Human identity is not given and stable, but constantly
under construction. Reality can only be known indirectly, through
some form of representation. There is no essential difference
between the categories of literary character (personaje) and real person
(persona). Both are
construed by a reader/observer, on the basis of observable,
verifiable data («text», «discourse»,
«signifier») and reasonable inference of aspects not
visible on the surface («story»,
«signified»). An unconscious dimension can be inferred
(construed) for verisimilar literary characters as for real people.
Literary characters are composed of properties of
«discourse» and properties of «story»
supplied by readers both within and outside the text. Within texts,
characters are constructed by themselves, their fellow characters,
and their narrators. Examples are Belica/Isabel and Pedro in
Pedro de Urdemalas,
and Cardenio in Don Quijote I, leading to Don Quijote himself and his
overdetermined self-fashioning. Outside the text, characters are
constructed by authors and then reconstructed by readers. Any
reader's first mission is to reconstruct the «story»
from the «discourse». The author-textual person-reader
relationship is studied in relation to Don Quijote (fiction) and
«Serbantes» of the 1580 Información de Argel
(fact).
At the beginning of La
española inglesa, the third-person narrator
distances himself from the characters. Isabela at first appears as
a stereotype embodying the Neoplatonic concept of feminine beauty
which inspires love in the beholder. Initially presented as the
«donna» of Renaissance poetry, she is later envisioned
in chivalresque terms as the prize for the knight who must win her
love through his heroism in battle; both literary traditions
converge in the creation of the two lovers Isabela and Ricaredo.
The novella thus develops the three themes of love, letters, and
arms; and in doing so, it constantly evokes the model of the
poet-soldier Garcilaso de la Vega and his illfated love for Isabel
Freyre. The distanced and laconic presentation of Isabela gives way
to a much more detailed, first-person narration to recount the
(largely autobiographical) heroic deeds of Ricaredo. Near the end
of the novella, the narrator confides that it was Isabela herself
who committed the story to writing. Thus, she not only inspired
Ricaredo's words but also immortalized
them.
The character Sancho is constructed gradually by means
of action, that is, by means of that series of
«physical» acts in space and time, and those statements
, proverbs, parables, thoughts, tears, and lies which are
fabricated in the mind and emanate from the person who bears the
name Sancho. We know almost nothing about him until his personality
develops and even changes before our eyes. The purpose of this
essay is to demonstrate that Sancho has been misunderstood because
his life, in this great adventure, develops alongside that of a
passionate, idealistic hidalgo. His personality is
«constructed», in the eyes of the reader, not as an
«autonomous» personality but as the distorted,
grotesque reflection of Don
Quixote.
When he set out to compete with the classic Heliodorus
in writing Persiles y
Sigismunda, Cervantes used as his point of departure
the narrative scheme of the old Greek novel, which had been popular
in humanistic circles since the mid-sixteenth century. The traits
of Cervantes' character do not merely reproduce those of the
protagonist of the Greek/Byzantine narrative, but introduce some
aspects that were latent in the ancient hero. Though not a
completely original creation, Periando embodies specifically
Cervantine characteristics, while at the same time he is
transformed into the appropriate hero for the
Counter-Reformation.
This essay analyzes the structuring and delineation of
characters in three of Cervantes' Novelas ejemplares. Drawing on the work of Carlos
Castilla del Pino, René Girard, Erving Goffman, and D. A.
Gonthier, the author focuses on the importance of the relationship
between the individual and society in the fabrication of these
characters.
The character Pedro de Urdemalas enters Cervantes'
fictional universe already weighed down by the baggage of a long
and complex series of vicissitudes in the broader cultural
«text». Cervantes adopts the paradigm and, taking
advantage of the character's protean nature, (re)writes him with
certain deviations -which took shape practically and pragmatically-
appropriate to his new context. Seen from this perspective, the
(re)writing of Pedro de Urdemalas, transforming the legacy of
tradition, is a good example of the intertextual movements which so
often cross paths in the Cervantine universe, and which ultimately
enrich the shaping of character and the textual space of the
comedia.
The lad for the field and marketplace, a servant in the
household of Alonso Quijano, appears in the novel's first paragraph
but immediately disappears without a trace. However, one need only
pay careful attention to the hidden erotic dimension of the
vocabulary used in his presentation to realize that his fun-filled
escapades -though never explicit- contribute to sharpening the
characterization of the housekeeper, the niece, and above all, Don
Quixote.
In Marcela, Preciosa, and Dorotea, Cervantes
demonstrates to the reader the operation of «free will»
vis à vis the «object of beauty», while at the
same time nostalgically portraying the «classicist
woman». The author therefore presents a complex world,
realistically sketched, but presented with but a single background:
the stereotype of woman in the «glorious Golden Age», a
semi-divine woman, an ideal who bridged the human
and the divine, thus sustaining Paradise, and finally a free
expression of divine
light.
This essay presents a semiological study of the
character Cide Hamete and attempts to demonstrate that this
character is simply a rhetorical procedure in the discursive
construction of the novel. It includes a study of the system of
fictitious authors in Don Quixote from the viewpoint of
the semiology of literature. Examining the praxis in Don
Quixote, it studies the construction and disposition of a) the
real author in the text, b) the principal narrator, and c) the
rhetorical system of the fictitious authors. The concluding summary
attempts to justify, from the viewpoint of the principle of
discreteness, the polyphonic and discontinuous expansion
provided by Don Quixote's narrative system, as a body of
successive and concentric recursive
procedures.
In Don Quixote the task of character
constructon, properly the narrator's, is to a large extent usurped
by the protagonist himself. He appears to rebel against the
novelist and the multitude of fictitious authors and creates his
own world, conferring names (Don Quixote, Dulcinea, Rocinante) and
status (knight, lady, steed) on the characters, and even changing
the ones they originally had. Hence, one can conceive the novel as
a constant tension between author and protagonist, in which the
former repeatedly punishes the latter (deceptions, beatings, final
defeat) for refusing to accept the world he had initially proposed
to him. In Don Quixote the task of character constructon,
properly the narrator's, is to a large extent usurped by the
protagonist himself. He appears to rebel against the novelist and
the multitude of fictitious authors and creates his own world,
conferring names (Don Quixote, Dulcinea, Rocinante) and status
(knight, lady, steed) on the characters, and even changing the ones
they originally had. Hence, one can conceive the novel as a
constant tension between author and protagonist, in which the
former repeatedly punishes the latter (deceptions, beatings, final
defeat) for refusing to accept the world he had initially proposed
to him.
The fiction of Micomicona's seduction, employed to
inspire Don Quixote to set out to conquer a kingdom, is in fact a
trick to return him to the circumscribed space of his Manchegan
village. Dorotea's deception, echoing that of Boiardo's Angelica,
follows the model of the deception carried out by Armida in Tasso's
Gerusalemme. The literary model and the use of such
materials in the construction of a character are not unusual in
Cervantes. But in this case it is the character herself, a reader
of books of chivalry, who assumes her disguise and constructs her
character, at the same time constructing herself, as both image and
agent in the Quixotic universe.
