The contrast of Vidriera's best efforts with Sancho's joking goat story (mentioned in note 14) is instructive. Sancho claims merely to be passing on a folktale to Don Quixote, but he transforms the received motifs and structures, making the familiar matter deeply his own and expressive of his resentment toward his lord, mentor, and friend who has exposed him to memorable days and nights of abuse. No one will learn anything comparably significant about Vidriera's personal aspirations and frustrations by close study of his jokes.

I have the impression that the first dozen items, and especially {2} and {9}, have received as much attention as all the rest together. Does the enthusiasm of readers wane after the first few or do readers earn diminished interest on their investment in study after a promising start, or both? El Saffar mentions but one and quotes none of Vidriera's jokes and jests; Casalduero mentions three; Forcione by my count includes fifteen items in his discussion.

«[Tomás] mostraba tener turbados todos los sentidos; y aunque le hicieron los remedios posibles, sólo le sanaron la enfermedad del cuerpo, pero no de lo del entendimiento, porque quedó sano, y loco de la más extraña locura que entre las locuras hasta entonces se había visto» (53). On entendimiento as a key term in this text see my «Garbage», 20-22.

A relatively simple jest, we see here, can mask a tendentious thought. Receivers are «bribed», Freud suggests, with superficial pleasure that makes an underlying, unvoiced idea acceptable. The jest above has given receivers «forepleasure» while acting as a «façade» beneath which another pleasure is produced by the lifting of an inhibition (168–69). No writer has shown better awareness of witty undercover subversion than Cervantes, who names it proverbially in the second paragraph of his «Prólogo» to Don Quijote, Part I, in the course of a declaration of his readers' freedom of conscience: «y sabes lo que comúnmente se dice, que debajo de mi manto al Rey mato».

In addition to jesting, Vidriera engages on a few occasions in preachment: about doctors ({44}), about actors ({65}) and impresarios ({67}), about notaries ({78–79}); these, excepting the first, are laced with irony and inverted meaning, but they are not jests. Likewise Vidriera sometimes voices opinions in other forms that include little or no jestwork ({18, 30, 37, 43, 61, 67, 71, 82}). A few other times the Salamanca graduate's memory supplies material from classical and Biblical sources, appropriated ironically ({2, 69, 91}) or played straight ({20– 22, 44}).

In a concluding study of «El licenciado Vidriera» I shall examine some psycho- social and social-historical meanings of this tale. Meanwhile I recall that in his prolog presentation of the novelas their author makes memorable reference to the symbolic significance of both the square and the park. «Mi intento ha sido —77→ poner en la plaza de nuestra república una mesa de trucos, donde cada uno pueda llegar a entretenerse». Then the prologuist ponders the life-restoring refreshment that imaginative literature provides the weary soul, «el afligido espíritu» (an idea represented also in Vidriera's item {26}), and he likens his stories to parks: «Para este efeto se plantan las alamedas, se buscan las fuentes, se allanan las cuestas y se cultivan, con curiosidad, los jardines» (1: 52). In a passage of «El licenciado Vidriera» where some readers feel the presence of the author in his persecuted character's words, Vidriera draws in some of these same prolog images to dignify the profession of actors and theater directors, saying of the latter: «son necesarios en la república, como lo son las florestas, las alamedas y las vistas de recreación, y como lo son las cosas que honestamente recrean» ({66–67}). This association of literary creation and its publication with spiritual consolation and cultivated natural forms reappears elsewhere in the page-poet's well-known rhapsody to the performance artist Preciosa in praise of poetry («las fuentes la entretienen, los prados la consuelan, los árboles la desenojan, las flores la alegran» [«La gitanilla» 1: 91]).

Vidriera's extreme, polarized pronouncements are substantially and temperamentally inconsistent with views and feelings about poetry that Cervantes and his more sympathetic creatures express on other occasions. It is improbable that the author would have a mindless rant speak for him on this or any other significant subject. I touch on this in «Garbage» 19.

Indeed Fechner (whose Vorschule der Ästhetik in two volumes was published in 1876) maintains that a convergence of this kind might result in pleasure even where the individual determinants were too weak to achieve any on their own. Freud entertains the principle but refrains from applying it, believing that «the topic of jokes does not... give us much opportunity of confirming (its) correctness». Here and at a few other points our narrator's anthology of jests supplies that opportunity.

Audacious jests are apt to be ambiguous, for their protection. R. M. Price (83) construes the object of «mira a quién sirves» in {35} to be mules: the muleboys are dishonored by serving their asses. There are two reasons for discounting this reading: Vidriera explains that he has in mind the mule-boys' own definition of amos, by which they mean the clients they transport on their mules; and the topic sentence in {35} («la honra del amo descubre la del criado») unmasks the sullied honor of the wealthy and favored who are themselves, rather than the menials they exploit, «la más ruin canalla que sustenta la tierra». Beneath its façade the jest displaces dishonor from the low and ignorant, who are ugly victims, onto the powerful, disreputable victimizers. The topic sentence of {35} defines one of the most active themes of Don Quixote, Part II, one which is abundantly represented in life under the authority of the powerful and perverted duke and duchess.

Freud's developmental model illustrates a human «impulse to perfection» that he himself denied elsewhere but that Kenneth Burke (catching Freud in a contradiction) regards as inherent in language: «There is a principle of perfection implicit in the nature of symbol systems; and in keeping with his nature as symbol-using animal, man is moved by this principle» (17). Burke's perspective locates the principles of the joke not in the remote past «but in the possibilities of perfection which reside in the form as such» (390-91). The tendentious joke, this suggests, is the formal perfection of principles present and incompletely realized in pleasure-producing infantile play with language, and in jests and jokes of greater and lesser technical complication, significance, and capacity to produce pleasure against internal and circumstantial resistence.