoble heir to that rank (an unscrupulous galan who professes to be

bound by the chivalresque obligations of secret matrimony.^[27] ) who catches a glimpse of her. And afterward, instead of being disillusioned and realizing the truth of her preliminary hypocritical remarks on the domestic and social undesirability of such a match,^[28] this Damsel of the Resplendent Countenance sallies forth determined to retrieve her honor and win matrimonial fame.

Dorotea's penchant for rationalization and self-justification in its own way is even more imprudent than the courage that distinguishes her from Cardenio. Apparent throughout, it is at its most specious in the reproduction of her inner thoughts just prior to her surrender: my suitor may well be sincere; others before me have followed this path to high estate; it will be better to be married than raped; screaming would reveal to my parents that he is inexplicably in my room. Anything but have him ejected forthwith or admit to herself the strength of her carnal attraction! The same almost inhuman control of consciousness characterizes the tone of her narrative (delivered "without any hesitation, with so much ease, and in so sweet a voice that her auditors were no less charmed by her intelligence than by her beauty") as well as its style, which, as we said, sounds as if she enjoyed listening to herself. Among other indulgent artifices there are paired synonyms ("pleadings and prejudices," "promises and oaths," "sought and prized"), preceding adjectives (which have the same effect in Spanish as "house beautiful" in English), untranslatable plays on words,^[29] and above all

[27] This literary "institution"—which Cervantes, needless to say, found both absurd and risky—was fundamental to amorous relationships in the romances. Dorotea is as deluded as Don Quijote in her belief in chivalric conventions. See Justina Ruiz de Conde, El amor y el matrimonio secreto en los libros de caballerías (Madrid: Aguilar, 1948).

[28] "I told him to think it over . . . because the initial pleasure of such unequal matches does not last very long." She is far more sincere when she says, "I esteem myself as a subject and a peasant as much as you do as a lord caballero," and, above all, when she admits her satisfaction "at seeing herself so loved and esteemed by such an illustrious caballero." Estimar , like crédito, respeto, desigualdad , and humilde , all repeated, are characteristic of her socially self-centered lexicon.

[29] For example, when her shepherd master made an attempt on her virtue, she could not find another convenient cliff "de donde despeñar y despenar al amo." Despeñar , from peña (cliff), means throwing him over it as she had done to her servant, while despenar , from pena (grief), means—as they say in the blues—to satisfy his mind. The artificiality of the telling is intentionally contrasted to the grim naturalism of what is told.

that ever-present Golden Age puzzle for modern readers called zeugma, a form of "allusion and elusiveness,"^[30] of which a classic example occurs at the very moment of her seduction. Exactly like Don Quijote's romance when he sets out over the plain of Montiel ("Scarce had the rubicund Apollo spread o'er the face of the broad and spacious earth . . ." [I.2]), her story for her is a work of literary art that resists interruption and possesses its own autonomous reality. After a pause she continues in this fashion: "What happens in my story . . ."

Unlike poor Cardenio, who is his story and as a result is periodically insane, Dorotea fabricates (or at least arranges) her story imaginatively, admires it as she repeats it aloud, and proceeds to try to live it. As a genuine "loca-cuerda," she provides herself with a series of interacting roles that constitute the fabric of her self-understanding and therefore of her existence. She is successively the apple of her parents' eyes, the wise and respected mistress of their estate and household, the secluded maiden surprised and gratified by the potency of a beauty she pretends she had not realized was hers (and which she continues modestly to deprecate), and the

[30] "Alusión y elusión" is Dámaso Alonso's fortunate expression for Góngora's style, but it also applies to Golden Age rhetoric in general with its fondness for zeugma, roughly describable as a grammatical short circuit based on the ambivalence of an antecedent. The following example is representative: "con volverse a salir del aposento mi doncella, yo dejé de serlo" ("when my maid left the bedroom once more, I ceased to be one"). Doncella means both "lady's maid" and "maiden." Dorotea "alludes" to what happened but at the same time renders the joy and the sin "elusive" by shortcircuiting them stylistically, absorbing their living experience into linguistic play. Unlike Cervantes, she is not writing a novel, though her subject, as we shall see, in later centuries would be quintessentially novelistic. I should add that the poets of the time also used the classical form of zeugma, a single predicate for several subjects. Karl Vossler, the great German Romanist, was the first to explore the meaning of, and call our attention to the importance of, the Golden Age variety. See his Introducción a la literatura española del Siglo de Oro (Mexico City: Séneca, 1941), PP. 50—55

innocent victim of unexpected and undeserved faithlessness who bravely sets out in perilous quest of just reparation. One does not have to remember certain women one has known all one's life—women as admirable in their way as Alonso Quijano is in his—in order to appreciate Cervantes's profound portrait of female Quixotism in contrast with the male variety. Neither shares Cardenio's authentic alienation; both suffer the harsh consequences of folly and self-delusion. But while Don Quijote returns in dejected defeat to mortal resignation in Argamasilla, Dorotea (admittedly with the indispensable Ariosto-like intervention of her author) will predictably settle into a long run in the role of aristocratic matriarch of an adoring family. And her seducer, Don Fernando (all literary creatures aspire to biological and biographical life in spite of our critical "fallacies"!), will have reaped the opposite of his just deserts.

If Dorotea's self-indulgent audition of her own story and her incurable propensity for role-playing lead first to seemingly inevitable perdition in Sierra Morena and later to contrived wedded salvation, her acute consciousness of herself as a social being is for Cervantes less excusable. Let us begin with her parents, whose easily imagined consternation and grief at the disappearance of "the support of their old age" has no place in her self-centered confession. Although wealthy and upwardly mobile ("coming by degrees" she remarks complacently, "to be treated as hidalgos and even as caballeros" [I.28]), they nevertheless belong by birth to the third estate.^[31] That is, they are traditional tillers of the soil

[31] Upward mobility or change of status to that of hidalgo was achieved by conversos and rich peasants alike by arranging for what was called a probanza de hidalguía , a legal deposition in which neighbors and friends (often bribed) testified to the ancestral status of the family. This social farce was widespread; the standard questionnaire was composed in a specialized language Cervantes frequently enjoyed teasing. For example, when the Priest tells Sancho that Dorotea is the heiress of the kingdom of Micomicón in Guinea "por linea recta de varon" ("directly descended from the masculine line"), this stock probanza formula, which has absolutely nothing to do with royal lineage, is an implicit critique of all the false dignities and titles that abounded in Spain as well as the general social absurdity of the time. Then Sancho continues the game by remarking that Micomicona is a suitable name for a princess from Micomicón, not because mico means "monkey," but because in Spain, too, many surnames and lineages are taken from place names. As Sancho and everybody else knew, Jews at the moment of baptism often took as their own the name of the town where the sacrament was administered. Thus, Dorotea's assertion of clean blood and peasant honor and her adoption of a ridiculous "aristocratic" name derived from a kingdom of blacks (a race to which she herself, skin aside, is presumed to belong) are presented in comic contrast. Just beneath the narrative surface the Quijote is replete with contemporary social alusiones and elusiones that probably should be ignored by foreign readers. Moreover, if they are not, anachronistic interpretations can result. For example, in a course given at the University of California at San Diego, a very gifted black student objected to the "racism" of this episode. It took an office hour to get him to understand Cervantes's malicious burlesque of Spanish discrimination and presumptuousness. And when he did, he—quite pardonably—continued to object to the use of Africa for such a purpose.

(villanos , or villeins) and, as she does not fail to point out, for that very reason (like Sancho) Old Christians proud of the "untainted blood" that distinguished them from those hidalgos and caballeros whose ancestors had intermarried with wealthy descendants of Jews or Moors or were maliciously suspected of having done so. As a result, the very humility of her lineage endowed Dorotea with that "peasant honor" that was peculiar to that culture and that in its opposition to the proud and overbearing honor of the nobility had become a prominent theme of the drama. It is precisely this unprecedented variety of honor that Don Fernando besmirches, an action that in certain well-beloved comedias would have resuited (inverisimilitude aside!) in his poetically justifiable murder or execution.

Cervantes, however, purposefully eschewed the kind of plot we find in Lope's Fuenteovejuna or Calderón's Mayor of Zalamea . Rather, as a part of his ongoing offensive against what he considered to be the destructive national myths of Old Christianity, cleanliness of blood, and codified honor itself, he probes more deeply into Dorotea's acute social selfawareness. As the result of the politics of the Catholic Monarchs (and with the theatrical collusion of Lope), the caste to which she belongs, the axiologically rebellious and often proudly illiterate descendants of erstwhile villeins, had con-

verted the disdain suffered by its forebears into an assertive superiority, which for Cervantes (and other intellectuals and professionals who shared his stigma) was, to say the least, questionable. In Dorotea's case, however, such claims to social preeminence were insufficient in themselves; instead, they incited her into believing that she was entitled to the real thing: aristocracy with all the trimmings. When Sancho claims that his Old Christianity qualifies him for his future governorship, and Don Quijote replies, "It's quite enough and maybe even a bit too much," Cervantes's intention is comic. But here, without his staged intervention, the results of such presumption would have been tragic.

Is the author of the Quijote , then, intent on defending a stratified social order against presumptuous Becky Sharps? Does he in any way admire Don Fernando or justify his behavior? Not at all! Rather, he is intent on continuing his exploration of illusion and its consequences—but now as a social, rather than an individual, aberration. For example, absolving herself as usual from responsibility, Dorotea wonders whether her parents' "misfortune" in not possessing an "illustrious" family tree may not be the cause of her own misfortune. Don Fernando, she believes, would have kept his word and married her if only . . . Still an inhabitant of her fairy-tale Golden Age, she cannot comprehend the Iron Age treachery she was never taught to expect. As she sees it, it is not her own ambitious gullibility that is to blame but the accident of her birth.

Here comparison with Becky Sharp and other protagonists of nineteenth-century novels is valid. Cervantes with uncanny prescience has discovered that those who live in between one social category and another must manufacture their own identities.^[32] It was a startling discovery, not because such lives were exceptional at the time, but because

[32] In the picaresque novel the protagonists often conceal their shameful or lowly origins with a series of disguised false identities—which is not the same thing as Dorotea's serious effort to create for herself a new one that will be authentic.

seventeenth-century Spaniards preferred to celebrate the blessed petrifaction of their culture and their community. Lope de Vega's theatrical heroes are those who best perform their assigned roles in the face of adversity, and his villains (not villeins!) those who fail to do so. As the ultimate antinovelist, Lope would not have understood Cervantes's problematical approach to self and society, nor would he have acknowledged his responsibility for having exacerbated the problem.

Dorotea's discontent with her social heritage is most censurable (which is not to say that she is a Lopesque villain) in her relationship with the "servant of her father's," to whom she confides her secret and whom she asks to accompany her in her sally as a squire. As she admits, "Though he remonstrated with me for my boldness and condemned my resolve, when he saw how intent I was, he offered to accompany me, as he said, to the end of the world" (I.28). A man of decent instincts and of peasant origin, he might—wealth aside—have been a suitable partner for her. Yet when our Cinderella learns of the inevitable rumor that she has run away with him, what cuts her to the heart is to realize the stain on her reputation: "Losing my good name because of my flight was bad enough, but even worse was to be thought to be involved with a fellow so far beneath me and so unworthy of my favors." But what follows is worst of all: "My good servant, until that moment faithful and trusty, finding me all alone in this desert and incited by his own perversity rather than by my beauty, tried to take advantage of the occasion" (italics mine, for obvious reasons!). Beginning with "words of love," which were harshly rejected, he ends by resorting to force. However, Dorotea "with the help of Heaven" manages to throw him over a convenient cliff and leaves him there without caring whether he is "alive or dead." Had this homicidal, rather than suicidal, precursor of Emma Bovary heard Don Quijote's oration on the Golden Age in its entirety, she would have known what might happen and perhaps would have been able to handle the situation less savagely. At the very least, she might have been less self-righteous.

In presenting Dorotea as an Old Christian who lives her seduction as a case of honor, Cervantes waited until the denouement at the inn before revealing the theatrical—or antitheatrical—significance of her plight; not so when it came to her transparent masculine disguise. As we have seen, she is an inveterate role-player, and this was a role that was immediately recognizable both to the readers and to the other characters. The mass audience of the Golden Age theater was particularly fond of the legshows provided by harebrained heroines who donned tights and buskins and set out with conventionally assured success to recapture the hero of their choice.^[33] It was exactly this show that the Priest, the Barber, and Cardenio enjoy when, like the Elders and Susanna, they spy her washing herself at the fountain with "her gaiters . . . rolled halfway up her legs which seemed truly to be as white as alabaster" (I.28).

Once begun, the show must go on. After Dorotea's story has been spun to the end, the Priest explains the peculiar rescue mission he and the Barber have undertaken—whereupon, without being asked, Dorotea volunteers for the starring role of damsel in distress. She has read "many books of chivalry and knows by heart the style [they] use when they ask a boon of a knight-errant." Without further ado, she dons the fancy feminine costume saved for the scene she had been planning upon encountering Don Fernando. She is ready to perform, and she scores her first hit with Sancho, who is all the more impressed when the Priest announces the program: "Just to say it out of the blue, brother Sancho, this fair lady is no less than the heiress . . . of the great Kingdom of Mico-

[33] Carmen Bravo Villasante in La mujer vestida de hombre en el teatro español (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1955), gives some twenty-five examples from Lope prior to 1603 (the date of his own first published catalogue of plays). Her book is particularly interesting for us in that she demonstrates the origins of such transvestism in the Italian novella and epic, above all in Ariosto, a relationship Cervantes clearly intuited. His originality consisted in combining that variety of willful heroine with a second theatrical prototype, that of the Old Christian maiden concerned with her peasant honor.

micón who has come to ask your master as a boon to redress the tort and injustice a wicked giant has done to her" (I.29).

In commenting on this episode, many critics have noticed the irony of an ostensibly real damsel in distress—Dorotea—whose honor is restored as the result of her impersonation of an ostensibly fictional counterpart—the Princess Micomicona. Don Quijote, without realizing it, has actually been instrumental in the defeat of an evil giant, the perverse grandee Don Fernando. Yet however comic and suggestive this paradoxical coincidence may be, it seems to me to ignore the deeper malice of Cervantes's critical intent. Quite clear1y, for him both literary roles—that borrowed tacitly from the theater and that imitated verbally from the romances of chivalry—are equally artificial and absurd. There is, however, a crucial difference between Don Quijote as an actor and Dorotea as an actress. If the former could survive his three sallies (insofar as his mad humor awakened at least as much amused sympathy as careless brutality), Dorotea's story demonstrates the inevitable dangers awaiting attractive young ladies (and there are records of such cases^[34] ) who might be tempted to enact in life what they had seen working out so well on the stage.

Even worse is the fact that Dorotea—except at the end when she triumphs—is not very talented. Her impersonation of a shepherd boy is as unconvincing as Huck's impersonation of Sarah Williams; as the Princess, she forgets her new name, confuses her itinerary, and has to depend on the Priest, who takes the role of prompter.^[35] Although Cervantes (like Fielding in the eighteenth century) is here concerned with reproving the sloppy acting of the traveling companies of his time, that is not his real target. Rather, what he wants to do is to lead his reader to contemplate on his own the inner

[34] Bravo Villasante, La mujer vestida , pp. 183–203.

[35] In this case the reference to the theater is literal and specific. Dorotea forgets her new name, and the Priest reminds her with an "apuntamiento," or prompting. She replies, "from now on I don't think it will be necessary to apuntarme " (I.30).

similarity of two equally reprehensible genres, the one grotesque and ridiculously obsolete, the other at the height of its popularity, a purveyor of unlivable and stereotyped images of self for the whole of the nation.^[36] There on stage the audience could pick and choose among identities: aggressively honorable peasant, fearless gallant, irresistible seducer, heavy father, or adorable heroine willing to risk all for love. It was serious nonsense, for, as Don Quijote himself observes to the Bachelor later on, "the most discreet character in comedias is the fool" (II.3).

The perceptive reader has been warned, and others will have to wait for the four-way encounter at the inn with its disguises and gestures, its confrontations and anagnorises, its cunningly timed entrances and exits, its mysteries and revelations, its tears and orations, and its two undeserved happy endings to perceive how a plot that began with two words, roto and Fili , gradually evolved from verse to voice, story, and theater—or rather, to a semiburlesque exaggeration of theatrical exaggeration. It was precisely this kind of superbly controlled comic narration that Henry Fielding referred to as "the manner of Cervantes," and since his version of it will be familiar to my presumed readers, I shall spare them further analysis.^[37]

If I have dwelt on the affairs of Cardenio and Dorotea, it is simply because those who read (or teach) the Quijote in English are often so puzzled or put off by these so-called interpolations that they shunt them aside. The Viking Portable Cervantes omits them; Nabokov superciliously refers to them as "the dregs of Italianate fiction"; and Virginia Woolf in her diary (August 5, 1923) terms them "dull." The author himself

[36] See Marcos Moríñigo, "El teatro como sustituto de la novela en el Siglo de Oro," Revista Universitaria de Buenos Aires 11 (1957), PP. 41–61.

[37] One of the reasons I undertook to rewrite these essays for readers whose Spanish is either nonexistent or rudimentary is the failure of many students of Fielding to "receive" the Quijote with Fielding's uncanny accuracy and insight. I have also contributed an article entitled "On Henry Fielding's Reception of Don Quijote " to Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Honor of R. B. Tate (Oxford: Dolphin Books, 1986). It is intended for anyone who may be curious about a Hispanist's view of the relationship.

even sounds a bit apologetic at the beginning of Part II, when he remarks that the most "jovial" among his readers only ask that he allow Don Quijote to go on "charging" and Sancho to go on "talking" for their complete satisfaction. That is precisely the point at issue: joviality is fine, but it is not a sufficient qualification for reading a text of this magnitude. One must apply one's entendimiento to the whole in all its parts, not just because what happens and what is said in Sierra Morena is as fascinating a technical accomplishment as the generic play that preceded it (a well "cleansed, twisted, and reeled-up" yarn complementary to the "subtle design" of the "cloth woven from various and beautiful skeins") but also because in the process of inventing in Orlando Furioso and in the comedia, Cervantes discovered the full potentiality of the new kind of narrative—the novel to be—that here concerns us.

"To the discredit of the truth and the detriment of history. . ."

Once the inner resemblance of the two genres has been recognized by Cervantes's readers, they are led to realize that all his objections to the romances of chivalry can be extended to the comedia. In chapter 33 the Priest and the Barber return to their inquisitorial role and conduct a miniscrutiny of four books that have been left at the inn by a "traveler"—presumably a sly reference to Cervantes himself, since he also left the manuscript of El curioso impertinente . The episode is beloved because of the Innkeeper's description of how romances were read aloud: "When it is harvest time, the reapers flock here on holidays, and there's always one who knows how to read and he takes up one of these books. We gather around him thirty or more and we sit there listening to him with such pleasure that it takes away our grey hairs." It is an image that, as we saw, corresponds in popular terms to the Canon's heretical "new mode of life." Then, those present who have listened avidly to these sessions describe their personal varieties of incitation: the Innkeeper loves the blows and, like another Alonso Quijano, feels the urge to join in the

fray; Maritornes is thrilled by the scenes of physical lovemaking, which, she says, "taste like honey"; and the daughter emotes upon hearing the lovelorn rhetoric of caballeros who are out of favor with their ladies.

The fondness of nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers for this particular chapter has a certain dose of anachronism. Cervantes did not intend to sketch a folkloric scène de campagne but rather to point out that the above reactions were stimulated only by the two absurd romances of chivalry selected for burning and not by the two other chronicles of authentic Spanish heroism—that of the so-called Great Captain and that of the latter-day peninsular Hercules, Diego Garcia de Paredes.^[38] The Innkeeper naturally objects: if half his circulating library has to be burned, let them choose the latter pair and not the former, beneath the grotesquely fictional surface of which he submerges himself as joyously as Ortega does beneath that of the Chartreuse , which is exactly why the amateur Inquisitors have decided to condemn them!

Spain's genuinely heroic "old life," Cervantes implies, is being literally buried not only by junk sentimentality and violence but also, far worse, by an avalanche of pseudohistory and pseudoheroism accepted as true by the masses of illiterate innkeepers, reapers, and their like. Alonso Quijano is an isolated case of folly: the audience at the inn (identical to those that filled both fixed and ambulatory theaters^[39] ) is the

[38] "El gran capitán" was, of course, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, King Ferdinand's heroic and victorious general in Italy while Diego García de Paredes, "the Spanish Bayard," fought in the same ranks and was famed for his legendary physical strength. It is interesting that Cervantes, unlike Lope, picks out sixteenth-century heroes rather than those of the early Reconquest, whose fame had already been blurred by apocryphal chronicles and ballads.

[39] In order to understand Cervantes's alarm, one must take into account the almost incredible proliferation of theatrical activity after Lope perfected his three-act formula with its incessantly changing versification. Lope's endless fecundity corresponded perfectly to the insatiable appetite for plays of those he called with good reason "my Spaniards." His own plays are uneven in quality, ranging from masterpieces such as El Caballero de Olmedo to potboilers, but in the hundred or so I have read I have not found a single one lacking moments of sheer poetic delight. His example, however, as Cervantes points out in El viaje del Parnaso , inspired numerous followers to emulate the fecundity, but in most cases without the quality. Along with the immense number of playwrights and plays, there was a corresponding increment in performances of all kinds. Unlike France and England with their limited number of institutionalized theaters and traveling companies, in Spain, aside from the two theaters and the officially recognized troupes in Madrid, there were countless bands of nomadic actors—ranging from those thirteen or fourteen strong that toured the larger towns to lone beggars in remote hamlets able to recite a single comedia from memory in exchange for a handout. Both the peninsula and the American viceroyalties were literally inundated with a theater that celebrated values that Cervantes found questionable and that unashamedly falsified the heroic past. The soul of the nation had been literally captured by what we now would call mass culture—commercialized and standardized mass culture as against prior oral and spontaneous folk culture. This theater was made possible, of course, by the existence of the ballad tradition, and many of the stories and characters as well as fragments of that tradition were utilized in comedias; but it was mass production, mass consumption, and mass performance that made Spanish theater an unprecedented socioliterary phenomenon.

nation itself. When the Priest tries to explain to the Innkeeper the difference between history and fiction, he replies (like Don Quijote, who later uses the same argument) that his romances cannot lie because they are vouched for "by the license of the Lords of the Royal Council." The proposition of official censorship of the theater is obviously waiting in the wings. If two romances of chivalry could so mislead these simple souls, the same responsible Lords had better begin supervising the mass folly of the comedia.

Overt criticism of the national theater only appears in chapter 48 after the lesson on fictional verisimilitude and harmonious narrative structure, and in it we perceive immediately the increment of social preoccupation that modifies the aesthetic criteria of the initial Scrutiny. Cervantes, of course, does not employ twentieth-century terminology—role models and the like—but when citing Cicero he observes that drama should be a "mirror of human life, model of manners, and image of the truth," he is clearly worried about the health of the nation's collective consciousness. When he goes on to say that the kind of plays that are put on in 1605 are instead "mirrors of insanity, examples of folly, and images of lascivi-

ousness," we begin to comprehend the lesson of Sierra Morena. Once they have come to the end of their insane, foolish, and lascivious stories, Cardenio and Dorotea are ready to be transported from that labyrinth to the impromptu stage of the inn, where they find the happy ending they do not deserve. A population that only knows itself as reflecting the shadow lives of the comedia will perforce be exiled from its past and lost in its present. Enslaved to a commercial product ("mercadería vendible"), it will ignore both its own "history" and the authenticity or "truth" of its human existence. Hence the urgent need of appointing "an intelligent and discreet person in the capital to examine all plays before being put on . . . and whose approval, seal, and signature would be required in each case." Cervantes himself?

Cervantes's precepts for drama reflect the standard neoAristotelian doctrine of the time (the three unities and the rest) and need not be summarized here. But the implications of communal alienation and axiological degeneration in the Priest's discourse were singularly prescient. One only has to look at the state of Spanish literature at the end of the seventeenth century in order to realize how clearly Cervantes foresaw the shape of things to come. Much as we may admire the great plays of Lope, Tirso, and Calderón, what we would now term the mass culture out of which they sprang was to become a cultural wilderness, in which unleashed ingenio would entirely supplant insight, and accelerated and compartmentalized adventures (an express freight train!) would lose all semblance of recognizable experience. Cervantes may not have believed that his proposition of censorship was practicable, but when he has the Canon justify the flames ("Such punishment they certainly deserve for being liars and imposters and as the founders of new sects and a new mode of life" [I.49]), he implies that instead of being "innocent," as in chapter 6, such literature (romances of chivalry and, by extension, the comedia) is far more dangerous to the traditional values of a Christian commonwealth than minor religious deviations. He then proves his case by returning to the theme of Spain's authentically heroic past, its collective iden-

tity embodied in individual heroes, which is in danger of being lost forever:

Lusitania had a Viriatus, Rome a Caesar, Carthage a Hannibal, Greece an Alexander, Castile a Count Fernán González, Valencia a Cid, Andalusia a Gonzalo Fernández, Extremadura a Diego Garcia de Paredes, Jerez a Garcí Pérez de Vargas, Toledo a Garcilaso, Seville a don Manuel de León, and reading about their valiant deeds can entertain, teach, delight and inspire the most elevated of ingenios .
(I.49)

If we have to have an Inquisition—the question seems to be—why not invent one that would be intelligent and discreet and that would attend to what was really polluting ("staining," in the parlance of the time) the soul of the nation?

Cervantes's "modest proposal" of censorship is once again a case of "duplicity within duplicity, a sword turning all ways," but it does correspond to what he had discovered in the course of writing Part I: that, like decent theater (how much he would have admired Molière!), fiction—reformed as he had reformed it—instead of just inundating the public with fantasy, could confront it with sanity and truth. In the First Sally he had taken the narrative pulse of an individual aberration, and by the end of the Second Sally he had arrived at a profound diagnosis of his Quixotic society. In drawing on each reader's experience for the validation of his fiction, he had—or at least hoped he had—led him or her to realize its collective dimension and to assess the degeneration of its collective worth.

Ironically and without the slightest trace of bombast, Cervantes had discovered in himself a historian and a prophet, a Homer and an Isaiah, who could teach his fellows how to free themselves from collective determinism. For the protonovelist Cervantes, being who he was and living in the time he lived, that determinism was literary (the endemic "Literarisierung des Lebens" he found at once deplorable and wildly amusing), but the lesson was not lost on the nineteenth century. We may not go to Heaven, and we cannot

aspire to the spiritual heights and depths of Don Quijote, Huck Finn, Emma Bovary, Fabrice del Dongo, Raskolnikov, Captain Ahab, Parson Adams, or Prince Myshkin, but having lived their lives novelistically, we are freed from having to be Cardenio or Dorotea—or their descendants: a money-mad Dombey, a power-mad Vautrin, or a Madame Verdurin mad for a variety of social gratification that was itself a strange aberration.

In conclusion, since we have taken pains to analyze the composition of the Sierra Morena narratives (the author's own and those of the two protagonists) as a characteristically Cervantine fusion of genres (an "epic, lyric, tragic, comic" cocktail, according to the Priest [I.48]), let us reflect on what was discovered therein in terms of generic theory. For Cervantes the fundamental aberration of the comedia as formulated by Lope was not just facile fecundity and absurd plots but, more important, the fact that both audience and authors took its literary vision of life as seriously as Alonso Quijano took that of the Amadís . Far more than either the English or the French theaters, it provided seventeenth-century Spaniards with the same instrument that the novel was to provide nineteenth-century Europeans: a mirror of mores, a reflection of the relations and accepted roles of servants and masters, fathers and grown-up children,^[40] gallants and damsels, kings and subjects, nobles and commoners, peasants and landlords, and husbands and wives.

Unlike those of the future novel, however, the mores of the comedia^[41] were not the typical "manners" or "affectations" of a given time portrayed critically, humorously, and, at times, affectionately by an ironical outsider. Rather, as we

[40] Since the comedia was alternately celebrative and conflictive, there was no place in it for Shakespearean pathos or for the intimate tenderness of the mother-child relationship. With a few exceptions—Jesus as a child of macho matriarchs—neither is to be found in the typical cast.

[41] Although elaborate scenery was current by the time of Calderón later in the seventeenth century, Lope specialized in what were termed purely oral comedias de ingenio , in which standardized "scenes" were recognized only from the dialogue.

have stressed, they reflect the exigencies of honor—that is to say, of a code inherited from the centuries of the Reconquest, exaggerated fictionally in the romances of chivalry, exacerbated socially by unrelenting caste tensions, and celebrated unanimously by playwrights, characters, and the public. In so saying, we must take care not to confuse honor with religious faith or loyalty to king and country. The latter were unquestioned and unquestionable values, whereas honor functioned dramatically both as fateful anguish for those who had to conform to its dictates (must I kill my wife, my son, my liege lord, or my fiancée's father?) and, at the end of the play (in a fashion antithetical to the tragedy of Othello), as an "ingenious" form of resolution, a recipe for comforting conformance. Thus, as we have seen, in his two intertwined meditations on the comedia Cervantes took care to explore more profoundly the dishonored anguish (or lack of it) of the protagonists and to emphasize the artificiality of the climax.

The contrast of Spain's seventeenth-century theater and the nineteenth-century European novel as mirrors of society is elementary. We believe in the inhabitants and the milieu of the Maison Vauquer—"Mais, ils sont vrais!"—because Balzac's use of caricature in their portrayal converts them into heightened and thereby all the more recognizable vessels of personal experience. Instead of being admirable or reprehensible enactors of standard roles (determined by a consecrated social code of behavior) in a conventional setting (anteroom, public square, bedroom, court, or battlefield), in their particular speech and in their milieus they provide clues—unexpected but immediately comprehensible signs—to their privacy. It was precisely the absence of that kind of individuation that seemed so false and misleading to Cervantes. What, he asks, might actually be the actions and reactions (the possible experience) of a second- or third-tier caballero whose fiancée is coveted by an all-powerful grandee or of a peasant maid determined to reclaim her honor by sallying forth in a wide and obdachlos world in search of her seducer?

Obviously, these two interpolated tales and performances are not novelistic in the nineteenth-century sense; they are at

best social fables for Cervantes's time. The isms indispensable for depiction of the full complexity of private existence in a historical milieu had not yet been invented—which, of course, is why everything had to take place in Sierra Morena and on the improvised stage of the inn and not in the urban world of "this Andalusia" remembered fragmentarily by Cardenio and Dorotea. Nevertheless, the counterposed indications of just "how it felt to exist in the happening" (the "twinning" perfected by Fielding), the awareness of the intricacies of social stratification (as against simply "I am a caballero" or "I am an Old Christian"), and the skeptical contemplation of the convention of honor (by an author who was nonetheless a patriot and an Erasmian Catholic) taken together indicate that Cervantes had drawn an intuitive chart of the future course of the novel, or that at least he had erected a sign post pointing in the right direction.

Thus, emergent from his generic criticism of the comedia, the critic was granted a brief vision of a strange and unprecedented genre of which his own Quijote was to be the precursor. Even more, without the experimental isolation and the absence of social contamination made possible by the human laboratories of Sierra Morena and the inn, the protonovelistic episodes that take place in the manor house of Don Diego de Miranda, in the Duke's palace, in Barataria, and in Barcelona would all have been impossible. If the romances of chivalry had provided Cervantes with a model for printed narration, the comedia, by portraying contemporary Spain in terms of honor—at once traditional and fictional—provide his ironic mirror with a society for ironic reflection. The anachronism that was the life of Don Quijote could now be observed on the national stage. The chivalresque, picaresque, and pastoral topika of the beginning remain no less serviceable, but they have been infiltrated by others derived from the theater's Literarisierung of social mores. Like Columbus, without knowing exactly what it was, Cervantes had set foot on a new continent later to be called the novel.