—93→
Washington University in St. Louis
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«En el mundo del espíritu, cada cual suele buscar precisamente aquello que lleva en sí». |
| Salvador de Madariaga, Guía del lector del «Quijote» | ||
We celebrate today at this meeting in Washington the persistence in time of Cervantes' writing. His texts have lost none of their interest as reading matter and as an incitation to dialogue and thought. The Third Part of Don Quixote, fortunately lacking yet the last word, is made up by an intricate web or quilt of interpretations that shows the traces of diverse times of origin. The temporality of interpretations can be contrasted with the apparent immobility of the text itself. While examining and questioning in this paper the validity today of one reading, that of Salvador de Madariaga, I wish not only to show briefly and in general terms the historicity of criticism but also I hope to offer some indications about our contemporary stance that sets us apart from an agreement with the illustrious author of the Guía del lector del «Quijote».85
Few interpretations of Don Quixote have exerted greater influence than the Guía. There we are presented with a version of the facts that —94→ has been generally accepted, formulated as «the Sanchification of Don Quixote and the Quixotization of Sancho»: «while Sancho's spirit ascends from reality to illusion, Don Quixote's declines from illusion to reality» (p. 135). A careful reading reveals, first, that Madariaga interprets his process in a way that is generally forgotten and, second, that he superimposes upon the reconstruction of events the modern concepts of history and progress.
For Madariaga, Sancho represents the ambition of the populace, limited, weighed down by vanity, egotistical, and this trims the positive value that could be given to his more exact perception of everyday reality. Don Quixote is contaminated by this Sanchesque element in his very being, where a fault has existed even before he met Sancho, but his squire allows its cancerous growth and the knight's decay and defeat.86 The spatial representation of this change, Sancho's ascent and Don Quixote's decline, underlines the negative evaluation of the change in the master and the positive in the case of the servant.87 The idea that underpins this reading is prophetic: Don Quixote represents the traditional aristocracy and idealistic intelligentsia corroded by the democratic principles and the excess of rationality that has brought to an end the liberal experiment. Madariaga deplores these changes, because for him liberalism is the philosophy that established the most positive groundings of contemporary society under the guidance of a few visionary minds.88 The whole of —95→ the 19th-century liberal experiment can be compared with Don Quixote, as Madariaga affirms in a prologue, written during the Spanish Civil War, to Diálogos famosos:
| (p. 14) | ||
If, in contrast, the 20th century considers itself definitely to have failed (a rather bold affirmation by Madariaga in the 30s!), it is because those who should have led their people have lost their bearings (p. 14). This has happened as a direct consequence of the rise and access to power of the will of the people. Madariaga calls Sancho in the Guía «democrático» (p. 173), but in the introduction he alerts us against a mechanical, positive, interpretation of this designation:
| (p. 15) | ||
In order that this decadence (of Don Quixote and the West) be convincing, Madariaga avoids commenting on the last chapters, where he would have had to deal with the meaning of the knight's regaining of his senses and his death. In order to underline Sancho's corrosive and deleterious influence Madariaga does not confront the sudden bursts of madness that pervade the narration. He loses sight of the sudden nature of the transformations from the sage to the madman and back, proposing instead a neat dialectic of approach and withdrawal equivalent to multiple sessions on Freud's couch. For Madariaga, the acceptance of the ordinary that creeps in on the mind of the knight is not a positive sign, but, instead, a symptom of an idealistic progress undermined and short-circuited by Sanchoracy, just as democracy and the excessive role of reason in the ordering of —96→ life has extinguished the fire and the efficacy of liberal ideas. Furthermore, it represents the decadence of what he considers the Spanish ideal, as can be found in Columbus (!) and in Don Quixote previous to his Sanchification:
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Cervantes set alive in Don Quixote a prototype of the Spaniard -ultrasubjective and, while shrewd, practical, aware of reality, indeed as realistic as any man, nevertheless ready to ignore reality, to transcend it, even to fight against it in the name of something higher, better or simply dearer to his own unruly self. From this point of view, Columbus and Don Quixote are brothers.89 |
The fact that this prophetic reading is not acceptable today, at least for this critic, forces us to question the adequacy of speaking about progress / decadence in the story narrated in Don Quixote. Such an evolution of the character and certain progress towards maturity have been the obligatory staple of those critics who see in Cervantes' book the first modern novel, and snatch it away uneasily from La Galatea and the Persiles. Let us agree that there are certain transitions, certain changes in the personal histories of the characters, but, what is their nature?
The idea of History as a narrative that shows transformation and progress towards the betterment of Humanity is an invention of the 18th century.90 In the 17th century the dominant conception of History is cyclical change, a ragged pattern made of a national chronicle, based on goings on at the court, and a personal history, where the final chapter is individual death, with a corollary of glory or condemnation, of fame or oblivion.
Nothing can clarify this better than the study of an element missing from the cultural context that is normally attributed today to Cervantes. I speak of the contemporary difficulty in remembering —97→ that one of the genres that was in great vogue during Cervantes' adult life was the books of emblems.91 Alciato's emblems were translated in Spanish rhymes in 1549, and they received a learned and long commentary by Francisco Sánchez, el Brocense, in 1573. Juan de Borja, Duke of Gandía, published his Empresas morales in 1581, Juan de Horozco y Covarrubias his Emblemas morales in 1589 (and they merited new editions in 1591 and 1604, and a Latin translation in 1601), and Hernando de Soto his Emblemas moralizados in 1599. The Licenciado Francisco Murcia de la Llana who signed the Fe de Erratas of the Second Part of Don Quixote in 1615 had also been in charge of proofreading Covarrubias' Emblemas morales published in 1610. In the emblems we do not find images of the future; instead time is envisioned as a serpent devouring its own tail, as a wheel, or as the river that flows into the sea.92 How exceptional, and thrilling for the scholar, is the inscription for one of the emblems of Diego de —98→ Saavedra Fajardo in his Idea de un príncipe político cristiano: «Futurum indicat»! But when we contemplate the illustration or pictura we encounter a coffin and we go on to read in the subscriptio that the prince must reserve some time of his own «procurando que al tramontar de la vida esté el horizonte de la muerte despejado..». The visual conception of History is determined by Ripa's imagination, because it was he who represented her as a woman with wings who writes resting her book on the back of Time (who holds a sickle), and she looks back to what has already happened.93 History does not act, it does not lead the way; it just records what would be otherwise forgotten. History is not the origin of transformation but on the contrary, it stands on a stone cube that symbolizes her stability and unchanging veracity.94 Later on, after the French Revolution, History will use her wings to plunge forward and lead the way with an uplifted fist or torch. History will become a shared national destiny. But in the books of emblems the future is private.95 In contrast to the —99→ interlocking destinies of characters in a 19th-century novel, where money and class create an uninterrupted web, we note that in Don Quixote there is a great space of liberty for characters, who may disappear quietly to go elsewhere and who often do not know each other from one episode to the other. A brief excursus may be in order here in order to compare Don Quixote with Fortunata y Jacinta, where every element is interrelated by the capillary system of streets, families, commerce, friendship, and, above all, the unending labor of gossip. Stephen Gilman notes correctly in Galdós and the Art of the European Novel: 1867-1887 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981) that «The notion of biography as such... depends... on perception of the historicity of individual lives. This perception... was alien to the confessionally or celebratively inclined inhabitants of earlier centuries. The acknowledgments of sins and temptations or the exemplary song of unique deeds presented as if they were unrelated to their immediate social contest was replaced in the nineteenth century by a sense of self radically interpenetrated with the rest of history» (p. 11). Don Quixote, in contrast, is the chronicle of the episodes in one life as it sinks away into death.96 It would be a strained interpretation that affirmed that the social and physical landscape that he visits is perceived by the characters themselves or the implied author as sliding into the vortex of chilling negative change that we associate with 17th-century Spain. To clarify: the —100→ situation is rather somber, but stable; it could be turned around. It constitutes the backdrop of the changes in the fortune of the life of one man, changes that belong more to chance and are more discontinuous and unpredictable than Hegelian history. There does not exist a necessary continuity from one anecdote to another.97 In a similar way, the book of emblems does not require a continuous reading, but rather an episodic, insular contemplation and hermeneutic, where each member of its triptych exists independently of those that surround it. And the emblem itself, its three parts, the inscription, the illustration, and the explanation in prose or verse, converse from their clearly delimited locations and surrounded by a heavy and convoluted frame, teeming with its own life, a margin that invites the reader's eyes and mind to explore, and rest, and blur into the contemplation of flowers and satyrs completely independent of the emblems they surround. The emblems are texts for readers more interested in the eternity of their soul than in collective evolution or the final destiny of humankind.
How can one, then, speak of change in Don Quixote? The pairs of terms «progress / decadence, Sanchification / Quixotization» seem to me inexact for the reasons I have just explored. It is possible to search in another direction, to fight another amputation, the suppression from collective memory of the great text of change, the Western I Ching, well known to all writers of the Golden Age: Ovid's Metamorphoses. In fact, Galdós, an extremely perceptive reader of Cervantes and a disappointed liberal, uses in Fortunata y Jacinta the terms «metamorfosis» and «trastorno» when he wishes to describe changes in Maxi, Don Quixote's alter ego, as well as the inexplicable shifts by Juanito Santa Cruz and the government of Spain. For Galdós, in the waning years of a sobered 19th century, the idea of progress had receded and remained only on the surface of fashion, while he feared that at a deeper level there was only a mysterious reiterated oscillation.
And in what does metamorphosis consist? In a radical and sudden change, inexplicable unless by outside forces that are not under the control of the afflicted human being. (In a sense it's a paranoid text, —101→ where the encantadores are in charge). It is someone else taking over as the narrator of your story, and defining the terms anew. Ovid opens his poem with the transition from Chaos to Cosmos, and we are left to suppose that the opposite metamorphosis is also possible. The sudden change to a new order of things is what the squire of La Mancha expects when he believes that he is knighted. The different natures in conflict, Alonso Quijano, a good man, the visionary, idealistic knight, the saint's apprentice, are successive metamorphoses ordered by nature, closer to the alchemy of the bodies than to the great undercurrent of History and the ordered necessity of progress. And it is precisely this sense of rupture, this sudden, unpredictable fracture or fault, this discontinuity of the world, which turns out to be our contemporary reading of Don Quixote, while I am less convinced by the organic and homogenized world of Madariaga and the typical 19th-century novel. These jumps from one nature to another, the radical alteration of a way of being, explain better, in my view, the episodic structure of Don Quixote. We can see this after so many years because this celebration of permanence in a world today as discontinuous and threatened as that of Cervantes, where the confidence in material progress, in logical evolution, and the lure of a glorious, shared, future are no longer necessary attributes of History. How would we paint her today? Probably white, a heathen white, always in need of being rewritten ceaselessly, knowing that there are only versions in the palimpsest; the eyes have insight and blindness, and the stone has been removed, and she has been mise en abîme, the wings are silicon chips, and the order of things is no longer apparent. Metamorphosis opens up the next moment to surprise, to someone who may sing a better song, completely different, to waking up at home, with sanity recovered or surrounded by lakes of wine or among unknowns on a plane or to opening a door and discovering that your library has been stolen by the police. For this road there is no sure guide, except for the easy pace of Rocinante, who approaches dutifully the next, catastrophic, adventure: move over Marx, Cide Hamete writes again!