Preface
"Pour qui écrit-on?" asks a great French humanist ("malgré lui!") of those who presume to publish what they have written. The arrogance of the question with its implicit demand for self-justification tempts "one" to retort just as arrogantly. Perhaps like Stendhal one might say: "For the 'Happy Few' gifted with sufficient understanding." In this case, however, both modesty and honesty forbid. Let me answer instead by anticipating the foreseeable disappointment of those for whom I am not writing. The four essays that follow are not intended for professional "cervantistas" who, if they take the time to read one more addition to their immense bibliography, will find many interpretations and much information with which they are quite familiar, together with other observations which may seem arbitrary or irrelevant. Nor will what I hope to communicate serve as a useful introduction or guide to the Quijote .[1] That is, I do not seek future readers who wish to learn what to make of its peculiar narrative behavior or how to estimate its value.
Granted, certain comments may interest—or at least provoke—my colleagues and others might be helpful to amateur addicts of fiction who find themselves disconcerted by what Francis Thompson called Cervantes's "duplicity within duplicity, a sword turning all ways."[2] Nevertheless, such readers
[1] I have eschewed the English "Don Quixote" (except when citing critics who use it) because it does not permit the convenient Spanish distinction between the person, Don Quijote, and the book, "el Quijote ," or in my text, "the Quijote ."
[2] "Was there ever so strange a book as this Don Quixote! To what class shall we assign it? Solitary, singular, it will not be pigeonholed; your literary entomologists shall ticket it, genus and subgenus at their peril. It is complex beyond measure. It is a piece of literary duplicity without precedent or succession; nay duplicity within duplicity, a sword turning all ways" (Francis Thompson, The Academy , Sept. 18, 1897, p. 220). I am indebted for this reference to Louis Murillo. In the course of the essays to follow, we shall examine the apparently paradoxical combination of the generic uniqueness of the Quijote remarked on by Thompson and the subsequent "invention" of the novel.
deserve to be warned that they have not been sought for. Instead, as a Hispanist, I have tried to tell comparatists and students of literary theory what we think we know about the origin of a generic phenomenon unique in the cultural history of the West: the so-called rise of the novel. How did this special kind of fiction take its initial steps upward? What were the personal, the social, and, above all, the literary circumstances (or contexts) within which an aging would-be author, who by his own admission had failed as a lyric poet and dramatist, sat down to write: "In a village of la Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to recollect, there lived not long ago . . ."?
Faced with these questions, skeptics will reply either that the novel as narrative (a "Naturform der Dichtung") began in Eden or that there are any number of other tales and tellers—fictions and authors—with as good or better claims to priority. Among them one could mention Heliodorus (who, as we shall see, would have been Cervantes's candidate), Boccaccio (for the "elegy" of Fiammetta ), Rabelais, Madame de Lafayette, Fielding (according to Stendhal), and Sir Walter Scott (who also favored Fielding, again for Tom Jones ).[3] It all comes down to a question of prior definition, and definitions, when claims of this sort are at stake, are notoriously self-serving. It was just such critical hypocrisy (often reflecting professional or national zeal) that E. M. Forster challenged humorously in his first lecture, at Trinity College, Cambridge, on aspects of the novel:
[3] Sir Walter Scott, The Fortunes of Nigel , vol. 14 of The Waverley Novels (Boston: Little, Brown, 1853), p. 14: "Fielding had high notions of the dignity of an art which he may be considered as having founded."
Any fictitious prose work of over 50,000 words will be a novel for the purpose of these lectures, and if this seems to you unphilosophic, will you think of an alternative definition which will include The Pilgrim's Progress, Marius the Epicurean, The Adventures of a Younger Son, The Magic Flute, The Journal of the Plague, Zuleika Dobson, Rasselas, Ulysses , and Green Mansions , or else give reasons for their exclusion?[4]
I agree. In the introductory essay, I shall forbear to trace indefensible generic frontiers and instead attempt—with the aid of two major novelists in the Cervantine tradition, Henri Beyle and Samuel Clemens—to define the way novels need to be read—and indeed how all the fictions on Forster's heterogenous list have on occasion been read (however unsuitably) by readers habituated to novelistic surrender and enrichment.
However, just as in Orwell's Animal Farm some animals are more equal than others, so too some novels are more novelistic than others, which is to say, better prepared for the kind of reading that Cervantes, as a professor of that engaging metier, was concerned to profess. Therefore, following the first essay (entitled "Definition" but in truth an antidefinition), the remaining three will examine primarily how in Part I of the Quijote Cervantes learned to teach naive seventeenthcentury addicts of printed romances of chivalrry, roguery, and sentimentality how to mend their bad habits. Lionel Trilling goes too far when he proposes that "all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote ."[5] The truth is at once more and less encouraging to those of us who care. It is not prose fiction that finds its role model in that eccentric narrative, but rather sophisticated reading of fiction. A more justifiable proposition is that of Harry Levin: "Don Quixote is, thus, an archetype as well as an example, the exemplary
[4] E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1954), p. 6.
[5] Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: Scribner's, 1976), p. 209.
novel of all time."[6] Similar testimony is abundant: Schelling, who declared Cervantes to be a modern counterpart of Homer; Sterne and Fielding, who discovered in their laughter new creative directions; Byron and Heine, whose reading generated romantically ironic tears; Georg Lukács, who in part derived his Theorie therefrom; and Mikhail Bakhtin, who described the fount of those opinions and emotions to be "the classic and purest model of the novel as a genre."[7] But for my purposes a comparison to be found at the end of Ortega y Gasset's Meditaciones del "Quijote" (1914) is the most suggestive: "What is needed is a book which would demonstrate in detail that every novel embeds the Quijote within itself like a secret watermark, just as every epic poem encases the Iliad as if it were the pit of a peach."[8]
Unfortunately (from the point of view of literary theory), the trail-breaking Meditaciones , which preceded the young Ortega's recognition of this necessity, does not address it. Instead, he was intent on formulating his own nascent philosophy in terms of Cervantes's novelistic portrayal of human exposure and the "perspectivism" therewith engendered. And equally unfortunately (from the same point of view), what I have to say is far too limited in scope to have satisfied Ortega. Nevertheless, to begin at the beginning, to attempt to explain how Cervantes (as unaware of his destination as Columbus) perceived his own narrative innovations and to elucidate what can be known about the literary and historical motives of those innovations is at least to clear the ground. Neither peninsular scholars nor foreign Hispanists have yet produced the definitive book requested by Ortega.[9] Like
[6] Harry Levin, Contexts of Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 97.
[7] Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination , ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), p. 324.
[8] José Ortega y Gasset, Obras completas (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1950–1961), 1: 398 (translation mine).
[9] In addition to Américo Castro's illuminating introduction to the Porrúa edition published in Mexico in 1960 (translated by Edmund L. King and myself and included in An Idea of History [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1977], pp. 77–143), there is Harry Levin's thoughtful essay on the subject in Grounds for Comparison (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 224–44.
those who cultivate other academic fields, most of us spend far too much time writing for each other. It may as a result be worthwhile for someone among us to make an effort to communicate to those outsiders who might be interested in what we profess (the verb also means "pretend") to know: just how the Quijote became "the exemplary novel of all time."
How do things begin? The obvious answers are triple: inventions are invented; hitherto unknown regions and unrecognized capacities or values are discovered; and living creatures (after conception and gestation) are born. And since the Quijote began in all three of these ways—as a result of intentional narrative invention, as a discovery of hitherto unperceived potentialities of printed fiction, and as a burgeoning of new life—each of these aspects will be considered separately. Such a procedure, admittedly, has two serious disadvantages. First, it is artificial, in that isolation of the three modes of beginning tends to disguise their organic interrelationship. Second (derived from the first), repeated examination of key episodes and passages from differing points of view is necessary. However, the only other solution I can imagine would be that of Borges's Pierre Menard: to write the Quijote over again and in so doing watch it in the process of becoming itself.
A word of warning to the readers I do seek, readers who contemplate "the novel" and try to explain its generic peculiarity aesthetically in any number of ways. To propose, as I have done, that the novel began in the course of composing Part I of the Quijote is essentially to propose that within the ocean of prose fiction there is a Cervantine Gulf Stream traceable but not rigorously surveyable that includes the very best of the good reading. This would be the content of the book that Ortega demanded and that I have not provided, except
from time to time in lists of novels that in one way or another resemble the Quijote generically. I hardly need to say that it is not a question of "influence"—not even in the case of Joseph Andrews , "written in imitation of the manner of Cervantes." Rather, the novelists of later centuries who can be perceived as belonging to the Cervantine tradition rediscover, reinvent, and give birth anew to creatures who experience their residence on earth in a way comparable to Don Quijote and Sancho. This is the reading that matters and in terms of which we may gauge the aesthetic and ethical worth of the rest of our voluptuous immersions (both the adjective and the noun will be justified contextually within a few pages) in story books of every kind.
In conclusion, I should point out that the four essays—here substantially revised—were originally lectures delivered on different occasions.[10] Their unity is not due to a single act of composition, but rather is the reflection of a professional lifespan dedicated in large part to brooding on how the novel began and how it grew. But not lonely brooding. In the beginning there were my first teachers of the Quijote , Augusto Centeno and F. Courtney Tarr; then there have been colleagues, Jean-Jacques Demorest, Donald Fanger, Roy Harvey
[10] The introduction was given at the English Institute and was greeted with marked hostility by the assembled scholars and later by the supervising committee, with the exception of Roy Harvey Pearce. Excluded from their 1972 volume, it was finally printed (thanks to J. Hillis Miller, who thought it had merit) in Interpretation: Theory and Practice , ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), pp. 153–71. The second essay, "Birth," was prepared for a symposium on Cervantes at the University of Wisconsin (Madison). A portion of it has since appeared, entitled "Don Quijote, Part I, Chapter 20: Interruption, Experience, and the Birth of the Novel," in Homenaje a Ana María Barrenechea , ed. Lia Schwartz Lerner and Isaías Lerner (Madrid: Castalia, 1984), pp. 241–46. The third, "Invention," stems remotely from a 1953 lecture first presented at Fordham (at the invitation of Vicente Gaos). A portion of the present text was submitted to an homenaje that I hope will appear before this book. Finally, the fourth, "Discovery," was the inaugural Américo Castro Lecture delivered in Princeton in 1969. In the following year it was translated, revised, and presented at the Third Congress of Hispanists in Mexico. It appears as "Los inquisidores literarios de Cervantes" in Anales del Tercer Congreso de Hispanistas (Mexico, 1970), pp. 3–25.
Pearce, Francisco Márquez Villanueva, and George Shipley,[11] whose generous reading and suggestions have helped immensely. I am particularly indebted to Dolores Timbas, whose editorial scrutiny has saved me from myself many times. Finally, two major "cervantistas" spent hours and days of their precious time correcting and redirecting one portion or another. I therefore dedicate what follows to my master, Américo Castro, and to my colleague, Raimundo Lida.
[11] I have, of course, had far more intellectual company than I have mentioned. During the decades of their gestation these essays have been enriched by my unsystematic (after the publication of my dissertation on Avellaneda in 1950) inundation in the inexorable flood of contemporary Cervantine bibliography. As a result, those of my colleagues who may read them will surely perceive unacknowledged echoes of their contributions and ideas as well as occasional tacit disagreement. I hope they will not be offended by my decision to avoid blunting the thrust of what I have to say with a survey of their criticism. What I have done for the benefit of the readers I seek is to mention in the appropriate notes the major studies, which are our common point of departure, as well as the sources of certain still controversial interpretations that I accept as true. Here I refer most particularly to the mature work of Américo Castro.