Translated (from English to American) and adapted by Daniel Occoquan for an undergraduate Don Quixote class taught at Berea College by Patricia S. Finch, winter, 1987. (N. from the E.)

The following is a transcription of a paper invited for presentation at the 1985 annual meeting of the Cervantes Society of America at the MLA conference in Chicago. (N. from the E.)

El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, I, ed. Luis Andrés Murillo (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1973), p. 446. Unless noted otherwise, all further citations to the Quijote will be from this edition and will be parenthetically documented in my text by chapter only. (N. from the A.)

See Sansón Carrasco's comments on El curioso as a misfit in II.3, and Cide Hamete's excuses for it in II.44. To recall one strident example of the «outdoing topos» -by Cervantes' «flesh and blood» over his fictional critics- see Unamuno's judgment of El curioso as a «novela por entero impertinente a la acción de la historia» (Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho [Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, S. A., 1966], p. 95). Not the least of Cervantes' distinctions is his challenge to the confining logic of verosimilitude -his showing us that what we take to be plausible or pertinent («lo que se puede llevar») is itself an artifice, a convention. The Cervantine character who strategically preempts forthcoming criticism of El curioso is further ironized by his role in the novel: as a celibate priest, his flawless ignorance of sexual otherness may itself «discredit» those constraints of likeliness that, as a reader, he proffers us. He appears to regard as «impossible» any violation against his readerly expectations that fiction will reinscribe for him only the received cultural ideas of marital dynamics. (N. from the A.)

Wardropper's seminal essay appeared in PMLA 72 (1957), 587-600. Castro's remarks are from El pensamiento de Cervantes (Madrid: Editorial Hernando, S. A., 1925), pp. 121-28. I disagree entirely with the conclusion «imposed» on Castro by his reading: «se impone la conclusión de que Cervantes tenía no muy buena la opinión de la mujer» (p. 127n.). (N. from the A.)

Of El curioso, Cohen assures us that «neither its morality nor its psychology bears a moment's examination», and that «it is difficult to see what amusement the average reader can find in it». His advice «to skip» El curioso is, astonishingly, aimed at «anyone who has found his patience wearing thin, say, during Marcela's speech on freedom» -a telling double erasure (Cervantes: Don Quixote, trans. J. M. Cohen [Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1950], p. 15). In his translation for The Portable Cervantes, Putnam reassures us in an editorial summary replacing El curioso that «the substance of it may be given rather briefly» (trans. and ed. Samuel Putnam [New York: Viking Press, 1949], pp. 299-302 and 307-09). And Starkie's 1957 abridgement intrepidly crosses over El curioso as a «digression» (Don Quixote of La Mancha, trans. and ed. Walter Starkie [New York: New American Library, 1957]). Note that the 1612 Shelton translation included El Curioso. (N. from the A.)

Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Don Quixote, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), p. 143. (N. from the A.)

Salvador de Madariaga, Don Quixote: An Introductory Essay in Psychology (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1934), p. 79. That there seems to be no room at the inn for «intruders» seems doubly suspect if we recall the text's revelation, some dozen chapters later, that the abandoned valise also contained the «real-life» manuscript of «Rinconete y Cortadillo», left behind by that absent-minded «visitor» —and that both stories might just be «de un mesmo autor» (I.47). Italics mine. (N. from the A.)

Borges, «La intrusa», in El Aleph (Madrid: Alianza / Emece, 1971), pp. 175-80. The epigraph to the Spanish «La intrusa» is even more cryptic: «2 Reyes, I, 26». Ronald Christ sees this epigraph as foretelling «the national [i.e., the Argentine] mythos» (The Narrow Act: Borges' Art of Allusion [New York: New York Univ. Press, 1969], p. 126), but I view it as having a more global literary resonance. Borges made his rivals into brothers, as he puts it, in order «to avoid unsavory implications», as if unaware of the «unsavory implications» of such an avoidance technique (The Aleph and Other Stories: 1933-69, ed. and trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni [New York: Dutton, 1970], p. 278). (N. from the A.)

«La intrusa», p. 180. Borges speaks of «La intrusa» as his favorite story in Emir Rodríguez Monegal's Borgès par lui-même, trans. Françoise-Marie Rosset (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970), p. 172. «Los teólogos» may also be found in El Aleph, pp. 37-48. (N. from the A.)