The quijotista / Quixotist hungry for learning is advised to approach this smörgåsbord leisurely; such a gourmet can anticipate teasing his palate, but the hurried gourmand will only traumatize his paunch. Ingest slowly, digest at ease. Read Friedman's menu, the guide to your plaice in the Quixote or to your currant interests, and save room for the Parr-fait dessert.
Agreed, despairing reader, enough of this «ludic
antiphony to serious scholarship»
(Friedman 12), but I
did mean to catch your eyes and to convey the ideas of the bountiful variety
here offered and the general satisfaction of consuming it. Don Quixote's birth,
life, death. Love, justice foolery.
Celestina, Lazarillo, Huckleberry Finn.
Sancho,
primo, Camacho. Dulcinea, Lady Honoria
Dedlock, Molly Bloom. All this and more, with obfuscatory lexemes mostly left
by the wayside and the pleasures of rereading and rewriting so many magical
parts very much in evidence.
In «Cervantes's Rhyming Dictum on
Celestina: Vita artis gratia or
Ars vitae gratia?» (19-36), Anthony J.
Cárdenas takes up El Donoso's
versos de cabo roto regarding
Celestina -«libro, en mi
opinión, divi-, / si encubriera más lo huma»-
-interpreted by «two camps: those which maintain that these lines
inveigh against the lasciviousness of
Celestina and those which maintain that
they stress the artistic element of Cervantes's
Literaturanschauung»
(19). Bringing to bear several critical opinions, Cárdenas
observes what might be called the contrast between floodlighted reality and the
gauzy lens of art, as when, for example, as opposed to Calisto's
«graphic» comment to Melibea («Señora, el que quiere comer el ave, quita primero
las plumas»
), «the most delicate of terms
reveals Dorotea's capitulation to Fernando»
(21, 22).
Considering Quixote's nighttime «discovery» of Maritornes'
«beauty», «with its potential for the crassness seen in
Celestina, emphasis rests in the ironic
transformation of the real to the ideal»
(23). Given the
name
Donoso, the reader expects «his work
to be of
ingeniosa
invención»
(29); so also is the tale of
Don Quixote, «a central, conscious theme»
of which is
«the power of art to transform [sic]
life»
(28).
Carmen Vega Carney, in «Righting Wrongs:
Don Quixote and the Rhetoric of
Justice» (37-55), investigates the «principal conceptions of
justice that are staged in
Don Quixote [which] are natural law and the
law of the state»
, the two giving rise to a conflict
«because each concept, one divinely inspired and the other worldly,
leads to differing outcomes in the administration of justice»
(37). Sending felons to the galleys
and setting them free, for example, are two
modes of adjudication which simply cannot coexist: «an act of justice
by Don Quixote is accompanied by either breaking the law or by making evident
that formal justice is required to correct a social injustice»
(41). Natural law holds sway in much of Part I whereas in Part II
it is found only in the episode with Roque Guinart, «the mimetic
representation of the motif of righting wrongs [...] accomplished by the bandit
Roque, rather than by our hero; distributive law emerges as a topic for
dramatic representation, as well as canon law»
(49).
Quixote's declining use of archaic language imitates the gradual disappearance
of the primacy of natural law, as when he speaks to the brayers' squadron:
«Rather than using the rhetoric of chivalry to settle the dispute, he
proceeds to apply logic and persuasive speech. [...] The hero is becoming more
like those who surround him»
(44). Returning to Alonso
Quixano's prosaic world is Quixote's (thus Cervantes') «specific
disavowal»
of «the archaic value system»
(50).
A «holistic tree image»
and
«Plotinus's concept that places man on an ascending ladder between his
lower physical roots and his higher godly nature»
(127)
are major considerations in «Don Quixote as Lover: A Neoplatonic
Paradigm» (127-44) by José L. Gallegos who sees this love as
«more akin to communication than a feeling of affection towards
others»
(133). Thus Quixote's «chivalric ideal
is limited by the reality of social conventions and is tempered by his genuine
concern for Sancho»
, whereas Marcela displays no sympathy for
Grisóstomo, evidence that «extreme or unbalanced idealism can
stunt psychic growth»
(135). Inherent in Quixote's
career is the «transformation [...] from a purely Platonic idealist to
a more compassionate human»
(140), leading from the
chivalric quest in Part I to «a serious discourse on the symbolic
meaning of love and knighthood in Part II»
(141).
Marion F. Freeman looks at «The Cave of Montesinos and
Camacho's Wedding: Text and Intertext» (91-103) «not so much
interested in
what these episodes mean [...] as in
how they mean»
(91)
and begins with a list of eight common elements though «there are
significant differences»
(92). Central is Sancho's
body-bound role in the wedding versus «the spiritual, interior, and
subterranean workings of Don Quixote's mind at a critical moment in his
knightly adventures»
(94); the latter begs more
attention here. The conclusion: the Camacho-Quiteria-Basilio encounter is
«an intertext for the subsequent episode»
of the Cave,
effecting «a transposition of the first narrative [...] from one mode,
one literary realm, into another»
(100).
On the first page of «'They Say That... You Can Read
That...' (II, 44): On Origins in
Don Quixote» (237-49), James A. Parr
refers to the «logocentric world-view»
in which
«writing is a supplement to the original form of communication, speech
or orality»
. In the pages to follow he traces a sort of
which-came-first sequence, the chicken or the egg?, the written or the spoken
word?, as he digs
—122→
down to the opening of Part II, chapter 44, to
find that «What is being highlighted [...] is the misguided search for
a center -for origins, or sources»
, «part of a larger
pattern of parodying the fruitless search for sources, origins, beginnings, and
firsts»
(243, 244). There are moments in this essay,
however, when Parr appears to denegrate the primacy of orality: «This
analeptic prolepsis of epistemological excess travesties the impossible dream
of hermeneutic grounding, insinuating the prospect of a
mise en abyme or infinite regress,
enhancing exponentially the instability of the text discussed so perceptively
by Weiger»
(243).
Jay Farness differentiates «Clown and Jester in
Don Quixote» (57-80), the first
preeminent in Part I, the second in Part II, principally due to the
intervention of the
duques: «the lowlife festival
[in Part I, akin to the Saturnalia] has crossed into its imitation in courtly
entertainment; a more immediate presentation of festive motives has become
their elaborate representation according to the carefully calculated but
inexplicit motives of official art and power»
(62).
There's no love lost for the self-indulgent aristocrats: their
«masques feel overdone and overworked, just as, inversely, the
hospitality of the great house seems at time mean, illiberal, and
cost-conscious, literally so for Governor Panza»
(67).
Farness aptly lays bare the attendant humiliation of «inferiors»:
«The court, though seemingly oblivious to vulgar affairs, is
enthralled by lower interests, not by higher aspirations, by the crash of
Clavileño, not by its flight»
(75).
Yvonne Jehenson introduces the question of «the Erasmian humanism of Cervantes» in «Don Quijote and Sancho: The Wise and the Foolish» (181-93) with the guidance of Alban K. Forcione's Cervantes and the Humanist Vision and Antonio Vilanova's 1949 edition of Erasmo y Cervantes (181). She wishes
| (181-182; cf. 191-92) | ||
Of note is her term «unreal
conditionality»
in reference to the repeated avoidance of threatened
calamities: «Through linguistic expressions such as 'if it were not
for,' 'had it not been that,' the disaster imminent in the knight's actions is
attenuated»
(185), thus enabling «Don Quijote
and Sancho to have time to develop a progressive regard for each other and to
lessen the extreme penchants that characterize them initially»
(186). Carroll B. Johnson reviews «A Gallery of Decadents:
Society in
Don Quijote, Part II» (195-211). The
duques, of course, she
«beautiful on the outside and literally rotten on the
inside»
(202) and he «inhibited from playing
his social role because he is in debt to his vassal»
(203), amongst other failings. How many others to whom Don Quixote
«emerges as morally superior»
(196)? Roque
Guinart: «Honor,
agravio and
venganza are all negatively charged.
They oppose chivalry
—123→
and
enderezar tuertos, as Roque opposes
Don Quijote»
(202). The
grave eclesiástico:
«the narrator predisposes us to dislike this man even before he
condemns himself out of his own mouth»
(197). The
primo, Humanist in name only, betrayed
by «the pedestrian quality of his mind»
(198).
The translator of
Le Bagatelle, as worthless a compilation as
the
Ovidio español. Lastly Don Diego de
Miranda whose mode of hunting -described in his «unremittingly smug
and self-satisfied self-portrait»
(206)- betrays his
conscious renunciation (my phrase) of the expectations of his social rank, a
nominal
caballero astride a dappled mare.
In the first paragraph of «Character as Caricature: Don
Quixote and the Distorted Image» (225-36), Doreen M. O'Connor is
forthright: «Finding an adequate definition of
caricature might resemble the search for
the leaden box containing parchment records of future adventures alluded to in
the final chapter of Part I of
Don Quixote»
. She examines its
artistic origin in Italy around 1600; «the tendency to emphasize the
peculiarities of a subject became an effective vehicle for pictorial satire. In
a literary text, as in art, caricature operates by exaggerating and distorting
an individual's prominent features and characteristics»
(226). Amadís, then, is caricatured by Quixote in Part I;
in Part II he is himself «a living caricature [...] and is perceived
as such by those who have read of his adventures»
(227).
The
duques receive their due here also:
the cats episode «is not only humiliating and cruel, but extends
beyond that to border on the grotesque»
(231); these
decadents and Altisidora are so engaged in seeking their jollies that they have
overlooked the chivalric ideals which could be the corrective of their lives
were they to see straight. One might memorize O'Connor's last sentence:
«The distorted image has become a mirror for distortion»
(233).
Roberto Véguez presents «Pedagogy for the Oppressor:
The Role of the Grave Ecclesiastic in the Ducal Episodes of
Don Quixote, Part II» (309-21). The
effect of the narrators' initial description of the
grave (II, 31) «is to
predispose the readers towards a negative evaluation of whatever may follow
related to the ecclesiastic»
(309). Our protagonists'
experiences in the ducal pleasure dome show that «nobility,
generosity, and a Christian approach to others are in very short supply, as can
be shown by comparing some of the characteristics of court knight itemized by
Don Quixote [II, 17] with actual happenings»
(312). A
faithful reader must apply this same «retroactive
elucidation»
(317) to come to full grips with Cervantes'
intentions. When, for example, Quixote and Sancho leave the palace after the
second stay and Benengeli considers the
duques «very close to looking like
fools themselves when they took such pains to make fun of a pair of
fools»
(II, 70), not only must the reader review the
elaborate jests and the character of the perpetrators, but also determine
whether he or she has «failed to see, beyond the laughter, the
multiple levels of signification, the layered approach to the story and the
main characters»
(319).
If the reader is «undecided as to whether our hero's
[terminal] illness is the logical consequence of the exhausting life he has led
in pursuit of his adventures, or if, on the contrary, it is attributed
exclusively to divine will»
(81), Juan Fernández
Jiménez briefly confronts that indecision in «Anticipation and
Meaning in Don Quixote's Death» (81-90). Cervantes, once decided to end
his protagonist's life, provides anticipations thereof, but «In
reality, and in spite of
—124→
enunciations that might make us believe
the contrary, Alonso Quixano does not repent of his past as Don
Quixote»
(84). Thus it is that «Cervantes
achieves a marvelous artistic creation at the end of his masterpiece, in which
he makes his protagonist die so that he can live forever in the world of
literary fiction»
(87).
For Lee Daniel Snyder in «The Non-Processional Procession
in
Don Quixote» (279-289), Quixote's
encounter with the four saints' images (II, 58) presents a deeper message than
a first reading might suggest. There is a meaningful contrast with the
procession of the penitents (I, 52) which «suggests Erasmus and his
critique of the cult of the saints»
(282). Whereas Sts.
George, Martin, and James are seen as representing the «moral
characteristics»
of knighthood, compassion, generosity, and courage
(284), the matter of St. Paul is less straightforward;
«his presence as a sub-text»
, however, «does speak
to a number of thematic issues raised by Don Quixote»
, principal
among them freedom (285-86). His conversion may be seen as
foreshadowing Quixote's own and, had Avellaneda not impertinently intruded upon
Cervantes' plan, Alonso Quixano the Good might well have appeared sooner,
following the trampling by the bulls (280).
Besides the works cited in his title -«Madness and
Community:
Don Quixote, Huarte de San Juan's
Examen de ingenios and Michel Foucault's
History of Insanity»
(213-24)- Brian McCrea takes up Teresa Scott Soufas's
Melancholy and the Secular Mind in Spanish Golden
Age Literature as he corrects visions of Quixote's madness: Huarte's is
acceptable (he «understands madness to be caused by a preponderance of
'heat' in the individual, a preponderance leading to excessive, if sometimes
instructive, imaginativeness»
[215]), the others
self-contradicting. «While Foucault claims that in the Renaissance
madness is 'an undifferentiated experience,' Spanish society offers powerful
evidence against that generalization»
(215). Soufas
treated melancholy, to be sure, but «perhaps unwittingly reinstituted the
categories she would discredit»: «she so blurs the distinction
between choler and 'adust melancholy ' [Otis H. Green's "El 'Ingenioso'
Hidalgo" was her target] [...] that it becomes relatively insignificant».
(216) McCrea's basic argument is that the knight is not
incarcerated; particularly in Part II «Cervantes places Quixote in
communities which adapt to, even as they enjoy, his
madness»
(219). Thus he is accepted in homes, not
asylums, and is free to depart, leaving behind memories of the fun his
locura entreverada spawned.
Edward H. Friedman introduces «Executing the Will: The End
of the Road in
Don Quixote» (105-25) succinctly:
«Near death, [Quixote] claims to see the light of reason. The
spiritual path replaces the earthly course, the knightly quest, and he returns
to God's text»
(105). But the «physical»
demise has a twist: «death becomes the culmination of a progression
toward self-knowledge and, at the same time, and somewhat ironically, proof of
the superiority of the deluded character over his unimaginative
double»
(107). He diligently retraces Quixote's steps
towards his «Quixanessence» (my word) and, after noting that the
key to Part II seems to be «the shift from the books of chivalry to
Cervantes's book as the primary element of the intertext»
, he
declares that «Don Diego de Miranda, the most conspicuous non-reader
of the first part, is sound of mind but of only
—125→
negligible
interest»
(119). Careful reading and meditation lead to
this perceptive statement: «The writer begins by killing his poetic
predecessors and ends by killing his creation. In the middle is an expansive
critical space, the space of art as mirror to nature and to itself»
(121).
John Incledon's «Textual Subversion in
Lazarillo de Tormes and
Don Quixote» (161-80) sees Cervantes'
own disillusioning experiences as inspiration for much in the
Quixote; it and
Lazarillo are alike in being
«dangerous to the authorities in power and dangerous to the authors
who penned them»
(162). Without the shield of anonymity,
Cervantes had to be cleverer, choosing «to mask his subversive intent
by displacing his indictment of [the] militant, imperial ideology with an
indictment of the tamer, literary phenomenon of the romances of
chivalry»
(171). Incledon investigates «the
Oedipal subtext»
(164) in
Lazarillo and reveals how the author's
«subversive impulse has a discernibly Oedipal character»
which ends with a sly denunciation of the Archpriest (167). He
applies to the
Quixote Freud's
«displacement»
theory, «the mechanism by which
unacceptable ideas [...] are turned into acceptable, albeit difficult to
understand, dream images»
(173). Hence the topic of the
pernicious
libros de caballerías serves to
shelter «a stinging indictment of Spain's political ideology and its
vision of empire»
, the point of departure for Part I
(173).
Mary Power offers «Myth and the Absent Heroine: Dulcinea
del Toboso and Molly Bloom» (251-61), the one «a perfect
spiritual being whose province is pure love and the ideal»
, the other
«terrestrial and humorous and perhaps no better than she should
be»
(251). There are several points of contact, even
small ones, like the names Marion / Tweedy (Molly) and Dulcinea / del Toboso
giving «a mixed message. The first name elevates and the second
deflates ironically»
(255). And finally they
«triumph as heroines because they have assumed the significance of
myth»
(260). To say, however, that Quixote
«never visualizes [Dulcinea] at all»
(256) is
to overlook the description (admittedly stereotypical) which he gives
señor Vivaldo, including the unseen: «what modesty conceals
from sight is such, I think and imagine, as rational reflection can only extol
but not compare»
(87, the Ormsby translation Power
cites).
In «Don Quixote and
Huckleberry Finn: Points of Contact»
(145-60) Robert V. Graybill lists twenty-four categories of analogies between
the two, from «mathematical jokes»
to «slapstick,
buffoonery, and incremental horseplay»
(147-48). Perhaps
each author should have considered another genre: «The preoccupation
with dramaturgical devices in
Don Quixote suggests that Cervantes should
have written a play. The resolution of dilemma through tragic sacrifice in
Huckleberry Finn suggests that Mark Twain
also should have been writing drama»
(147). But there
are jarring notes which leave one wondering how carefully the
Quixote was read. For example, masks are
considered disguises for Don Fernando and Luscinda (153), forgetful that the
Ormsby translation employed explains at the moment of their arrival at the inn
that travelers' masks were worn «to protect the face from sunburn and
dust»
(286, n. 2; cf. also 62, n. 3). And how much
umbrage would Montemayor, Gil Polo, Cervantes,
et al., take at this?:
«the whole pastoral tradition seems filled with disappointed lovers
escaping to the fields to tup sheep behind a bush»
(156).
Too much sex in novels? Without it there would be none, Walter
Reed inventively explains in
«Don Quixote: The Birth, Rise and Death
of the Novel» (263-78): «The novel is born, again and again,
whenever polite literature, vulgar fiction and true history forget their proper
places and mix it up between the covers, hard covers or paperback
ones»
(265). Ian Watt suffered from an
«Anglocentric vision»
(266) as he tried to plot
the history of the novel; Michael McKeon gave more time to Cervantes (and
Richardson and Fielding), but «the rise of the novel is prefigured in
the character and plot of Sancho Panza»
(267), to
flourish due to «the enforced leisure of the middling ranks of Spanish
society in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries»
(268). Its death «comes at the hands of its
readers»: «The death which haunts the second part of
Don Quixote is the story of the fate of the
genre itself as it pursues an ever wider circle of readers and thus loses, in
the process, its authority to declare the proper meaning, the proper value,
even the proper facts, belonging to its characters, conflicts and
plots»
(272 -and discover p. 275 for yourself).
Robert ter Horst, «The Spanish Etymology of the English
Novel» (291-307), characterizes
Siglo de Oro poetry as
«a collector's item, driven and kept out of the hands of the multitude
so that it can express a restricted, potent, and constant standard of value.
[...] The economy of the novel is, in contradistinction, based on
convertibility»
(291). Thereupon he traces the novel
from
Lazarillo and
Guzmán de Alfarache through to the
twentieth century as a genre which «owes its existence to the
emergence of a new economic personality whose unauthorized and illicit
motivations bar her or him from a poetic past that did not choose to grant any
kind of validity to the pursuit of profit or gain»
(294). Defoe. Scott, notably
The Fortunes of Nigel. Dickens: «at
the end [he] came to write the eucharist of finance»
(303). The course of the novel's «derivation [from the
Spanish novel] is so unobvious as to be a whole new philology awaiting
discovery»
(304).
Products of an NEH summer institute convoked in 1989 at the
Arizona State University, Tempe, the principal instructors Friedman and Parr,
these nineteen essays attest to the wide range of interests of some of the
academics in attendance, essayists who, as Friedman states in his
«Introduction» (12), «here encode themselves
into the text; we see them as readers viewing readers, as writers engaged in
deciphering a writer's game»
. The instructors should be heartened by
the generally high level of the results of this interactive interplay they
prompted.
In Parr's «AFTERWORD / AFTERWARD» he comments on six monographs which appeared in the period 1990-1992; I have chosen one excerpt from each:
1. José Manuel Martín Morán,
El Quijote
en ciernes: «What I find
particularly interesting here is the thesis that Cide Hamete is a latecomer
and, more specifically, the idea that the author went back over the manuscript
of Part I, inserting him strategically, for both structural and parodic
reasons»
(324).
2. Eduardo Urbina,
Principios y fines del Quijote: «The
Quixote is assigned to the generic
tradition of romance, which brings Urbina's contribution into a dialogic
relationship with my
Anatomy [...] and also with those studies
that define it as a novel»
(325).
3. Eric J. Ziolkowski,
The Sanctification of Don Quixote:
«While Ziolkowski's study is a model inductive approach to 'religion'
in literary texts, he might have been a bit more critical of wilful misreadings
of Cervantes's original»
(325).
4. George Mariscal,
Contradictory Subjects: «I do not
think that anyone who fancies himself a humanist will subscribe to its guiding
premises, which are, frankly, anti-humanistic and implicitly
authoritarian»
(327).
5. Steven Hutchinson,
Cervantine Journeys: «Possibly
because the author wears his considerable learning lightly, we accompany him
gladly on an erudite and instructive amble through largely uncharted
terrain»
(327).
6. Félix Martínez-Bonati, Don Quixote
and the Poetics of the Novel (translated by
Dian Fox): «he measures the 1605 and 1615 volumes against his own
compelling criteria for the realistic and self-conscious varieties, with the
inescapable conclusion that the
Quixote is, in fact, neither»
(330).
The
Indiana Journal of Hispanic Literatures is to
be commended for giving us the opportunity to have before us these essays which
should prompt the reader to (re)examine his or her approaches to the
Quixote. One's own experience at each reading
of this book seems always to reveal something new; reading of others' such
experiences can of course be equally revealing and instructive. «'Miren también un nuevo caso que ahora sucede,
quizá no visto jamás'»
said Maese
Pedro's
muchacho (II, 26), words
most appropriate even for inveterate investigators of the magic of Cervantes'
masterpiece.