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ArribaAbajo Theoretical Implications in Don Quijote's Idea of Enchantment

Bryant L. Creel



The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Si el tema del encantamiento en el Quijote se analiza en relación con teorías epistemológicas de actualidad en la época de Cervantes, y si se interpreta figuradamente, se puede ver que sirve para articular la base teórica de la disposición favorable del autor hacia el idealismo estético y moral. La tensión renacentista entre la idea de que la realidad inteligible es una creación de la actividad conceptual voluntariosa de la mente y la idea de que las impresiones sensoriales son una base adecuada para el saber, tiene un paralelo hoy día en la oposición entre el estructuralismo/post-estructuralismo (que en algunos sentidos es comparable al nominalismo) y sus detractores. Cervantes concibe el encantamiento como una metáfora del realismo epistemológico, y el esfuerzo tragicómico platonista por parte del excéntrico hidalgo por librarse de los hechizos del encantamiento es tanto una metáfora de los procesos mentales requeridos para la lucha disidente de la imaginación creadora como una posible analogía de la búsqueda heroica del romanticismo cervantino. En su teoría sobre la metáfora, Ricoeur elabora ideas acerca de la imaginación semejantes a las que parecía tener Cervantes.


After defeating the Knight of Mirrors (actually the Bachelor Sansón Carrasco), Don Quijote puts the tip of his sword above his prostrate adversary's face and orders him to confess that the knight he previously claimed to have defeated «neither was nor could have been» Don Quijote de la Mancha but was an illusion created by enchanters (II, 14)1. Part of the irony of that incident lies in the fact that the character who pronounces those words, Alonso Quijano, «neither is nor can be» Don Quijote either. The character «Don Quijote» is precisely an illusion, and the «enchanter» who created him is Miguel de Cervantes, whose supreme feat of magic is that his illusory hidalgo seems to depart from the order of reality as we generally know it by actually being not just more interesting than people in real life but more significant for a new understanding of the real world. Even when what Don Quijote sees is obviously a figment of his imagination, we as readers are more interested in what he sees than in what is really there. At times Don Quijote defends his perceptions with a surprising earnestness and lucidity: he explains the existence of elements of the real world that are incompatible   —20→   with his fantasies by claiming that they are illusions that enchanters have maliciously created in order to confuse people. Hence, for example, the windmills are not just giants but are giants cleverly made to look like windmills. Don Quijote rebels against such deceitful illusions, and he does so on the level of the very act of perception. When Don Quijote considers a barber's basin to be the legendary Helmet of Mambrino in enchanted form, what he perceives is not a barber's basin but a fabulous helmet that he has seized in battle and that is worthy of his own identity as a knight and champion of the tradition of high courage. So is an inn a castle, the packsaddle of a mule the fine harness of a steed, a flock of sheep an enemy army, a water mill a fortress, a rough peasant lass Dulcinea del Toboso, the Bachelor Sansón Carrasco the Knight of Mirrors, etc. If they appear otherwise, Don Quijote thinks, it is because they are «enchanted», i.e., they have been transformed into deceitful sensory images. It is evident that Don Quijote's tendency to see a world that is subject to being subverted by sinister forces, instead of a world of pre-given, neutral objectivity that is to be regarded with optimistic impartiality, is not due to a simple incapacity on his part, for Don Quijote is able to see what he alone sees and what others see as well. As a result, it becomes more difficult to dismiss his delusions as mere entertaining frivolity. Our attention naturally turns to the differences between Don Quijote's perception of the world and that of everyone else in the novel, the differences between -in Riley's words- poetic myth and historico-empirical actuality (p. 170).

Criticism generally recognizes that in the Quijote Cervantes explores the dual character of human nature and the ethical and aesthetic implications of the relationship between human being's physiologically real and psychologically fantastic aspects. Per haps it is not too much to suggest that Cervantes introduced Don Quijote's obsession with enchantment and the complex process whereby Don Quijote sees what is there yet what is not there to serve as a clue to how his novel can be seen to convey a meaning. The prominence of the enchantment motif alone (it is the most frequent topic of discussion in the novel, being spoken of by Don Quijote and Sancho more than a hundred times [Predmore 75]) and the peculiarly esoteric manner in which Don Quijote regards empirical reality with suspicion because he considers ideal conceptions to be a basis for skepticism are themselves enough to imply that ideas on the subject of enchantment   —21→   point to more than the fantastic and gratuitous delusions of a mind warped by romances of chivalry and to suggest that the concept of enchantment has a bearing on deep thematic dimensions of the novel. Critics have long noted, like Riley, that enchantment itself is an important thematic motif in the Quijote2,   —22→   but studies of it have been mainly descriptive. The enchantment motif has not been the subject of serious analysis or interpretation on a philosophical plane, and the implications of exactly what Don Quijote himself thought about enchantment have been overlooked altogether.

The usual interpretation of Don Quijote's idea of enchantment is that its function is primarily practical: it is a means that Don Quijote uses both to render his world more fabulous, like the world of the chivalric romance, and to defend that fantasy world from the encroachments of empirical fact. That view seems essentially accurate, but it would seem that the romances of chivalry provided no more to the enchantment motif than a point of departure. Richard Predmore, for example, has pointed out in his study on «La función del encantamiento en el mundo del Quijote» (1955-56) that Cervantes's use of enchantment in the novel is quite different from the part that it plays in the romances of chivalry. Not only is enchantment in the Quijote almost without exception the work of anonymous enchanters (whereas enchanters are completely identified in the romances of chivalry), in the Quijote enchantment serves specifically to make it possible for characters (Don Quijote and Sancho) to maintain their illusions, to evade responsibility, and to provide explanations where rational explanations are lacking (p. 77). Predmore observes that for Don Quijote himself enchantment has the function of defending his illusions from the need to reconcile them with the real world and that they accomplish that end specifically by changing appearances (pp. 66, 77-78). Perhaps criticism's reluctance to analyze Don Quijote's own notions about enchantment or to interpret enchantment in broad figurative terms (even if it is sometimes interpreted thematically) is another instance of what Américo Castro characterized in 1925 as criticism's established tendency to take the view that Cervantes's work is not problematic (p. 15). If a more ambitious study of enchantment in the Quijote were to prove revealing, it would certainly not be the first discovery of unexpected dimensions in   —23→   what one critic has referred to as Don Quijote's gigantesca locura (gigantic madness)3.

The bizarre, seemingly farcical character of Don Quijote's behavior in relation to what he calls enchantment is certainly one of the most difficult features of that character to reconcile with an attempt to explain his thematic significance in serious terms. On the other hand, extravagant, quasi-grotesque motifs are not uncharacteristic of the manneristic literature of the High Renaissance. One thinks, for example, of the stark artificiality and archetypal, elegiac atmosphere of the Spanish pastoral romance, whose emergence was largely due to «maverick» intellectual, Neoplatonist influences. It is logical to associate the emergence of a doctrinaire subjective idealism in Renaissance literature with the vogue for Neoplatonism. Renaissance Neoplatonism is best known today as a somewhat localized if refreshing, secular moral idealism based on a spiritualized concept of sexual love. Actually, it was a source of a new, widespread independence of spirit and speculative rationalism, especially as it combined with nominalism and the voluntaristic teachings of St. Augustine. It was an entire metaphysical system, and it provided an alternative to the official, Aristotelian-scholastic tradition. What is often overlooked, however, is that whereas in the period prior to Renaissance humanistic learning a real knowledge of Aristotelian doctrines was restricted to members of the clergy, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are a period of intense interest in Aristotle, many of whose works were becoming available in translation for the first time (Bolgar 308-10). Hence, there was also an interest in re-reading Aristotle and in establishing the points of contact between his teachings and those of Plato4. Renaissance   —24→   thought bears evidence of widespread interest in Platonist and Aristotelian theories of knowledge and perception. That Cervantes was aware of those theories is generally accepted by Cervantes scholars, largely on the basis of a quotation from Book IV of La Galatea, where a character refers to «that opinion of the one who said that the soul's knowledge is the memory of what it already knows» and «the other, better opinion of the one who asserted that our soul was like a tabula rasa» («el que dijo que el saber de nuestras almas era acordarse de lo que ya sabían... el otro mejor parecer del que afirmó que nuestra alma era como una tabla rasa»: p. 7045).

A concept that was especially important to Platonism, with which it originated, but was also important to Aristotelianism is the concept that ideas do not exist only as mental constructs but that they have a real, though non-material, existence in the physical world. Ideas are what make sense objects «real» in the sense of intelligible, i.e., objects of consciousness. In contrast to   —25→   the modern, empiricist epistemological conception of the possibility of establishing a rational correlation of material nature viewed objectively as a causal mechanism, Plato and Aristotle both taught that knowledge requires transcending a mere awareness of sense-data, that to know is to have knowledge of ideas, or concepts, which are the intelligible forms of objects in the physical world. Whereas Plato maintained that there exists a separate, more truly real world of ideal, universal forms of which particular sense objects are imperfect reflections, Aristotle held that the objects of our senses have real, external, independent existence and that it is in knowing particular objects that we know the universal or ideal. The Aristotelian maintains that, in perceiving, the mind abstracts ideas from sense objects, in which they inhere. The Platonist sees ideas, or universals, as having an existence that is separate from particular objects, which are themselves instances of universal ideas: in perceiving the objects of the physical world the mind assigns ideas to them by subsuming sense impressions under concepts. Thus, for Plato the world that we know is a vast projection of universal and self-subsistent mind. Not only is the spiritual faculty able to act on matter and organize a world in which our ideals and values are objectively real, but mind's preeminence is secure because matter cannot act upon mind or alter ideal being. The entire Platonist metaphysic can be seen as an elaborate means of emphasizing the creative and synthesizing capabilities of mind. Even in Aristotelianism the mind does not assume a passive role in the perception of objects but actively apprehends ideas or forms that are present in objects. However, what needs to be emphasized for purposes of the present study is that in both Plato and Aristotle knowledge depends on the conceptual activity of the mind and that in the Platonist theory of knowledge the mind not only assumes an active role but a creative role: by means of what Plato calls «memory» it supplies the concepts or memory-images that make sense objects intelligible (Hamlyn 16).

We wish to suggest that Cervantes elaborated the enchantment motif in the Quijote in such a way as to make Don Quijote incarnate the Platonist concept of mind exercising its capacity to «remake reality» creatively. Cervantes illustrates that creative process by first setting up in Don Quijote's behavior the Neoplatonist, activist model of perception as an assigning of meaning on the basis of sense impressions. Cervantes then has Don Quijote greatly exaggerate the free activity whereby mind assigns to   —26→   an object a concept that has ordinary descriptive reference by having Don Quijote first assign and then (applying an Aristotelian principle) abolish such a descriptive concept on the grounds that it is an illusion and finally proceed beyond the empirical realm altogether and, by projecting ideal values, replace the descriptive concept with another one, one that endows the object with mythopoeic significance. The process is rendered in vivid, dramatic terms by Don Quijote's having the idea that sense impressions (created by «enchanters») are deceitful illusions, or «phantasms» -an idea taken from Aristotelian-Thomist epistemology. When the eccentric hidalgo claims, for example, that the barber's basin he sees is the Helmet of Mambrino made by evil enchanters to look like a barber's basin, Cervantes is pointing out to us the fundamental, dissenting, «nonobservant» aspect of the process whereby the creative mind, willfully turning its back on the ordinary descriptive concepts with which we refer to objects, creates a metaphorical language that gives them new meaning and that posits new, more valuable ways of looking at the world. The broadly comical incongruity of seeing an ordinary barber's basin as a legendary helmet is a subtle means of acknowledging metaphor's characteristic «tension between semantic congruence and incongruence» (Ricoeur 146) and underscoring the «deviant» character of metaphorical language and of the creative faculty in general. The creative process as it is characterized by Cervantes is very similar to Gadamer's idea of «concept formation» (Weinsheimer 237-40, Ricoeur 147), referred to by Ricoeur in relation to his theory concerning the role of imagination in the creation of metaphor, which we shall discuss below. Don Quijote, himself an idea made real and a novel, highly suggestive metaphor, is, in part, a fictional projection of Platonist and Aristotelian theories of perception cast in psychological terms.

***

When considered in the light of the Neoplatonist theory of knowledge, certain of Don Quijote's attitudes vis-à-vis enchantment appear less paradoxical. In the Neoplatonist view, the ideal world of eternal essences, forms, or «Ideas» -the intelligible world- is concealed by the empirical world of appearances and change, the phenomenal world that can be known by the senses. Speaking to Sancho in the Sierra Morena mountains, Don Quijote   —27→   says, «There is a throng of enchanters always among us who change and switch everything and alter it according to their pleasure» («andan entre nosotros siempre una caterva de encantadores que todas nuestras cosas mudan y truecan, y las vuelven según su gusto»: I, 25). In a world in which sense impressions are misleading, what, one may ask, could be the basis of certainty? The answer to that question is given when the silk merchants whom Don Quijote has ordered to declare that Dulcinea del Toboso, Empress of La Mancha, is the most beautiful maiden in the world protest that they cannot pay homage to someone whom they have never seen, and Don Quijote says that if they saw her their confession would have no value: «the essence of the matter is for you to believe, confess, affirm, swear, and maintain it without seeing her» («la importancia está en que sin verla lo habéis de creer, confesar, afirmar, jurar y defender»: I, 4). For Don Quijote what is real is what is true, but «truth» is not empirical knowledge, nor is it merely based on a non-rational fideism; it is cognizance of the real value of a suprasensible ideal. He tells Sancho, «For me it is sufficient to think and believe that the good Aldonza Lorenzo is beautiful and chaste» («bástame a mí pensar y creer que la buena de Aldonza Lorenzo es hermosa y honesta»: I, 25). Truth here is not the mere fantasy of a wish-fulfillment dream -it is a function of an epistemological and ethical freedom from the claims of the sensuous or material, a matter of axiological priority. One could wonder whether Don Quijote's censuring of empirical reality by claiming that it is mendacious and instead asserting the truth of the books of chivalry is not Cervantes's way of parodically inverting the humanists' practicalist intolerance of the books of chivalry on the grounds that they were «mentirosos»6. Following the Platonist model, Don Quijote draws from memory the ideas, or memory-images, with which he supplants ordinary descriptive concepts, memory here being the fund of images that Don Quijote has gathered from the romances of chivalry. Nor can material being alter Don Quijote's fantasies, which -seen in the Platonist perspective- belong to the impervious order of ideal being.

The mechanism whereby Don Quijote misconstrues the contents of the physical world is not triggered by faulty sense perception but rather is conditioned by the combative aspirations of   —28→   his moral will. He sees his mythical world as being under assault by forces that would debase it and trivialize it by imposing the banality of a literal empiricism conditioned purely by sense impressions, factuality, and practical interests. In Don Quijote's view, sense impressions are something to be risen above; they are not, we repeat, phenomena to which he is blind. When Sancho will not agree with his claim that he has been placed in a cage by enchanters, Don Quijote tells him confidently (as though he were addressing superficial readers of the novel), «You, Sancho, will see how you are mistaken in your understanding of my misfortune» («Tú, Sancho, verás cómo te engañas en el conocimiento de mi desgracia»: I, 48). He does not deny that he sees himself in a cage. He says, «I see myself caged» («yo me veo enjaulado»: I, 48). What he denies is that he must willingly accept the dictates of sense knowledge and be reconciled to them. He denies that the empirical fact should take precedence over a moral priority and that the mind's capacity to project a different reality must be subordinated to natural necessity, a claim which he considers false and misleading, a malicious fabrication intended to confuse the moral sense by placing it under a spell. He says,

I know and am persuaded that I am enchanted, and that is sufficient for the safety of my conscience; for I would be greatly burdened if I thought that I was not under a spell and allowed myself to be in this cage lazy and like a coward, defrauding those who are distressed and in need of the help I could give them» («yo sé y tengo para mí que voy encantado y esto me basta para la seguridad de mi conciencia; que la formaría muy grande si yo pensase que no estaba encantado y me dejase estar en esta jaula perezoso y cobarde, defraudando el socorro que podría dar a muchos menesterosos y necesitados de mi ayuda:)


II, 49.                


In implying the existence of an antithetical relationship between the moral will and empirical fact, Don Quijote's incongruous attitudes hint at the author's suggestion that, in general, the enthusiasm and integrity of subjective motivation can depend, to some extent, on an artificial and even self-conscious denial of outward reality. Except towards the end of the novel, Don Quijote is invulnerable to depression because he refuses to take seriously those threats that a less heroic cast of mind might find intimidating. He is grandiose in his projections but modest in what he actually requires to satisfy his demands of life. The reason   —29→   is that his truth is conative, based on the strivings of the will, and hence independent of the actual realization of values7. The reality that Don Quijote opposes, that he sees as being perpetrated against him by his enemies the enchanters, and that he denounces as unreal, is the reality of a commonplace natural necessity that, when asserted in absolute terms, would obviate moral strivings by rendering them not just inviable but meaningless.

As Américo Castro has pointed out, the Neoplatonist theory of perception was skeptical, rationalistic, relativistic, and antidogmatic (pp. 82-90) in, we might add, much the same way that «poststructuralist» theories are today. Castro held that in writing the Quijote Cervantes was reacting against an authoritarian dogmatism that was based on the scholastic-empiricist claim that sense-perception plays a necessary role in providing us with reliable knowledge. In contrast, Castro maintained, Cervantes's novel offers an innovative, prismatic vision of life's complexity, of a world where reality is unstable and wavering and is full of uncertainties, deceitful appearances, and problematic differences of opinion and in which knowledge is relative, differing according to the point of view of the individual observer. Castro believed that for all his geniality, the stability of his moral vision, and notwithstanding the restrained character of his skepticism, in the Quijote Cervantes presents a Weltanschauung that is impressionistic, relativistic, and ambiguous. Not only is a basin a helmet, it is also a basin-helmet (pp. 75-122). Spitzer characterized what Castro called «relativism» as «perspectivism». The Neoplatonism that these critics have perceived as underlying Cervantes's outlook is not moral idealism but the speculative and critical rationalism of Neoplatonist epistemology. We wish to suggest that within that same, general Neoplatonist framework, Cervantes developed the enchantment motif originally furnished to him by the novels of chivalry and that he did so as a moral idealist as well. As we shall see, Cervantes added to his synthesis the concept of the phantasma, which comes from the Aristotelian theory of perception -a concept that today we know as the principle of transcendental-phenomenological reduction set forth by Husserl. Husserl intended that principle to be a means of suspending our ordinary awareness of objects in order to make   —30→   possible a transition to a reflective attitude. In making Don Quijote a fictional vehicle of the Neoplatonist theory of perception and introducing the Aristotelian-Thomist principle that sense-impressions, or phantasmata, are dream images, delusions, Cervantes elaborates the enchantment motif on a scale that leaves the materials he received from the novels of chivalry far behind.

Indeed, it is hard to see how Cervantes could have relied on the romances of chivalry alone for the idea of an appearance that is illusory because of its limiting, material particularity and for the idea of rendering such an appearance significant, as Don Quijote does, by abstracting it from the conditions of concrete individuality and altering it in order to apprehend it in terms of a broader, more universal frame of reference. Plato had held that knowledge is always of the self-subsistent universal; all we ever really know about the sensible world is our idea of it through judgement by the mind, since reality consists of mind, not matter. It was Aristotle who, in De anima, originally posited the view that sense-knowledge and intellectual knowledge are essentially distinct: the former recognizes only matter itself with its individual qualities while the latter has for its object the essence of material things. Intellect depends on sense-perception because forms have a being only in things. Hence, intellectual knowledge follows upon sensation. The active intellect makes sense representation, or «phantasma», capable of being known in a universal, intellectual likeness through a process of abstraction (De anima 431a-432a, pp. 139-45). Thomas Aquinas also distinguished between a) appearance, or «phantasm», the sensory image that results from the body-sense experience of a material thing yet without our awareness of such a sensation (i.e. without intelligibility, understanding); b) «material intelligence», or sensing such an image only in its particularity, i.e., passively and knowingly experiencing only the sensation of the individual image; and c) active apprehension of things in their universal aspects: «dematerializing» a thing so as to see beyond its particularity and understand it conceptually, spiritually (Summa Theologica, Question 79, articles 2-3, pp. 149-57)8.

  —31→  

Thus, in Platonic and Aristotelian-Thomist epistemology, as for Don Quijote, immediately-given reality-phenomena, empirical reality as such, cannot be the object of actual knowing. Aristotle and Aquinas held such phenomena to be given as   —32→   meaningless appearances, or phantasms (phantasmata), which must be rendered intelligible by the activity of the mind. If one sees Cervantes as having drawn on principles of Platonist, Aristotelian, and Thomist epistemology for the way he conceives details of Don Quijote's actions and ideas in relation to enchantment, Cervantes's specific adaptation of those theories would seem to have taken him well beyond the simple scheme of psychology based on bodily humors in Huarte de San Juan's Examen de ingenios. Cervantes first devised a psychology corresponding to the concept of a knowledge of Forms that is actually antithetical to an empirical factualism and then broadened the scope of intelligibility to draw on ethically-charged poetic myth, thus reaching beyond mere cognition to include the aesthetic and ethical modes of apprehension as well9. He then personified sense-impressions as malicious enchanters whose spells or «enchantment» -manifested as a superstitious respect for empirical truth-claims (a full endorsement of epistemological realism)- enslave their victims and make them believe in sensory images, in «phantasms». Don Quijote sallies forth into the world of fiction as the iconoclast of realistically-circumscribed, empirical truth-claims to whose categorical «malice» eventually he himself heroically succumbs. Of course, whatever «malicious» distortions of reality Don Quijote imagines himself to experience he sees as being presented to him as illusions, so the reader may choose to remain on a literal level and dismiss them as meaningless fantasy. As Don Quijote himself states after wrecking the puppet show of Maese Pedro (actually the fugitive Ginés de Pasamonte in disguise), «These enchanters who pursue me merely place figures as they are before my eyes, and then they turn them into what they want them to be» («estos encantadores que me persiguen   —33→   no hacen sino ponerme las figuras como ellas son delante de los ojos, y luego me las mudan y truecan en las que ellos quieren»: II, 26, my emphasis). In Don Quijote's view, the realities that he has perceived have been transformed into illusions, into elements of the mundane reality that everyone else sees. What can be seen to start out as a humorous probing of «the way in which desire can loosen a person's grasp on reality» and then becomes a contest between an aesthetics based on empirical reality and an aesthetics that is based on illusion and validates the free play of the imagination (Forcione 341, 339-48), assumes, for the non-literal-minded reader, the broad, allegorical dimensions of an epic struggle between the right of a disruptive, ideal truth to insist upon the validity of its claims and the right of a factual truth to repudiate those claims once and for all as idle fantasy. That same opposition shifts to the arena of reader response, as the reader is faced with a decision as to how to interpret the novel.

The objects that Don Quijote substitutes for ordinary elements of everyday life are always values that he must struggle for or disvalues that he must struggle against. He considers to be in a state of «enchantment» and deceitful appearance that which has a finite utility value that is, relatively speaking, merely «materially intelligible» and has no bearing on moral aspirations. As a proponent of knightly heroism, Don Quijote is primarily concerned with the ethical struggle and character-values. For him empirical facts alone lack «reality» because they lack moral significance, a perspective, as we have seen, that is reminiscent of the Platonic distrust of sensory perceptions and of the Aristotelian-Thomist depreciation of sensory, «material intelligence» as the passive experience of an isolated image that is in itself an unintelligible appearance because of its inability to refer to anything beyond itself. Cervantes's debt for Don Quijote's belief that it is the ideal alone that is real would, we repeat, be to Plato, for whom the forms of things in the physical world subsist non-materially as expressions of a noumenal or intelligible world. Don Quijote «artificially» transforms «material knowledge», expels the iconoclastic phantoms of a literal factuality, and liberates meaning by transforming objects, «remaking reality» in conformity to what he perceives to be the claims and predicative demands of universal moral interests. He «connects the aesthetic vision with the seriousness of the ethical struggle» (Hartmann 2, 328) by dematerializing things, suspending their posited reality,   —34→   conferring upon them a poetically transcendent universality, and making them intelligible -not only cognitively and passively, but with a new ethical impress, as factors in the creation of values. It is often impossible to know what conscious motives prompted the work of an author who lived centuries ago, but in Don Quijote's peculiar psychology on the subject of enchantment Cervantes may well have intended to encapsulate some of his own views on the nature of artistic creation. If Don Quijote's idea of enchantment is emblematic of some of Cervantes's ideas concerning art, the possible connection of the enchantment motif to the theories discussed would support the view developed by Castro, Forcione and others, that Cervantes regarded poetic art largely as a mode of apprehension and would suggest that he viewed aesthetics not merely as a science of forms but as a cognitive and epistemological domain as well.

***

One sign that philosophical inquiries into the essential nature of artistic creation are, in our own day, acknowledging the importance of epistemological issues is that some recent theories concerning the cognitive, semantic value of metaphor (the central poetic figure) address points similar to those discussed here. The most paradoxical element in Don Quijote's concept of the way enchantment works is his self-conscious acceptance of the truth-value of perceptions that he himself recognizes as deviating from empirical fact. His attitude seems to be summed up in the words with which he tells Sancho quite candidly that the way he sees Dulcinea is the way he imagines her, whether it is the truth or not:

I imagine that everything I say is true, without anything being added or left out concerning either her beauty or her eminence, and Helen doesn't equal her any more than Lucretia approaches her, nor any other of the famous women of past ages, Greek, barbarian, or Latin («yo imagino que todo lo que digo es así, sin que sobre ni falte nada, así en la belleza como en la principalidad, y no la llega Elena, ni la alcanza Lucrecia, ni otra alguna de las famosas mujeres de las edades pretéritas, griega, bárbara, o latina»:)


I, 25.                


Don Quijote simply denies what is in his factual experience and replaces it with a cherished vision. As a guide to making decisions in everyday life, such a modus operandi must be impractical to say the least, as Don Quijote discovers. However, the mental   —35→   process that Paul Ricoeur considers to lie at the center of the poetic imagination is remarkably similar. Ricoeur's theory incorporates Husserl's principle of the phenomenological suspension of presuppositions about the nature of experience and what is distinctly reminiscent of Coleridge's view that imaginative synthesis is preceded by a stage at which the fixed, definite character of images is dissolved. For Ricoeur imagination begins with the subject's turning his back, as it were, on conventional modes of thought; it is a negative making oneself «absent to the whole of things», for «to imagine is to make oneself absent to the whole of the world» (p. 152). Metaphor, specifically, is «a deviant predication», a «semantic impertinence» (p. 143). Once imagination has succeeded in suspending the direct reference of thought and emotion to the objects of our ordinary discourse and the literal emotions of everyday life (vs. poetic emotions), it performs its next task, that of applying synthetic insight to the projection of new possibilities of redescribing the world. «Image as absence is the negative side of image as fiction», and symbolic systems have the power to remake reality (pp. 155, 152, 145).

The question of whether it is possible to alter reality to some degree -or even fundamentally, or if it is possible to create new reality- by altering the way in which it is perceived (the supposition that was so powerfully censured by Marx and Engels in their critique of Feuerbach (German Ideology) and that underlies the difference between naturalism, or the picaresque, and what Lukács refers to as «realism», which is actually just more romantic than naturalism) -this question is what is ultimately at issue in Cervantes's complex presentation of the way Don Quijote conceives of enchantment. As Mark Johnson notes of Ricoeur's emphasis on the imagination's role in the creation of meaning (imagination's semantic feature),

The underlying issue is whether «reality» is objectively given, so that, as knowers, we can only stand apart and comment on it, or whether we have a «world» only by virtue of having a language and system of value-laden concepts that make experience possible for us. This, as Ricoeur and many others note, is not a question limited to metaphor -it is a fundamental ontological and epistemological issue


(p. 41).                


Johnson is aware that the way one judges the value of symbolic images (and their associated emotions) for making truth-claims will depend on the concept one has of truth: is it descriptive of an objective reality that exists in itself and would exist even if   —36→   there were no minds to be aware of it, or is «truth» the linguistic manifestation of cognitive processes that are experienced as we encounter our world «not passively, but by means of projective acts influenced by our interests, purposes, values, beliefs, and language?» (Johnson 41) Clearly the latter alternative, which is the nominalist view -i.e., that our means of formulating truths are mere names or vocal utterances without any corresponding realities- assigns much greater scope and value to the free human will and creative imagination, which explains the prestige that theory enjoyed in Cervantes's day as an element in the philosophy of nominalism. Nominalism differed from Thomism in being voluntaristic in the tradition of Augustinianism. In positing what today seems a distinctly «Fichtean» concept of subjective idealism emerging from the moral will, Cervantes was undoubtedly influenced by the nominalists, whose teachings were very much in vogue in sixteenth-century Spain. In our age a similar desire for freedom from traditional forms of thought probably explains a good deal of the widespread interest in, for example, Derrida's denial that subjective conceptions can define anything that has independent, real existence outside the mind and in the structuralist claim that social and cultural phenomena, like literary works, are semiotic systems whose elementary units are not objective facts but conventional relational elements, arbitrary signs10. As Genette has observed, «structuralism is not only a method; it is also what Ernst Cassirer calls a 'general tendency   —37→   of thought,' or as others would say (more crudely) an ideology...» (p. 68). Whether the ideas upon which structuralism is based stand to prove as fruitful in our day as their prototype did in the post-medieval period has been a subject of much recent controversy.

Cervantes lived in a world that for a time had been cordoned off from the rest of Europe in order to defend, ironically, a religion that advanced the doctrine of free will. Following the Neoplatonist teachings of Augustine, the emphasis on the superiority of the will over the intellect was powerfully reasserted in Europe by the nominalists. Nominalism emerged in the fourteenth century as a challenge to the dogmatic authority of philosophical (ontological) realism. It received a new impetus from the influence of Reform piety and entered Spain as a progressive force with the founding of the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares in the early sixteenth century. As it developed, nominalism itself contributed to the forging of dogma, viz., the doctrine of merit11. Some critics in our own day would seem to consider the influence of linguistics in contemporary literary criticism to have followed a course that is comparable to the influence of nominalism. Emphasis on the view that truth is a function of language is seen as having fostered the attitude that the subject of language can only be language itself, that what one may consider «truth» is never more than a linguistic formulation and a function of language's inherent formal conventions: what Frederic Jameson has termed «the prisonhouse of language» and Terry Eagleton calls «the poststructuralist dogma that we are prisoners of our own discourse» (Jameson passim and Eagleton 144). For his part, Don Quijote, who has an unmistakable tendency to equate truth and language (especially the language of fictional discourse), establishes himself from the outset as an opponent of literal, uninspired truth-claims and drab objectivity. He consciously defies the existence of a self-evident factuality. Cervantes the romanticist author (he is a «realist» as well) can be said to do likewise; however, unlike Cervantes's, Don Quijote's heightened vision is categorical. Even when, after his second sally, he is placed in a cage like a criminal or a heretic (I, 46), he insists that the cage is   —38→   an illusion, the creation of enchanters. Sancho would seem to have the last word, with his observation that the cage in which Don Quijote is being carried home «has more of malice than of enchantment» (I, 48). The implication of Sancho s common-sense attitude would seem to be that, whether it is perceived concretely or abstractly and acts physically or psychologically, a cage is illusory only if one can get out of it.

In a way, what Don Quijote claims is obviously ridiculous, but only if one tries to apply to him the standards of conventional modes of thought and refuses to accept the poetic imagination's «semantic impertinence», its deviant withdrawal from the objects of our ordinary discourse, for what it is. Don Quijote is a fictional character who has been aberrantly displaced into the world of historico-empirical actuality and whose very existence is a function of the principle of poetic imagination. He represents both the virtues of poetic heightening and its potential vices. The virtues are evident in the fact that serious readers study Cervantes's novel in the first place. The vice that Don Quijote represents is error itself, i.e. the tendency to take fictional claims literally and read them dogmatically as fact instead of as polysemous symbol. When we laugh at Don Quijote's delusions and, in our literal-mindedness, dismiss his behavior as mere folly, we commit the same error, which is also the error that structuralism and poststructuralism have objected to and, some would claim, sometimes even exemplified, viz., thought's formalistic tendency to carve out its own self-complacent niche in the intellectual environment, grow one-sided, and effect a quasi-mystical retreat from life's complexity in the process.

Any language system tends to lapse into pseudo-objectivity by becoming self-directing and self-certifying through the elaboration and fulfillment of its own characteristic form. It is a typical feature in the work of Cervantes for motifs that are idyllic (in Schiller's sense of the coincidence of the ideal and reality) to suggest another, critical and ironic dimension, and it should not surprise us to find that such is the case in the way he represents the poetic imagination as well. Don Quijote's lengthy disquisitions on the subject of knight-errantry, as he entrenches himself deeper and deeper in his signifying system, are, in addition to his visual fantasies, a noteworthy example. Instead of being the condition for actual knowing, Don Quijote's authoritative, encyclopedic frame of reference takes on dimensions and proportions of another, mythological form of organized illusion, a «phantasma»   —39→   the very fiction of which his hallucinatory images of absent phenomena are (to use Ricoeur's terms ironically) the negative side. Don Quijote's compulsive cataloguing of «facts» that he has taken from the romances of chivalry tempts the reader to speculate that the derivation of poetic symbolism does not always entail the process that Aristotle and Aquinas describe as a transfer of the phenomenon into an idea and then, as Goethe held (Maxims No. 1113, p. 693)12, into a suggestive image, but that it can also start with a metaphysics in the form of images and affects, or quasi-rational presuppositions born more of a suspension of reference to objective reality than of an impartial observation of it, and that it can then transfer those images into the form of a pseudo-non-fictional, rationalistic discourse that is simply a displaced form of fiction. If fiction can have an axiological basis, then it must be possible for positive thought to have a fictional basis as well -at least, as Greimas maintains, in the human and social sciences13. It was most likely Freud's sensitivity to the inescapable importance of a conceptual framework with formal characteristics in organizing the immediate sensations of experience that prompted him to describe his own work as «metapsychology»14.

An additional area, then, that the Quijote can be seen to address indirectly and somewhat ironically in association with the enchantment motif and that Cervantes explores further in works such as «El coloquio de los perros» is the issue of the extent to which the literary dialogue, with its conventional claim to being universally edifying, has a didactic value that is necessarily relative to the frame of reference of its (fictional) speakers15. Such a theme is, of course, not without broad implications. We are very   —40→   likely still discovering the extent to which our world and our relation to it would be unimaginable for us were they not organized in some sort of fictional framework. From this point of view a fundamental trait that fiction and real life could be seen to have in common is that the individuals who populate both can be thought of as metaphors in a vast creative fabric, and largely self-conceived metaphors at that. Thus regarded, poetic imagination assumes the character of a moral adventure, one that demands the exercise of free will and that is also not without risk. As Lessing observed, a heretic is a person who sees with his own eyes.

One reason that the character Don Quijote has such rich metaphorical value is that he can be seen as both exercising a vital free will and as not doing so. Don Quijote rejects one set of conventions (sense-knowledge) on the grounds that it is illusory in order to be able to embrace another set of conventions (chivalric romanticism) with an attitude of naive indifference to the problem of what is or is not illusory. In this sense his situation is comparable to that of the deconstructionist critic, who is unable to dispense with the conventions of the very logocentric language from which he wishes to disassociate himself. Just as a thinker without a language is inconceivable, so is a human being inconceivable without a fantasy world. So observes Francis Bacon:

Doth any man doubt, that, if there were taken from men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations, as one would, and the like vinum Daemonum (as a Father called poetry), but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?16


The Quijote would seem to advance the proposition that healthy fictional presuppositions should be considered sacred. When they are not, the result can be a crisis such as that which is presented in the «Tale of Impertinent Curiosity». Don Quijote's recurrent self-deceptions concerning the identity and intentions of others cause him to behave violently; hence, they must eventually be dispelled. On the other hand, his idealization of Aldonza Lorenzo causes harm to no one. Sancho -who eventually learns, under Don Quijote's influence, to liberate his own poetic imagination- playfully yet maliciously takes it upon himself to   —41→   contradict iconoclastically his companion's illusions concerning the being whom Don Quijote describes as «the only refuge of my hopes» (único refugio de mis esperanzas: II, 29). It is ironic that Sancho's naturalistic description of the Dulcinea whom he claims to have spoken to when she was winnowing wheat in the barnyard is a fictional invention as well, yet for that profanation Sancho must make restitution in the form of three thousand three hundred lashes. While Sancho's fictionalization of Aldonza Lorenzo may be less fanciful than Don Quijote's, it is more reprehensible. Thus it is implied that imagining that things can only be as they appear, that sense-impressions are an adequate basis for knowledge, is comparable to a delusion or a fantasy, to being under a «spell», and it is implied that the «enchanted», or fictional, aspect of such a one-sided epistemological realism (of the assumption that the only reality attributable to objects of our knowledge is a reality of their own) is that it is at once too naive and too cynical: too naive because it ignores its own partiality and, hence, its own fictional character, too cynical because it disregards the crucial importance of subjective factors for conceiving ways in which reality can be recast and improved.

In Cervantes's novel (for all the pregnant and contradictory implications that one may wish to see in the circumstance) it is the very incarnation of the quixotic vision himself, Don Quijote, who insists that what the general run of people think they see in the world around them is, in fact, a fiction created to mislead them, and yet who admits quite frankly that what he claims to be true is what he imagines and wills to be true. One implication of that attitude on Don Quijote's part could be that fiction is a fundamental ingredient in any perception of reality. It could also follow, both logically and from Don Quijote's example, that once one accepts that fact one can aspire to build a reality on the fiction that is most inspired and most elevated. At that point the role of learning is not merely to justify empirical knowledge but to help provide a road to knowledge of a higher kind.

  —42→  
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