141
The ending of
Don Quixote is far more complicated and
subtle than Nabokov intimates, and ironically, so are Nabokov's comments about
the ending. Don Quixote's «well-intentioned» friends and relative
want him to give up idealistic «delusions» that embody both
Christian and chivalrous notions; these «delusions» are supposedly
destroying the knight. But what finally destroys Don Quixote is his realization
that his «delusions» were illusions -and so presumably were his
selfless ideals; only Don Quixote's «friends» and niece benefit
from his recantation. Nabokov inadvertently discloses the effectiveness of the
ending when he states that Don Quixote's recantation is the book's
«saddest scene»
(18). (N. from the
A.)
142
Sicroff's article («The Demise of Exemplarity») is a recent example of schematic reevaluation of the whole series' didactic aims. (N. from the A.)
143
While El Saffar posits a chronological movement in the composition of the novelas ejemplares from the realistic or novel form to the transcendent idealism of romance, other critics (for example, Riley and Sobejano) argue that in the novelas, as in his other works, Cervantes continued to experiment with both forms, often producing a strong resonance of counter-genres within one work. Friedman's recent study of La fuerza de la sangre, especially 153-54, and Johnston's essay on La ilustre fregona are excellent examples of the increased attention given to this generic hybridization in individual novelas. (N. from the A.)
144
Spadaccini and Talens argue in «Cervantes and the
Dialogic World» that literature of the Spanish Baroque, however popular
or «massified» it appears, functions to
instill in readers the ideology that privileges specific «structures
of institutionalized power»
(238). Hence, they explain,
«in Baroque culture the collaboration between text and receiver is
illusory to the extent that the power of interpretation is 'given' to the
reader/spectator in order to make the manipulation (and the persuasion) more
viable»
(240). (N. from the A.)
145
Among those critics who see this work as clearly exemplary of Christian values, both in its final definition of liberalidad and in its resolution through marriage, are Lowe, Pabon, El Saffar, Sicroff, Casalduero, Amezúa y Mayo, and Forcione. For reviews of twentieth-century criticism of its style and form, see Amezúa y Mayo, 2: 58-59; Lowe, 400; Hart, 306. (N. from the A.)
146
In Orientalism, Said dates the formulation of the «Orientalist discourse» from the great imperial drives of Britain and France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, he acknowledges the significant contribution to Orientalism of the Spanish and other smaller empires prior to this (17). Although the Orientalism of the Spanish Golden Age has not been widely studied as a phenomenon broader than specific racial and religious issues, the construction of literary texts such as El amante liberal reveals the strong influence and the complexity of its discursive articulations well before those of modern Orientalism. (N. from the A.)
147
While Paul Julian Smith does not study the representation of Moors and Turks in the Golden Age, he comments in opening Representing the Other: 'Race', Text, and Gender in Spanish and Spanish American Narrative (1992) upon the importance of the largely unstudied Oriental motifs that abound in peninsular literature of the period (2). (N. from the A.)
148
Brundage's monumental study
Law, Sex, and Christian Society,
demonstrates the insistence with which canon and then civil law sought from
early Christianity onward to guarantee the stability of social structures by
regulating sexual behavior. The historical shaping of these legislative
systems, he argues (152), reveals the belief of authorities that
«sexual urges... must be curbed and controlled; otherwise they were
sure to result in irrational and frenzied couplings that would disrupt the
orderly creation of families and the management of household
resources»
. Edicts and sanctions against homosexual and heterosexual
non-procreative sexual behavior, which increased considerably after the Black
Death and sought to ensure repopulation and secure transmission of structures
of power (533), were grounded in the doctrinal argument that desire was
incompatible with spiritual health and could not be allowed as the basis of
sexual activity. The difficult corollary was, of course, the model of Christian
marriage as a procreative union without lust, except for that stimulation
necessary for its consummation and productivity. The defusing of erotic energy
between the two protagonists at the end
of
El amante liberal's plot seems clearly
dedicated to the representation of this ideal. (N. from the A.)
149
See Laquer, Chapters 1 and 2, for a discussion of the
«single-sex» theory. Irigaray's radical analysis of the subject in
the wake of Freud brings us full circle back to a more profound understanding
of the conception of the subject and its sexual identity that largely
influenced the Golden Age -that of the perfected human specimen manifest as a
male and the imperfect specimen constituting an immanent male, whose
manifestation is female. See the section «Speculum» (particularly
«Any Theory of the 'Subject' Has Always Been Appropriated by the
'Masculine'»), in which she argues that the Other is conceived by the
male subject's desire and molded to his reflection (133-46). Irigaray's
language in this essay is at times striking proof of the profound entrenchment
of Orientalism in all Western discourse of the Other, for her own metaphors
glide between sexual and the racial or geographical ones that often
characterize this discourse of the cultural Other, as she attacks the subject's
drive to «colonize». In one of many examples she writes:
«When the Other falls out of the starry sky into the chasms of the
psyche, the 'subject' is obviously obliged to stake out new boundaries for his
field of implantation... But how to tame these uncharted territories, these
dark continents, these worlds through the looking glass?»
(136). (N. from the A.)
150
I have consciously played upon the use of this expression in Spike Lee's film, «Do the Right Thing», for this film impresses me as an excellent example of a cautionary narrative whose representation of racial, class, and sexual relations contains elements that are at once visionary and retrograde, in a confusion of discourses that leaves American viewers anxiously pondering the correct interpretation of the film and its implications for their world. (N. from the A.)