Cervantes in Perspective 9783954870660

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Julia Domínguez (ed.) Cervantes in Perspective

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Julia Domínguez (ed.)

Cervantes in Perspective

Iberoamericana - Vervuert - 2013

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cervantes in Perspective / Julia Domínguez (ed.). pages cm ISBN 978-1-936353-13-2 (Iberoamericana Vervuert Publishing Corp.) – ISBN 9788484897187 (Iberoamericana) 1. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 1547-1616. –Criticism and interpretation. I. Domínguez, Julia, editor of compilation. PQ6351.C484 2013 863’.3–dc23 2012050273

All rights reserved: © Iberoamericana, 2013 Amor de Dios, 1 – E-28014 Madrid Tel.: +34 91 429 35 22 Fax: +34 91 429 53 97 [email protected] www.ibero-americana.net © Vervuert, 2013 Elisabethenstr. 3-9 – D-60594 Frankfurt am Main Tel.: +49 69 597 46 17 Fax: +49 69 597 87 43 [email protected] www.ibero-americana.net ISBN 978-84-8489-718-7 (Iberoamericana) ISBN 978-3-86252-768-8 (Vervuert) ISBN 978-1-936353-13-2 (Iberoamericana Vervuert Publishing Corp.) Depósito Legal: M-3652-2013 Cover: a.f. diseño y comunicación Printed in Spain The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ISO 9706

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Table of Contents Introduction....................................................................................................7 Julia Domínguez Don Quixote: Five Facets of a Multi-faceted Work............................................................13 James A. Parr The Literary Classics in Today’s Classroom: Don Quixote and Road Movies....................................................................29 David R. Castillo Who is Berganza? Sniffing out the Conundrums of the Coloquio.............................................45 William H. Clamurro Innocents Abroad; Or, Lost in La Mancha: Teaching Don Quixote in the United States.................................................53 Edward H. Friedman Don Quixote as Museum...............................................................................71 Charles Victor Ganelin Writing to be Heard: Performing Music in Don Quixote...............................................................85 Chad M. Gasta What is us? Cervantes, Pedro de Valencia, and Ricote’s Return in the Quixote...................109 Rosilie Hernández

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From La Mancha to Manresa: Sancho Panza’s Incarnational Spirituality...................................................127 Michael J. McGrath Don Quixote, the Skeptical Reader and the Nature of Reality...............................................................139 Steven Wagschal Contributors................................................................................................155

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Introduction Julia Domínguez Iowa State University It is my distinct honor and privilege to present to the reader this volume of essays, which contains the expanded versions of the scholarly talks from the 11th Annual Cervantes Symposium in Chicago, which culminated in a keynote address by James A. Parr. The collection brings together important and original essays on the life and works of Miguel de Cervantes written by nine noteworthy Cervantes scholars and represents the first time research emanating from this prestigious symposium has been published. Since its beginnings in 2001, the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies Cervantes Symposium has offered the opportunity to scholars from throughout the United States and abroad to share and discuss emergent research in the field. On April 29, 2011, the 11th Cervantes Symposium took place for the first time at the Instituto Cervantes of Chicago, sponsored by DePaul University and the Instituto Cervantes, with support from the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies. The Cervantes Institute hosted the symposium’s sessions, which were attended by a number of scholars, students, and others interested in Cervantes. Among the participants, it is worth noting that three were former or current Presidents of the Cervantes Society of America, and two are distinguished or named professors at their respective institutions. This volume stands as a vibrant reflection of the diverse interests that Cervantes’s fiction continues to engender, marking not only the resolute popularity of this writer but also how his work continues to yield evolving and innovative areas of investigation. Hence, the essays treat topics ranging from the impact of Cervantes’s fiction on contemporary culture to close readings of individual works to the influence of Cervantes on literary theory.

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In his keynote address and subsequently expanded essay, “Don Quixote: Five Facets of a Multi-faceted Work,” James A. Parr discusses five important features that justify the preeminence of Don Quixote as one of the most central works in world literature. The five facets include the 1605 title; an ironic pre-text serving to convey authorial point of view while also orienting the reader; focalization; motivated and unmotivated narrators; the Disnarrated; and the sounds of silence. According to Parr, these characteristics reveal the art of Cervantes as a master storyteller on one hand, and, on the other, they serve to propose some of the reasons why Don Quixote is still a touchstone for literary criticism. In “The Literary Classics in Today’s Classroom: Don Quixote and Road Movies,” David Castillo offers a pedagogical approach to Cervantes’s classic novel. In times when literature scholars and professors are facing various challenges, Castillo presents masterfully the pedagogical possibilities of a classroom practice of cultural commentary that places the literary classics like Don Quixote side by side with the products of our own contemporary media culture. He examines Don Quixote alongside films as different as Easy Rider, The Motorcycle Diaries, Thelma and Louise, Into the Wild, and Borat and concludes that Cervantes’s novel shares many of the same operative principles as those found in the road movie genre. Based on his experience and the exchange of ideas in the classroom, William Clamurro offers an interesting study on the concluding double novela in Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares, “El casamiento engañoso” and “El coloquio de los perros.” His article, “Who is Berganza? — Sniffing out the Conundrums of the Coloquio,” seeks to illuminate the nature of the canine spokesperson projected by Campuzano. Clamurro suggests that the Berganza-Campuzano juxtaposition might serve as a corrective or a suggestion for re-reading or rethinking much of the ostensibly more idealistic narrative lessons that have preceded the “Casamiento/Coloquio,” from the first (“La gitanilla”) to the tenth (“La señora Cornelia”), in effect prompting a kind of deconstruction of the seemingly more exemplary messages of those previous texts. In “Innocents Abroad; Or, Lost in La Mancha: Teaching Don Quixote in the United States,” Edward H. Friedman provides detailed insight into how he teaches Don Quixote to U.S. students who only recently have begun to study Spanish literature. He calls his method “directed spontaneity,” an effective and innovative approach to Don Quixote that aims to prepare students to examine the novel without losing the spontaneity of the reading experience itself. His methodology is therefore geared toward facilitating the reading and examination of the novel.

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In his study “Don Quixote as Museum,” Charles Ganelin analyzes how the sense of touch in the novel is a key component to an understanding of how and why Don Quixote interacts with those around him, both people and objects. The knight’s efforts to link his chivalric worldview within the world that he travels are frequently carried out through the sense of touch and the practice of collecting, the latter having become commonplace by the early seventeenth century in Spain and the rest of Europe. Focusing on the episode of the “cabeza encantada,” Ganelin argues that Don Quixote both engages in the creation of a “museum” and becomes transformed into one through the objects he touches and the object he becomes. He is utterly and completely reduced to an object of curiosity, a walking museum whose prize object is himself and is part of the larger, even if temporary, holdings of Antonio Moreno. In “Writing to be Heard: Performing Music in Don Quixote,” Chad M. Gasta studies how music played a very significant role in Miguel de Cervantes’s life even though the historical record makes almost no mention of Cervantes’s affinity, training or even interest in singing or instrument playing. In fact, songs and musical numbers are abundant in most of the author’s fiction. Gasta provides an overview and analysis of several different musical pieces that appear in Don Quixote before discussing their origins and significance in the novel. He then argues that music and lyrical poetry generally appear as oral objects in the novel (as opposed to literary pieces), which sheds light on Cervantes’s striking interest in and familiarity with music and the role it plays in Don Quixote, as well as how the writer was interested in preserving orality as a literary culture that was emerging. Rosilie Hernández explores the ways in which the story of Ricote’s exile and return can be read as a fictional extension of contemporary discourses of tolerance vis-à-vis the discourses of exclusion and repression in Early Modern Spain. In “What is us? Cervantes, Pedro de Valencia, and Ricote’s Return in the Quixote,” Hernández establishes a dialogue between Pedro de Valencia’s Tratado acerca de los moriscos, a treatise on the expulsion of the Moors and Cervantes’s personal interpretation of the outcomes of the morisco expulsion as evidenced in the Ricote episode. The extraordinary nature of Sancho Panza’s character is one of the many reasons Don Quixote fascinates scholars and non-scholars alike. In “From La Mancha to Manresa: Sancho Panza’s Incarnational Spirituality,” Michael McGrath analyzes how Sancho expresses his faith in God as savior and protector numerous times throughout the novel, and, in doing so, he reveals himself to be a disciple of Ignatian spirituality, particularly its incarnational view of the world. While Don Quixote endeavors to attain the glory of the knights from his books of

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chivalry, Sancho Panza’s incarnational spirituality, which he manifests through his actions and his words throughout the novel, reminds Don Quixote, and the reader as well, that the Ignatian philosophy of “finding God in all things” is the true source of everlasting glory. McGrath proposes that such a reading of the novel contributes to Cervantes’s message of redemption. Using as a starting point the essay “Descartes’ Demon and the Madness of Don Quixote” (1997) by philosopher Stephen Nadler, Steven Wagschal argues in “Don Quixote, the Skeptical Reader and the Nature of Reality” that Nadler’s comparison does not go far enough. Beyond Nadler’s focus on the analogy of first-person accounts by Descartes and by Cervantes’s narrator, Wagschal argues that the reader of Don Quixote has reasons to believe in the sabio encantador’s actual existence within the fictional world of Don Quixote. While we must be skeptical about the existence of the sabio encantador, the reader needs also to be somewhat skeptical of the “truth” that there is no sabio encantador. The readers of both Descartes and Cervantes, then, are brought into an exercise in living with extreme skepticism. Ultimately, the implications of the reader’s doubt (and the concomitant logical possibility of the sabio encantador’s real existence) lead to the creation of a fictional world that is much less like the reader’s “real world” than many critics have previously acknowledged, lending credence to the idea that Don Quixote is a work sui generis and not the first modern novel. As these brief descriptions attest, the breadth and depth of this collection reflect the varying interests of Cervantes scholars today and the fact that the writer’s fiction has yielded so many exciting and interesting avenues for research and discovery, as well as scholarly debate. Such stimulating and innovative scholarship would not be brought to the reader if not for the help and support of many others. First, I would like to thank all of the symposium participants as well as the institutions and their representatives for making the symposium possible. In particular, special thanks goes to Glen Carman for proposing that I organize the conference and for providing invaluable help in preparing the event. The symposium’s success was partly due to Glen’s expertise and support. Next, I would like to mention the different institutions and organizations that greatly contributed to the event: DePaul University, the Center for Renaissance Studies of the Newberry Library (especially Karen Christianson), the Instituto Cervantes of Chicago, and Iowa State University (in particular Mark Rectanus, Chair of the Department of World Languages and Cultures). Finally, I wish to acknowledge Michelle Maynes, a stellar recent graduate, for her help as an editorial assistant. This volume would not have been possible without Klaus Vervuert of Iberoamericana-Vervuert to whom I am eternally grateful for agreeing early on to

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publish the collection, and for working with me through the various stages of production. Similarly, I am very appreciative of the Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development at Iowa State University for its generous financial support in the form of a Publication Subvention Grant, which covered the expenses related to publishing the collection.

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Don Quixote: Five Facets of a Multi-faceted Work James A. Parr University of California, Riverside In 1997, Life magazine listed the publication of Don Quixote as one of the hundred most important events of the millennium. Some ten years ago, the Nobel Institute, in collaboration with the association of Norwegian book clubs, polled a panel of 100 authors from 54 countries on what they considered the “best and most central works in world literature.” Although the books were not ranked, the editors revealed that Don Quixote received 50% more votes than any other work (2002: BBC). I would hope that the five facets to be discussed here might offer a modest justification for the preeminence of Cervantes’s masterpiece. These five facets represent aspects of the work that I have addressed in recent years and, in that sense, the paper offers a concise retrospective of my thinking since the 1988 Anatomy of Subversive Discourse. A guiding premise of my talk is that if we are to understand and appreciate Cervantes as a contributor of consequence to the Western narrative tradition, we must focus on form and, specifically, on how the tale gets told, being attentive always to the tellers in the tale. Well before 1988, I had coined the term “supernarrator” for the extradiegetic-heterodiegetic text speaker, who functions as orchestrator and editor, within the text of the Quixote. He does not surface until the end of chapter 8, and then irrupts again, unannounced, in chapter 9, both times through an infraction of narrative level called metalepsis. This entity orders, organizes, and comments upon the efforts of the pseudo-authors and sometime narrators of record, most especially Cide Hamete, and most notably so in Part II.

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It is particularly in Part II that the supernarrator comes into his own, very much at the expense of poor Cide Hamete, as the ruse of the found manuscript and the Moorish historian becomes increasingly unstable and ultimately untenable. “Super” is intended to suggest that this narrative voice is assigned superior insight and control in comparison to the other narrative voices and pseudo-authors and also that it is situated above them in the hierarchy of textspeakers, as in “superimposed.” We might succinctly summarize the characteristics and role of the supernarrator as follows: 1) it is a useful concept for understanding and appreciating the narrative hierarchy in the text, and it is important also for appreciating Cervantes’s achievement as an innovative and experimental teller of tales; 2) my supernarrator is, in Gérard Genette’s terms, the extradiegeticheterodiegetic narrator, but I trust my coinage may be a bit simpler and easier to understand; 3) the supernarrator is configured by the manner in which he configures the text and by his interventions from within it; 4) he is sometimes overt in his overtures, but, often as not, he is stealthy and somewhat devious, like Hermes, as when his voice irrupts into the text without warning or fanfare, particularly so in Part II; 5) this voice is a decidedly Christian one, which serves to counterbalance that of the pseudo-historian of another faith, Cide Hamete Benengeli; 6) the supernarrator is a voice, rather than a presence who merely mills about, like Cide Hamete; and 7) he represents orality, while the Moor, whipping boy that he is, represents writing. Orality takes precedence in the telling of this tale —even Cide Hamete’s writing is sometimes presented as speech: “Y dice más Cide Hamete [...]” (II.70). But, significantly, that orality cannot stand alone. It needs the support of its supplement, and for that framing and sustaining écriture we are indebted, not to Cide Hamete, of course, but to Miguel de Cervantes. A supernarratee can be inferred from the discourse of the supernarrator. It seems fair and safe to say that the intended receiver of this narrator’s discourse is assumed to be a Christian and not a Moor. The narrator may be said to assume implicitly that his narratee will share his values and perspective. Whether one or both are New Christians (converts) or Old Christians is something we probably need not address. There are no markers pointing either way. We may suppose also that this narratee is considered capable of following the constant oscillation between speaking and writing, for instance the ubiquitous tag line “dice Cide Hamete,” which is synonymous with “dice la historia.” The supernarratee is also assumed adept enough to follow convoluted passages like the beginning of II.44, where orality and literacy are shown to be interdependent, and also to deal with the surprising revelation

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that there is a single “original” at the source, rather than the plethora of texts adduced by our first author (of I.1-8). It is evident, in short, that the supernarrator addresses someone he assumes to be an uncommonly perceptive and competent interlocutor. This narrator is, without doubt, demanding. He assumes a narratee on the same wavelength. This brief preliminary stroll through the fictional woods (with a bow to Umberto Eco) leads to two fairly obvious preliminary conclusions: 1) the posture and tone of a given narrator serve in large measure to configure the narratee he addresses; an ironic narrator, like the first author (I.1-8), presupposes a narratee of that set of mind, or capable of entering into that frame of mind; an enthusiastic and highly involved narrator, like the second author of I.9, takes for granted a narratee of like mind, or at least one susceptible of having her enthusiasm aroused; and 2) the supernarrator is the most demanding of those who intervene in the transmission of meaning. He assumes that his narratee will be able to follow the many instances of metalepsis, recognizing his voice whenever it surfaces, that the narratee will not be confused by the interplay between speaking and writing, or by disnarration in its several guises, but above all, he must assume that the supernarratee will recognize that he is the narrator, the real text-speaker, rather than Cide Hamete, and that the frequent allusions he makes to the Moorish historian serve to relegate this figure to the periphery, emphasizing his marginality and “supplementarity” (since he represents writing, taken here to be a supplement to speech). We might also posit a superreader, taking our cue from Michael Riffaterre. This would be one of us, indeed all of us. It would be an extra-textual entity, clearly, but it would also be, in a very real sense, an extension of the supernarratee within the text. In sum, it is merely another name for the informed, competent reader we strive to create in the academy. It seems likely that any reader capable of entering into the text in order to become Cervantes’s ideal or model reader is, perforce, a superreader. Two tests the superreader should pass, to be certified as such, are, first, to show an understanding of the concepts that come into play and, second, to demonstrate an ability to capture and appreciate the flow of sense and nonsense between supernarrator and supernarratee. The superreader should be grounded in the cultural and intellectual history of Cervantes’s day, also in modern literary theory, while being, in addition, a meta-critic, which is to say a critical reader of other critics. First and foremost, however, it is someone capable of moving beyond a focus on character, plot, and theme in order to concentrate instead on the diegetic dimension and the ways in which information moves along the communication model from senders to receivers.

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Facet 1. The 1605 title El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha. A point of view is insinuated here toward the main character and the world he will inhabit, a point of view that must surely influence reader response. This initial paratext is highly ironic and is by no means charitable toward the main character. It begins already to express the tensions, the festive, mocking tone, and the topsyturviness of what will follow. A key word at the heart of this “pre-text” is the title within the title, that seemingly innocuous interloper, the honorific “don.” Its effect is to undermine what might otherwise be a quite acceptable heading, for it clashes with hidalgo, since the modestly landed gentry of that rank were not entitled to such ostentation, and also with Quixote, taken to be a derivative of a surname (Quix-ano or Quix-ada, with the root retained and the playful pejorative -ote tacked on). Don is used only with given names, never with surnames. Even if we were to accept Quixote as a newly-minted first name, since it could be said to function as such in conjunction with don, the coinage would nevertheless represent a transparent inversion of an important aspect of the historical process of naming in Spanish, whereby patronymics derive from given names (Sánchez, meaning son of Sancho; Rodríguez, son of Rodrigo, etc.). Cervantes conversely, or perversely, has his character create a given name from a surname. There is thus an audible whisper of subversion at the very threshold of the narrative. Well before we come to the other threshold structures —the self-deprecating prologue and the festive verses, for instance— an authorial stance or point of view has been articulated with regard to the main character and the world he will inhabit. The subversion effected by including the unwarranted title “don” (which Cervantes himself never presumed to use) as the central element of the uncharacteristic title of the book itself serves to call attention to the procedure at work and to identify that larger title as self-conscious, self-questioning —even self-mocking, in the best tradition of Erasmus of Rotterdam. As Otis Green and others have pointed out, the term “ingenioso” can have both negative and positive connotations. In the latter vein, it can mean witty and insightful. A more negative spin would point out the suggestion of a humoral imbalance, with a predominance of choler, or yellow bile, making the individual impulsive and quick to anger. There is sufficient textual evidence to support both meanings, so one can only conclude that the term here is ambiguous. “De la Mancha” refers to the character’s place of origin, a prosaic, proximate, and unromantic place at best, which serves to contrast with the remote and exotic places of provenance of the knights-errant he wishes to emulate, such

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as Amadís de Gaula, Belianís de Grecia, Cirongilio de Tracia, Palmerín de Ingalaterra, or Felixmarte de Hircania. Its effect is thus deflationary. A “mancha” is also a spot or stain, and, as Daniel Eisenberg remarks, “a mancha or stain was, of course, something a caballero should avoid at all cost” (1987: 116). The witty insinuation here seems to be that the character may have a blot on his escutcheon, which could only be caused in his social context by impure blood, that is, by the taint of Moorish or Jewish ancestry. This too would obviously be deflationary in a society that prized purity of blood. The essential tension in the title of the book is to be found between don and Quixote. The word don serves to highlight the knight’s presumption as well as his imaginative aspirations to recreate a world of romance, while the comical and deflating Quixote (a term referring to the piece of defensive armor that protects the thigh, a thigh-guard, in other words) points in the opposite direction, downward, toward the degraded world of the body and, at the same time, the modes of irony and satire. There are thus two generic tendencies announced in the name of the main character, romance in the don and satire in the name Quixote. It is curious, by the way, that the anomalous don has come to be privileged in English, perhaps reflecting a tendency toward Romantic readings; it is not uncommon in English to refer to the main character as “the Don.” In Spanish, “Don Quixote” (the name, not the title) tends to be an indissoluble unit. Compounding the festive tone is the fact that Don Quixote’s story is attributed to Cide Hamete Benengeli (roughly equivalent to “Sir Eggplant”; Sancho is quick to note the similarity of Benengeli and berenjena, eggplant). Is it possible to translate the title of Don Quixote? Would we want to call the main character what his name means literally, Sir Thigh-guard? Can one capture the subtleties teased out here in an English version of the title? The answer to all three questions is “probably not.” The 1605 title thus serves to illustrate the importance of seuils (paratexts or threshold structures) —Gérard Genette’s term— or parerga —Jacques Derrida’s term— in orienting the reader and also the incipient deconstruction that begins to effect its undoing even before we enter the text proper. Looking again at that title, the first element of it, the definite article, would appear to need no elaboration. Another option for this slot would have been the indefinite article, however. In point of fact, one is tempted to say that the first three words of the title could have been omitted, along with the last three, for that matter. All we really need, and all that readers generally remember, are the two in the center, Don Quixote. Those six words on either side of the center are not haphazard, however. This definite article, for instance, makes clear that we have to do with an individual who is one of a kind, not one of a class. The aspect that serves to set him apart from the class of hidalgos is found in the next word, ingenioso.

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We come finally to that most peculiar place of provenance: de la Mancha. As anyone who has read books of chivalry knows, self-respecting knights errant invariably reside in remote and exotic landscapes that are especially congenial to dragons, giants, and other worthy opponents. La Mancha is too dry even for dragons, and giants are so few and far between that windmills must serve as surrogates. There is an unwonted proximity to this prosaic place, this lugar de la Mancha. The flights of fancy anticipated in the high-sounding don and the humordriven ingenioso, enhanced by the uniqueness set forth by the definite article, el, all quickly run aground when confronted by the grubby reality that begins with the transitional and most definitely realistic hidalgo, followed by the less-thanflattering Quixote, and this downward spiral culminates in the decidedly unpretentious and unpoetic de la Mancha. So we move from the unique, el, to the commonplace, de la Mancha, with several gradations between those extremes, one ambiguous (ingenioso) one pretentious (don), one accurate and unambiguous (hidalgo), and one inverted, degraded, and pejorative (Quixote). We might think in terms of a rising action, or at least a raising of expectations, in the first three words, bringing us to the heart of the matter with the name of the central character, followed by a falling action —a definite decline in expectations— when we learn that he cannot claim the exotic origins we associate with knights errant (Hircania, Grecia, Ingalaterra, or Gaula), but comes instead from a village not far away. The essential binary opposition of the title is between don and Quixote. The relationship between the piece of defensive armor and the name of the character is metonymic, albeit with a tinge of metaphor. The part is metamorphosed into the whole —the armor into the knight— by a curious logic similar to that involved in the transformation of a surname into a given name. In chapter 5 of my Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Related Subjects, there is a discussion of the possible relationships among this piece of armor, the region of the body it protects, and Don Quixote’s repeated efforts to protect himself from any threat of sexuality. Several commentators have noticed the resonance of Lanzarote [Lancelot] in the name Quixote (see esp. Murillo). Lancelot is, of course, the archetypal knight. Any similarity of sound or structure is superseded, however, by compelling discrepancies at the level of substance. Lanzarote incorporates the name of a knight’s offensive weapon par excellence, the lanza, or lance. Quixote, conversely, conjures up a piece of defensive armor and, what is more, one designed for protection of the less-than-heroic lower reaches of the anatomy. If Lanzarote connotes action and forcefulness, Quixote suggests passivity and marginalization. If Lanzarote suggests tumescence, Quixote suggests flaccidity. The relation-

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ship between Quixote and Lanzarote is therefore one of inversion, not affinity or complementarity. A more likely model is Camilote, the eccentric hidalgo of Primaleón, studied perceptively by Dámaso Alonso. The parallel between the oxymoronic name assigned the mock-historian, Cide Hamete Benengeli, and the one assumed by the mock-hero is probably evident. Sir Eggplant (berenjena, suggested by Benengeli) offers the incongruity of a man of letters and apparent leisure who is nevertheless related to one of the muleteers at the first inn (I.16), and who takes it upon himself to write down the story of a person of equal or lower social standing —someone of a decidedly different cultural extraction and religious persuasion. The parallel, in brief, lies in the juxtaposition of a high-sounding title and a silly surname or given name. Thus we have the story of Sir Thigh-guard attributed to Sir Eggplant. The irony that typifies this self-deconstructing threshold structure sets the tone for all that follows, with the exception of the interpolated stories of Part I. Facet 2. Focalization The second facet to which I would call your attention is a writer’s device called focalization. Two questions that need to be asked of narrative instances in texts are: 1) Who sees? and 2) Who speaks? The one who sees is the focalizer, while the one who speaks is the narrator. Sometimes they are one and the same, but other times they are not. Let me give you two examples. In II.18, the editorial voice tells us that the translator chose to suppress the description of Don Diego de Miranda’s house that was part of Cide Hamete’s manuscript. It is too late, however. All that we need to know has already been focalized through the eyes of Don Quixote prior to the translator’s decision to suppress that description. The supernarrator looks into the mind of the character in order to give us a description of what Don Quixote saw: Don Quixote found Don Diego de Miranda’s house to be a large rural style dwelling; the family coat of arms, though fashioned in rough stone, hung over the main door, which faced the street; the inner courtyard served as a storeroom, and the front hall as a wine cellar, and there were great wine jugs all about (...) (II.18).

I shall return to Don Diego’s house in a moment, within another context. What Cervantes does here, it seems to me, is point to the possibility of a tension between narration and focalization. But he will go further. In at least one instance, he re-focuses focalization from seeing to hearing. This occurs in a night

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scene, as might be expected, when visibility is virtually nonexistent, particularly so in that time and place. The incident to which I refer is at the end of I.42: A little before dawn the ladies heard a voice which was so fine and tuneful that they had to listen… None of them could imagine who was singing so well, and unaccompanied. Sometimes the voice seemed to be coming from the courtyard, at other times from the stables… Dorotea, listening as hard as she could, heard that what was being sung was the following: (I.42).

Then the song is reproduced, presumably filtered through the ears of Dorotea, offering an instance of auditory focalization, if you will, or possibly a variation on synesthesia. Facet 3. Motivated and Unmotivated Narrators The narrator who starts us off is a pseudo-author, a kind of archivist/compiler and sometime editorial voice. The source material he is collating into a kind of critical edition of Don Quixote’s story comes from oral tradition, other written versions (it is in his comments on these that he assumes the role of editorial voice), and the annals of La Mancha. He is self-conscious about his role, occasionally describing the process of establishing the sequence of events rather than getting on with the story. This conscientious attention to detail would seem to certify his authority —that is, until we reach the end of chapter eight and discover that he has abdicated. Why would he abort such a promising beginning? The answer may lie in his attitude toward the main character —a rather negative one, to say the least. How many narrators can we recall who speak of their protagonist as “brainless” and of that person’s discourse as “utter nonsense” (I.2)? The contrast between this reluctant relater and his successor, the highly motivated “second author,” is quite striking. The hyperbole of this new text-speaker can only sound hollow at this point in time, however, following the oxymoronic and deflating title, the stinting depiction by the dramatized author of the prologue, the burlesque verses, and eight chapters of less than heroic adventures and less than flattering characterization. The second author’s extravagant allusions to “our famous Spaniard [...] the light and ornament of La Mancha knighthood,” and “the never before seen exploits of such a splendid knight” (I.9) cannot begin to repair the damage already done. Moreover, the intervention of this worthy author is restricted to the first half of chapter nine, so he has neither time nor space to rehabilitate the character before turning over the story to the less favorably disposed trio of translator, Moorish historian, and supernarrator (editorial voice).

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If ever there were a writer of dubious dedication, it would surely be Cide Hamete. His motivation for undertaking this particular history is obscure at best. E. C. Riley is quite correct in viewing him as an example of total and complete inverisimilitude (1962: 330), particularly so with regard to motivation. It certainly challenges the imagination to believe that someone of another faith, culture, and language might bother to recount the misadventures of an ungainly, aging hidalgo from a nondescript village in a backwater region of an alien nation. What could possibly be a believable motivation? If he is a narrator (and if he can be considered such, he is a silenced and embedded one at best, situated at the intra-intradiegetic level), he would doubtless qualify as the archetypal unmotivated narrator. Cide Hamete is, nevertheless, surprisingly even-handed in his presentation. Seldom does he justify the bias asserted by the second author (I.9). Indeed, he occasionally loses objectivity in favor of a hyperbolic (although doubtless ironic) praise of folly, as happens in the lion episode (II.17). So we may justifiably say that, while he lacks any explicit or implicit motivation for doing what he is reported to have done —recording the history of Don Quixote— he does not display an overtly disparaging manner toward the character in the way the first author does. It would seem that Cervantes set himself the task of further complicating third-person narration, which is inherently more problematical than first-person (e.g., the picaresque), quite possibly as a self-assumed challenge to his narrative skills. Lázaro de Tormes is a highly motivated narrator, and with reason, but the same cannot be said of the Quixote’s dramatized author (of the prologue to Part I), first author (of chapters 1-8), translator, or Moorish historian. At the heart of that challenge is the seemingly insoluble problem of how one might go about making a mock-heroic character appealing to an audience, and, to complicate matters a bit further, how then to have that mock hero’s misadventures recounted by sometimes antagonistic, and at best indifferent, narrators and pseudo-authors —without alienating the reader. The common reader cannot be expected to understand or appreciate this “self-test,” but it may be that the discreet reader, both then and now, will rise to the occasion. Facet 4. The Disnarrated We tend to ignore the paths not taken. One such narrative option would be the ornate rhetoric espoused by the main character, in imitation of his secular scriptures, when he makes his first sally. Not just any choice not made qualifies as “disnarration,” of course; otherwise, the possibilities would be infinite and the concept meaningless. The criterion is that the possibility not actualized must

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be insinuated within the text as a viable option, then implicitly or explicitly rejected in favor of other possibilities. Don Quixote’s pretentious description of his first foray onto the plains of Montiel is, thus, a valid instance. It is a kind of narration that is presented as a viable option within the text, but is passed over in favor of a more laconic and prosaic presentation. It illustrates what Gerald Prince, who coined the term, defines as the disnarrated. Prince also points out that “the narrator may emphasize his or her power by [...] underscoring the lines of development that could be adopted” (1988: 4). This is certainly the case in the instance just cited. The first pseudo-author makes clear his distaste for such pomposity by deflating it immediately with his prosaic summation, “and it’s true that he was crossing the plains of Montiel” (I.2). This juxtaposition of the florid and the unadorned intimates that he could continue in the vein suggested by the character, should he be so inclined, but he chooses not to do so. It is therefore a display of dominance over the material, its ordering and organization, and the style in which it will be conveyed to the reader. Two sub-categories of the disnarrated sketched by Prince are the unnarrated and the unnarratable. The first of these is synonymous with ellipsis, but, again, it must be something mentioned in the text, and then passed over in favor of condensing the presentation. A clear-cut example is the non-description of Don Diego de Miranda’s house in II.18: “Here the author offers us a portrait of Don Diego’s home, including in it everything contained in the home of a wealthy gentleman farmer; but the translator of this story thought it best of pass over these and other minor details in silence (...)” (II.18). The translator is allowed to assert his authority by imposing his aesthetic criterion with respect to “irrelevant” details, as the text goes on to make clear. The “author” referred to is Cide Hamete, but the narrator is the editorial voice or supernarrator. The unnarratable is not far removed from the example just given, for it has to do precisely with those matters that fall below the threshold of narrativity, details so trite and inconsequential that they can make no claim on our attention. An eighteenth- or nineteenth-century realistic novel might be expected to elaborate the very description that is omitted in Don Quixote II.18. This difference may illustrate a change in the notion of tellability between two historical periods, but it also serves as evidence of Cervantes’s ludic manner. There are times when we are provided with a plethora of details without which we could have done very well, while at other times some rather glaring omissions of important material may leave our curiosity unsatisfied. The description of the resident ecclesiastic at the summer palace of the duke and duchess, with

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its insistent and alienating anaphora, illustrates the former, while the lack of information about the main character’s name and place of provenance in I.1, demonstrating the manipulative and controlling nature of the first text-speaker, may produce an uneasy sense of deprivation. When Don Quixote complains in II.3 of the defeats and drubbings narrated in Part I, what he is saying is that these are inconsequential and should have been suppressed to join other irksome details that remain in the inkwell because they are, by their very nature, insignificant. A narrator does not mention every time a character dresses or undresses, shaves, picks his nose or teeth, scratches, or, heaven forbid, urinates or defecates. He is maintaining that his drubbings are just such incidentals and that they fall below the threshold of narrativity. For Sancho, on the other hand, they are indispensable as proof of veracity: as he puts it, “that’s how one can tell that the story is true” (II.3). One person’s unnarratable is not necessarily another’s. Nor is one narrator’s unnarrated necessarily so for another. Even though the translator suppresses the description of Don Diego’s home, the supernarrator uses Don Quixote to focalize as much as we shall need to know, as we saw earlier. Then we have a delightfully duplicitous passage in II.60, where the unnarrated and unnarratable are brilliantly conjoined: (...) for the next six days nothing happened worthy of being recorded, after which time, night overtook him just as he was leaving the road and riding into a dense grove of oak trees —or perhaps they were cork trees, for Cide Hamete is not quite so careful, on this point, as he usually is about such matters (II.60).

Hard upon the ellipsis involving the events and conversations of six entire days comes the quibble over the kind of trees offering refuge, as the unnarrated (what is not told) gives way to the unnarratable (what hardly merits the telling). We are perhaps the poorer for not knowing what happened during the week in question, but it matters not one iota whether the trees were of one kind or another. That sort of distinction falls below the threshold of narrativity. What is interesting here is that our narrator (the editor/supernarrator) displays a clear awareness of the two types of disnarration, moving easily from one to the other within a remarkably limited space. It must also be evident that Cervantes himself possesses a clear awareness of these two types of disnarration, since he is able to move easily from one to the other within the confines of a single sentence. Equally remarkable is that here we have practice anticipating its codification into theory by almost 400 years. Gerald Prince published his theory of the disnarrated in 1988.

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Facet 5. The Sounds of Silence To state the obvious, silence cannot be heard. And yet it may possess a certain resonance. Things an author, narrator, or character might wish to silence may also produce a certain “noise” in the mind of the reader, who will be alert to implication, innuendo, to what can legitimately be read between the lines, or what seeps through the interstices of the text. Critics have missed a marvelous opportunity to remain silent on the matter. Alan Trueblood was one of the first to do soundings in this area, and also one of the most eloquent. His early work and the more recent ruminations of Aurora Egido cannot but produce in someone writing at this point in time a certain “sense of belatedness,” as Harold Bloom has called it, because one necessarily wonders whether there remains anything of consequence to be added. Once we get into the book, by chapter 20, let us say, it becomes clear that we have here two very verbal characters, Don Quixote and Sancho. Neither is the strong silent type. Each is in a way surrounded by silence, nevertheless, for we are not told everything we might like to know about them, nor are they themselves as forthcoming as one might wish. Sometimes we receive the impression that their chatter masks certain evasiveness, an avoidance of coming to grips with reality or anything of real substance. Of course, the main character lives in a world of illusion, and his sidekick might not recognize substance if he stumbled over it. Within that world of illusion, founded on excessive reading of romances of chivalry and the misguided attempt to live literature, there exists one of the more intriguing characters of the two volumes, someone who is forever silent, because she has no voice, because she has no body. Dulcinea might be seen as the Knight’s silent partner. He can write to her, emulating knightly protocol, but he will never speak to her, nor will she ever speak to him, because she does not exist, except as a figment of his imagination. But is she less real for all that? What is the ontological status of an imaginary being that exists only in the mind of another imaginary being? However that may be, one of her most intriguing aspects is her complete and utter silence. The Knight’s other constant companion is, of course, the complete opposite of Dulcinea. If she is silent, he is loquacious in the extreme. If she is imaginary, he is decidedly corporeal, as his surname makes clear. Sancho could be seen as the enemy of silence. For him, silence is a challenge, something to be filled with speech, in whatever form: babbling to himself, gossip, stories, proverbs, or dialogue with his master and other characters. In addition, he is quite useful in

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filling the silence we can imagine as a dominant feature of the boredom typifying the lives of the duke and duchess of Part II. Nowhere are the sounds of silence more tellingly portrayed than in the subdued entrance into Toboso in II.9. Ambivalence and ambiguity abound in the description we are given in the first paragraph, which is replete with comical contradictions, beginning with the first sentence: “It was midnight on the dot, more or less” (II.9). The first part of the phrase is lifted from the “Ballad of Count Claros of Montalbán,” and it means that it was exactly midnight. But this precision is immediately undercut by the prosaic and mocking “poco más o menos,” as the prosaic undercuts the poetic. Here, precision is replaced by imprecision as a statement about reality is contradicted and transformed before our very eyes. This sets the tone for what is to follow, having to do with silence. In the next sentence, we are told: “The village was enveloped in blissful silence, because its denizens were fast asleep, stretched out like logs, as the saying has it” (II.9). But two sentences later we learn the following: “The only sound heard in those environs was the barking of dogs, which assaulted Don Quixote’s ears and made Sancho’s heart beat faster” (II.9). What has happened to the silence announced earlier? The following sentence goes on to elaborate on this noisy silence: “Occasionally an ass would bray, pigs would squeal, cats would meow, and their voices, in various registers, were heightened by the silence of the night” (II.9). The animal world typical of satire rears its collective ugly head. Rather than silks and satins and precious perfumes, which one might associate with a princess and her domain, our heroes are confronted by a cacophony of canine, feline, porcine, and asinine sounds. The scene is funny in the extreme. It is a masterful display of comedy based on contrast and undermining. With some justification, Don Quixote takes it to be a “bad omen,” however. But our focus is on the sounds of silence —a phrase not lacking its own inherent contradictions. What seems to be demonstrated in the passage just cited is that silence must be punctuated by sound in order to be perceived as such. If all were silent, we would not be aware of it as silence. It therefore exists only by contrast with whatever interrupts it. The situation is analogous to the music of the spheres, the heavenly bodies that, in their rotation, supposedly emit a constant sound, and have done so since they were set in motion, but this sound is perceived by the human ear only as silence. This is so precisely because it is constant, never interrupted, never contrasted with its opposite, having begun before we were born and certain to continue long after we shuffle off. Cervantes illustrates the paradox of sound needing silence for its perception, as well as the other side of that coin, the fact that silence requires sound for us to be fully aware of it, in this beautifully crafted paragraph at the beginning of II.9.

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Conclusion Other dimensions, or facets, might have been foregrounded instead of those highlighted here. Many of you know of my fondness for the beginning of II.44, for instance, with its infinite regress in search of grounding, whether it be in speech or in writing. Cervantes’s dalliance with the questions of origins, grounding, and authority is evident in many places, of course, not just in II.44. I do hope that the five facets offered here will serve nevertheless to suggest something of the art of this master storyteller, while also proposing a few of the many reasons why Don Quixote continues to be a touchstone for literary criticism and to be held in such high esteem by writers around the world in the 21st century. Works Cited Alonso, Dámaso (1962): “El hidalgo Camilote y el hidalgo don Quijote.” In: Del siglo de oro a este siglo de siglas. Madrid: Gredos, pp. 20-28. Bloom, Harold (1973): The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York/London: Oxford UP. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de (2009): El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. Fajardo, Salvador J./Parr, James A. (eds.). 3rd prntg. 2 vols. Asheville, NC: Pegasus P. — (2001): The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. Rutherford, John (trans.). New York: Penguin Classics. Derrida, Jacques (1978): La Vérité en peinture. Paris: Flammarion. “Don Quixote Gets Authors’ Votes.” BBC News . Eco, Umberto (1994): Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Egido, Aurora (1991): “Los silencios del Persiles.” In: Parr, James (ed.): On Cervantes: Essays for L. A. Murillo. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, pp. 21-46. Eisenberg, Daniel (1987): A Study of Don Quixote. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta. Genette, Gérard (1987): Seuils. Paris: Seuil. Green, Otis H. (1957): “El ‘ingenioso’ hidalgo.” In: Hispanic Review, 25, pp. 175-93. Life Magazine (Fall 1997): Special Double Issue: The Millennium, 100 Events that Changed the World. Don Quixote, 96, p. 21. Murillo, Luis Andrés (1977): “Lanzarote and Don Quixote.” In: Folio, 10, pp. 55-68. Parr, James A. (1988): Don Quixote: An Anatomy of Subversive Discourse. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta. — (2004): Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Related Subjects: Form and Tradition in Spanish Literature, 1330-1630. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna UP. Prince, Gerald (1988): “The Disnarrated.” In: Style, 22, pp. 1-8.

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Riffaterre, Michael (1980): “Describing Poetic Structures: Two Approaches to Baudelaire’s ‘Les Chats.’” In: Tompkins, Jane P. (ed.): Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins UP., pp. 26-40. Riley, Edward C. (1962): Cervantes’ Theory of the Novel. Oxford: Clarendon. Trueblood, Alan D. (1984): “El silencio en el Quijote.” In: Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 12, pp. 160-80.

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The Literary Classics in Today’s Classroom: Don Quixote and Road Movies* David R. Castillo SUNY Buffalo One of the most pressing challenges we are currently facing as literature scholars working in the revenue-driven universities of the 21st century is the need for self-justification. How do we explain our dedication to the commentary of texts written centuries ago, often in foreign languages, even as our students struggle to keep up with the massive amounts of information made available daily by increasingly powerful digital technology networks? How do we convince university administrators, educational boards, and government officials that a seminar on seventeenth-century literature is just as worthy of public investment as any computer science or business course? And just as important, what kind of “real life” lessons or skills might literature classes offer our students? This essay is partly an attempt to sketch a theoretical line of response to these questions and partly an illustration of the pedagogical possibilities of a classroom practice of cultural commentary that places the literary classics side by side with the products of our own media culture. Thus, the first half of this essay provides a speculative overview of “the state of the question,” while the second half rehearses a pedagogical approach to Cervantes’s classic novel, Don Quixote, as a road narrative that shares a good number of traits with road films as diverse as Easy Rider, The Motorcycle Diaries, Thelma and Louise, Into

A slightly different version of this essay was first published in the online collection MartínEstudillo, Luis/Spadaccini, Nicholas (eds.): Hispanic Literatures and the Question of a Liberal Education. In: Hispanic Issues On Line, 8, pp. 26-41. *

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the Wild, and Borat. My goal is to suggest that the literary classics are most effectively (and productively) engaged in the new Humanities classroom in practical exercises of strategic re-historization. Revisiting the Literary Classics in the New Humanities Classroom Scholars working in the tradition of ideological criticism have tied the “invention” of the literary classics to modern projects of national construction. They go back to the 1860s and 1870s when the term “literature” acquired a restricted meaning as a distinctive form of “national” writing “which has claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect” (Oxford Dictionary, quoted by Tony Davies in “Education, Ideology and Literature” 1978: 5). Following in the footsteps of Raymond Williams and Louis Althusser, Tony Davies refers to this nineteenth-century legacy as a “moral-aesthetic ideology of literary consumption” (1978: 6) that manufactured “an ideologically constructed canon or corpus of texts operating in specific and determinate ways in and around the apparatus of education” (1978: 13). Williams, Davies, and other cultural materialists —along with more recent proponents of the study of literature as an institution, such as Tony Bennett and Peter Bürger— call for a critical re-examination of the notion of the “literary” and a return of the classics to the entire body of human work. As Davies writes in characteristically polemical fashion: I am not recommending that we all abandon literature […]. I am not suggesting that literary texts consist of nothing but the shadow play of ideologies […]. On the contrary, I believe that they are too valuable and important to be conceded to literary ideology. They must be reclaimed, reappropriated […]. But we shall not accomplish that rescue unless we first refuse the ideological notion of the ‘literary’ along with everything that it implies […]. Herded apart from all the other texts that human beings have always produced, robbed of his human uses, forced into the service of an ideology […], literature as we know it is only a wasted shadow of the thing that, restored to the whole field of work, utterance and imagination, it might one day become (Davies 1978: 14).

While it could be argued that educational practices and cultural institutions have changed considerably since the late 1970s, when Davies published his hard-hitting essay, it is also true that the literary classics are still treated in many respects as monumental symbols of national cultures. As I noted elsewhere, many of the commemorative events organized in 2005 around

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the 400th anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote illustrate this point.1 Among these celebratory acts, I mentioned the publication of a new anthology of Cervantes’s novel that was meant to take the place of the Bible at the night stand of each of the bedrooms of Paradores Nacionales de Turismo de España. As the editor of the anthology, prominent literary historian and critic Andrés Amorós states in his introduction: “…sin exagerar mucho podemos decir que nuestra Biblia es el Quijote: un libro con el que se aprendía a leer […], el mejor resumen de nuestro espíritu y el símbolo de lo español y lo hispánico en el mundo entero (2003: 10). These notions are echoed in the words of the president of the sponsoring institution, Ana Isabel Mariño Ortega, who compares the author of Don Quixote with the national monuments of Paradores insofar as he represents or reflects, as closely as they do, the national essence. In her own words, Cervantes and Paradores are above all “embajadores de la esencia cultural y artística de España y los españoles, espejo que ofrece al mundo lo mejor de nosotros mismos” (2003: 9). This type of monumental framing is certainly representative of the nineteenth-century legacy of national construction and its familiar “moral-aesthetic ideology of literary consumption” (Davies 1978: 6). But we should also note that an increasing number of critics, including many Golden Age scholars and Cervantes specialists, have been calling for, and actively pursuing, radically different approaches to the literary classics. In the case of Don Quixote, the recent books by Julio Baena, William Childers, and Bruce Burningham represent three different models of textual commentary that either transcend or actively oppose the monumental tradition exemplified by the anthology of Paradores Nacionales. In his self-consciously iconoclastic Discordancias cervantinas (2003), Julio Baena strives to rescue Cervantes’s work from the cultural and political institutions that continue to elevate it (or reduce it) to the status of a national monument, including the Instituto Cervantes, the Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, and the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, along with “institutional” editors from Clemencín to Francisco Rico. Based on his recent anthology, we could certainly add Andrés Amorós to this list. Baena contrasts the carelessly edited and error-ridden Don Quixote of 1605 to the cleaned-up and heavily annotated classic of the 21st century in an attempt to bring the text and its author back from the literary heavens to the continuum of history, that is, to

See my article “Que trata de la velocidad de Rocinante y otros asuntos de importancia” in Johnson, Carroll B. (ed.): Don Quixote Across Four Centuries: 1605-2005. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, pp. 61-69. 1

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the imperfect and messy body of human work. Baena’s insistence on the need to preserve the traces of human error, failure, and uncertainty in the literary classics seems particularly appropriate for the work of an author who delights in exhibiting the (loose) seams of the storytelling process and in mocking the solemn language of cultural authority. After all, as Fernando Vallejo reminded us during the year of the 400th anniversary: “[E]l Quijote se burla de todo […] las novelas de caballerías y las pastoriles, el lenguaje jurídico y el eclesiástico, la Santa Hermandad y el Santo Oficio, los escritores italianos y grecolatinos, la mitología y la historia” (El País, September 10, 2005). William Childers follows a different path of re-historization of Cervantes and his writing in Transnational Cervantes (2006). He employs “a transnationalizing strategy” inspired by the work of postcolonial theorists Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Homi Bhabha, and Edward Said in order to re-situate Cervantes at the center of a series of politically charged discussions on and around the subject of subaltern identities, transnational cultures, and national practices of internal colonialism. Thus, Childers devotes the last two chapters of his book to “Cervantes and the new Moroccan immigration to Spain,” and to exploring ways of “chicanoizing Don Quixote” in the United States. Childers’ transnational Cervantes is by no means a paradigmatic ambassador of “our artistic essence”; and his Don Quixote is nothing like a cultural symbol of Spain or a compendium of the national spirit. Childers’ book may be said to offer a “postcolonial” response to the fundamental questions articulated a few years earlier by the contributors to the multiauthored volume Cervantes and His Postmodern Constituencies (1998), edited by Anne Cruz and Carroll Johnson. As George Mariscal put it in his contribution to the collection, fittingly titled “The Crisis of Hispanism as Apocalyptic Myth,” “[t]he basic question in the area of scholarship, but especially in the pedagogical sphere, is: What kind of Cervantes do we want? Or, put another way, what kind of Cervantes do we need? Not only as individual readers but as communities, academic and otherwise” (1998: 205). Questions about our use of the classics are also integral to feminist and psychoanalytical approaches to Cervantes going back to the volume Quixotic Desire: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Cervantes (1993), edited by Ruth El Saffar and Diana de Armas Wilson. We should note that gender-inflected and theoretically oriented readings of the Spanish classics have been more common among scholars working in American universities than among those working in Spain, where these approaches have often been met with skepticism. Thus, in his extensive review of current approaches to Don Quixote, José Montero Reguera calls feminist and psychoanalytic readings —he specifically mentions the work of Ruth El Saf-

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far and Carroll Johnson— “debatable” or “discutibles” for their incorporation of issues of our time that allegedly have little to do with Cervantes’s true concerns, and for their “excessive distance” from the text (1997: 177).2 Bruce Burningham’s recent book Tilting Cervantes: Baroque Reflections on Postmodern Culture (2008) seems particularly interesting in light of this discussion. Burningham stages a series of Borgesian conversations between the cultural production of the Spanish Golden Age and a selection of postmodern narratives and films. The book offers comparative analyses of the works of Lope de Vega and John Ford, and Cervantes and Salman Rushdie. It also includes sections on Don Quixote and Toy Story, and Don Quixote and The Matrix. The following quote provides a window into Burningham’s view of our relationship with the literary classics: I explore the hermeneutic ramifications of the fact that for contemporary readers […] the various texts I analyze in this book are ultimately coetaneous, regardless of the centuries that separate their actual moments of production. Taking seriously Borges’s notion that literary works create their own precursors […] I suggest that the collection of disparate texts I examine in this book can be read —in a very Borgesian fashion— as precursors of each other (Burningham 2008: 2).

While Burningham’s “presentist” approach to the Golden Age might draw skepticism in some historicist and philological circles, his methodology is consistent with the premises and expectations of an emerging current within Hispanism that no longer believes in the primacy of the written word. Gonzalo Navajas describes this transformation of our reading practices in his contribution to the volume El Hispanismo en los Estados Unidos: Discursos críticos/prácticas textuales (1999): “En lugar de una perspectiva única, preeminente y estrictamente definida, ese método propone la integración de todas las lenguas, la intercomunicación no jerárquica entre sistemas diversos de signos, la no-primacia del lenguaje escrito sobre otras formas de comunicación” (1999: 155). Navajas offers the provisional term “co-relational textuality” (textualidad correlacional) to refer to this new reading practice which would have resulted from the postmodern dissolution of boundaries. To make the best of this mode of textual engagement, Navajas urges us to envision ways to articulate the diverse currents that flow within the selected texts to ensure that our comparative For an insightful discussion of the different currents within Hispanism in the United States, see del Pino, José Manuel/La Rubia Prado, Francisco (eds.): El Hispanismo en los Estados Unidos. Discursos críticos/prácticas textuales. Madrid: Visor. On the subject of feminist approaches, see Elizabeth Scarlett’s contribution to the volume. 2

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reading is “integrador pero no universalizante; transhistórico pero preservador de la diferencia circunstancial; anticanónico pero capaz de asumir significativamente el texto clásico” (1999: 155). As we can see, Navajas calls for a trans-historical method of textual commentary which ought to be capable of integrating disparate media and sign systems while preserving their circumstantial specificity. Admittedly the challenge would be to assume or accept the postmodern dissolution of boundaries between past and present and between different systems of communication, and, at the same time, to avoid the leveling effect of undifferentiating commentary. In the case of Burningham’s programmatic pairing of the Golden Age classics with the products of our own media culture, we could ask whether the traps of anachronism are truly avoided or avoidable in this type of approach. While this is certainly a valid question that goes to the heart of the alleged postmodern erasure of the past and its proclamation of the end of history, I would propose turning the question on its head in reexamining the matter of analytical historicity apropos the work of Cervantes. Most Golden Age scholars, including critics whose approaches are as disparate as those of Montero Reguera, Ruth El Saffar, and Bruce Burningham, would agree that Cervantes’s texts — from Don Quixote and El Coloquio de los perros to Galatea and Persiles to Pedro de Urdemalas and El retablo de las maravillas, among others— invite reflection on issues of literary theory and cultural history. Many of these critics would also agree that the Cervantine dialogue with the cultural practices of his day, including the mass-oriented Comedia Nueva of Lope de Vega and his followers, call for a critical examination of prevalent literary, theatrical, and social conventions. From this perspective, it would seem obvious that “historical readings” of the work of Cervantes ought to take special care to examine as closely as possible its cultural and social context. The remaining question would be whether we must take into account the circumstances structuring our own reading practices. Of course, we could note that our present reading contexts are relevant insofar as our horizon of expectations conditions, or even pollutes, our view of the past. Yet, Burningham seems to go after a more radical Borgesian revelation with regards to the interpenetration of past and present. Otherwise, the subtitle of his book might as well read “Postmodern Reflections on Baroque Culture,” rather than “Baroque Reflections on Postmodern Culture.” My own take on the subject is indebted to the Benjaminian insight that a historical reading must address “the state of emergency” in which we live. As Walter Benjamin writes in his defense of “materialistic historiography” over traditional historicism in “Theses on the Philosophy of History”:

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A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only when he encounters it in a monad […]. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history —blasting a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time [sublated/aufheben]; in the lifework the era, and in the era, the entire course of history […]. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one (1969: 262-263).

With regards to the subject of our discussion, I would submit that if we think of Cervantes as an author-critic deeply concerned with the mass-media of his time and its effect on readers and spectators, we must brush his writings against the grain of our own mass-culture in order to do him “historical” justice, that is to say, in order to assess his full “historical” impact. The alternative would risk confining Cervantes’s work to the past in a way that would dissolve our sense of its “emergency status,” draining the historical lifeblood from it. I would also argue that we should not be blind to current manifestations of Islamophobia in our reading of those passages of Don Quixote and Persiles that allude to the plight of the Spanish moriscos who were discriminated against all throughout the sixteenth century and eventually expelled from Spain in 1609-1614. Similarly, in reading Marcela’s explanation of the reasons behind her self-imposed exile from traditional forms of social exchange, we should not be afraid to recognize echoes from the 1991 film Thelma and Louise, for example. From a pedagogical perspective, these “recognitions” of trans-historical bridges or “constellations”— to use Benjamin’s metaphor— have obvious advantages as students feel that the authors we study “speak their language” in dealing with issues that are relevant to their own life experiences, their concerns, aspirations, fears, and hopes. Don Quixote and Road Movies Three years after the release of his most famous film to date, The Motorcycle Diaries, director Walter Salles published an interesting piece in The New York Times Magazine, “Notes for a Theory of the Road Movie,” in which he traced the origins of the road film to the exploration of the unknown and the adventure of the journey, going back to Homer’s Odyssey.3 Salles notes that early road I would like to acknowledge my colleague Kari Winter for directing my attention to Salles’ article in The New York Times Magazine and also for sharing her thoughts on road movies with me. I suspect that my views on films such as Thelma and Louise are directly influenced by our conversations. 3

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movies are often about national identities in construction (as in John Ford’s The Searchers), or in transformation (as in Edgar Ulmer’s Detour). In terms of later developments of the genre, Salles identifies Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider as the cultural landmark that “defined road movies for today’s audiences” by capturing “the implosion of the American dream during the Vietnam years” (2007: 68). Easy Rider is indeed a paradigmatic example of the counter-cultural drive of modern road movies “in which the identity crises of the protagonist mirrors the identity crisis of the culture itself ” (2007: 68). Against the culture of the spectacle and the aesthetics of the simulacrum best exemplified by reality TV, today’s road movies continue to vindicate the transformative experience of the journey. As Salles aptly writes: Reality shows offer the audience the illusion that they can live through certain experiences, but only vicariously. What is sold is the impression that all has been lived and that nothing is left to be experienced anew. Road movies directly challenge this culture of conformity. They are about experiencing, above all. They are about the journey. They are about what can be learned from the other, from those who are different. In a world that increasingly challenges these ideals, the importance of road movies as a form of resistance can’t be dismissed (Salles 2007: 70).

When we look at Don Quixote side by side with films as different as Easy Rider, The Motorcycle Diaries, and Thelma and Louise, we can see that Cervantes’s novel shares in the operative principles of what has come to be known as the road movie genre. Don Quixote is indeed a story about a personal identity crisis that arguably mirrors —to use Salles’ words— “the identity crises of the culture” (2007: 68) and also a story about “what can be learned from those who are different” (2007: 70). Hence, we can identify a host of Cervantine characters that represent alternative and/or deviant (socially unsanctioned) lifestyles, from Don Quixote and Cardenio, to Marcela and Maritornes, to Roque Guinart and Ginés de Pasamonte. And of course the Cervantine story is shaped, first and foremost, by the experience of the journey. We can say that the protagonists of Cervantes’s novel are the literal embodiments of a “mad” desire to experience; or to put it differently, they are the direct result of an act of affirmation of experience. This is a recurrent topic in Cervantes’s novel well beyond the initial episodes that narrate the circumstances of the conversion of “reader” Don Alonso into “actor” Don Quixote. The theme of active experience vis-à-vis passive spectatorship is perhaps most effectively (if ironically) explored in II.26, when Don Quixote charges against the puppets of Maese Pedro’s show. As we reread the episode from this perspective, we realize that the knight’s intervention is hardly

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motivated by his inability to distinguish between fiction and reality, as it has often been said, but rather by his irrepressible desire to participate in the scene in order to rewrite the story in accordance with his (and possibly our own) expectations, including those expectations that are commonly associated with poetic justice. Let us recall that Don Quixote tries to steer the story in form and content (that is, to become co-author of the text) before he takes up the paradigmatically quixotesque role of the epic hero. Another key principle of the road movie genre mentioned by Salles is “continual motion” (2007: 70). Salles applies this principle to the central characters as well as the storyline. Thus, he underscores the need to allow room for improvisation in screenplays that ought to anticipate thematic wanderings: “In doing different road movies, I also came to realize that a good screen-play grants you more freedom to improvise […]. It’s like jazz: the better the melody, the easier it is to wander away from it, because it will also be easier to return to it later” (2007: 6970). These reflections provide important insights into the debates surrounding the Cervantine wanderings that led to the inclusion of loosely integrated stories and different types of narrative material in the two Don Quixote volumes. My impression is that the second novel is much closer to the melodic principle of jazz alluded to by Salles. Thus, the profoundly metanarrative currents that run through Don Quixote II make it easier to incorporate different types of stories and narrative forms while maintaining the central storyline in view. But the most important principle that the Cervantine novel shares with the films mentioned by Salles is of course the prominent presence of the road, which can no longer be thought of as a circumstantial element of the landscape. Remarkably, the road has not received the kind of critical attention one would assume among Cervantes specialists. To be sure, there are plenty of studies of Don Quixote that focus on the Spanish region of La Mancha and even on the individual places that Don Quixote and Sancho encounter along the path, but the road itself as a structuring principle of the novel is often neglected. This critical forgetting may be part of a general neglect of the road, even in the field of landscape studies, that it is only now beginning to be corrected. As John B. Jackson writes: “Disqualified by its own genealogy, outclassed by the prestige of private space, the road has long suffered from neglect by historians and students of the landscape […] whereas the house […] has become the symbol of arcadian simplicity and innocence” (1994: 190). According to Jackson the social prestige of the house vis-à-vis the road comes down to a choice between “a sense of place or a sense of freedom” (1994: 190), since the house is commonly associated with the blessings of stability while the road is often thought of as “a disturber of the piece, an instigator of radical change” (1994: 190).

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Jackson’s notions may shed some new light on the political implications of the lifestyle choices made by the protagonists of many road narratives. Thus, the central characters of road movies such as Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise, The Motorcycle Diaries, and Into the Wild choose the freedom that comes with movement and change over the social promises of home, family, and even country, which are explicitly associated with the ideological trappings of an exploitative and dehumanizing establishment. In Easy Rider, for example, the endless horizons associated with the road are frequently contrasted with moving shots of houses and tombs, towns and cemeteries. I can think of only two anthropological places that are shown in a positive light in Easy Rider: 1) a frontier-type family farm that stands out as an invitation for us to recall the foundational freedom dreams of America allegedly abandoned in the name of narrow-minded notions of citizenship and patriotism; and 2) the progressive utopia of a 60s-style agricultural commune that represents socialist ideals.4 The film Thelma and Louise shows a similarly dark picture of our most familiar anthropological places: the home and the city. If Wyatt, Billy, and George, the representatives of inconformity in Easy Rider, are ultimately murdered, the female protagonists of Thelma and Louise choose to commit suicide rather than returning to the masculine prison-world from which they had fled by taking to the road. Our familiar anthropological places do not fare much better in Cervantes’s novel. We alluded earlier to Marcela’s self-imposed exile from traditional forms of social exchange. Others have discussed the speech in which the beautiful maiden defends her right to live in the wilderness, away from any form of masculine subjection. They have noted that Marcela chooses to keep company with nature and other women as an alternative to the bonds of home and marriage.5 Marcela’s well-known defense of her unconventional lifestyle choice in Don Quixote I.14 amounts to nothing less than a justification of a form of socio-symbolic suicide in seventeenth-century Spain. Yet, her words can also be offered as an explanation of the “real” suicide of Thelma and Louise at the conclusion of the controversial 1991 film: “[T]engo libre condición y no gusto de sujetarme […]. Tienen mis deseos por término estas montañas, y si de aquí salen es para contemplar la hermosura del cielo” (I.14). While the eloquent Marcela has deservedly become a magnet for critical commentary due to the feminist echoes of her words, she is but one of the many unconventional characters that represent alternative lifestyles in Don Quixote I 4 I use the notion of anthropological place in the sense in which Marc Augé conceptualizes it in Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. 5 See Ruth El Saffar’s discussion of this episode in her essay “In Marcela’s Case,” in: El Saffar, Ruth/de Armas Wilson, Diana (eds.): Quixotic Desire: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Cervantes. Ithaca: Cornell UP., pp. 157-178.

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and II. This list includes self-reliable deviants like Maritornes, and even notorious fugitives such as the self-described pícaro-comediante Ginés de Pasamonte and the famous bandit Roque Guinart. But Don Quixote himself is arguably at the top of the list of characters who reject the comforts of familiar spaces and mainstream social conventions. His existence is inextricably connected to, or conjoined with, the open road. At home he can only be Don Alonso, an hidalgo verging on fifty with virtually nothing to do. From this perspective, the famous opening of the novel may be seen as an apt description of a thoroughly unremarkable existence. Thus, the portrait of Don Alonso Quijada or Quesada, or perhaps Quejana, as a man trapped in meaningless home routines in the first chapter is reminiscent of the unnamed middle-aged man who dozes off in solitude in the scene of The Motorcycle Diaries in which Ernesto “Che” Guevara and his companion, Alberto Granado, plan their trip across the Americas. The brief pausing of the camera in the direction of the anonymous man dozing off in the background is accompanied in this initial scene of Salles’ film by a warning against the paralyzing effects of life routines: “You don’t want your life to end up like that.” The film sets up an explicit contrast between this “background” humanity trapped in the circularity of meaningless life-routines and the protagonists’ rebellious craving for new experiences, and their uncompromising love for the road (“la pasión por la ruta,” as the narrative voice puts it). Significantly, this scene takes place just before Alberto Granado, in anticipation of the journey before him, draws a playful comparison between his Norton 500, the motorcycle that he has renamed The Mighty One (La Poderosa) and Don Quixote’s horse, Rocinante. While it is fair to say that the experiences of the journey will transform the two friends in profound ways, Alberto Granado will end up returning to his former life. For his part, Ernesto Guevara will reject the path that had been prefigured for him at his hometown in order to follow a different road, on his way to becoming the homeless and stateless revolutionary leader known as “Che.” One could draw similarities between the literary character of Don Quixote as a self-proclaimed knight-errant determined to become the champion of the weak and powerless and the legendary figure of the uncompromising guerilla fighter, especially if we accept the popular “romantic” reading of Cervantes’s novel. On the other hand, those who favor the “anti-romantic” interpretation of Don Quixote as a “funny book” will no doubt be less inclined to entertain connections between the pathetic figure of a ridiculous madman who believes himself a heroic knight destined for glory and the fictionalized reconstruction of the life of a young idealist who is genuinely concerned with the plight of the poor, the sick, and the mistreated in The Motorcycle Diaries.

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One of the advantages of this type of comparative approach is that we do not have to choose between the different critical or historiographic versions of Don Quixote, the character, and/or Don Quixote, the novel. We may instead encourage students to familiarize themselves with the terms of ongoing critical debates over the meaning and significance of the Cervantine work and to be on the lookout for textual evidence that could potentially fit different, or even contradictory, interpretations of this seventeenth-century classic, as they read it alongside the road movies of today. To be sure, we are likely to “discover” different dimensions of Don Quixote when we examine it side by side with Easy Rider as opposed to Thelma and Louise or The Motorcycle Diaries. While a viewing of Easy Rider might encourage reflection on issues of national culture and imperialism, a comparative analysis of Don Quixote and Thelma and Louise is, —as we have explained— more likely to lead towards gender-inflected readings. On the other hand, an exploration of potentially common themes in Cervantes’s novel and Salles’ filmic reworking of the published diaries of “Che” Guevara would likely invite reflection on issues of social (in)justice. I would claim that these are all potentially “productive” explorations of the Cervantine classic insofar as they direct our attention to different, but equally significant, dimensions of the novel. We could extend this pedagogical project to incorporate such road films as Into the Wild and Borat. One of the most interesting aspects of Borat, the mockdocumentary directed by Larry Charles, is the way in which it forces spectators to think about their own positioning vis-à-vis the views expressed by those individuals and groups who are caught with their guard down, so to speak. Thus, the radical eccentricity of the “road character” played by comedian, writer, and producer Sacha Cohen reveals aspects of our social “normality” that would otherwise remain under the (political) radar. I would venture that a close examination of the episodes of Don Quixote II that take place in the country-house of the duke and duchess in light of the scene in which Borat dines with the social elites of a Southern U.S. town, for example, could help us focus the discussion on the critical engagement of social issues in Cervantes’s novel. Similarly, I would argue that the film’s compulsive repetition of anti-Semitic and racist jokes places the spectator in an uncomfortable position, which is, in some ways, analogous to the self-reflective place that Cervantes constructs for his own readers in those passages of the novel that allude to the discriminatory treatment of Jewish and Muslim converts in Habsburg Spain and the eventual exile of tens of thousands of Spanish moriscos between 1610 and 1614. More generally, I would maintain that a viewing of this 2006 mock-documentary alongside Don Quixote could illuminate the reasons behind the Cervantine investment in the unmasking po-

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tential of the figure of the radical eccentric (etymologically off-the-center).6 Thus, a comparative analysis of the tonal structuring of both texts around the eccentricity of their protagonists would provide interesting ways to reflect on issues of reader positioning in connection with the mechanics of humor and laughter in classic works of literature, as well as in the products of our own popular culture. In Into the Wild, we are offered a fictionalized recounting of the true journey of Christopher McCandless, a top Emory University student, from his suburban home in Annandale, Virginia, to the deep Alaskan wilderness. The film is a dramatic and often lyrical version of McCandless’ road trip as a journey of self-discovery. As in the case of Don Alonso, the journey of Chris McCandless is inspired by his favorite books, but it is also a response to a profound sense of dissatisfaction with the circumstances of his life. In the end, it is the people he meets along the way and the meaningful (if transitory) relationships he forms with them, that will enable his extraordinary emotional and intellectual growth. The revelation to which McCandless arrives at the conclusion of his “mad” journey is perhaps best summarized by the simple words of another college student turned road character in Borges’ “El etnógrafo”: “El secreto, por lo demás, no vale lo que valen los caminos que me condujeron a él. Esos caminos hay que andarlos” (qtd. in Virgillo et al. 1989: 40). Significantly, the Alaskan wilderness, the place of destination that McCandless had associated with the promise of absolute freedom and self-reliance, turns into a confining prison, and ultimately a tomb. Isolated from the rest of the world, McCandless spends his final hours devising means of communication in the hope that his messages will somehow make it through after his death. For his part, the protagonist of Cervantes’s novel meets his own end at home, in the company of family and friends. Sancho, his road companion, is the only character who seems to understand that the renunciation of the road is a death sentence for Don Alonso. This is why he desperately tries to persuade him to imagine some other literary character (some other road persona) that he could inhabit. On the road he could be anything he wanted. As he says in I.5: “Yo sé quien soy […] y sé que puedo ser no sólo los que he dicho, sino todos los doce pares de Francia, y aún todos los nueve de la Fama, pues a todas las hazañas que ellos todos juntos y cada uno por sí hicieron, se aventajaran las mías” (126). By contrast, away from the road, inside the walls of home, Don Alonso is but a prisoner of the meaningless routine that governs his life.

Incidentally, Salles quotes Godard speaking of the intersection between fiction films and documentaries: “All great films drift toward documentaries, as all great documentaries drift toward fiction” (Salles 2007: 70). 6

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To better appreciate the far-reaching implications of this view of the house —or more precisely of Don Alonso’s house— it would certainly help to know about the social-historical circumstances of seventeenth-century Spain; about the massive pressures that were crashing the bottom ranks of the nobility in the midst of a deep social crisis and a free-falling economy.7 Likewise, it would be essential to familiarize ourselves with the cultural context of reference in order to “get” the Cervantine jokes about chivalric and pastoral romances, picaresque narratives, and mass-oriented religious and secular spectacles in Counter Reformation Spain. But I would also note —and this is the gist of my argument here— that in taking into account our own circumstances of reception of the Cervantine classic, we may actually enhance the “historicity” of our reading, not only by recognizing that our horizon of expectations necessarily colors our interpretation of the work, but also, and perhaps more importantly, by preserving in it, and therefore in the work itself, a sense of historical urgency. Speaking of historical urgency, as I write these concluding paragraphs, one of our sister institutions, SUNY Albany, has announced its closing of three foreign language programs (French, Italian, and Russian), and two other core humanities disciplines (Classics and Theater), as part of an emergency action designed to absorb the massive budget cuts that the state of New York has handed down to the entire State University system. In response to this institutional action, my UB colleague Rosemary Feal, Executive Director of the Modern Language Association, has just issued a statement that reads in part: The plans of the State University of New York at Albany to deny students access to higher learning in three modern and two classical languages are a distressing reverse to the university’s recent efforts to promote global competencies. The advanced study of languages, literatures, and cultures of the French-, Italian-, and Russian- speaking world are essential components of a liberal arts education in a university setting (qtd. in Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, Oct. 4, 2010).

In our digital age in which the speed and volume of world-wide communications continues to increase at an unprecedented rate, it seems crucial to be able to pause and think about the mechanics of mass-culture and about the codes we use to conceptualize and represent the world around us. The very survival of our democratic societies depends on (admittedly idealistic) notions For a recent discussion of the writings of Cervantes in light of the pressing economic issues of his time, see Carroll Johnson’s Cervantes and the Material World (2000). José Antonio Maravall’s introduction to his volume La picaresca desde la historia social offers a compelling overview of Spain’s social and economic crisis in Cervantes’ time. 7

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of individual responsibility and free-thinking citizenship. With this in mind, I would suggest that the Humanities, and more specifically the literary disciplines, including those currently housed in departments of foreign languages, can play important roles as “public spaces” devoted to the critical examination of the cultural codes and social practices that structure our perception of the world, and consequently, our social identities. Works Cited Amorós, Andrés (2003): Don Quixote de la Mancha. Selección de capítulos y versión modernizada por Andrés Amorós. Madrid: Paradores de Turismo de España. Augé, Marc (1995): Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Howe, John (trans.). London: Verso. Baena, Julio (2003): Discordancias cervantinas. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta. Benjamin, Walter (1969): “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In: Arendt, Hannah (ed.): Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books. Bennett, Tony (1990): Outside Literature. New York: Routledge. Borges, Jorge Luis (1989): “El etnógrafo.” In: Aproximaciones al estudio de la literatura hispánica. Friedman, Edward/Valdivieso, Teresa/Virgillo, Carmelo. New York: McGraw-Hill, p. 40. Bürger, Peter (1984): Theory of the Avant-Garde. Shaw, Michael (trans.). Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P. Burningham, Bruce R. (2008): Tilting Cervantes: Baroque Reflections on Postmodern Culture. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP. Castillo, David R. (2006): “Que trata de la velocidad de Rocinante y otros asuntos de importancia.” In: Johnson, Carroll B. (ed.): Don Quixote Across Four Centuries: 16052005. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, pp. 61-69. — (2011): “The Literary Classics in Today’s Classroom: Don Quixote and Road Movies.” In: Martín-Estudillo, Luis/Spadaccini, Nicholas (eds.): Hispanic Literatures and the Question of a Liberal Education. In: Hispanic Issues On Line, 8, pp. 26-41. Cervantes, Miguel de (1998): Don Quixote de la Mancha. 2 vols. Madrid: Cátedra. Charles, Larry (2006): Borat, USA/United Kingdom, Baron Cohen’s Production Company. Childers, William (2006): Transnational Cervantes. Toronto: U. of Toronto P. Davies, Tony (1978): “Education, Ideology and Literature.” In: Red Letters, 7, pp. 4-15. El Saffar, Ruth (1993): “In Marcela’s Case.” In: El Saffar, Ruth/de Armas Wilson, Diana (eds.): Quixotic Desire: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Cervantes. Ithaca: Cornell UP., pp. 157-178. Hopper, Dennis (1969): Easy Rider, USA, Columbia Pictures Corporation. Jackson, John B. (1994): A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time. New Haven: Yale UP. Jaschik, Scott (2010): “Disappearing Languages at Albany.” In: Inside Higher Ed, Oct. 4, . Johnson, Carroll (2000): Cervantes and the Material World. Chicago: U of Illinois P.

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Maravall, José Antonio (1986): La novela picaresca desde la historia social. Madrid: Taurus. Mariño Ortega, María Isabel (2003): “Carta de la presidenta-consejera delegada.” Don Quixote de la Mancha. Selección de capítulos y versión modernizada por Andrés Amorós. Madrid: Paradores de Turismo de España. Mariscal, George (1999): “The Crisis of Hispanism as Apocalyptic Myth.” In: Cruz, Ann/Johnson, Carroll (eds.): Cervantes and His Postmodern Constituencies. New York: Garland, pp. 201-217. Montero Reguera, José (1997): El “Quijote” y la crítica contemporánea. Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos. Navajas, Gonzalo (1999): “Postmodernismo: ¿Cómo leer una novela hoy?” In: del Pino, José Manuel/La Rubia Prado, Francisco (eds.): El Hispanismo en los Estados Unidos. Discursos críticos/prácticas textuales. Madrid: Visor, pp. 149-168. Penn, Sean (2007): Into the Wild, USA, Art Linson Productions. Salles, Walter (2007): “Notes for a Theory of the Road Movie.” In: The New York Times Magazine, November 11, pp. 66-70. — (2004): The Motorcycle Diaries, Argentina, Filmfour/South Fork Pictures/Tu Vas Voir Production. Scarlett, Elizabeth (1999): “La crítica feminista en el hispanismo, la recepción feminista de Rosalía de Castro y la melancolía femenina en En las orillas del Sar.” In: del Pino, José Manuel/La Rubia Prado, Francisco (eds.): El Hispanismo en los Estados Unidos. Discursos críticos/prácticas textuales. Madrid: Visor, pp. 91-110. Scott, Ridley (1991): Thelma and Louise, USA, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Vallejo, Fernando (2005): “El gran diálogo del Quijote.” In: El País, September 10, .

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Who is Berganza? Sniffing out the Conundrums of the Coloquio William H. Clamurro Emporia State University In 2013 we are celebrating the four-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares, and for some of us who have given a little attention and effort to the study and commentary of the texts that make up this strange and strangely asymmetrical collection, there continue to be nagging questions and conundrums (obsessions perhaps) that deserve a reconsideration in light of the quadricentennial for the Novelas eight years after the celebrations for the publication of Part One of the Quixote. In the larger context of Cervantes’s obra, the Novelas ejemplares —be it any of the individual stories, or be it the full collection considered as one unified work— is always to be overshadowed by Don Quixote and some might argue also by the Persiles. But others would suggest, not without justification, that the Novelas ejemplares enjoys a significance equal to or surpassing any of the other major Cervantine works or collections, including the Galatea, the Persiles, or the collection of plays. In addition, to compare the twelve highly diverse exemplary novels with a presumably unified work like the Galatea or the Persiles makes little or no sense, anyway. I, of course, have something of a vested interest in defending the high artistic value and broad significance of the Novelas, having hitched a goodly part of my modest, if not entirely shabby, professional wagon to this curious and deceptively confusing collection. Among the elements of the Novelas, taken as a whole, that have engaged me for perhaps too long are the troubling diversity of style, structure, and tone of the twelve (or is it only eleven?) stories, and

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also there remains the problem of exemplarity itself. What possibly edifying lesson might be proffered by, for example, Rinconete y Cortadillo? Or by La señora Cornelia? Or even by La gitanilla? And if there is a clear moral lesson embodied in La fuerza de la sangre, I have yet to find it.1 We readers have also been haunted —or teased— by the notorious and explicit but notably slippery assertion made by Cervantes in his “Prólogo,” to the effect that “si bien los miras, no hay ninguna de quien no se pueda sacar algún ejemplo provechoso; y si no fuera por no alargar este sujeto, quizá te mostrara el sabroso y honesto fruto que se podría sacar, así de todas juntas, como de cada una de por sí” (I, 52).2 Of course, one can always try to infer or impute a lesson or ejemplo to any of the stories, just as one can attach a lesson to almost any narrative. And, in fact, Cervantes does seem to state explicit lessons at the end of some of the novelas.3 They are often evasive or strangely inappropriate to what has gone before.4 To make matters worse, there is Cervantes’s own most vexingly teasing statement, toward the end of the “Prólogo,” that the reader should consider that “algún misterio tienen escondido que las levanta” (I, 53) —the sort of authorial “throw-away” that suggests a kind of red herring which can and probably has inspired generations of critics, or at least graduate students, to sally forth on futile but perversely enjoyable quests for the hidden treasure. My purpose in the brief remarks that follow is less ambitious. Rather I want to return to a suggestion that I set forth toward the end of my study (Beneath the Fiction) and that I’m happy to find independently seconded —in subtle, indirect ways— in a couple of the excellent studies published in the fascinating collection Novelas ejemplares: Las grietas de la ejemplaridad.5 I refer to the notion that the final, double novela, the Casamiento/Coloquio, as the two parts interact with each other and also as they echo elements of certain previous texts in the collection, work to form part of the missing exemplary “frame fiction.” As I have suggested before, the whole of this concluding double, and Perhaps the most interesting reading of the implications of this novela is given by A.K. Forcione (1982: 317-397). 2 All quotations of the text refer to the Sieber edition and are identified by volume and page number. 3 One might consider the end of El amante liberal; the end of La española inglesa gives something of an “example”: “Esta novela nos podría enseñar cuánto puede la virtud y cuánto la hermosura...” (I, 283). But the lesson at the end of La fuerza de la sangre is unconvincing, to say the least, as is the forced example concluding El celoso extremeño. 4 For example the conclusion of Rinconete y Cortadillo. 5 See in particular María Rey López, “La negación del cornice en las Novelas ejemplares” and Bárbara Rodríguez Guridi, “El carácter ‘casi’ picaresco de las Novelas ejemplares”. 1

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doubling-back, text not only forms the ghost of a desired “frame” but also subtly instructs us in how to read (or reread) what has preceded it.6 I have argued this concept elsewhere, but I want to return to a part of the narrative tactics of the Casamiento/Coloquio unit, and in particular, as my title implies, I would like to talk about the dogs. There is something about the two dogs —who, of course, we immediately take to be a projection of Campuzano, which is to say, a device at second remove from the real and historical author, Cervantes himself— that has long troubled me. It is a combination of their exquisite or excessive concern about “murmuración” and other ethical problems that is nonetheless balanced by their almost coldly clinical lack of proper canine passion: dispassionate dogs. Berganza in particular intrigues me since it is his autobiographical narrative, as well as his excesses and digressions, that largely determine the themes and the strange tone of the Coloquio. In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to confess that I have had unfair help in the concocting of this commentary: in the autumn semester of 2010, I gave my advanced Spanish literature class a short quiz whose simple question was “¿Quién es Berganza?” In what follows I will interweave some of their shrewd insights alongside my own suggestions.7 Another motivation behind my revisiting of this notorious text and its problems, meanwhile, has been my own reconsideration of some of the judgments and perspectives of Alban Forcione, whose views on the Novelas ejemplares I had, at an earlier time, tended to consider a bit overstated. I refer mainly to Forcione’s vision of certain parts of these works as opening onto or portraying what he has called a demonic world.8 I have come to agree that in many parts of the Novelas we are in fact given hints of demonic worlds, or at the very least, of elements of the profoundly and perversely evil dimension of human interaction and desire. As for Berganza, Forcione makes an important point about the implication of the animal perspective: As the sensible dogs remind the reader, in the hierarchical scale of the creation[,] beasts belong to an order which is inferior to that of man and his civilization. However, in the disoriented world envisioned in Cervantes’ novella, we observe human beings everywhere descending to the level of the beast, and we quickly

6 See the conclusion of Beneath the Fiction (291-94). A similar insight was proposed by Joaquín Casalduero at the conclusion of his study Sentido y forma (262-63). 7 The members of that seminar were Ilda Flores, Claudia Gómez-Beltrán, Susana Hernández, Reuben Kirk, Angela Krehbiel, Chase McIver, Scott Westhoff, and Sarah Wiggins. 8 Among many other passages, see Cervantes and the Humanist Vision (95) and Mystery of Lawlessness (especially 59-64).

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realize that the only heroism visible in its murky atmosphere is ironically to be found in the pathetic figure of a dog, whose principal defense against the swarm of evil adversities is an ability to flee (Forcione 1984: 83).

Independently of any direct knowledge of Forcione’s work, and under the unfair and artificial pressure of a quiz, one or more of my students saw something of the curiously detached nature of Berganza and also his telling duality. As Claudia Gómez-Beltrán noted, in the first instance this dog is the product and projection of Campuzano: “Berganza es producto de la imaginación de Campuzano” and with regard to the theme of duality, Berganza “sirve como una paradoja de lo bueno y lo malo de la vida de una persona.” Similarly, Scott Westhoff rather intriguingly stated that “Berganza representa el hombre natural y [también] el hombre civil” —as we can see in the curious clash between both dogs’ acute sensitivity toward ethical borderlines, on the one hand, and (for example) Berganza’s utterly indifferent and yet very canine theft of the Bretón’s trousers to get at the “tocino” stashed in one of the pockets. During that particular episode, as we will recall —the entrapment scheme of the cops and their prostitute accomplice— Berganza looks on, essentially without judgment or shock, at an action that he knows to be as immoral as anything else he had witnessed or would see in the future.9 A similarly complex indifference and detachment (oddly enough) is displayed by Berganza during what for Forcione and for many others is the most grotesque moment of the story, the place in the encounter with Cañizares where the naked, horrific (as described), and unconscious body of the witch is dragged out into the open by the dog.10 In his narration of this episode to his companion Cipión, Berganza has clearly emphasized his revulsion at everything about this woman. And yet, in this key moment he has little hesitancy in taking her heel in his mouth and dragging her out into the open. Quite aside from the improbable exaggerations —e.g., the old woman’s size and bodily condition; the likelihood of any dog, no matter how big and strong, dragging an inert body by just one heel, and so on— and quite aside from Berganza’s asserted disgust, one is struck by the fact that there is no purpose to this action on the dog’s part. Moreover, Berganza then merely squats there, looking on, without the slightest suggestion of humane or compassionate feeling. There is only disgust, and yet he does not 9 Ruth El Saffar’s fundamental if idiosyncratic study delves into the moral complexity of Berganza quite incisively (1974: 62-78). 10 See Forcione Mystery of Lawlessness (especially 83-87). I have previously argued that there is something of a false climax in this moment, despite the obvious excess of the grotesque; see Beneath the Fiction, especially 278-280.

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flee the scene until later when he is attacked by the others who have seen (but do not all agree about) the horrendous sight, and who then attack the dog, accusing him of being a demonic creature. But despite what I argue to be the two dogs’ cool indifference and detachment from authentic human emotions (they vacillate between the most absurdly cerebral, as when Cipión and Berganza engage in philosophical disquisitions about words or about the moral dangers of going too far across the border between commentary and “murmuración,” on the one hand, and the very bestial, instinctive actions that Berganza recounts from his past, on the other), the role or function of both dogs, and especially of Berganza, is that of judgment. Often these judgments are seemingly ethical and unimpeachable —such as Berganza’s discovery that the shepherds are actually killing their employer’s sheep and giving the pretext that it is wolves. Similarly, we could mention the episodes in the home of the rich merchant of Seville, for example, both Berganza’s effusive praise of the Jesuits and their school and also his attempt to prevent the crafty black servant woman from carrying on her immoral trysts. But later, especially toward the end of his narration, some of Berganza’s judgments seem both harsh and too simplistic. I refer specifically to what he says about the gypsies and the moriscos. As Forcione (among others) has pointed out, it is impossible to read or hear Berganza’s comment on the evils of the gitanos and not recall with some unease those elements of the gypsy world of La gitanilla that we would prefer to see as, if not respectable, at least benig.11 Likewise, Berganza’s wholesale condemnation of the moriscos smacks of a cold and reflexive racism that does not accord with Cervantes’s much more complex and nuanced treatment of the question in the Ricote passages of Part II of Don Quixote (1615).12 But what of these clearly inconsistent —sometimes harsh, sometimes all too generous or at other times, standard or clichéd— judgments? In the first instance, the identity and convenient perspective of a dog permits this license, a sort of fantastic and anarchic but morally obsessed freedom. As another of my students (Chase McIver) stated “Porque Berganza y Cipión pueden hablar, tienen la habilidad única de ver la vida y hablar sobre ella con ojos diferentes, desde una perspectiva diferente... En efecto, pienso que Berganza sirve como extensión de la conciencia de Campuzano.”13 Or one might wonder, is Cam11 Though Forcione’s own reading of that first novela stresses the evil and demonic substrate of La gitanilla; see Cervantes and the Humanist Vision, in particular 184-192. 12 See the relevant chapters of Don Quixote, Part II; see also F. Márquez Villanueva’s study, 151-221. 13 On the problematic of “conscience” with the two dogs, El Saffar has noted how Cipión serves as, among other things, Berganza’s conscience: “Cipión is Berganza’s conscience on questions of morality and his arbiter on stylistic matters” (1974: 65).

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puzano the ventriloquist and Berganza thus his “dummy” and is he painting a world or a society of such cold, indifferent, routine cruelty and corruption that his listener/reader Peralta, who in turn is our double (we read along with him as he reads Campuzano’s manuscript), will be more generously inclined toward the stupidity and greed that brought on Campuzano’s supposed misfortune? In effect, if we consider Berganza to be Campuzano’s creature (and creation), as we must, then Berganza and his story and vision serve as the redemption for poor Campuzano’s folly. But this is too obvious and easy. Berganza is also —and more essentially— Cervantes’s creation, a kind of device. But for what? It is my contention that Berganza, or the complex and combination of Berganza and his colleague Cipión, serves as a lesson in the necessary reading and reconsideration of the total world of the Novelas ejemplares. Berganza’s attitude toward and judgment of the gypsies and moriscos, as well as his peculiarly cold interactions with the others with whom he has lived and worked, hint at the reality that we may already have sensed: that the putatively happy-ending tales,14 as well as those that end bitterly15 or don’t really end,16 all reveal worlds of cynical, harsh cruelty, worlds where love may appear to redeem, but where even the fortunate and “beautiful” characters, moving on into a seemingly happy future, leave behind many who will remain far less fortunate and where, in any case, even the fortunate ones are the obvious beneficiaries of social privilege and inequality of status. Thus, Berganza is our key to this perspective on the body of the entire Novelas ejemplares.17 We are dealing with the games of texts, of course. But bodies matter also. In Cervantes’s work the reality of the bodily is never too far away. To re-privilege the corporeal, and to put things into perspective, there is nothing more efficacious than the canine. So I leave you with the most suggestive and poetic of my students’ observations. As Reuben Kirk has so aptly put it, “Esta historia es un cuerpo vivo y Berganza sería los ojos y la lengua. Cipión sería las orejas... Berganza está compuesto de perspectivas, perspectivas que los humanos del Coloquio nunca pueden entender porque los humanos no pueden ‘hablar’ [la lengua del] perro.” I would propose that, in our travels through Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares, we might need and probably should have a guide dog, and in Berganza we have one of the best of the breed. One has to mention La gitanilla, El amante liberal, La española inglesa, La fuerza de la sangre (though with serious reservations), La ilustre fregona, Las dos doncellas, and La señora Cornelia. 15 El licenciado Vidriera, El celoso extremeño. 16 Here we would have to mention Rinconete y Cortadillo as well as the Casamiento/Coloquio unit. 17 One is obliged to reference Orfeo’s soliloquy at the end of Unamuno’s Niebla; here the voice of the “dog” makes profound and indispensable sense of the playful yet pathetic world of Augusto Pérez and the metafictional games of the preceding narrative voices. 14

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Works Cited Casalduero, Joaquín (1974): Sentido y forma de las Novelas ejemplares. Madrid: Gredos. Cervantes, Miguel de (1984): Novelas ejemplares. 2 vols. Sieber, Harry (ed.). Madrid: Cátedra. Clamurro, William H. (1997): Beneath the Fiction: The Contrary Worlds of Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares. New York: Peter Lang. El Saffar, Ruth S. (1974): Novel to Romance: A Study of Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP. Forciones, Alban K. (1982): Cervantes and the Humanist Vision: A Study of Four Exemplary Novels. Princeton: Princeton UP. — (1984): Cervantes and the Mystery of Lawlessness: A Study of El casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los perros. Princeton: Princeton UP. Márquez Villanueva, Francisco (2010): Moros, moriscos y turcos de Cervantes. Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra. Rey López, María (2008): “La negación del cornice en las Novelas ejemplares.” In: Baena, Julio (ed.): Novelas ejemplares: Las grietas de la ejemplaridad. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, pp. 31-46. Rodríguez Guridi, Bárbara (2008): “El carácter ‘casi’ picaresco de las Novelas ejemplares.” In: Baena, Julio (ed.): Novelas ejemplares: Las grietas de la ejemplaridad. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, pp. 127-66. Unamuno, Miguel de (1914): Niebla. Madrid: Espasa Calpe.

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Innocents Abroad; Or, Lost in La Mancha: Teaching Don Quixote in the United States Edward H. Friedman Vanderbilt University —Dádmele acá, compadre, que hago cuenta que he hallado en él un tesoro de contento y una mina de pasatiempos. (I.6)

I spent the spring semester of 2010 in Madrid, where I taught two classes in American literature and culture at the Universidad Complutense. During my stay in Spain, I delivered some papers, mainly on contemporary drama, but one was on teaching Don Quixote in Tennessee. This essay, which stems from that talk, is hardly a variation on Jorge Luis Borges’s “Pierre Menard,” but it attempts to situate reading Cervantes’s novel in a specific —and different— time and place. As a professor of Spanish literature in the United States, with a specialization in the Golden Age, or what is currently often called the Early Modern period, I have had the opportunity to teach Don Quixote on a regular basis. Of course, in my classes I cover many other texts, including Renaissance and Baroque works: the picaresque, the Comedia, the exemplary novels, or novellas, of Cervantes and María de Zayas; poetry from Juan Boscán and Garcilaso de la Vega to Luis de Góngora and Francisco de Quevedo and from the secular to the mystic; essays by Baltasar Gracián; and so on. I also teach more general courses, such as Introduction to Hispanic Literature and Drama from 1600 to 1850, along with courses on theory and comparative literature. Here, I would like to comment on how I teach Don Quixote in the United States to students who, in general, have only recently begun to study Spanish literature and culture. I

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have been at Vanderbilt University since 2000, having taught previously at three other schools for a total of some twenty-five years. At Vanderbilt alone, I have taught Don Quixote in a number of contexts: undergraduate courses in Spanish, graduate seminars in Spanish, and comparative literature courses in English. The courses in English have titles such as “Don Quixote and the Development of the Novel,” “Don Quixote and the Experimental Novel,” and “Don Quixote and Metafiction.” I have taught a course on Don Quixote in a graduate program for working professionals called the Master of Liberal Arts and Science and in the Vanderbilt Summer Academy, sponsored by the Programs for Talented Youth, in a three-week course for fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds. My calculation is that I have taught Don Quixote sixteen times in the last eleven years. It has always been fun, and it is always different. (As one might guess, the biggest challenge was maintaining the interest of the teenagers, gifted though they were.) When Spaniards undertake a reading of Don Quixote —even though, needless to say, every Spaniard is different and comes to the task with diverse experiences and diverse backgrounds in reading— there are certain literary, historical, and cultural aspects of the novel that will not need an explanation. When readers who live outside Spain read Don Quixote, it behooves them to know something about its contexts, and I have devised an approach to Don Quixote which aims at (1) preparing students to read the novel and (2) maintaining the spontaneity of the reading experience itself. I call the method “directed spontaneity.”1 The system is geared toward facilitating the reading and examination of Don Quixote. The idea is to make reference to many things that relate, in one way or another, to Don Quixote, without talking directly about Cervantes’s work. The first stage concentrates on general facets of literary study. I begin by looking, on a very basic level, at the genre of narrative: definitions, forms, and participants. After determining what constitutes a narrative text, one can distinguish between the author and the narrator —the one who creates the text and the one whose “voice” is heard from within. Discussion of the narrator leads to a consideration of perspective and the various options associated with point of view. We look at dichotomies such as plot and theme, story and discourse, narratee and implied reader, and at the construct of the implied author, as differentiated from the narrator and the historical author. The implied author is not a speaker or a character, but the implied presence of the author gleaned from markers within the text, notably markers that seem to promote an ironic reading. The implied reader, in turn, is the “agent” who recognizes the intervention of the implied author. Thus, on one side of the spectrum stand the historical author, the implied author, and the nar1

See Friedman, “Quixotic Pedagogy” and “Readers Digest.”

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rator, and, on the other, the real reader, the implied reader, and, in some cases, the narratee, the object of the narrator’s words, such as the figure of Vuestra Merced in Lazarillo de Tormes. The inquiry into point of view and into the elements of analysis allows one to survey the field and aims of narrative theory, sometimes called narratology, which summons the work of Wayne Booth, Seymour Chatman, Gérard Genette, Susan Sniader Lanser, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Gerald Prince, and others who fall under the rubric of what Mark Currie designates as postmodern narratology.2 Roland Barthes differentiates between the what he calls the “readerly” and the “writerly” —lisible and scriptible— that is, between those texts that situate the reader in fixed and predetermined interpretative circumstances (readerly), and those that engage the reader in the act of interpretation (writerly). Readers of this essay know into which category Don Quixote fits, and it is interesting to note that the classic novel of realism —often the locus of the “readerly”— fall chronologically well after Cervantes, who both anticipates narrative realism, avails himself of its underlying assumptions, and distances himself from it. In class, I bring up the work of reader-response theorists, such as Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, who deal with the lacunae —”gaps” and “indeterminacies”— found in texts and strategies for “filling them in.” I then move to the topic of intertextuality, a term coined by Julia Kristeva. The concept of intertextuality presupposes interrelations among texts. No text exists in a vacuum, but is connected to other texts by literary precedents and conventions and by social and cultural codes. Intertextuality covers difference as well as similitude. For example, José Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio has among its intertexts Tirso de Molina’s (we think) El burlador de Sevilla, from which it takes its central plot, and neoclassical drama, from which the Romantic playwrights broke away. Its major story line belongs to a particular tradition, while its form represents a deviation from a tradition that is acknowledged in the divergence itself. The last feature of this section is self-conscious or self-referential fiction, fiction that flaunts its fictionality, its distance from unmediated reality. A key here is the prefix meta-, in terms such as metafiction, metanarrative, metatheater, metapoetry, and so forth. Some authors try to hide the separation between the literary or artistic media (the signifiers) and the things that are being represented (the signifieds). Metafiction does the opposite, by, as the Russian formalists labeled 2 The starting point for a survey of recent narrative theory quite naturally would be Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction. In addition to the authors mentioned, and to name but a few of the many scholars who have worked in the field, see Davis, Hutcheon, Keen, Melberg, and O’Neill. The bibliographical listings in Works Cited are meant to provide a representative sampling of available materials.

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it, “laying bare their devices.” (See Shklovsky.) In some ways, then, metafiction stands in contrast to realism. To be sure, I gear the level of sophistication of the introductory material to the specific group, but I cover the concepts, in some fashion or another, with all groups, including the teenage summer students. The second stage of my introduction offers examples. The goal here is to “concretize” the elements that I have outlined in a somewhat abstract way. The examples have included, in the original or in translation, the dispute between the Greeks and the Romans from the Libro de buen amor by Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita; Jorge Luis Borges’s “Borges y yo”; Julio Cortázar’s “Continuidad de los parques”; and Lope de Vega’s “Soneto de repente.” Juan Ruiz dramatizes, in the fourteenth century, the variable —the polysemous— nature of signs. Borges makes his reader aware of the writer, the writing process, and the division between the public Borges and the private Borges and the unstable blending of the two personas. Cortázar fuses and confuses —rather than separates— reality and fiction. Lope writes a sonnet whose only topic is the challenge of writing the sonnet, verse by verse (see Rivers 1998: 225). I contemplate with students Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas: its juxtaposition of art and reality, its self-portrait of the artist, its foregrounding of the observer (and the consumer) of art, its plays with space and with light, its framing technique, its reciprocal qualities, etc. In addition to the presentation of Las Meninas as a work of meta-art, I use the painting to illustrate intertextuality by having the students view the British artist Richard Hamilton’s version of Las Meninas, which is based not only on Velázquez’s work but on Pablo Picasso’s variations on the theme. The artist’s face is Picasso’s, the figures are abstract, and the seated dog looks like its counterpart in Guernica. The wonderful visual image provided by Velázquez demonstrates self-conscious art and intertextuality, as well as characteristics of the Baroque and technical points of contact with Don Quixote. My closing example in this section contains selected passages from an essay titled “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” from Tropics of Discourse by the historian and theorist Hayden White, who created a sensation in the early 1970s with his book Metahistory. In the essay, White argues against the Aristotelian proposition that history (historiography) is objective and that poetry (fiction) is subjective. History, like fiction, is mediated, subject to the ideology and rhetoric of the historian. History is, to use White’s term, emplotted, predicated upon the preferences, priorities, and prejudices of the historian, who chooses and structures events in a given, and subjective, manner. White demystifies the objectivity of history and the unmediated nature of historiography, and he suggests that there are many common threads between the writer of fiction and the historian. What I think students will see as they read Don Quixote is that, almost four centuries before Hayden

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White, Cervantes presents an anti-Aristotelian argument, electing as he does to unite —to entangle— history and fiction. Reversing the title of White’s essay, Don Quixote presents “the literary text as historical artifact.” The motive behind these two sections of the introduction is to plant ideas and to cover topics that will come up in the reading and discussion of Don Quixote. To give an example: Without having heard the term intertextuality before the course began, students will now be able to answer the question, What is the primary intertext of Don Quixote, Part I? When they read Part II, they will recognize —and likely appreciate the irony— that the major intertext has now shifted from the romances of chivalry to Don Quixote, Part I, joined by the Avellaneda sequel. Cervantes in Don Quixote intensifies, to the nth degree, the emphasis on the act of writing of Lope’s “Soneto de repente,” but both works stress the importance of process and its inseparability from a final product. As Marshall McLuhan phrased it, “The medium is the message.” I generally give students further readings, with questions, on several literary texts, which may include Marco Denevi’s “Apocalipsis” and “El dios de las moscas,” Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” Ana María Matute’s “Pecado de omisión,” Mark Twain’s “The Story of the Bad Little Boy,” and Julio Cortázar’s “La noche boca arriba.” In each of his micro-stories, Denevi makes a solid statement in a short paragraph. In “Apocalipsis,” we discover, at the end of the account of man’s invention of powerful machines and the demise of humanity, that the narrator is a machine. In “El dios de las moscas,” the description of heaven for the flies would be a hell for human beings, and vice versa. Denevi is a specialist at playing with perspective and paradox. Chopin’s story is about the reaction of a wife to the news that her husband has died in a train accident. Her family and friends believe that she is devastated. The protagonist retires to her room, where, through an omniscient narrator, we find out that she feels liberated, that she is relieved and joyful, not about the death, but about what could be considered her rebirth. We know that she has a heart condition, and when she discovers that her husband was not aboard the train, she keels over and dies. In “The Story of an Hour,” each space —the living room and the bedroom— is the site of an opposing story, one of grief and one of exultation. Only through the narrator does the reader —unlike the characters outside the protagonist’s room— comprehend the true story, the correct version of the two presented. Something similar occurs in “Pecado de omisión.” In Matute’s story, a village mayor takes charge of his distant cousin, the recently orphaned Lope, and places him the countryside as a shepherd, and, after five years, brings him back to the village for a medical checkup. Lope ends up killing the mayor with a rock. The villagers cannot understand what could have motivated the boy to commit such a crime against the man who protected him. The recap

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of the events tells one story, but the narrator tells another. The mayor has Lope sleep in the barn before sending him off. The schoolteacher remarks on the boy’s intelligence, but the mayor cuts him off. In the countryside, Lope lives in a hut in which he cannot stand upright, and his only companion is a mentally-challenged man. When the boy returns to the village, he meets up with a former friend, “que siempre le iba a la zaga,” now a refined young man and a law student with great possibilities. When he offers Lope a cigarette, Lope cannot help but notice the difference in their hands, one coarse and toughened by work and the other soft and smooth. Lope cracks and murders the mayor. Because the narrator’s sympathy lies completely with Lope, the reader can discern the poetic justice of the violent act. Discourse trumps story. There is a communication between the author, narrator, and reader that explains the significance of “pecado de omisión.” In “The Story of the Bad Little Boy,” Twain plays, ironically, with the intertext of the Sunday-school moral fable, in which the good are rewarded and the bad are punished. The title character, from early childhood through adulthood, could hardly be more disobedient or more criminal in his behavior, yet he only moves forward in triumph, ending as a successful elected official. Twain realizes that the reading public will be awaiting a sordid ending to the irreverent conduct of the protagonist, but that ending never comes, because the story is not about justice but about irony and not about a reversal of fortune but about a reversal of expectations. In a more complicated design, Cortázar, in “La noche boca arriba,” provides a narrator who alternates between a motorcycle accident and the victim’s time in the hospital and what seem to be his dreams of a distant past, in which he is being pursued by Aztec warriors who are participating in a sacrificial ritual. At the end, the narrator transposes the dream and the supposed reality in order to demonstrate a projection into the future. The accident is the dream, and the sacrifice is the reality, or is it? The inversion is hard to justify, and it is as if Cortázar were accentuating the blurring of lines between the two realms, much as he does in “Continuidad de los parques.” As a narrative analogue of the transposition, the apparently reliable narrator himself becomes unreliable, contradicting in the conclusion what he has stated at the beginning of the story. It might be said that chaos replaces order, or that every story —at least, every “writerly” story— both withholds data and provides for multiple interpretations. Together with these reading assignments, I give the students short written exercises to turn in before class discussion, so that they will have “come to terms” with the material on their own and thus will have begun to polish their critical skills and to develop their self-confidence as critics. They will be able to read the commentary of others not submissively or uncritically but metacritically.

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To summarize briefly: The introduction starts with a presentation of terms and concepts related to narrative, narrative theory, and the study of narrative. Crucial factors are the participants in narrative “transactions,” including types of narrators, point of view, the reliability (or unreliability) of narrators, and the role of the reader. Two basic topics, with regard to Don Quixote, are intertextuality and metafiction. I try to complement the explanations of the concepts themselves with examples in two sets: those presented in class and those that students work on prior to class discussion. From there, we proceed to the second stage, the focus of which is Early Modern Spain. What should one know about Spain to appreciate as fully as possible a reading of Don Quixote? I initiate the introduction to the historical and cultural backgrounds by examining the terms “Golden Age,” the period from 1550 to 1700, by uniting the reign of the Habsburg monarchs to the literature written between 1554 (the date of publication of Lazarillo de Tormes) and the end of the seventeenth century (the school of Pedro Calderón de la Barca). I attempt to underscore ten fundamental aspects of the time, including (1) the push for political and religious unity; (2) the Inquisition and censorship; (3) the obsession with blood purity and the division between Old Christians and new Christians; (4) social and class divisions based on economics and life in urban versus rural areas; (5) divisions based on gender, and especially the role of women in society; (6) the distinction between intrinsic human worth and social values, as exemplified in the distinction between el honor and la honra; (7) the influence of the New World, the new science, and the new religious crisis (the Reformation and the Counter Reformation); (8) the Council of Trent and its use of literature as a didactic tool; (9) the dialectics of hegemony and the subversion of authority; and (10) the manifestations of the Baroque (including the distinction between culteranismo and conceptismo) and the contrast between Renaissance and Baroque art. Then I center on the genres of narrative, theater, and poetry. With respect to narrative, I stress the distinction between idealism (chivalric, sentimental, and pastoral romance) and an incipient realism (the picaresque, the novelas ejemplares of Cervantes and María de Zayas, and the influence of the Italian novella). I seek to provide a short answer to the questions, What forms of fictional narrative existed prior to the composition of Don Quixote, and who were the most significant writers of narrative during the Golden Age? Obviously, I want students, as they begin to read the text, to understand the presence in Don Quixote not only of Amadís de Gaula and other books of chivalry but also of the pastoral (as in the episode of Marcela and Grisóstomo), the picaresque (the reference by the captive Ginés de Pasamonte to the Lazarillo, for example), and other texts, such as those mentioned in the investigation of

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Don Quixote’s library. I want students to have a general knowledge of Golden Age theater, the comedia nueva: the role of Lope de Vega in the development of a national theater, the formal structure of a comedia, and the wide variety of plays written during the period. I want them to know something about how Spanish theater compares and contrasts with Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in England and neoclassical drama in France. One factor to which I allude is the representation of women in the Comedia, noting that, as Bruce Wardropper observes, comic plays —which can diverge from reality— typically feature assertive and accomplished unmarried women que se salen con la suya (as in Calderón’s La dama duende), whereas serious plays typically feature married women who frequently fare poorly (as in El médico de su honra by the same author). I also emphasize the phenomenon of metatheater, as defined by Lionel Abel, in which there are plays-within-plays or situations in which characters become metaphorical dramatists. And I mention the prolific output and the tremendous popular, commercial, and critical success of Lope de Vega, as contrasted with Cervantes’s disappointments as a playwright and the publication in 1615 of the Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nunca representados. This will help to explain the significance of Part I, chapter 48 (the attack on Lope and his dramatic formula by the priest and the canon from Toledo) and its consequences. My approach to poetry consists principally of a comparison between Renaissance and Baroque poems. I speak briefly about traditional Spanish verse forms and the incorporation of Italianate forms into Spain, with reference to Petrarchan conventions. My chief examples are two well-known carpe diem sonnets by Garcilaso de la Vega (“En tanto que de rosa y azucena”) and Luis de Góngora (“Mientras por competir con tu cabello”), which shift, respectively, from moderation, symmetry, and balance to hyperbole, intensification, and imbalance (see Rivers 1988: 37-38 and 163). The Góngora sonnet displays the Baroque quality of rivalry and competition that makes its way into Don Quixote. The third stage of the introduction covers, quickly, personal facts about Cervantes and the Quixote: 1. The novel was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. 2. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra lived from 1547 to 1616. He was, therefore, fifty-eight and sixty-eight years old when the two parts were published. 3. Cervantes was the son of a peripatetic doctor and possibly educated by humanists in Madrid. He lived for a time in Sevilla, where he saw performances of the pasos of Lope de Rueda. He might have had to leave Spain as the result of a fight in which a man was killed. Whether or not that was the case, in 1569 he traveled to Italy, where he served a nobleman who became a cardinal. As a

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soldier, he took part in the battle of Lepanto, in 1571, and he was seriously wounded in this great Christian victory, and he lost the use of his left arm. He was extremely proud of his participation in the battle, and he was honored as a hero. When he left Italy, bound for Spain, in 1575, he carried strong letters of recommendation. Unfortunately, his ship was overtaken by Turks, and Cervantes spent the next five years as a prisoner in North Africa, until his rescue and return to Spain, where his former glory had been forgotten. 4. Until the publication of Part I of Don Quixote, Cervantes never enjoyed literary success, nor was he successful professionally or personally. He married a woman nineteen years his junior, and, from all accounts, the marriage does not seem to have been a happy one. 5. Cervantes published the pastoral romance La Galatea in 1585 and, after Don Quixote, the Novelas ejemplares, the plays, and, posthumously, the Persiles, which he called “an epic in prose.” The fourth and final stage of the introduction addresses the development of the novel. I raise the question of the polemic over “the first modern novel” and suggest that scholars of English literature —among them, Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel— tend to exclude Spain from consideration. I draw attention to the two faces of intertextuality: the intertexts of Don Quixote and Don Quixote as intertext. I look at the objectives of European realism and naturalism, with examples, and follow with allusions to modernism, postmodernism, and the continuity of metafiction. I feel that the expenditure of time for the introduction is meaningful, because the materials covered lay the groundwork for a reading of Don Quixote within an array of contexts, many of which treat the study of narrative in a broad sense and are complemented by a consideration of Early Modern Spain. With these concepts in mind, students can, I think, read with greater insight, intellectual and aesthetic, and they can, I hope, derive satisfaction from the reading. While I certainly will not ask you to indulge me in an analysis of the comprehensive text of the two parts of Don Quixote, I would like to give some examples of the “directed spontaneity” to which I referred: 1. The first speaker in Don Quixote is the narrator of the prologue. This is not the voice of the historical Cervantes, nor is this an implied author, a pure abstraction. The speaker is a fictionalized version of the author and perhaps could be named “Cervantes” (Cervantes entre comillas). He is a type of alter ego, and the “friend” who appears in his study and engages in conversation with him becomes the alter ego of an alter ego. 2. The prologue to Part I is about a number of things, foremost of which is the writing of a prologue. There is a discussion about the changing norms

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of publication, intimately related to the invention of the printing press, and about new centers of authority. The friend advises the author figure to make up whatever he wants to fill up the space of a prologue, and the result qualifies as a metaprologue. 3. The first chapter of Don Quixote establishes, to a large degree, the parameters of the narrative as a whole. Chapter 1 begins with a sense of vagueness. The narrator chooses not to name the village, nor does he give the exact name or age of the protagonist. The themes of truth and history are introduced. In the first case, relative truth seems to supersede absolute truth, and, in the second, history seems to have a rather subjective cast. Perspective here takes the form of multiple perspectives. The books of chivalry and the time for leisure reading lead to the madness of the man who would become Don Quixote. The prologue is about preparing the manuscript for publication. Chapter 1 is about the preparation for the first sally. Madness is less a pathology than aesthetics gone awry. 4. Even before he has his first adventure, Don Quixote envisions a chronicle that will record his exploits. He has a historical self-consciousness. He also has an impressive memory from his readings, and these memories mix with his wild imaginings when he is on the road, away from his collection of books. 5. The scrutiny of Don Quixote’s library in chapter 6 is a stimulating exercise in literary criticism, an allegory of the Inquisition, and a chance for Cervantes to include La Galatea and a memorable self-portrait: “más versado en desdichas que en versos.” The assessment simultaneously encompasses taste, decorum, and dogma. 6. The invention of the “wise enchanter” by the priest and its appropriation by Don Quixote gives the knight errant not only an excuse for his defeats but an alternate reality, another way of interpreting signs. 7. The squire Sancho Panza expands the function of dialogue in the narrative. The illiterate Sancho keeps oral and folkloric traditions alive in a story built on the effects of the new print culture and increasing literacy. 8. The closing of chapter 8 shows a narrator who has run out of data. The reference to “the second author” is vague and mysterious. The discovery of the manuscript, in Arabic, of the Muslim historian Cide Hamete Benengeli in chapter 9 reconfigures the motif of the “true history” and questions the reliability of the narration. Cervantes brings the holy wars of Christianity into the text, in a clever, ironic, and ultimately profound way. The chronicle of Don Quixote becomes ever more complex and more susceptible to reinterpretation. Another brilliant stroke is the hiring of a Morisco to translate the Arabic text into Castilian. The text gets farther away from its original, pristine state, since, through the itinerary of what poststructuralism calls “deferral,” something will inevitably be

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lost in translation.3 And, of course, if we think about it, Cide Hamete himself will have translated the dialogue of Spaniards into Arabic, so an “original state” is a myth. It is, for me, a source of pleasure to think of one of Borges’s comments on Don Quixote. According to Borges, he first read an English translation of the novel in his grandfather’s library, and when he read the work in Spanish, it seemed to him to be a bad translation. By all means, the text that comes down to us should rightly seem to be a bad translation. 9. The episode of Marcela and Grisóstomo in chapters 12 through 14 rewrites the pastoral prototype, giving it a feminist thrust. It also serves as a lesson in perspectivism. Hearing the comments of Grisóstomo’s friends and advocates, the reader could be predisposed to condemn Marcela, but her speech in her own defense is rhetorically and philosophically sound. The same story is presented through two diametrically opposed perspectives. 10. There is a wonderful moment in chapter 19, in which Sancho Panza gives Don Quixote the sobriquet “el Caballero de la Triste Figura.” The knight asks his squire what provoked the appellation, and Sancho replies that it is Don Quixote’s sorrowful appearance. Don Quixote disagrees, saying that it must have occurred to the wise enchanter charged with writing the history of his deeds to give him an epithet, as was the case of all knights errant of yore. Don Quixote is recognizing, in essence, that someone is putting words into Sancho’s mouth, as a ventriloquist might do with a puppet. The detail offers not only a comic twist but a statement on authorship, authority, and control. 11. After Don Quixote and Sancho escape from the main road to enter the Sierra Morena, following the liberation of the galley slaves, the rhythm of the narrative changes from chivalric adventures to what could be termed “adventures in storytelling.” Characters tell stories, and the stories are interrupted and continued in interweaving and intricate patterns. The most extended story involves Cardenio, Dorotea, Fernando, and Luscinda. Cervantes provides entertainment, variety, and a dose of morality. 12. Cardenio is especially important, for Don Quixote has the opportunity to reflect and remark on the young man’s madness, and, shortly thereafter, Don Quixote undertakes to imitate the madness of Amadís de Gaula. 13. In chapter 32, the innkeeper Juan Palomeque —a type of surrogate for Don Quixote— maintains that the books of chivalry are truthful and that they are superior to the works of historians, while the great majority of those assembled argue in favor of history. There follow the two lengthy intercalated tales —El curioso impertinente and the captive’s story— that exemplify both sides of 3

See, for example, Leitch.

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the debate. The intertext of the first is Orlando Furioso and that of the second is Cervantes’s personal experience as a captive. Fascinatingly, the more realistic or verisimilar narrative is the acknowledged work of fiction, while the more fantastic and farfetched narrative is presented as autobiography, with an illusion to a soldier named Sayavedra. The categories become blurred. 14. The canon from Toledo, who appears at the end of Part I, becomes an emblem of the Counter Reformation and its repudiation of the romances of chivalry and all manner of escape fiction. The canon and the priest from Don Quixote’s village, as proponents of literary purity and the position of the “ancients” (as opposed to the “moderns”), malign Lope and the comedia nueva and go so far as to wish for greater censorship. One can feel Cervantes’s intrusion here, as a playwright who has been unable to compete with Lope. The effect of this exercise in venting his anger is enormous, for a defender of Lope, under the pseudonym of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, will publish a “spurious” —and adversarial— sequel in the fall of 1614. 15. The prologue to Part II of Don Quixote is, in some ways, the antithesis of the prologue to Part I. The topic now is not an unpublished manuscript but a published book, and the speaker is not a fictionalized Cervantes but the “real” Cervantes, who reacts to the insults hurled at him by Avellaneda. The prologue reveals what will happen at the end —Don Quixote will lie dead and buried— so that there will be no further sequels. Fiction and history continue to collide, but in ways that Cervantes could not have foreseen. 16. Time passes on two discrete planes. Ten years separate the publication of the two parts, while internally only one month has passed. As he sets Part II into motion, the narrator seems to have forgotten the commentary at the end of chapter 52, the closing chapter of Part I. 17. The early chapters of the 1615 Quixote highlight public response to the knight errant and to the chronicle of his adventures. The literary criticism in Part I now turns to the text itself, as the favored elements and the flaws are brought forward by the wily bachiller Sansón Carrasco. The critique moves from word-of-mouth to reader-response, and Cervantes stands —intriguingly, and somewhat precariously— as subject and object. He now has an obligation of sorts to take the criticism to heart as he writes Part II. 18. Cervantes faces a number of challenges in Part II: he must sustain the reader’s interest, address the “tachas” of Part I, and deal with Avellaneda. Since the most criticized element of Part I was El curioso impertinente, deemed a digression without a link to the main story, he must stay on point in Part II. Serendipitously, Cervantes elects to make the publication of Part I (that is, of Cide Hamete Benengeli’s chronicle) a vital motif of Part II. The themes of rivalry and competition play a note-

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worthy role in this respect. Don Quixote himself must contend with his celebrity status, which has positive and negative components. He is famous, which means that his modus operandi and his anachronistic brand of chivalry are known to the many characters in Part II who are familiar with the chronicle. Fame threatens him with passivity, since his actions do not surprise those around him, which include characters such as Sansón Carrasco and the duke and duchess, who become metadramatists in their own right. 20. If Don Quixote becomes more passive in Part II, Sancho Panza becomes more active. He has not had to read the book —fortunately for him— but he has lived the experience and has learned how to maneuver his master when the occasion calls for it. His biggest coup in Part II —learned from the “enchantment excuse” that is always within Don Quixote’s purview— is when Sancho “enchants” Dulcinea del Toboso, casting three farm girls as the lady and her attendants. The act not only signals a more aggressive and metatheatrical Sancho, but gives Don Quixote a new mission, as well: he will dedicate himself to “disenchanting Dulcinea.” 21. Sansón Carrasco invents a plot in which he, as the Knight of the Wood (or of the Mirrors) will goad Don Quixote into battle, defeat him, and force him to return home for a year without exercising knightly protocol. The metadrama fails: Sansón loses the battle, and his goodwill turns into thoughts of revenge. 22. Don Quixote meets his conventional Other in the figure of Don Diego de Miranda, whom he dubs the Knight of the Green Cloak. Don Diego lives a “normal life” with his wife and son, a poet. He has a library but no books of chivalry. Don Quixote interests the reader because he is eccentric. Don Diego bores even the translator of Cide Hamete’s manuscript, who deletes part of the description of Don Diego’s house. Don Diego is predictable. Don Quixote is erratic and impulsive. Don Diego is, shall we say, “prosaic,” while Don Quixote is “novel.” 23. One can see in the episode of Camacho’s wedding the metatheatrics of the industrious Basilio and an adjustment by Cervantes to the critique of the digressions in Part I. In this episode, Don Quixote and Sancho are spectators in a theatricalized setting, with ceremonies and danzas habladas and tragedy averted. Don Quixote ends by protecting Basilio and Quiteria after the scheme has achieved its desired result. The recourse to storytelling in Part I seems to be replaced in Part II by variations on the theme of the theater, including, of course, metatheater and spectacles, staged and improvised. 24. The episode in the cave of Montesinos allows the reader to enter the subconscious of Don Quixote, who merges his chivalric readings with the illusions and delusions that comprise his identity and sense of self. The most

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striking encounter is, perhaps, his meeting with the enchanted Dulcinea and her ladies-in-waiting, one of whom asks him for money, the lack of which had plagued him on the road. He now carries money, as can be seen in his offering to pay for damages that he has caused (in the case of Maese Pedro’s puppet show and the enchanted boat). 25. The theatrical motif is most pronounced in the large section of Part II that takes place in the palace of the duke and duchess, avid readers of Part I who devise means of subjecting Don Quixote and Sancho to their whims. Aware of Sancho Panza’s fabrication and Don Quixote’s descent into the cave, they invent elaborate methods of disenchanting Dulcinea, of involving the knight in new chivalric and amorous adventures, and of granting Sancho the promised governorship. They are directors, scriptwriters, and actors, with the means to produce spectacles on a grand scale. The interweaving here —arranged within the main plot— is the movement between the palace and the island of Barataria, and enhanced by the visit by one of the duke’s pages to Sancho’s village, where the governorship of the squire is validated before Sansón Carrasco and the priest. 26. After Sancho renounces his governorship, he comes across Ricote, a former neighbor, who brings the historical expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609, and their sanctioned reentry in 1614, into the narrative. Cervantes counterbalances this fragment of history with the story of Ricote’s daughter Ana Félix, which follows the model of pure romance. 27. Don Quixote and Sancho leave the ducal court to make their way toward Zaragoza, where the knight plans to compete in jousting tournaments, as promised in chapter 52 of Part I. On the way, at an inn, they meet two gentlemen who have a copy of the “false chronicle” of Avellaneda, and, in a climactic moment, Don Quixote holds the book in his hands. Learning that the illegitimate Don Quixote spent time in Zaragoza, the genuine Don Quixote vows not to step foot into that city. He will go to Barcelona instead. If one discounts the prologue, chapter 59 includes the first reference to the Avellaneda sequel. Cervantes will use several means of disparaging his rival. The weightiest is the introduction of Don Álvaro Tarfe, a character from the Avellaneda tome, who certifies before a notary that the man before him is the authentic Don Quixote. The most bizarre occurs during the return, by force, of Don Quixote and Sancho to the palace of the duke and duchess. The maiden Altisidora tells of a near-death experience in which she has seen two devils playing a game like tennis, but instead of balls the demons were hitting volumes of the Avellaneda book. Cervantes shows his feelings in the prologue, but he is calculatedly distanced in the text proper. The way in which he combats the sequel is radically different from Mateo Alemán’s response to a false continuation of Guzmán de Alfarache, published in 1602,

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between the two “legitimate” parts. Alemán allegorizes the theft, but he cannot separate himself from his character, and his emotional investment in the writing is palpable. Cervantes fits his critique more impersonally into the story, but, alas, he immortalizes Avellaneda by writing him into the “real” second part.4 28. Much of the irony, the humor, and the wit of Part I of Don Quixote — not to mention Cervantes’s quarrel with Aristotle— depends on the incongruity between the denomination of “true history” and the tainted —from the Christian perspective— origins of the Muslim author. The “true history” is comical, satirical, and conflictive. The Avellaneda sequel changes the impact of the classification, for if Avellaneda writes a false continuation, the collaborative efforts of Cervantes and Cide Hamete Benengeli constitute, however paradoxically and however inadvertently, “la verdadera historia de don Quijote.” Hence, Avellaneda substantiates Cervantes’s premise. 29. Cervantes complies with his intention of “killing off” Don Quixote. Defeated finally by Sansón Carrasco as the Knight of the White Moon and obligated to return to his village, the knight —now Alonso Quijano el Bueno— thoroughly renounces chivalry and all remnants of his quest, and he ends his life having given up the fantasies and the misconceptions that have ruled his actions. His death, therefore, is both practical, since there will be no more sequels, and exemplary, since he has followed Christian doctrine. One might submit, from another angle of vision, that Alonso Quijano dies and that Don Quixote survives, or, alternatively, that the romance dies and the novel survives. As with the spectators in Las Meninas, the reader remains indelibly within the frame. 30. Once one has read Don Quixote, the act of reading is never the same. When I teach Don Quixote, I am a bit obsessive, even a bit quixotic, about the interplay of process and product throughout the narrative. Cervantes crosscuts the completed work of fiction with its composition. The lines —the plot, the movement, the structure— combine with what happens between the lines —the technique, all that is implicit, all that the author is thinking and feeling— to create a rich, beautiful, and mutable object. Cervantes reacts against idealism, but my own idealism shows through when I see in the Quixote a precognition —an intuitive glance forward— of contemporary theory, which includes narratology, poststructuralism and its aftermath, and postmodernism. Cervantes tells a remarkably varied and nuanced story and sets it against the weight, and the burden, of history, and he appends —or makes part of the story— metacommentary on the trials of authorship. He integrates reading, writing, criticism, theory, and metacriticism. One cannot say that he does this seamlessly, precisely because he wants and needs for the seams to 4

See Friedman, “Guzmán de Alfarache” and “Insincere Flattery.”

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stand out, to protrude, to buckle from the narrative fabric. Don Quixote is about all facets and phases of art, about its creators and consumers, about differences between history and poetry and between history and historiography, about the human condition and the domain of fiction, about contacts among women and men, about relations among texts and among cultures, about the omnipresence of irony, about constructive and destructive humor, about the world view and institutions —and, conspicuously, about the margins— of Early Modern Spain. When I ponder the messages of the Quixote, Stephen Sondheim’s phrase “the art of making art” comes to mind and so does the union of perception and perspective. A course on Don Quixote, by its very nature, becomes a master class on word processing, in the broadest possible sense. Literature is not a supplement or a graft, but a component, of life, and, as projected by Cervantes, an essential component. Correspondingly, metafiction is not so much the opposite of realism as a contrasting approach to reality, and, in my opinion, in Don Quixote the two approaches coexist. That is why Don Quixote serves as a template for the novel and for the future of narrative.5 The first time that I taught Don Quixote, many years ago, something happened that has been repeated with some frequency. At the beginning of the semester, students seem to place great faith in my critical competency. They hang onto my every word, and they accept the validity of my analyses. As the semester progresses and as they read further into the Quixote, I hear my opinions challenged and, at times, refuted. By the end of the semester, I am merely a “facilitator” of discussion. As you might imagine, that state of affairs pleases rather than discomforts me. Cervantes —maybe with a little help from me— was teaching them to be critical thinkers, without sacrificing enjoyment. My undergraduate students who read the unabridged text of Don Quixote in Spanish inform me that they are exhausted when they reach the conclusion, but they say that I am correct when I assure them on the first day of class that, if they stick with this, they will feel a sense of pride and a sense of accomplishment. Don Quixote is the most Spanish and the most universal of novels. Every reader will have limitations, some literary, some geographical. Those of us who read, desde lejos, this book that is much more than a book, can learn to love it with “near-native fluency.”

5

This is a guiding premise of my study Cervantes in the Middle.

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Works Cited Abel, Lionel (1963): Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form. New York: Hill and Wang. Alemán, Mateo (1998): Guzmán de Alfarache. Madrid: Cátedra. Barthes, Roland (1974): S/Z: An Essay. New York: Hill and Wang. Bjornson, Richard (ed.) (1984): Approaches to Teaching Cervantes’ Don Quixote. New York: Modern Language Association of America. Booth, Wayne C. (1961): The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U. of Chicago P. Borges, Jorge Luis (1980a): “Borges y yo.” In: Prosa completa. 2 vols. Barcelona: Bruguera, II, pp. 347-48. — (1980b): “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote.” In: Prosa completa. 2 vols. Barcelona: Bruguera, I, pp. 425-33. Cervantes, Miguel de (1998): Don Quijote de la Mancha. 2 vols. Ed. del Instituto Cervantes. Rico, Francisco (dir.). Barcelona: Crítica. — (2001): Don Quixote. New York: New American Library. — (2005): El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta. Chatman, Seymour (1990): Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP. — (1978): Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP. Chopin, Kate (1981): “The Story of an Hour.” In: Lanser, Susan (ed.): The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP., pp. 246-64. Cortázar, Julio (1973a): “Continuidad de los parques.” In: Final del juego. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, pp. 9-11. — (1973b): “La noche boca arriba.” In: Final del juego. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, pp. 169-79. Currie, Mark (1998): Postmodern Narrative Theory. New York: St. Martin’s. Davis, Lennard J. (1987): Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction. New York and London: Methuen. Denevi, Marco (1965): “Apocalipsis.” In: Yates, Donald A. (ed.): “Ceremonia secreta” y otros cuentos. New York: Macmillan, p. 9. — (2007): “El dios de las moscas.” In: Virgillo, Carmelo, et al. (eds.): Aproximaciones al estudio de la literatura hispánica. New York: McGraw-Hill, p. 78. Fernández de avellaneda, Alonso [pseud.] (1987): El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, que contiene su tercera salida y es la quinta parte de sus aventuras. García Salinero, Fernando (ed.). Madrid: Castalia. Friedman, Edward H. (1998): “Readers Digest: The Critical Frames of Don Quijote.” In: Confluencia, 14, 1, pp. 3-11. — (2000a): “Guzmán de Alfarache, Don Quijote, and the Subject of the Novel.” In: LaRubiaPrado, Francisco (ed.): Cervantes for the 21st Century / Cervantes para el siglo XXI: Studies in Honor of Edward Dudley. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, pp. 61-78.

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— (2000b): “Insincere Flattery: Imitation and the Growth of the Novel.” In: Cervantes, 20, 1, pp. 99-114. — (2005): “Quixotic Pedagogy; Or, Putting the Teacher to the Test.” In: Hispania, 88, 1, pp. 20-31. — (2006): Cervantes in the Middle: Realism and Reality in the Spanish Novel from Lazarillo de Tormes to Niebla. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta. Genette, Gérard (1988): Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP. Hutcheon, Linda (1984): Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. New York and London: Methuen. Iser, Wolfgang (1978): The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP. Jauss, Hans Robert (1982): Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P. Keen, Suzanne (2003): Narrative Form. New York: Palgrave. Kristeva, Julia (1980): Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia UP. Lanser, Susan Sniader (1981): The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP. Lazarillo de Tormes (1987): Rico, Francisco (ed.). Madrid: Cátedra. Leitch, Vincent B. (1983): Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction. New York: Columbia UP. Matute, Ana María (1961): “Pecado de omisión.” In: Historias de la Artámila. Barcelona: Destino, pp. 29-35. Melberg, Arne (1995): Theories of Mimesis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. O’neill, Patrick (1984): Fictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory. Toronto: U. of Toronto P. Prince, Gerald (1982): Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative. Berlin and New York: Mouton. Rimmon-kenan, Shlomith (1983): Narrative Fiction. Contemporary Poetics. London and New York: Methuen. Rivers, Elias L. (ed. and trans.) (1988): Renaissance and Baroque Poetry of Spain. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press. Ruiz, Juan, Arcipreste de Hita (1985): “… la disputaçión que los griegos e los romanos en uno ovieron.” In: Girón Alconchel, José Luis (ed.): Libro de Buen Amor. Madrid: Castalia, pp. 70-75. Shklovsky, Victor (1965): “Art as Technique.” In: Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln: U. of Nebraska P., pp. 3-24. Twain, Mark (1985): “The Story of the Bad Little Boy.” In: Kaplan, Justin (ed.): The Signet Classics Book of Mark Twain’s Short Stories. New York: New American Library, pp. 7-9. Watt, Ian P. (1957): The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: U. of California P. White, Hayden (1978): “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact.” In: Tropics of Discourse. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP., pp. 81-100.

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Don Quixote as Museum Charles Victor Ganelin Miami University The role of the senses in Early Modern European literature, as a number of excellent studies have pointed out over the past decade, helps to define in both a personal and material way the relationship between the individual and society. Literary studies have responded amply to these questions and recent anthropological approaches to human sensorial experience have resulted in a growing interdisciplinary view of Early Modern life.1 How one learns, perceives objects, responds to social stimuli, or approaches the universal questions of existence, is always taken in by the senses, and as a result our understanding of them requires ever-widening contexts.2 In the world of early seventeenth-century Spain, Cervantes understood the importance and implications of a full sensory experience —the loss of use in his left hand from the Battle of Lepanto, five years of captivity in Algeria, ongoing penury— and he teases them out especially in Don Quixote. The sense of touch in the novel is central to an understanding of both how and why Don Quixote interacts with those around him, whether people real or imagined, or objects real, transformed, or created. His attempts to interweave his chivalric worldview within the world that he travels are frequently carried out through the sense of touch;3 the Classen and Howes are especially helpful as introductions to this inquiry, while Jütte offers a worthwhile history of the senses. The fundamental resource remains Vinge. 2 Smith offers a brief perspective on the historical understanding of the role of the senses in his Introduction, “Making Sense of History.” 3 On other occasions I have spoken about Don Quixote’s (mis)use of his hands and the relationship between poor tactility, language and narrative. This previous work, along with the current essay, is part of a book in progress on the senses and Early Modern Spanish literature. For an analysis of hand use and its relation to language in Calderón, see Ganelin. 1

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actual touching of objects evinces a close relationship between this sense, which occupies the bottom rung in traditionally-rendered hierarchies of the senses, and an ability to narrate properly. In particular, Don Quixote fails repeatedly both to insert himself into the chivalric narrative he so intensely desires to perform and to imbue contemporary life with the values he has discerned in the chivalric romances.4 However, touch presents a curious twist to the paradigm in chapter 62 of Part II in the episode of the “cabeza encantada” (enchanted head) as here it relates to the practice of collecting that had become common by the early seventeenth century in Spain as well as in the rest of Europe.5 The events of this chapter are well-known: after leaving the company of the bandit Roque Guinart amid the lawless region of Cataluña, Don Quixote is met at his entrance into Barcelona by Guinart’s friend, the merchant Antonio Moreno. Moreno, informed by Guinart of his new guest’s tendencies, leads the knight to his home and settles him in, having arranged for a series of mocking practical jokes that recall in nature if not in kind those carried out by the Duke and Duchess (II. 30-57).6 The principal incident of the chapter concerns the fortune-telling “cabeza encantada,” whose “virtues,” of course, are created expressly for the enjoyment of Antonio Moreno and his guests at the expense of Don Quixote. This reduced summary cannot begin to tell the rest of the story, which constitutes another stage in Don Quixote’s sensorial passage through the

4 In an article currently in preparation I argue that, in I.43, Don Quixote’s being tied into the donkey halter at the hands of Maritornes, Luscinda and the innkeeper’s daughter is directly related to his inability to weave as well as to live the impossible narratives derived from his reading. For an anatomical reading of this chapter, see Fernández. Equally important for laying the groundwork of a hands/narrative intersection is Don Quixote’s attempt in I.2 to fashion a helmet appropriate for a knight-errant; his first attempt at testing its mettle by hitting it with his sword is met with disaster as the construction is broken to pieces, yet Don Quixote refuses to retry the experiment once he has rebuilt the object. Ironically all that he learns from the experiment is to place the same sort of misguided “faith” in its quality as in his desire to resurrect the novelistic world of knights. 5 The bibliography on collecting is lengthy. An excellent and detailed starting point is found in Daston and Park; for an emphasis on science, see Campbell. For other fundamental studies see Castillo; Pomian; Checa; Morán and Checa; and Pearce (especially Part II, “The Poetics of Collecting,” 1995: 159-279). This brief list is intended as a general guide to the topic; Castillo represents one of the few fully developed studies for Early Modern Spain and offers a good bibliography. The reasons that collecting became popular are many, and arise in the early Renaissance, as Daston and Park indicate and as Findlen argues in detail. Barkan, for his part, illuminates the late fifteenthand sixteenth-century literal uncoverings of classical ruins in Italy, events which traded on the already-growing sense of curiosity of the period. The bibliography on this study is likewise long. Fundamental studies are Avalle-Arce, Joly, Lee, Murillo, and Redondo. 6 All references are to the Cátedra edition prepared by John J. Allen, and are indicated by Part.Chapter.Page.

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novelized landscape of La Mancha and, now, Cataluña. In the episode, Don Quixote’s touch —indeed, the question of tactility as a whole— is questioned anew. Enrique García Santo-Tomás has written of a “poética del tacto literario” (2004: 289), part of the sensuality prevalent during the period of Philip IV (1621-62).7 We see evidence of this much earlier, as Cervantes demonstrates how the senses connect to a much larger poetics of knowledge and learning at the same time that we follow both development and denouement of Don Quixote’s final adventures. This essay explores Don Quixote’s sense of touch in relation to the Early Modern Wunderkammer, or chamber of wonders (or curiosities) and argues that Antonio Moreno creates such a chamber to play on Don Quixote’s skewed apprehension of sensorial experience until Don Quixote himself becomes a self-contained museum. In the Wunderkammer, age-old curiosities, ancient wonders or simply strange, unusual, monstrous, or even quotidian objects frequently were brought together for study as well as enjoyment by their owners and invited observers all drawn by the spirit of Renaissance discovery and curiosity. The conscientious practice of collecting began in earnest in the late medieval period, tracing a long trajectory from medieval bestiaries, for example. The culture of collecting by Cervantes’s time became finely honed through the magnificent armories of the Catholic Kings and Charles V, to the art collections of Charles and especially of Philip II and IV (Checa; Brown) to the chamber of wonders of D. Juan de Espina, whose curiosities Quevedo considered “abreviatura de las maravillas de Europa” (qtd. in Morán/ Checa 1989: 207; concise reflection of Europe’s marvels, my translation). At the same time the proliferation of collections—which over time evolved into the more familiar idea of a museum—in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries logically accompanied a desire to produce texts, written by collectors themselves, that explained the wonders of the world (Findlen 1989: 61). Objects in such collections engage the senses, especially sight and touch, in an era already rich in sensorial experience and reveal eccentricity, display innovation, explore artistic boundaries, challenge scientific assumptions, and develop projects of classification. One need only view the series of paintings by Rubens and Brueghel entitled The Five Senses, located in Madrid’s Prado Museum, for a vision of unusual items that reflect the typically eclectic chambers, often by virtue of objects juxtaposed with dissimilar ones, each calling attention to itself and to the collection as a whole.8

García Santo-Tomás’s book (see Works Cited) is organized around the five senses and the city of Madrid. For a fuller rendering of a poetics of touch than I can provide here, see his chapter 6. 8 Also see Los cinco sentidos y el arte, published by the Museo del Prado for its 1995 exhibit of the same title. 7

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The context I have briefly outlined above helps us to understand how Cervantes, in Don Quixote, induces us to match curiosity with curiosity in order to explore the novel’s engagement with a world of objects, one of Cervantes’s many strategies to display Don Quixote’s interaction with the physical world within the novel and in the wider cultural world. Throughout his errantry Don Quixote comes into contact with numerous objects in both Parts I and II: helmets, supposedly beautiful damsels seemingly in distress, muleteers, corpses, enchanted boats, and heads, to select but a few; these objects, in turn, appear to Don Quixote to have a life of their own and a specific relation to the individuals with whom they are or have been associated.9 Each owner leaves a particular imprint upon the object; the object then carries the cumulative imprints throughout its path to destruction or enshrinement.10 Don Quixote becomes both a physical and metaphorical repository for the many objects he has “collected”; they, then, are transformed, again physically or metaphorically, through contact with him, from implements with a practical value into artifacts that no longer serve their original purpose. At the same time and from Don Quixote’s point of view, objects associated with him undergo an inversion, from old and useless to marvelous, a change effected by his sense of touch. Some items, infused with his missions impossible and improbable, are to be enshrined, not touched, just like in a modern museum. A prime example is his second-hand armor: in 1.3 Don Quixote watches over these noble accoutrements of his profession as if he were a museum guard or the guardian of a peculiar and particular metonymy; his armor is part and parcel of him, it represents the duties he feels compelled to fulfill. By forbidding it to be touched he alters its status, however temporarily, from object to artifact, limiting its current function to the elicitation of pseudo-admiration and (false) reverence.11 When the muleteer insists 9 Whether objects can actually communicate knowledge or impart their essence through the senses, especially through touch, is both part of a Renaissance belief and an aspect of Locke’s investigations into knowledge and the soul. While I do suggest below that Don Quixote is led to “feel” the importance of the head by touching it, a fuller airing of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding would be necessary to understand Don Quixote’s fraught relationship with the objects he touches. I refer the reader both to Locke and, for a concise discussion of the problem, to Candlin. 10 Space does not allow a full airing of this question, and I direct the interested reader to a special issue of the Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez (40.1), “L’objet de main en main/El objeto de mano en mano.” A different collection of essays, Objets et mémoires, offers a philosophical study, and includes an article by Gérard Lenclud, “Être un artefact.” 11 An argument can be made that an object, when removed from circulation, becomes an artifact. Lenclud suggests that such an example can be a boat: is the object that sails the seas the same as one sitting in a museum or atop a monument (Lenclud 2007: 60).

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on removing Don Quixote’s armor and weapons from the fountain’s edge in order to allow his animals to drink, the “truth” of these objects becomes sullied in no small measure because the touch of the “other” —mule drivers were often of Islamic descent— presents a violent interruption of Don Quixote’s chivalric reveries as this touch is foreign to his idealized narrative. As Don Quixote accumulates odd items throughout his travels we need to ask —as Octave Debary and Philippe Gabel argue with regard to other second-hand items— if these “things” control Don Quixote or if Don Quixote controls them, who is the collector and who or what the collected. These daily objects take on a role in Don Quixote’s life as his life takes on a role with them, a process which invests them with a vital history (Debary/Gabel 2010: 126). Don Quixote stamps upon his objects all that his very literary existence implies. Similarly his touch both recalls and affects the way he fashions (or not) his helmet, or the way he narrates (or not) his deeds, or the way he and narration suffer (in a kind of Gordian knot) when Maritornes, Lucinda, and the innkeeper’s daughter, from a hayloft, tie his hand in Donkey’s halter (I.43), leaving Don Quixote unable to free himself (physically and metaphorically) and suspended just above Rocinante’s saddle. At the risk of a generalization, Part I of Don Quixote tells, while Part II “displays”: the difference lies in the characters’ awareness of Part I’s existence, which turns Part II into a chamber of curiosities whose most important artifact is Part I itself. In general the transactions of Part II that occur through the sense of touch give new meanings to the object. An item’s new “owner” creates specific effects as well, especially when objects cross social and cultural boundaries. A look back at a Part I episode (I. 21; 45) is telling: a barber’s basin (“bacina”), which resembles for Don Quixote the “yelmo de Mambrino” (Mambrino’s helmet) and has long been desired by him for its alleged chivalric status, falls into his hands in an attack on the defenseless barber/surgeon. The essence of this object emanates from the use made of it by its owner: the gear of an everyday surgeon barber or chivalric attire. The difference in this case is reflected in its positioning, convex to receive the head to be shorn or collect the blood to be let, concave to cover the head that rights wrongs, fulfilling its condition, through the metamorphosis impelled by Don Quixote, as marvel. The bifurcation of purpose is reinforced linguistically through the confusion of male and female direct object pronouns (“lo” and “la” referring to “el yelmo” and “la bacina,” respectively), wherein the struggle between social and physical positioning come together (I.21.260, for example).12

When the barber finds himself again in the company of Don Quixote in I.45 the narration suggests a magical nature to the object’s transformation: “el barbero, cuya bacía allí delante de sus ojos se le había vuelto en yelmo de Mambrino...” (I.45.531). 12

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Such effects suggest that objects can also be transmitters of virtue or other moral qualities, an aspect of the material goods that comes to the fore in Part II and that is initiated in an early chapter. Cervantes writes in II.3, concerning the publication and ensuing popularity of Part I and its display that “los niños la manosean, los mozos la leen, los hombres la entienden y los viejos la celebran” (II.3.51). The reception traces the book’s movement through the senses (touch and sight, especially, in this case) until it reaches a new status (an object to be celebrated, admired, held in esteem). The profound differences that mark the tone of Parts I and II also appear in the nature of objects and the manner of their collection. If in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spain —as Miguel Morán and Fernando Checa amply detail— collections of extensive varieties of an object (such as armor, weaponry, or jewels held by royals and noblemen) evolved into unique chambers of wonder —so too are the combined objects of Part II distinct from those in Part I. The episode of the Cueva de Montesinos (II.23-24), whose legendary marvels Don Quixote wishes to examine first-hand, is a case in point. Antonio Bernat Vistarini argues that the assortment of unusual items Don Quixote finds within the cave are worthy of a collector’s interest and reflect Early Modern collections of wonders (2001: 678). The young man who guides Don Quixote to the cave, a cousin of a licentiate Don Quixote had met in the preceding episode of Camacho’s wedding, is also the author of a book on collections, in this case “libreas” (liveries; II.22.190) —he claims to identify and describe 703 distinct varieties of them; he is also preparing yet another, humorous treatise on collections. For present purposes the episode serves to indicate Cervantes’s awareness and satire of Early Modern collections and compendia, reinforced by the guide’s serious yet exaggerated pursuit of the unusual, leading Don Quixote and Sancho to the site of the fantastical. Bernat Vistarini notes at the conclusion of his essay that the space of the cave presents the erudite’s ideal “studiolo” (2001: 680), wherein one can view fixed or immutable objects, a Wunderkammer, where Don Quixote is but a spectator. This relationship between observer and observed takes a dramatic turn during Don Qujiote’s and Sancho Panza’s extended stay at the ducal palace (initiated in II.31), where the pair is subjected and observed reacting to myriad practical jokes. Don Quixote’s fame had preceded him (through Part I), and the Duke and Duchess believe themselves fortunate in having “acquired” the pair, even if temporarily, in order to slake their thirst for curiosities. The episode, lasting 27 chapters and being the longest within both parts of the novel dedicated to thematically-related episodes, is the first time the reader perceives Don Quixote himself as a collected object.

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The events in Antonio Moreno’s home in Barcelona (II.62), soon after Don Quixote’s and Sancho’s unpleasant (for them) farewell from the Duke and Duchess, both enlarge the chamber of curiosities initiated in the Cave of Montesinos as well as in the ducal palace and complete the inversion of the relationship between observer and observed. Don Quixote is prepared for his entrance into Barcelona by Roque Guinart, an outlaw with whom Don Quixote and Sancho had spent several days: “se le pondría en mitad de la playa de la ciudad, armado de todas sus armas, sobre Rocinante su caballo, y a su escudero Sancho sobre un asno” (II.60.489). I think it is important to note that Guinart “handles” Don Quixote as if he were staging a play or preparing an object for general admiration. Reinforced are a tone, attitude, and orientation that further differentiates Part I from Part II. Don Quixote, once again, has lost control of his image, of presenting himself as he sees fit, given a form predetermined by Part I and conforming to the reception by Part I’s novelized readers. The actual arrival in Barcelona coincides, according to the text’s usual disregard for real-time chronology, with the festival honoring St. John (Día de San Juan, June 24, yet the novel suggests that this arrival takes place in August) and produces a raucous turnout that Don Quixote believes to be part of his welcome. Once met by Guinart’s friend D. Antonio Moreno, the host leads the pair to his home, where a safe asylum from the crowds comes to serve as an elaborate showcase for this recent acquisition, an “object” perfectly suited to a bustling Barcelona where, like in so many Early Modern cities, tactility constitutes a fundamental aspect of modern life (Cowan/Steard 2007: 6). Antonio first removes Don Quixote’s armor —an act that suggests removal of ritualized or even mystical garments, as Don Quixote placed such a value on them— before leading him, in his “acamuzado vestido” (II.62.493), to the balcony where the crowds, we read, “como a mona le miraban” (II.62.493), with carriages parading beneath him on the street (the text refers to “libreas” [liveries] recalling the book in its extensive varieties written by the guide to the Cave). Many collectors of the period opened their homes to curious observers and observers of the curious. David Castillo has recently written, in a different context, about “a metonymic identification of curiosities with the curious subjects who enjoy them” (2010: 66), and there is an intriguing oscillation in focus between Don Quixote’s antics and the observation of them.13 Antonio Moreno, the text makes clear, wishes to engage in what he believes to be and what was then generally considered good-natured fun, by draw-

The elaborate mockery of Don Quixote that had been prepared by the Duke and Duchess is certainly for their and their household’s benefit, but the primary observation is from Cide Hamete Benengeli’s perspective; in Antonio Moreno’s house, the narrative focus is on Moreno’s reaction. 13

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ing out Don Quixote’s obsessions. At the same time that he follows the collector’s cultural script and shares the wonder with invited friends, Moreno also opens the inside space to the outer world by exhibiting (or, again, staging) Don Quixote on the balcony. This initial display together with the ensuing banquet represent a synthesis of the primary sensorial experiences Don Quixote and Sancho have undergone throughout Part II; Sancho, particularly, is said to be quite content “por parecerle que se había hallado, sin saber cómo ni cómo no, otras bodas de Camacho, otra casa como la de don Diego de Miranda y otro castillo, como el del duque” (II.62.493).14 The narration returns to Don Quixote at the moment D. Antonio leads him, by the hand, to a different room containing the enchanted head. A location, doubly or triply “within,” is an Early Modern commonplace found also in numerous Cervantine texts; the placement corresponds to the period’s popular conception of the universe as informed by Ptolomy, of concentric spaces, or, in Constance Classen’s words, “an enclosed space of enclosed spaces animated and ordered by a network of multisensory energies” (1993: 362). Findlen speaks of the studiolo —the place of collected wondrous objects—whose completeness arises out of enclosure (1989: 64). At the same time, during this period of great discovery and uncovery, spaces within spaces invite investigation —seeing, touching, even tasting— and the poetics, whether of Cervantes or others, demand it. In other words, we as readers are confronted by a world between the visible and invisible, hidden from immediate sight, forcing a dependence on other senses to “see” and comprehend.15 Don Quixote exists between these constructs, the visible one of the narrative, the invisible one of the particular narrative world of his making —woven from the other narratives of his reading— and the attempts at making it visible are his adventures. Thus the “virtues” of the enchanted head, as well as any other objects with which Don Quixote comes into contact, are “invisible” to others around him. This exposition in Part II, within what is clearly meant to be a chamber of curiosities, reflects, too, a wider cultural moment before an important shift

14 Sancho and his relationship to the senses is a topic unto itself. Though food, luxury, and space appeal to Sancho’s senses as well as to his selective memory, they inform a rough sort of base materiality that do not teach nor from which has Sancho learned; the emphasis on his supposed gluttony as expressed by Antonio Moreno during dinnertime conversation with Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and a few guests, as numerous readers have noted, serve primarily to refute this characterization found in the apocryphal second part of the novel and not to draw out additional character development. 15 Pomian offers an insightful comment on the act of collection as “an attempt to create a link between the visible and the invisible” (1990: 5).

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in how viewers considered such objects. Anticipating the development of museums, a movement “from the tactile to the visual,” in Susan Stewart’s words (2001: 171), coincides with a long-held fascination of the visual taking place through tactile means. The exacting sense of touch for Juan Luis Vives, for example, may allow to verify “the falsity of illusion of relief in painting” (qtd. in Stewart 2001: 171) (a superb example contemporary with Cervantes would be Caravaggio’s 1603 Doubting Thomas wherein Thomas’s fingers forced by Jesus’s firm touch into the wound serves to prove the “truth” of Resurrection while it constitutes Caravaggio’s exploration of how to render three-dimensionality in a two-dimensional medium, an idea elaborated by Margaret O’Rourke Boyle, 191). Stewart elaborates on museum space, noting that it is “a consequence of a series of gestures and actions” which elicit “gestural responses” by the viewer (2001: 171).16 We expect, then, the ensuing play between the tactile and the visual in the presence of the enchanted head; Don Quixote, after promising not to utter a word about its “secret” existence, is led to it: “En esto, tomándole la mano don Antonio, se la paseó por la cabeza de bronce y por toda la mesa, y por el pie de jaspe sobre que se sostenía” (II.62.496). The simple act of touching hand on hand on head familiarizes the object, demystifies it, and even sensitizes it. Finally touching the object permits an effective transmission of its essence and proffers a sort of knowledge, a kind of comfort (Watteau/Rouillard, “Presentation” 10) in its supposed titillating virtue to foretell the future (much like Maese Pedro’s “mono adivino,” fortune-telling monkey). John Locke held that while sight, of all the senses, is the most “comprehensive,” it is impossible for it to “grasp solidity” (qtd. in Candlin 2008: 285). Touch, for Locke, is a prerequisite for learning about the physical, external world (Candlin 2008: 285), and what Don Quixote does not learn throughout Parts I and II constitutes ample evidence of his faulty sense of touch, a source of the novel’s ongoing irony. Touch is now reinforced as both D. Antonio’s and Don Quixote’s hands probe the enchanted head in order to best learn of its powers. Even though the enchanted head never really predicts, it is later deemed by the Holy Office to carry potential danger for the uneducated, especially, I would add, if it were to be touched by the uninstructed, undiscerning masses. It could also be argued that the room holding the enchanted head is designed to be a masculine space. Findlen (1989: 69) describes the studiolo as a room both public and private, therefore masculine by definition. The presence of two women observing Don Quixote observing the head, all the while quietly joking and tittering between themselves, undercuts the room’s importance and allows the reader to understand even more profoundly that this elaborate machinery serves only to mock Don Quijxte. Yet the broad practice of creating curiosity chambers informs the space of the mockery. 16

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Indeed, the elaborate story of the head’s provenance could easily run afoul of the Council of Trent, as the caresses D. Antonio imposes convert it into an object of (mock) veneration; the Council had prohibited images whose finishing details might carry “seductive charm” (qtd. in Stewart 2001: 173). What could be more seductive than the multiplying effects of hand on hand on head, or a more seductive Cervantine narration on the crisis of knowledge even if through the example of a consistent failure to recognize a reality through touch in a world of tactility.17 One of D. Antonio’s final acts with Don Quixote is to parade his guest through the streets. Don Quixote is dressed, not as a knight with his well-worn regalia, but “de rúa” (in promenade clothes) (II.62.497), not on Rocinante but on a steed: “Pusiéronle el balandrán, y en las espaldas, sin que lo viese, le cosieron un pargamino, donde le escribieron con letras grandes: Este es don Quijote de la Mancha” (II.62.497); the narration takes the trouble to repeat its reading of the tag, as if to reinforce objectification: “En comenzando el paseo, llevaba el rétulo los ojos de cuantos venían a verle, y como leían: ‘Este es don Quijote de la Mancha,’ admirábase don Quixote de ver que cuantos le miraban le nombraban y conocían” (II. 62.497). If the scene in the enchanted head’s room intimated that the true object of curiosity was Don Quixote himself—all eyes watched Don Quixote watching the head—all pretenses now fall away. Just as the cabeza encantada is revealed to have all its depth on the surface —i.e., inside there is no there there, all forma without materia— all pretenses of D. Antonio’s doing his guest an “honor” falls away with the explanatory sign. Don Quixote is now the walking curiosity, object and museum rolled into one, wearing the telltale label that calls the observers’ attention to the artifact which has been removed from its natural environment, placed on a variety of pedestal (like the enchanted head) and like the head available to be touched.18 The crowds surrounding Don Quixote soon become unmanageable: “pero fue tanta la priesa que los muchachos y toda la gente tenía leyendo el rétulo, que se le hubo de quitar don Antonio, como que le quitaba otra cosa.” (II.62.498). Don Quixote has become such a popular exhibit that he is placed in danger and must be deaccessioned, left behind in the prosaic world, removed from the “temple” (Weil 1995: 8) containing such objects. The process calls into question the nature of the curiosity on 17 It could be argued that Cervantes, ahead of his time, suggests that touch’s ubiquitousness actually devalues the sense. 18 Agustín Redondo reads this incident (2000: 505) as a reduction of the character, as the sign Don Quixote wears, recalls those proceeding in Inquisitorial punishments; Don Quixote is also mounted on a mule, not a horse, leading to further ridicule. Redondo enriches our understanding of the episode yet does not invalidate what I propose.

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display in its chamber. Is its attractiveness determined by its nature, or by someone calling attention to its rarity, strangeness, newness, unusualness? Touching or not touching an object is related to a belief system associated with it or even evinced by it. Whether superstition (in the case of religion) or curiosity (in the case of unusual quotidian objects, or even written collections like those of the cousin) lies behind the attraction, how the object is treated determines its value. Antoinette Molinié writes about an untouchable Andalusian Virgen del Rocío for which ritualistic dressing both reaffirms untouchability and creates an object rendered accessible to the public (2010: 75). While the image of a virgin in a public processional does not appear to conform to the concept of a “collection,” the singularity of her story or her biography or her invention makes of her a true curiosity, but one invested with the sacred by means of a “holy” touch and reinforced through ritual “preparation” by a chosen few (consider Don Quixote standing guard over his armor in 1.3; and the episode of the “cuerpo muerto” (cadaver) in I.19, the remains of a venerated saint being transported to a new burial ground). Don Quixote’s presence in the streets of Barcelona, with the defining identification tag sewn to the back of his processional clothing, elicits a similar kind of devotion “a lo burlesco,” an object whose backstory is already known to many (as well as in the apocryphal second part). The problem with Don Quixote becomes knotty as the throngs surround the object of mock veneration, threatening the particular status that Antonio Moreno attempts to invest in him. The simple act of removing the sewn sign (how D. Antonio manages to do so “como que le quitaba otra cosa” defies explanation) deaccessions this object, as I said, from D. Antonio’s museum, demystifies the persona (without the sign attention must no longer be paid), and deflates the character. All that remains is the ensuing defeat to be suffered by Don Quixote at the hands of the Caballero de la Blanca Luna and the long road to La Mancha. The only remnant of chivalry is Don Quixote’s promise, in defeat, to return home. Yet one collection yields to another. Each time an object of curiosity is viewed, touched, exchanged, and touched again, it takes on a new life imbued by the new touch or the new view or even a new label. Bernat Vistarini’s perspective of the Cueva de Montesinos as a collection that conforms to displays in the 16th and 17th centuries underscores what Antonio Moreno attempts to do. Curiosities, wonders and objects shift over time and constitute, as Joaquim Pais de Brito suggests, a place of inexhaustible abundance of reflection on the subject, on groups, on society (“le lieu d’un foisonnement inépusiable de réflexion sur le sujet, sur les groupes, sur la societé,” my translation from the French) (2010: 145). Antonio Moreno may acquire and finally unacquire Don Quixote, distance himself from him, and leave him to his literary fate, but as María Antonia

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Garcés might argue every episode, every captivating moment in Don Quixote’s adventures is a captive’s tale, whether Don Quixote is bound by the hand in the harness of his own convoluted narrative or is labeled and displayed, made into a discreet object of discretionary desire. The contact between Don Quixote and Antonio Moreno, the literal physical contact among Don Quixote, the enchanted head and Antonio Moreno, speaks to the role of senses in allowing objects to move from the superficially fixed fictive to a transient “truth” or a “real.” The objects the fiction contains remain in critical movement, a very old yet always new kind of chamber. Throughout these manifold collections touch imposes the change required to resist the fixity of the object, to enable us to perceive differently, and to avoid becoming enshrined, out of touch, out of sync, with the object and the ambience that produced it. The ultimate collection remains the book,19 whose original today can be handled only by dispensation and with special gloves. The curiosities in the cabinet become our own curiosities and objects to invite our examination as we take them up and touch them in our own turn and in our own way, not to enshrine them but to make them more available and more “reachable” to each and every reader who is charged with the sacred duty of handling this curious, collectible, enchanting, and enchanted book. Works Cited Avalle-Arce, Juan Bautista (1983): “La cabeza encantada (Don Quijote, II, 62).” In: Mead, E.D. (ed.): Homenaje a Luis Alberto Sánchez. Madrid: Insula, pp. 49-53. Barkan, Leonard (1999): Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. New Haven: Yale UP. Bernat Vistarini, Antonio (2001): “‘Componer libros para dar a la estampa’ y las maravillas de la Cueva de Montesinos.” In: Bernat Vistarini, Antonio (ed.): Volver a Cervantes. Actas del IV Congreso Internacional de la Asociación de Cervantistas. 2 vols. Palma: Universitat de les Illes Balears, 1, pp. 671-84. Boyle, Margaret O’Rourke (1998): Senses of Touch. Human Dignity and Deformity from Michelangelo to Calvin. Leiden, Boston: Brill. Brown, Jonathan (1987): “Felipe IV, el rey de coleccionistas.” In: Fragmentos: Revista de Arte, 11, pp. 4-20. Campbell, Mary Baine (1999): Wonder and Science. Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca: Cornell UP.

The book as collection fits well with Don Quijote. Neil Kenny argues in this respect that objects on display are both physical and metaphorical; even “‘the history of learning’ (historia litteraria or histoire littéraire)” was considered a “metaphorical collection of curiosities” (2006: 46). 19

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Candlin, Fiona (2008): “Touch, and the Limits of the Rational Museum or Can Matter Think?” In: Senses & Society, 3, 3, pp. 277-92. Castillo, David (2010): Baroque Horrors. Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities. Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan P. Cervantes, Miguel de (1990): Don Quijote de la Mancha. Allen, John (ed.). Madrid: Cátedra. Checa, Fernando (1992): Felipe II. Mecenas de las artes. Madrid: Nerea. Classen, Constance (1993): Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Sense in History and Across Culture. London: Routledge. — (2000): “Historicizing the Senses.” In: Encyclopedia of European Social History from 1350-2000. Stearns, Peter N. (ed.). Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, pp. 355-64. Cowan, Alexander/Steward, Jill (eds.) (2007): The City and the Senses. Urban Culture Since 1500. Aldershot: Ashgate. Daston, Lorraine/Park, Katharine (1998): Wonders and the Order of Nature. 11501750. New York: Zone. Debary, Octave/Gabel, Philippe (2010): “Seconde main et deuxième vie. Objets, souvenirs et photographies.” In: L’objet de main en main/El objeto de mano en mano. Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, 40, 1, pp. 123-42. Fernández, Enrique (2001): “‘Sola una de vuestras hermosas manos’: Desmembramiento petrarquista y disección anatómica en la venta (Don Quijote, I, 43).” In: Cervantes, 21, 2, pp. 27-49. Findlen, Paula (1989): “The Museum: Its Classical Etymology and Renaissance Genealogy.” In: Journal of the History of Collections, 1, 1, pp. 59-78. Ganelin, Charles (2001): “Calderón Incorporated: Hands and Speech in Las tres justicias en una and El postrer duelo de España.” In: Bulletin of the Comediantes, 53, 1, pp. 179-95. Garcés, María Antonia (2005): Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive’s Tale. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP. García Santo-Tomás, Enrique (2004): Espacio urbano y creación literaria en el Madrid de Felipe IV. Pamplona/Madrid/Frankfurt: Universidad de Navarra/Iberoamericana/ Vervuert. Howes, David (ed.) (2005): Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg. Joly, Monique (1991): “Las burlas de Don Antonio en torno a la estancia de Don Quijote en Barcelona.” In: Actas del segundo coloquio internacional de la Asociación de Cervantistas. Madrid: Anthropos, pp. 71-81. Jütte, Robert (2005): A History of the Senses. From Antiquity to Cyberspace. Cambridge: Polity P. Kenny, Neil (2006): “The Metaphorical Collecting of Curiosities in Early Modern France and Germany.” In: Evans, R. J. W./Marr, Alexander (eds.): Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 43-62. Lee, Christina H. (2005): “Don Antonio Moreno y el “discreto” negocio de los moriscos Ricote y Ana Félix.” In: Hispania, 88, 1, pp. 32-40. Lenclud, Gérard (2007): “Être un artefact.” In: Turgeon, Laurier/Debary, Octave (eds.): Objets et mémoires. Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, pp. 59-73.

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Lledó, Emilio (ed.) (1995): Los cinco sentidos y el arte. Madrid: Museo del Prado. Molinié, Antoinette (2010): “La déesse intouchable: une Vierge andalouse.” In: Melanges, 40, 1, pp. 57-77. Morán, Miguel/Checa, Fernando (1985): El coleccionismo en España. De la cámara de maravillas a la galería de pinturas. Madrid: Cátedra. Murillo, Luis A. (1972): “The Summer of Myth: Don Quijote de la Mancha and Amadís de Gaula.” In: Philological Quarterly, 51, 1, pp. 145-57. Pais de Brito, Joaquim (2010): “L’objet, le musée et la main interdite.” In: L’objet de main en main/El objeto de mano en mano. Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, 40, 1, pp. 143-45. Pearce, Susan M. (1995): On Collecting. An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition. London and New York: Routledge. Pomian, Krzysztof (1990): Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500-1800. Trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Portier. Cambridge: Polity. Redondo, Augustín (2000): “El episodio barcelonés de Don Quijote y Sancho frente a Don Antonio Moreno (II, 61-62): Intertextualidad, burla y elaboración cervantina.” In: Volver a Cervantes, pp. 499-513. Smith, Mark M. (2007): Sensing the Past. Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U. of California P. Stewart, Susan (2001): Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago: U. of Chicago P. Vinge, Louise (1975): The Five Senses. Studies in a Literary Tradition. Lund: Berlingska Boktryckeriet. Watteau, Fabienne/Rouillard, Pierre (coords.) (2010): “L’objet et la main.” In: Melanges, 40, 1, pp. 11-16. Weil, Stephen E. (1995): A Cabinet of Curiosities. Inquiries into Museums and their Prospects. Washington: Smithsonian Institution P.

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Writing to be Heard: Performing Music in Don Quixote Chad M. Gasta Iowa State University Music is so prominent in Don Quixote that it would seem that Miguel de Cervantes must have been a trained instrumentalist or singer. While it is possible that Cervantes was a musician —or received some early instruction in the several Jesuit schools where he studied— nothing in the historical record assures that to be the case.1 But, the archival record also cannot account for the writer’s remarkable knowledge of a range of sixteenth and seventeenth-century musical pieces and instruments that appear in his works. Consider, for example, the frequency and number of musical references in Don Quixote: some allusion to music appears in 51 of the 126 chapters comprising Parts 1 and 2 and thirty-five different musical instruments are mentioned 125 times in different combinations (Leal Pinar 2006: 71-76). In a work of literature that has little to do with music specifically, such an extraordinary number and variety of songs and dances invites us to consider Cervantes’s According to Mariano Soriano Fuertes, Cervantes was a guitarist (1855: 153), and Charles Haywood states that the author’s time as a captive in Algiers provided the opportunity to become a “fairly accomplished performer of the guitar” and sing old ballads to pass the time (1948: 144–45). None of the major biographies on Cervantes provides information on any musical training. Except to state that Cervantes’ father, Rodrigo, owned a viol (1986: 59), Jean Canavaggio makes no reference to music in Cervantes’ life. However, Cervantes’ own education would have included musical instruction. The Jesuits, who were acclaimed for integrating song and performance into daily lessons, schooled Cervantes in Córdoba and Seville. The Jesuit Chapel Master, Alsonso de Vieras, was Cervantes’ teacher in Córdoba where the master trained the choir in polyphony, known then as canto de órgano. Given that musical training was mandatory in all Jesuit schools, it is likely that Cervantes was trained under Vieras, but to what degree of expertise, we cannot know. 1

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engagement with music in the novel. Yet the topic has received scant attention. Elsewhere in an essay on music in Don Quixote I tried to show that Cervantes was writing at a historically pivotal moment when literary culture was expanding but where oral discourse still dominated Golden Age Spain.2 In his novel, Cervantes grappled with this cultural shift by featuring implicitly oral poetic forms —sonnets and ballads (romances)— accompanied by reading cues that serve as strategies for performing the text. Such an approach to writing suggests he was accommodating an oral society. This essay will expand somewhat on that initial study by examining the remaining poetic-musical forms I was unable to consider previously: villancicos, coplas, canciones, seguidillas, silvas, madrigals, and Cervantes’s original creation, the first ever ovillejo. I will provide an overview of these different pieces, their origins and sonic significance in the novel in order to demonstrate that while lyrical poetry appears in Don Quixote as a literary object, such verse forms are actually meant to be considered oral markers to guide the reader toward auditory performance when his work was read for an audience. Such a strategy on Cervantes’s part would have made sense given he was writing at a time when orality still dominated social, religious, and juridical circles, and where any sort of widespread literacy was still off in the future. But, more than anything else, I want to demonstrate how important musical pieces are to plot and characterization and how Cervantes had an amazing agility with a variety of lyrical verse forms. Mikhail Bakhtin famously described Don Quixote as a polyphonic work where a plethora of characters and voices is freed from total authorial control.3 The notion of literary polyphony, however, can be taken quite literarily because the novel at times overwhelms with a sonic outpouring of musical forms and styles forwarded by a variety of characters and voices. Numerous characters sing or play instruments, entire episodes pivot on melodious interludes, or music is operative in background context.4 In Cervantes’s Spain, both historically and literarily music 2 See my article “‘Señora, donde hay música no puede haber cosa mala:’ Music, Poetry and Orality in Don Quijote.” This essay builds on that earlier study, which examined only the romances and sonnets appearing in the novel. 3 This idea was first examined in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984: 33) and further developed in “Discourses in the Novel.” 4 Some of the more well known examples include the following: the knight calls his steed Rocinante, “nombre, a su parecer, alto y sonoro,” and his lady Dulcinea, “nombre, a su parecer, músico y peregrino” (1999: 154); Don Quixote tells Sancho that “todos o los más caballeros andantes de la edad pasada eran grandes trovadores y grandes músicos; que estas dos habilidades, o gracias, por mejor decir, son anexas a los enamorados andantes” (1999: 212); his rival, the Caballero de los Espejos, sings a sonnet dedicated to the imaginary Casildea de Vandalia while playing “un laúd o vigüela” (1999: 353); at the inn, “sonó su silbato de cañas cuatro o cinco veces” which suggested he had arrived at some famous castle “y que le servían de música” (1999: 156); Don Quixote requests

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and song enjoyed a direct and dependent relationship with poetry. It is therefore not surprising that the most widely referenced musical forms in Don Quixote are lyrical poems, sometimes sung and accompanied by music, other times recited and performed from memory, and on occasion just mentioned in passing. The fact that in so many instances characters in the novel intentionally perform these pieces out loud references Cervantes’s concern with the pressing social and cultural changes of Early Modern Spain. More specifically, the author uses literature to promote an oral culture even as a burgeoning literary tradition is beginning to overwhelm orality. Despite a proliferation of written texts during Cervantes’s time, the oral tradition endured well beyond his lifetime (Zumthor 1987: 155; Frenk 2005: 17-19; García de Enterría 1988: 90-95). Indeed, most citizens of Early Modern Spain were illiterate and poor, unlikely to learn to read or write, or purchase books. But, each town boasted at least one erudite citizen, and he was frequently asked to read aloud to gathering friends and family. Hence, in the church, the university, or town government, official communication was mostly done orally; formal contracts of all kinds, purchase agreements, and other juridical covenants were nearly always done verbally, and they remain legally binding in many societies today. Orality’s pervasiveness and significance was paramount but also customary. For example, Lazarillo de Tormes’ most rewarding occupation was that of town crier of Toledo, and the townsfolk and government depended on him to broadcast important news and pronouncements. Hence, texts did not form a significant part of everyday life in more informal spaces such as friendly gatherings or at taverns and inns, either. According to Margit Frenk, authors like Cervantes were well aware of these circumstances and anticipated such orally inclined audiences by conceiving prose works destined to be heard, rather than read on any large scale (2005: 22).

an instrument to sing a ballad he invents on the spot: “que se me ponga un laúd esta noche en mi aposento, que yo consolaré lo mejor que pudiere a esta lastimada doncella” (1999: 436); Sancho tells the duchess, “Señora, donde hay música no puede haber cosa mala” (1999: 413); Cardenio writes and performs sonnets (I.23, 27); Dorotea plays the harp because “la música compone los ánimos descompuestos y alivia los trabajos que nacen del espíritu” (1999: 223); Altisidora also plays the harp and sings a lengthy romance (II: 34); a mule driver sings a popular romance about Roncesvalles (II.9); the goat herder Antonio plays his stringed rabel and performs romances (I.11); Antonio then narrates the story about Vicente de la Rosa, a musician and poet who played the guitar so well that “decían algunos que la hacía hablar” (1999: 313); in the Cueva de Montesinos, Balerma and her maidens sing four days a week in their procession to the tomb of Durandarte (II.23); Condesa Trifaldi’s arrival includes songs (II.37); Sancho takes up his post as Governor amidst bells and chirimías, and flees while drums, trumpets and ringing bells blare (II.47); Ricote and other pilgrims sing and solicit alms (II.54); and the Catalonian bandit Roque Guinart ends his speech with applause played to the music of chirimías and atabales (II.61). These are but a sample of the numerous references that appear in the novel. For a more complete listing, see Leal Pinar.

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We, of course, have no way of knowing the extent to which readers reading the novel “performed” aloud the written text for their audiences. However, research on orality suggests that writers throughout Early Modern Europe recognized that their texts would be read out loud to others, linking literature to orality. As James A. Parr has shown, Cervantes knew this too: “[i]t would seem obvious that Cervantes, as a writer of narrative, would privilege writing, and in a sense he does. We have the book itself as good evidence. And yet orality is quite literally there from the outset, informing writing, reading it aloud, invading its domain, parodying it” (1991: 171-72). As Parr shows, Cervantes inserts textual cues and carefully integrates reading strategies that establish orality’s continuous presence and, often, dominance. The novelist’s tactics include the insertion of textual cues that guide the reader toward oral or corporal performance of the text, an engagement with literary derivations from traditionally oral genres such as ballads and folklore, the prevalent use of popular expressions and refranes, and the practice of using direct address from narrator to narratee through oral markers such as “they say” or “You, dear reader…” (Parr 1991: 172). Similarly, Michel Moner argues in “Técnicas del arte verbal y oralidad residual en los textos cervantinos” that Cervantes knowingly integrated visual and structural strategies into his narrative as spoken prompts: verbal gestures (“veis aquí,” “lo que verás y oirás,” etc.), rhetorical devices (pauses, exclamations, etc.), and sound effects (“¡crac!”), all of which are ubiquitous in the oral tradition and guide the reader’s performance. Moreover, Cervantes’s constant use of verbs like “decir” and “contar” reveals that the written is a visual vehicle for the oral (Parr 2005: 318). According to Moner, the employment of these visual (literary) signals occurs equally with amateur storytellers (like Sancho) and professional ones (such as Maese Pedro), and denotes Cervantes’s personal interest in promoting orality more than other writers (1989: 100-01). This, in turn, suggests that Cervantes is questioning the reliability of the transmission of written texts (Par 2005: 325). Indeed, most texts within the frame of Don Quixote are read aloud, not silently (Iffland 1989: 27).5 For example, Cardenio asks the Priest at the inn to read the interpolated El curioso impertinente “de modo que todos le Margit Frenk argues that “leer” and “oír” were meant more or less the same thing and offers several examples of their exchangeable use (2005: 75-77): referring to Grisóstomo’s Canción desesperada Ambrosio asks Vivaldo to “leelde de modo que seáis oído” (1999: 181), Sancho asks Don Quixote to “lea vuestra merced alto” Cardenio’s sonnets (1999: 212), the Priest reads aloud Teresa Panza’s letters and “las oyó Sansón Carrasco” (1999: 449), the Duchess reads Sancho’s letter “en voz alta para que el duque y los circunstantes la oyesen” (1999: 454) and Sancho’s letter to Don Quixote “se leyó públicamente” (1999: 455). 5

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oyesen” (1999: 250).6 Here the priest takes cues from the text and invents his own performance style for a community of listeners comprised of Cardenio, Luscinda, Fernando, Dorotea, the innkeeper’s family, and other guests. From our present-day perspective, this is an important socio-cultural event because it provides us with a depiction of the sort of public reading that took place throughout Spain, not to mention it demonstrates how the act of reading could be an act of public performance. In fact, the Priest and other readers/ storytellers like him would have been significant contributors to the cultural life of their villages. Such events remind us that Cervantes was well aware that both his inter-textual and extra-textual readers approached the novel with a retinue of strategies directed at listeners. An examination of the different melodic pieces that appear throughout the novel amply demonstrates this process. Don Quixote features several polyphonic and monadic musical forms from Early Modern Spain, often accompanied by instrumentation. I divide the pieces roughly into two classes: “original” —those that Cervantes invented— and “formal”—lyrical works drawn from printed sources such as the Cancionero de Palacio or the Romancero general, the two primary sources with which Cervantes must have been familiar (Haywood 1948: 132), and for which actual music accompaniment is extant.7 In cases where the music no longer exists, there is usually enough historical source material to confirm the existence and popularity of the pieces in question. Romances and sonnets encompass the largest number of formal musical-poetic pieces in Don Quixote, and the groups that are most located in printed matter from the period. My aforementioned essay analyzed these two musical forms, but I list them here for convenience. Thirteen unique romances appear in Don Quixote (most of which are romances viejos) sung verbatim or nearly verbatim, whose musical notation is collected in one of the aforementioned anthologies or other published sources.8 Don Quixote mentions in passing an additional All citations from Don Quixote are taken from the Florencio Sevilla edition. In referring to particular episodes, I include the part and chapter, but page numbers are used in parentheses when quoting directly from the text. 7 Francisco Asenjo Barbieri compiled the Cancionero de Palacio songbook anthology of 458 profane musical pieces of polyphony from between 1474 and 1516, nearly all with instrumental notation. As Stevenson points out, the original indexer believed the majority of these lyrical works to be villancicos whenever they did not correspond to his own standards for romances. As such, 396 were labeled secular villancicos, another 29 as sacred villancicos and only 44 as romances. Such norms of musical categorization are not in line with standards today (1960: 252). The most significant collection of romances from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was the Romancero general, first published in Valencia in 1511 and edited by Hernando del Castillo. 8 They are summarized as follows: (1) Don Quixote states that his arms will provide com6

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three romances, but does not recite or sing their verses, and still another three are Cervantes’s own invention.9 With respect to sonnets, six appear in the novel, usually sung by a character aloud, sometimes with instrumental accompaniment: Cardenio sings about lost friendship in which “la música se había vuelto en sollozos y en lastimeros ayes” (1999: 227); the Captive recites “de memoria” two sonnets composed by his own brother “a manera de epitafios” (1999: 277) describing the fall of La Goleta (I.40); the Caballero del Bosque plays his laúd and sings about Casilda de Vandalia (II.12); Don Quixote recalls Garcilaso’s “¡Oh dulces prendas, por mi mal halladas / dulces y alegres cuando Dios quería!” (367); and Don Lorenzo sings about the fable of Pyramo and fort by singing “mis arreos son las armas, / mi descanso el pelear,” etc. (1999: 156), a romance published in the Romancero general; (2) the knight, laying illogical along the side of the road, sings the Romance del Marqués de Mantua y de Valdevinos (I. 5) found in the Cancionero de Romances; (3) Luis, “el mozo de mulas” and “desdichado músico” (I.43), serenades Clara by singing “Marinero soy de amor” (290) followed by a canción previously invented by Cervantes, “Dulce esperanza mía” (291); (4) Chapter 9 (Part II) begins “Media noche era por filo” (345) taken from the Romance de Conde Claros de Montalbán which is also a verse from a well known romance dedicated to El Cid held in the Cancionero de Romance and the Romancero General; (5) Entering El Toboso (II.9), Don Quixote and Sancho happen along a man singing the first two verses of the famous Romance de Roncesvalles (346), now found in both the Cancionero de Romances and the Romancero General (6) Emphasizing the friendship of Rocinante and Sancho’s donkey (II.12), the narrator quotes, “No hay amigo para amigo: / las cañas se vuelven lanzas” (353) taken from the Romancero general; (7) Durandarte, in the Cueva de Montesinos, sings a version of the Romance de Durandarte (II.23), which appears in the Cancionero de Palacio and Romancero General as well as in Luis de Milán’s Libro de música de vihuela; (8) the boy-narrator of the tale of Gaiferos and Melisendra in the “Retablo de Maese Pedro” (II.26) recites two verses taken an original ballad found in the Cancionero de Romances and the Romancero General; (9) Different verses from the same Romance del rey don Rodrigo are sung twice, first in the Retablo de Maese Pedro (II.26) then by doña Rodríguez (II.33); (10) Sancho derives verses from the Romance del Rey Favila contained in the Cancionero General (II.34); (11) Sancho defends himself from Don Quixote’s proposed whippings with verses taken from the Romance de don Rodrigo de Lara (from Romance de don Rodrigo de Lara in the Cancionero de Romances and the Romancero General) (II.60); (12) Cervantes closes the second part with “para mí estaba guardada,” from Pérez de Hita’s Guerras civiles de Granada (II.74); (13) Four different versions of the Arthurian ballads of Lanzarote del Lago appear in the novel (I.2, I.13, I.31 and II.23). The source materials cited here are provided by Stevenson and Querol Galvadá. See my article (2010) for more information. 9 Those mentioned in passing include the Romance of Lancelot, mentioned twice (I.49 and II.23), Don Quixote’s reference to the Marqués de Mantua (I.10), and Sancho’s mention of the Romance of Calainos (II.9). With respect to the two romances invented outright by Cervantes, they include one sung by Altisidora accompanied by the harp (II. 59), and one about knights, ladies and love composed and sung by Don Quixote at the Duke’s palace (II.46). Additionally, the appearance of Cardenio in the novel (I.23 and I.24) may be a nod to the poet, dramatist, musician and singer Juan del Encina whose Romance of Cardenio, which does not appear in the novel, was extant in the Cancionero de Palacio and the Romancero General.

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Tisbe (II.18), a poem from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. No musical scores exist for any of these, which likely means that none ever existed. The next largest group of lyrical poems is the copla, or couplet, popular short songs sung by all sorts of people in Golden Age Spain. We are told that the student-turned-shepherd Grisóstomo was fond of composing them (I.12), and there are a few included among Cardenio’s assorted written poetry (I.23). By my count, there are four instances in Don Quixote featuring couplets: Don Quixote dedicates six to Dulcinea (I.26); each of the allegorical characters in the theatrical spectacle staged for Camacho’s wedding —Cupido, Interés, Poesía, and Liberalidad— sing one (II.20); the Countess Trifaldi sings two different couplets about lost love (II.38); and Sansón Carrasco contributes two as an epitaph upon Don Quixote’s death (II.74). Some are found in published sources from the period while Cervantes himself may have invented others. Whereas the romance contained an indefinite number of octosyllabic verses with a repeated melodic phrase every four verses until the end of the ballad, the couplet typically was composed of four verses with varying lengths and no fixed rhyme. The most popular ones, however, featured four octosyllabic verses (called arte menor). Couplets were memorized and performed aloud as solo songs accompanied by a strummed instrument such as a harp or a vihuela. This simple configuration allowed it to be easily manipulated and matched to music. It also made them easy to remember, afforded ample opportunity for improvisation, and facilitated their oral transmission across classes, becoming a wildly popular part of the social fabric of Golden Age Spain. They usually expressed popular themes, often in colloquial language, and at times hinted at the comic or even the melodramatic. But, it may be exactly their popularity that led Cervantes to express dissatisfaction with the verse form. In the novel, he alludes to how the copla has been misused to the point of artlessness. Countess Trifaldi’s comments prior to actually reciting the verses perhaps provide the most intense perspective: “Y así digo, señores míos, que los tales trovadores con justo títulos los debían desterrar a las islas de los Lagartos” (1999: 420). Trifaldi calls for the banishment of any poet whose depraved seduction includes the overuse of the couplet, but she admits that the fault lies with “los simples que los alaban y las bobas que las creen” (1999: 420). As governor, Sancho similarly criticizes the lack of originality that permeates couplets such that “los pensamientos que dan lugar a hacer coplas no deben de ser muchos” (1999: 492). Sancho previously had declared that “Verdad es que las coplas de los pasados caballeros tienen más de espíritu que de primor” (1999: 212), suggesting that in his lifetime the couplet has lost its luster. What makes Cervantes so critical? Part of his reproach has to do with the couplet’s popularity in Golden Age Spain, which led to its overuse. Couplets recounted popular stories, local incidents or

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even praised specific people who became well known in the towns where the verses were composed. Since they were generally free, unrestricted, and easy to create, they provided a great harmonious way to produce stories in a memorable fashion. This also naturally meant that anyone could compose one, thus discounting their value for serious poets like Cervantes. It was probably the case that Cervantes is not criticizing the verse form but rather the unqualified people who simplified them to such a degree as to render them unsophisticated. Therefore, it is probably no accident that the author expresses such an aversion by deliberately having couplets sung by presumably literate characters in the novel. Indeed, unlike other poems in Don Quixote, it appears that the coplas are recited exclusively by the learned: Alonso Quijano famously has read so much that “se le secó el cerebro” (1999: 153); as majordomo to the Duke and Duchess, Trifaldi also must have known how to read and write; the actors at Camacho’s wedding were no doubt accustomed to reading scripts for performance; and Sansón is a university graduate who, we are told, has read widely. For Cervantes, the ease of creating a couplet and its widespread popularity equaled a lack of sophistication that highlighted its technical worthlessness. This was especially critical for the author whose desire to be a professional poet was paramount. Examining the couplets in question, however, does not easily lead us to such drastic viewpoints. One of the most prominent examples is found in the episode of the Countess Trifaldi, who tells Don Quixote how she sought to protect Princess Antomasia from the amorous pursuits of a young suitor. The young lover’s preferred method of wooing the princess? Singing couplets, which for Trifaldi so charmed the young woman that her downfall and surrender to him was imminent: “lo que más me hizo postrar y dar conmigo por el suelo fueron unas coplas que le oí cantar una noche desde una reja que caía a una callejuela donde él estaba, que, si mal no me acuerdo…” (1999: 420). Trifaldi then performs aloud the two coplas, both of which are known by their first verse, “De la dulce mi enemiga” and “Ven, muerte, tan escondida:” De la dulce mi enemiga nace un mal que al alma hiere, y por más tormento, quiere que se sienta y no se diga. (1999: 420)10 10 This particular copla was sung often at the end of the fifteenth century. Edward M. Wilson and Arthur L.F. Askins describe the evolution of this poem in “History of a Refrain: ‘De la dulce mi enemiga’” and provides examples of its transition through time and cultures. Pastor Comín provides musical notation for a variety of these same examples in “‘De la dulce mi enemiga:’ Ecos y contextos de una referencia musical en la obra cervantina.”

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Ven, muerte, tan escondida, que no te sienta venir, porque el placer del morir no me torne a dar la vida. (1999: 420)

Trifaldi’s couplets feature vocal parts and courtly language emblematic of the epoch’s art of seduction, a usage appropriate to this particular verse form. They are also considered excellent examples of the power of the couplet. In fact, hers are the most well known examples cited in Don Quixote. Querol Galvadá has traced the origins of the first of these to the Cancionero de Palacio—likely by an anonymous singer-songwriter—but postulates that the composer could have been Gabriel Mena who published a number of his works in the Cancionero general (1948: 80-81). Several others have confirmed Mena as the author. The author of the second couplet was Comendador Juan Escrivá, a fifteenth-century poet. It initially was published in Hernando de Castillo’s Cancionero general (1511) from which it was imitated many times by other poets such as Lope de Vega, thus leading to its contemporaneous fame (Querol Gavaldá 1948: 83). A second example occurs during the knight’s penitence in the Sierra Morena (I.26). There, away from urban life and seemingly alone with his thoughts, the knight imitates Amadís’ own penitence by carving into trees or writing in the sand six couplets in praise of Dulcinea: Árboles, yerbas y plantas que en aqueste sitio estáis, tan altos, verdes y tantas, si de mi mal no os holgáis, escuchad mis quejas santas. Mi dolor no os alborote, aunque más terrible sea; pues, por pagaros escote, aquí lloró don Quijote ausencias de Dulcinea del Toboso. Es aquí el lugar adonde el amador más leal de su señora se esconde, y ha venido a tanto mal sin saber cómo o por dónde. Tráele amor al estricote, que es de muy mala ralea;

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94 y así, hasta henchir un pipote, aquí lloró don Quijote ausencias de Dulcinea del Toboso. Buscando las aventuras por entre las duras peñas, maldiciendo entrañas duras, que entre riscos y entre breñas halla el triste desventuras, hirióle amor con su azote, no con su blanda correa; y, en tocándole el cogote aquí lloró don Quijote ausencias de Dulcinea del Toboso. (1999: 220)

The verses juxtapose appreciation for the natural world with feelings of longing and absence for Dulcinea, a topic commonly expressed by knights-errant in the chivalric literature of the period. Cervantes himself composed the verses, but music was later added by Mateo Romero and included in the Cancionero de Claudio de la Sablonara (ca. 1625) (Lambea 2006: 402). Certainly, here and elsewhere, the couplets provide Cervantes the occasion to showcase his poetic ability. However, the ease with which Don Quixote invents them on the spot, the simplicity and even absurdity of their message, and the fact that they are contrived to reflect the knight’s enamored situation all serve to reference Cervantes’s unhappiness with verse form. He reveals that dissatisfaction through the narrator, who alludes to the ridiculousness that one could write oneself into the poem irrespective of whether or not anyone else would understand the context for such an inclusion: “No causó poca risa en los que hallaron los versos referidos el añadidura ‘del Toboso’ al nombre de Dulcinea, porque imaginaron que debió de imaginar don Quijote que si en nombrando a Dulcinea no decía también ‘del Toboso’, no se podría entender la copla; y así fue la verdad, como él después confesó” (1999: 205). For Cervantes, the couplet is an overused poetic form that reflected whatever was in vogue at the time and, perhaps worse, they were effortlessly transferable to personal situations. They were not technically superior or thematically pleasing like the romances or sonnets. However, as much as Cervantes may not have liked it, the couplet’s popularity, especially around 1600, owed exactly to what the author detested —its lack of precision and sophistication. And, when matched to music, its simplicity made it an appreciated source of communal entertainment. Such is the case

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in the public performance of the allegorical rustic “danza de artificio” during Camacho’s wedding. Each danced copla represents the speaking parts of the four actors, Cupido, Interés, Poesía, and Liberalidad, who tell the allegorical story of how the power of money (Interest) wins over a damsel by overpowering love (Cupid) (II.20). The narrator informs the reader that the allegorical characters take the stage accompanied by four “very capable” drum and flute players: “Hacíanles el son cuatro diestros tañedores de tamboril y flauta” (1999: 374). The performance then commences with Cupid, “el dios poderoso,” whose song is complemented by the strumming musicians and followed in turn by Poetry and Liberality. As might be expected of any theatrical work, then, each performer performs in order: “Deste modo salieron y se retiraron todas las dos figuras de las dos escuadras, y cada uno hizo sus mudanzas y dijo sus versos, algunos elegantes y algunos ridículos, y solo tomó de memoria don Quijote —que la tenía grande— los ya referidos; y luego se mezclaron todos” (1999: 375). It is clear from the text that music was played in this meta-theatrical production: the entire theatrical company entered in a sort of procession that included dances while musicians played their instruments. Indeed, they are only silent when the characters sing their respective verses: “Acabó la copla, disparó una flecha por lo alto del Castillo y retiróse a su puesto. Salió luego el Interés, y hizo otras dos mudanzas; callaron los tamborinos…” (1999: 375). The entire presentation provides a hierarchy in which voice is superior to music. The process is repeated with Poesía, then Liberalidad; each time a character sings, the music and dancing stops. What makes the theatrical spectacle so significant is that it is the only event in the novel where music, song, and dance are intertwined to such an extent that each artistic form drives the other. The danzas at Camacho’s wedding are also excellent examples of the performative nature of the entire novel. As demonstrated by their centrality in the wedding and by their lack of precision or technical superiority, coplas were often considered a rustic verse form, easy to create and free of stringent poetic rules. Given that farming neighbors populate Camacho’s wedding, and that the festivities take place in a rural setting, it makes sense that the popular couplet is the preferred musical form. And Cervantes featured them in the episode precisely for that reason. Couplets were central to lowerclass entertainment as was the case of the seguidilla, a type of couplet that differed only in that the even numbered verses were shorter than the odd numbered ones: it alternates between six or seven syllables in the odd-numbered verses and six in the even-numbered verses (only the last stressed syllable is counted and one is added). The seguidilla was regularly associated with folk song and dance originating from La Mancha and often sung with music. The most well known example

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of the seguidilla in Don Quixote appears in the chapter following the episode of the Cueva de Montesinos when Don Quixote, Sancho, and the Cousin come upon a young man “cantando seguidillas, para entretener el trabajo del camino. Cuando llegaron a él, acababa de cantar una, que el primo tomó de memoria…” (1999: 386). As the man explains, he is off to war, and his song expresses not only his journey to the front, but also his determination to overcome his poverty and make something of himself: A la guerra me lleva mi necesidad; si tuviera dineros, no fuera, en verdad (1999: 386)

The man admits that he must serve his king and country or else risk becoming a burden to society. His comments nonetheless reference those who frequent the court, rather than common citizens like himself: “Y más quiero tener por amo y por señor al rey, y servirle en la guerra, que no a un pelón en la corte” (1999: 386). Here, the man sings a well-known poem without musical accompaniment to pass the time, as any person of the period might, but his comments conceal scorn for those better off than him. Although the seguidillas differed based on regions and time, in formal terms, by the sixteenth century most began with a guitar introduction followed by the poet’s vocal freestyle. This is similar to the romance in that players varied their performance by introducing short musical intervals between the sung verses. Singers, knowing these deviations would take place, waited for the musician to bring the main melody back before continuing the vocals. Hence, an unlimited number and type of vocal and instrumental styles could be applied as long as they obeyed the general syllabic count of the poem. In other words, seguidillas and other couplet forms were liberally interpreted and sung, making them accessible to anyone and, as a result, a rather fashionable genre. In fact, the themes of the seguidillas normally reflected common subjects that were lively and trendy (modern versions, however, are much more emotional and passionate). Nonetheless, the vocal aspects of the Golden Age seguidilla seemed to have been secondary to the dance movements. Countess Trifaldi has already warned against a suitor who sung “otras coplitas y estrabotes, que cantados encantan y escritos suspenden” (420).11 Among these were seguidillas which, according to The estrambote was the Spanish version of the Italian strambotto, a series of satirical or amorous verses added to a structured poem, usually a sonnet. Cervantes’s “Al túmulo del rey Felipe II en Sevilla” is probably his most well known example of the verse. 11

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Trifaldi, were rather inappropriate because of their seductiveness: “era el brincar de las almas, el retozar de la risa, el desasosiego de los cuerpos y, finalmente, el azogue de todos los sentidos” (1999: 420). Trifaldi’s criticism specifically references the lascivious nature of writhing bodies dancing to the tunes. Like the chacona or zarabanda, the seguidilla often was associated with lewd dancing, and attempts by moralists were made to outlaw them.12 They seem to have been at the center of debates often regarding public decency and morality. One of Governor Sancho Panza’s orders was to outlaw the misuse and overuse of the poetic form: “Puso gravísimas penas a los que cantasen cantares lascivos y descompuestos, ni de noche ni de día. Ordenó que ningún ciego cantase milagro en coplas si no trujese testimonio auténtico de ser verdadero, por parecerle que los más que los ciegos cantan son fingidos, en perjuicio de los verdaderos” (1999: 453).13 Sancho seems to imply that when couplets drift from their responsibility of being beautifully crafted, thematically pleasing, and technically well-conceived, they should be banned. Whether or not Sancho’s order exposes Cervantes’s true opinion of the couplet is difficult to determine. As is customary in Cervantes’s works, the author may be expressing his dissatisfaction with great wit, expecting the reader to take Sancho’s statement lightheartedly. On the other hand, a stinging condemnation of how the verse form is used may simply be hidden behind such jocularity. Regardless, ordering a fictional prohibition in no way impeded Cervantes from integrating couplets into Don Quixote. Even in the final chapter of the novel, arguably one of the most important and somber, which centers on Don Quixote’s death, Sansón Carrasco contributes the final verses of the novel and both are couplets: Yace aquí el hidalgo fuerte que a tanto estremo llegó de valiente, que se advierte que la muerte no triunfó de su vida con su muerte. 12 The chacona and zarabanda were native Peruvian dances set to profane music that eventually became popular in Spain. They were generally considered lascivious and lewd. While the chacona and the seguidilla became more stately and acceptable, ultimately the zarabanda was outlawed in 1630 by the Consejo Real de Castilla. See Louise K. Stein’s “De chacona, zarabanda y La púrpura de la rosa en la cultura musical del Perú colonial.” 13 According to the Francisco Rico edition, a similar prohibition existed in the Nueva recopilación de las leyes destos reynos (1640): “Otrosí mandan que ninguna ni algunas personas sean osadas de echar ni decir pullas ni cantares ni palabras feas ni deshonestas en esta corte, de noche ni de día, so pena de cada cien açotes y destierro desta corte por un año” (1998: 602).

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Tuvo a todo el mundo en poco, fue el espantajo y el coco del mundo, en tal coyuntura, que acreditó su ventura morir cuerdo y vivir loco. (1999: 505)14

The content of the verses may seem strange given the usual playful nature of the couplets. Here, Sansón replaces the good-naturedness with mocking and scorn for the hidalgo’s recent adventures, stating that the man died sane after living crazily. The timing for such criticism may also seem unpleasant since, as P.E. Russell notes, the cruelty upends the solemnity of the knight’s serene death (1969: 324-25). Russell is correct, of course, but subverting the gravity and seriousness of the occasion is exactly what couplets were meant to do as they implicitly were of a burlesque nature. Given the couplet’s various usages in Don Quixote, it seems clear to me that a distinct oral tradition serves as the basis for each one. None is explicitly said to be recited from any literary artifact and all are performed. In fact, all are either composed on the spot and sung aloud, or recalled from memory, perhaps suggesting to the reader that he or she should do the same. For instance, the text plainly states that Trifaldi’s couplets were drawn from her own memory (“si mal no me acuerdo decían”) and, at the moment of the knight’s death, Sansón follows the others by tacking on a few verses of his own in the form of an epitaph: “Déjanse de poner aquí los llantos de Sancho, sobrina y ama de don Quijote, los nuevos epitafios de su sepultura, aunque Sansón Carrasco le puso éste (…)” (1999: 505). Similarly, the four couplets at Camacho’s wedding may or may not have been written, but for the theatrical production they were committed to memory and performed aloud without script. Although Don Quixote writes his couplets to Dulcinea on the bark of nearby trees, it is clear from the text that he, too, formulates them at the moment, then writes them down: “Y así, se entretenía paseándose por el pradecillo, escribiendo y grabando por las cortezas de los árboles y por la menuda arena muchos versos” (1999: 224). Finally, we are told that the soldier sang aloud from memory to pass the time and that he just finished a song, which the Cousin then committed to memory. As presented in the text, each references a performative and oral context and likely mimics how others in Golden Age Spain both received or sang them. Like Don Quixote’s couplets for Dulcinea, Sansón’s are original creations by the author and, hence, no music originally existed. In 1610 Joan Pau Pujol eventually composed music to match the verses (Lambea Castro 2005: 402). 14

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The same cannot be easily said of the other lyrical poetic forms in the novel —villancicos, silvas, and madrigals— which appear much more limitedly in Don Qujiote. The first, villancicos, or carols, were performed around Christmas time each year, especially at the “Misa de Gallo,” a midnight mass celebrated on December 24. Their origins can be traced to the medieval period when they were sung according to the prominent events of the liturgical calendar. By the sixteenth century, however, villancicos became more prevalent and popular in nature, deriving their name from the lower class “villanos” who sung them. These tended to be polyphonic and sung by groups of three or four and accompanied by a vihuela. The standard poetic form for the carols included a refrain set to music. In Don Quixote, reference to the carols is made twice. First, we are informed that the shepherd Grisóstomo was “grande hombre de componer coplas; tanto, que él hacía los villancicos para la noche del Nacimiento del Señor, y los autos para el día de Dios” (1999: 81), but none of his carols is later recited at his funeral, though we may presume that a few were included among the papers with which he was buried. The second example involves Don Quixote’s contemplated return as “el pastor Quijotiz.” Upon learning of her uncle’s unthinkable plans and unnerved by yet another foray into mischief, his niece declares that he must stay at home, rest, and live a tranquil and honored life so as to not entangle himself in further problems. She further chides him by reciting “Pastorcillo, tú que vienes, / pastorcico, tú que vas?” (1999: 503). This well-known villancico appears in various versions in a number of sources from the period including the Cancionero de Palacio and the Cancionero de Francisco Ocaña, meaning it was oral in nature, then later set down in print. It was no doubt widely known across Spain during Cervantes’s lifetime (Pastor Comín 2005: 43). It may have been Don Quixote’s pastoral pursuits that brought the well-known song to Cervantes’s mind, thus finding its way into the novel. The scarcity of other textual villancico examples is probably related to the short Christmas holiday season during which they were performed each year. Toward the end of Part I, the guests at the inn are confronted with the sweet song of Luis, “el mozo de mulas,” and “desdichado músico” who, according to Dorotea, possesses “la mejor voz que quizá habrás oído en toda tu vida” (1999: 290). Luis is searching for his beloved Clara. As all the guests at the inn remain attentive, he follows up his singing of the romance, “Marinero, soy de amor,” with a canción, “Dulce esperanza mía.” The song is actually a poem previously written by Cervantes then incorporated into Don Quixote (I.43).15 The song’s theme describes the perceived impossibility of love between young lovers. Its appearance 15

This poem is held in the Biblioteca Nacional (MS 3.985, f. 142v).

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in the novel references both Luis’ relationship with Clara and also alludes to the love affairs featuring Dorotea and Fernando and Luscinda and Cardenio. The canción, loosely translated as “song” or “ballad,” imitated the sixteenth-century Italian canzone or Petrarchan ode, and was originally octosyllabic, sharing commonality with the earliest sonnets as well as the Italian madrigal. Luis’ poem, however, represents a new form called the silva, a strophe designed to be less restrictive than the Petrarchan canzone in that it alternated between heptasyllables and hendecasyllables with a consonant rhyme throughout.16 The form was in its infancy when Cervantes included this lone example in the novel. But, its immediate popularity was such that by 1613 Góngora’s entire Soledades was written in silvas. Cervantes’s use of it, like other poetic forms in Don Quixote, suggests that he considered them musical in nature. Such was the case that in 1591 Salvador Luis, Philip II’s royal musician, composed music for “Dulce esperanza mía.” Soriano Fuertes postulates that Cervantes wished to commemorate the musician by including a character named Luis singing the tune in Don Quixote (1855: 87).17 In the novel, the young man’s harmonious voice is so melodious “que de tal manera canta, que encanta” (1999: 290). Based on the historical information related to the music and verse for “Dulce esperanza mía,” it seems likely that Cervantes intended for Luis’ version to be musical even though he sang monodically with “una voz sola, sin que la acompañase instrumento alguno” (1999: 290). The fact that Luis’ song was a capella is similar to the vast majority of lyrical poems in Don Quixote. Most of the romances, sonnets, couplets, and other poems are performed as solo songs. The number and frequency of these performances represents the changing times. For most of the sixteenth century in Europe leading up to the publication of Don Quixote, most poetry was performed in polyphony. However, by the time Cervantes wrote the novel, so many people were performing the most popular versions of these different poems that musical accompaniment simply was neither necessary nor expected. Such a situation is very different from the madrigal, however. In many European court festivities in the fourteenth century, especially in Italy, the madrigal was the most popularly performed polyphonic work. The early madrigal was a short strophic poem of two or three verses sung with a single repeated melody Aurora Egido reports that both the silva and the canción were often confused: “Los límites entre canción y silva quedaron confusos en algunos casos…” (1989: 15). 17 Querol Galvadá doubts the connection: “El hecho de que un investigador tan sagaz y minucioso como H. Angelés no lo nombre en su estudio sobre los músicos de la Corte de Felipe II, es ya motivo suficiente para dudar de la afirmación de Soriano, historiador de la música tan famoso como sospechoso, por sus yerros y fantasías” (1948: 107). We might remember that Soriano also claimed Cervantes was a guitarist without offering proof. See Note 1. 16

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and included a refrain. It could be compared to putting a Petrarchan sonnet to music so that singing brings out the poem’s images and emotions by providing aural and visual stimuli. By the fourteenth century, the madrigal evolved to a free poetic composition without strophic repetition or a refrain and was instead sung collectively by three to five courtesans, thus producing a certain pleasing auditory polyphonic combination. The only requirement for this latter version was to adapt the musical rhythms to the poems being sung. Hence, they were flexible enough for singers to adorn them with their individual vocal talents, giving some independence from the polyphony and making it one’s own. To increase or improve one’s repertoire, madrigal singers went beyond established singing practices to include notes or harmonies that at first were not permitted by the Church. In Don Quixote one “madrigalete” is sung by the knight when he decides to forgo the night’s sleep in order to compose a poem about love: “daré rienda a mis pensamientos, y los desfogaré en un madrigalete, que, (…) anoche compuse en la memoria” (1999: 492). There, lying against a tree, the knight sings to himself from memory the following verses: Amor, cuando yo pienso en el mal que me das, terrible y fuerte, voy corriendo a la muerte pensando así acabar mi mal inmenso; mas en llegando al paso que es puerto en este mar de mi tormento, tanta alegría siento, que la vida se esfuerza, y no le paso. Así el vivir me mata, que la muerte me torna a dar la vida. ¡Oh condición no oída la que conmigo muerte y vida trata! (1999: 493)

This madrigal was first composed in Italian by Gli Asolani and translated by Pietro Bembo, although in the novel the narrator tells us that Don Quixote “compuso en la memoria.” Cervantes probably came to know it through his time in Italy when Bembo’s poetry was prevalent (Pastor Comín 2005: 56). Cervantes, quick to underscore the sentiment that the madrigal often elicited, tells us that Don Quixote’s verses were accompanied with all of the emotions that poetry could evoke: “acompañaba con muchos suspiros y no pocas lágrimas, bien como aquel cuyo corazón tenía traspasado con el dolor del vencimiento, y con la ausencia de Dulcinea” (1999: 493). As Jaime Fernández reminds us in reference to this madrigal, divergent emotions are predominant: “es lógico que

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aparezcan la seriedad y la burla, la alegría y la tristeza, es decir, que aparezcan los aspectos contrapuestos…” (2006: 110). Madrigals are normally polyphonic, but Don Quixote’s is interestingly monodic and without musical accompaniment. In that sense, and following the different antithetical emotions evoked by the poem, it could be viewed as a sort of parody of the genre. But, it more likely signals the quickening transition in Golden Age Spain away from the popular polyphonic songs to the monadic tunes that were sweeping much of Europe in the seventeenth century. Indeed, if Cervantes had been born just two decades later, his own life adventures, which took him to Florence, Naples, Rome, and Sicily, among other Italian places, might have also given him an opportunity to be acquainted with another style of monody —early opera from central Italy.18 It is indeed unfortunate that the great novelist did not have the opportunity to know opera first hand. But, Cervantes must have known something of the genre prior to his death in 1616, when operas by the Camerata Fiorentina (Dafne, 1597, no longer extant, and Euridice, 1600) had become widely known across Italy, and the great madrigal composer, Claudio Monteverdi, had perfected monodic recitative, profane music, and secular dramatic themes in several of his operas. The fact that so many sung poems in Don Quixote are in the new and fashionable monadic style at precisely the same time as monadic arias were being put to use in Italian opera may indicate Cervantes’s knowledge of these musical transformations. A couple of references in Don Quixote bear this out. First, in Maese Pedro’s Puppet Show, Cervantes demonstrates his awareness of polyphonic “counterpoint” (various independent melodies sung simultaneously) when the knight interrupts the boy-narrator of the story of Don Gaiferos and Doña Melisendra imploring him to not tell the tale in such a confusing fashion by straying from the main storyline. Maese Pedro chastises the boy by metaphorically reminding him to stick to the story and tell the tale plainly: “sigue tu canto llano, y no te metas en contrapuntos, que se suelen quebrar de sutiles” (1999: 391). This is followed two chapters later when one of the town mayors beats Sancho for braying like an ass, believing that the squire is mocking them. Reprimanding his squire, Don Quixote tells Sancho that “A música de rebuznos ¿qué contrapunto se había de llevar sino de varapalos?” (1999: 395). What this, and many other examples, suggest is that in Don Quixote Cervantes was intensely cognizant and perhaps had first-hand knowledge of the different musical forms in fashion in Spain, as well as those being developed outside of

Cervantes was in the service of Cardinal Acquaviva in Rome in 1569-1570, in Sicily in 1571 preparing for the Battle of Lepanto, and in 1574 he spent time again in Sicily, followed by Naples (1574-1575). 18

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the peninsula. He recognized the cultural importance of music as a part of literary forms, and he went to great lengths to integrate all sorts of Early Modern musical genres into his works. From the examples provided thus far, it is evident that the writer integrated musical pieces that could be considered representative of both high and low culture. Interestingly, it is the introduction of Cardenio that, in my opinion, provides what could be considered the most significant original advancement of music in Don Quixote. The Priest and the Barber, preparing to rest in the shade, are suprised to hear the sweet voice of someone singing nearby: “llegó a sus oídos una voz que, sin acompañarla son de algún otro instrumento, dulce y regaladamente sonaba, de que no pocos se admiraron, por parecerles que aquél no era lugar donde pudiese haber quien tan bien cantase” (1999: 212-13). Just as in the introduction to Luis’ canción, the narrator carefully and explicitly highlights the hierarchy of voice over instrumentation by stating that the voice rang forth without musical complement. Are these instructions as to how the poem is to be performed? We later find out that the voice belongs to Cardenio who also has stopped to rest and sings a song that speaks of love, jealousy, suffering, and absence, the principal themes of so many other lyrical poems in the novel: ¿Quién menoscaba mis bienes? Desdenes. Y ¿quién aumenta mis duelos? Los celos. Y ¿quién prueba mi paciencia? Ausencia. De ese modo, en mi dolencia ningún remedio se alcanza, pues me matan la esperanza desdenes, celos y ausencia. ¿Quién me causa este dolor? Amor. Y ¿quién mi gloria repugna? Fortuna. Y ¿quién consiente en mi duelo? El cielo. De ese modo, yo recelo morir deste mal estraño, pues se aumentan en mi daño amor, fortuna y el cielo.

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¿Quién mejorará mi suerte? La muerte. Y el bien de amor, ¿quién le alcanza? Mudanza. Y sus males ¿quién los cura? Locura. De ese modo, no es cordura querer curar la pasión, cuando los remedios son muerte, mudanza y locura. (1999: 227)

The songs illustrate the first ever ovillejos, a rather complicated verse form invented by Cervantes and cultivated intermittently by other poets. The ovillejo is a ten-verse poem consisting of three octosyllabic lines alternating with tetrasyllabic verses (“pie quebrado”), followed by a four verses (“redondilla”) whose last line assembles the aforesaid three tetrasyllabic verses into one. Whereas the octosyllables pose queries, the “pie quebrado” provides answers —sort of like an echo— with an overall resolution offered in the poem’s final verse. In this case, Cardenio’s problems surrounding lost love are unscrambled with each “pie quebrado” and ultimately summarized in the last verse.19 The insertion of the ovillejo no doubt underscores the value Cervantes placed on lyrical poetry in the novel and highlights the author’s masterful use and agility with a variety of literary and musical forms. In this case, he invented his own lyrical form. Moreover, by putting such a complex verse form in the mouth of Cardenio, a citizen of the aristocracy, Cervantes again might be arguing that genuine advancements in poetic technique and structure were being made by the cultural elite. And this, in fact, is what the narrator seems to express when he states that the ovillejos “eran versos, no de rústicos ganaderos, sino de discretos cortesanos” (1999: 213). Indeed, perhaps in an attempt at putting his own stamp on period poetry, Cervantes includes other ovillejos sung by the rich man-turned-pícaro Avendaño in La ilustre fregona. What we can glean from Cervantes’s application of diverse musical forms such as those mentioned here is that he was keenly aware that Spanish society was changing from a distinctly oral one to one where the written word would hold greater value. Troubadours and strumming players continued to play roles in both court and popular venues, but their centrality waned as the circulation of written literary works would eventually come to be the preferred form of en19 See Juan Diego Vila’s discussion for further information on the structure and content of this ovillejo.

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tertainment, slowly displacing orality. Such changes only accelerated with Early Modern technological advances such as the printing press. Nonetheless, some authors seemed to be quite aware of the downside to such social transformations. For instance, the poet Juan Boscán bitterly complained that written verse might not have been the ideal vehicle for reciting poetry stating that far too many could only understand his sonnets when they were recited aloud: Los unos se quexavan que en las trobas d’esta arte los consonantes no andavan tan descubiertos ni sonavan tanto como en las castellanas. Otros dezían que este verso, no sabían si era verso, o si era prosa… ¿Quién se ha de poner en pláticas con gente que no sabe qué cosa es verso, sino aquél que calçado y vestido con el consonante os entra de un golpe por el un oído, y os sale por el otro? (Boscán 1957: 87–88).

As Boscán points out, readers were unable to follow the poem’s cadence or fix its melody as they could when they were sung out loud, suggesting a need to perform them even when written. In itself, such a statement moderates the relevance and significance of written discourse. Like Boscán, Cervantes must have felt that the ongoing transformation to a culture dominated by the written verse had significant drawbacks, at least when it came to music and poetry. As a result, in Don Quixote the author expects the reader to find the textual cues to suitably perform the novel’s lyrical poetry, in much the same way as the troubadours of his youth would have. We will never know if his contemporaneous readers picked up on these clues. But, they are there nonetheless, indicating that Cervantes had an astonishing knowledge of Early Modern musical forms, while also reminding us that he was at a crossroads in history when society struggled with the significance of the written word. Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981): “Discourse in the Novel.” In: Holquist, Michael (ed.): The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: U. of Texas P. — (1984): Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Booth, Wayne (ed.). Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P. Boscán, Juan (1957): Obras poéticas. de Riquer, Martín/Comas, Antonio/Molas, Joaquín (eds.). Barcelona: Universidad de Barcelona. Canavaggio, Jean (1986): Cervantes. Madrid: Austral. Cervantes saavedra, Miguel de (1999): Don Quijote de la Mancha. Obras completas. Sevilla, Florencio Sevilla (ed.). Madrid: Castalia.

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— (1998): Don Quijote de la Mancha. Volumen Complementario. Rico, Francisco (ed.): Barcelona: Instituto Cervantes Crítica. Egido, Aurora (1989): “La silva en la poesía andaluza del barroco (con un excurso sobre estacio y las obrecillas de Fray Luis).” In: Criticón, 46, pp. 5-39. Fernández, Jaime (2006): “Don Quijote por dentro: el madrigal (DQ II, 68).” In: Estudios Hispánicos de la Asociación Coreana de Hispanistas, 28, pp. 109-21. Frenk, Margit (2005): Entre la voz y el silencio: La lectura en tiempos de Cervantes. México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Haywood, Charles (1948): “Cervantes and Music.” In: Hispania, 31, 2, pp. 131-51. Gasta, Chad M. (2010): “‘Señora, donde hay música no puede haber cosa mala:’ Music, Poetry and Orality in Don Quijote.” In: Hispania, 93, 3, pp. 357-67. García de enterría, María Cruz (1988): “Romancero: ¿Cantado-recitado-leído?” In: Edad de Oro, 7, pp. 89-105. Iffland, James (1989): “Don Quijote dentro de la ‘Galaxia Gutenberg.’ (Reflexiones sobre Cervantes y la cultura tipográfica).” In: Journal of Hispanic Philology, 14, pp. 23-41. Lambea castro, Mariano (2006): “Procesos intertextuales y adaptaciones musicales para las aventuras de don Quijote.” In: Edad de Oro Cantabrigense. Actas del VII Congreso de la Asociación Internacional Siglo de Oro. AISO. (Cambridge, 18-22 de julio de 2005). Close, Anthony (ed.). Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, pp. 399-405. Leal pinar, Luis (2006): La música en el Quijote. Guadalajara: Llanura. Moner, Michel (1989): Cervantès conteur: Écrits et paroles. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez. — (1988): “Técnicas del arte verbal y oralidad residual en los textos cervantinos.” In: Edad de Oro 7, pp. 119-27. Parr, James A. (1991): “Plato, Cervantes, Derrida: Framing Speaking and Writing in Don Quixote.” In: On Cervantes: Essays for L. A. Murillo. Parr, James A. (ed.). Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, pp. 163–87. — (2005): “Sobre el cuestionamiento de la oralidad y la escritura en el Quijote: Cide Hamete y el supernarrador.” In: Boletín de la Biblioteca de Menéndez Pelayo, 71, pp. 309-28. Pastor Comín, Juan José (2005): Por ásperos caminos: nueva música cervantina. Toledo: Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha. — (2006): “‘De la dulce mi enemiga:’ Ecos y contextos de una referencia musical en la obra cervantina.” In: Anales Cervantinos, 38, pp. 221-46. Querol Galvadá, Miguel (1948): La música en las obras de Cervantes. Barcelona: Comptalia. Russell, Peter E. (1969): “Don Quixote as a Funny Book.” In: Modern Language Review, 63, pp. 312-26. Soriano fuertes, Mariano (1855-1859): Historia de la música española desde la venida de los fenicios hasta el año de 1850. Vol. 2. Madrid: Narciso Ramírez. Stein, Louise K. (2002): “De chacona, zarabanda y La púrpura de la rosa en la cultura musical del Perú colonial.” In: Perú en su cultura. Americas Series/Collection des Amériques/Colección de las Américas 1. Castillo Durante, Daniel/Sattler, Borka (eds.). Ottawa: U. of Ottawa, pp. 227-39.

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Vila, Juan Diego (1995): “Don Quijote y el Arte poética de Cardenio: asedios en torno a la imagen del vacío femenino.” Actas del XII Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas. Vol. 3. Whicker, Jules (ed.). Birmingham, AL: U. of Birmingham, pp. 268-81. Stevenson, Robert M. (1960): Spanish Music in the Age of Columbus. The Hague: M. Nijhoff. Wilson, Edward M./Askins, Arthur (1970): “History of a Refrain: De La Dulce Mi Enemiga.” In: Modern Language Notes, 55, 2, pp. 138-56. Zumthor, Paul (1987): La letra y la voz. De la literatura medieval. Madrid: Cátedra.

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What is us? Cervantes, Pedro de Valencia, and Ricote’s Return in the Quixote Rosilie Hernández University of Illinois at Chicago The evolution of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spanish national identity is overarchingly defined by a set of beliefs, policies, and practices that demanded social and religious homogeneity, possible only through the expulsion, figurative and literal, of all that was other. In his book Faith in Nation, Anthony W. Marx supports this notion and employs Early Modern Spain as one of his primary examples for nascent nationalisms, refuting the notion that one can only speak of national identity in a post-Enlightenment context: Nationalism so defined does not require fully developed homogenization or popular rule and democratic self-determination, which may and did develop later with the advent of more formal citizenship. The nation as a unit of emerging collective sentiment does not have to be so firmly or legally established nor egalitarian for nationalism to be evident. Nationalism can be expressed without an established nation, though such a unit is then envisioned or implied even in the rudimentary idea or loyalty to or against a state (Marx 2003: 8-9).

Moreover, Marx positions himself against the notion of national identity as a trope resulting from an inclusionary or shared sense of belonging as theorized by critics such as Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, Deutsch, and Habermas.1

1

See Chapter 1, “History and Arguments.”

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The historian proposes instead that the construction of a shared identity or tight coalition amongst otherwise disparate members of a group depends on a determined marginalization of some identifiable other (Marx 2003: 15): Those theories have tended to assume universal inclusion, at least eventually with exclusions often described as mere lags in the provision of rights. But such omissions and exclusions may not be mere lags but instead purposeful, with the exclusion of some “other” not as accidents but instead crucially employed in an attempt to solder core coalitions among those included (Marx 2003: 21).

Marx focuses on religious intolerance as fundamental to the foundational exclusionary tactics of nation building and thus anchors much of his argument on an examination of the Early Modern period: “For religious linkages to become secularized and expanded beyond local ties, they had to be reformulated into a basis of distinctive cultural identity. To the degree that faith did instill such a collective identity, that identity could then be embraced by states as a basis for loyalty or obedience” (2003: 37). Within this framework, Spain serves as a pertinent example. Built upon a state-sponsored banning of all those that were not pure of blood and Catholic, Spain’s national identity depended, as Marx calls it, on a logic of “exclusionary cohesion” (2003: 24). The lack of social and political unity among the kingdoms that comprised the Spanish crown caused them to often act as semi-independent agents, insisting on exercising their local fueros and contesting ordinances of economic and military obligations to the central Castilian government. Exclusionary strategies based on religion thus provided the imaginary axis that allowed for a sense of common national identity among social groups that otherwise often found themselves at odds with one another: labradores versus nobles, Castilians versus Aragonese, rival factions within the nobility, and so on. Marx’s reading of Spanish Early Modern history is not atypical. It reflects the widely held notion that Early Modern Spain, marked by the politics and human consequences of expulsion, Inquisitorial trials, and purity of blood statues, was a society anchored on segregation, where an exclusionary and repressive understanding of the characteristics that defined its national identity quelled any notion of convivencia or broadly shared cultural and religious values current during the medieval period. It is in this context that Cervantes’s corpus is inserted with the Ricote episode in the Quixote directly addressing the discriminatory religious and ethnic notions that guided the cultural and political consciousness of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spain. As readers of the Quixote note, the affective connection that Sancho and Ricote share establishes a human contrast to the policies that resulted in the expulsion of the moriscos orchestrated by

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Philip III’s favorite, the Duke of Lerma. There is a long tradition of analysis as it regards this episode, with seminal studies such as Márquez Villanueva’s Moros, Moriscos y Turcos de Cervantes and two excellent recent articles by Roberto A. Véguez and Julia Domínguez.2 Domínguez, for example, explores the logic of exile that guides Ricote’s vision upon his return to Spain, focusing on the inherent duality and contradictions that frame his story of reencounter with the homeland. Véguez, on his part, focuses on the divergent political and religious positions that surrounded the expulsion of the Moors from Spain. Signaling to an often elided history of religious tolerance during the reigns of Charles V and Philip II, the critic contextualizes Cervantes’s apparent sympathies towards the exiled Moor vis-à-vis the “propaganda machine” pushed by Lerma in an effort to divert attention from the corruption and economic bankruptcy that plagued Philip III’s reign (2005: 109). Márquez Villanueva on his part masterfully examines apparent contradictions in the episode, such as Ricote’s stated agreement with the expulsion, with an eye on how Cervantes offers poignant legal and social commentary while avoiding censorship: “No se niega ni menoscaba la postestad real, sino nada más se expone (y ya es bastante) la deficiencia técnica del razonamiento legal que el texto aduce en su exposición de motivos” (1978: 229). Building upon these arguments, in this essay I will consider the ways in which the account of Ricote’s exile and return may be read as a fictional extension of contemporary discourses of tolerance that competed with the discourses of exclusion and repression that historians such as Marx have traced in Early Modern Spain, and which ultimately did succeed in defining an idealized yet exclusionary Spanish Early Modern national identity. In particular, I intend to establish a dialogue between Pedro de Valencia’s treatise on the expulsion of the Moors, the Tratado acerca de los moriscos, and Cervantes’s own commentary through the Ricote episode on the solution of expulsion and the place of the Moor in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spain. José Antonio Maravall in his Antiguos y Modernos and Oposición Política and Henry Kamen have catalogued the many treatises and other writings that located themselves in opposition to conservative political policies of exclusion and segregation that rationalized the decree of expulsion of the Moors in 1609. For example, in his article “Toleration and Dissent in Sixteenth-Century Spain: The Alternative Tradition,” Kamen offers an account of the numerous political and

Eric C. Graf contributes to this line of inquiry in the first chapter of his book asserting that, ‘‘the novel [Don Quixote] is principally concerned with challenging Spaniards to rethink themselves... an attitude capable of cultivating those aspects of Islam that might contribute to humanist reason’’ (2007: 52–53). 2

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religious counselors to Charles V, Philip II, and Philip III who publicly advocated for a measured non-violent treatment of non-Christians and Protestants. Yet, as Kamen notes, the ideological positions assumed should not be interpreted as liberal or radical in neither an Early Modern nor a present 21st-century sense. Rather, the impetus of their arguments can only be defined as conservative and orthodox within a traditional understanding of what were considered appropriate and necessary mechanisms for the creation of a unified, homogenous, and lasting Spanish Catholic state. For example, recalling the early case of Hernando de Pulgar who as secretary to Isabel la Católica publicly opposed the institution of the Inquisition, Kamen states the following: In reality, Pulgar and the others were merely representative of a long tradition which continued to be conscious of the problem of unbelief in a multicultural community. Time and again, throughout the sixteenth century, voices were raised to assert that no effort had been made to convert the Jews or the Muslims or even so-called Christians themselves (Kamen 1988: 8).

Refusing expulsion, inquisitorial trials, and burnings, these individuals argued that reason, education, and mercy were the fairest and most religiously cogent strategies for reaching the ultimate goal of a Catholic society. A later example cited by Kamen is that of Philip II’s confessor Alfonso de Castro who, although a “supporter of the death penalty for heresy” (1988: 14), believed that the underlying problem that prevented the true conversion of heretics should be attributed to deficient preaching: “heretics must be preached to and catechized before any attempt is made to use other methods. If the error is due to the pastors, why should those in error be punished? Once detained, a heretic must not be punished but rather instructed” (qtd. in Kamen 1988: 15). Luis de Granada, preacher and chaplain to Philip II and one of the best-known religious writers of the period, makes a similar claim, suggesting that “persecution and oppression” of non-believers or heretics is sinful since “they cause unbelievers scandal, and make them abhor the faith as much as they abhor its practitioners” (qtd. in Kamen 1988: 21). A rather particular example that Kamen also brings to light is that of Fadrique Furió Ceriol who as political advisor to Philip II stayed away from religious reasoning and instead argued for moderation and an exemplary profile for the members of the nation that focused on moral virtue, rather than on religious belief or race: Muy cierta señal es de torpe ingenio, el hablar mal y apasionadamente de su contrario, o de los enemigos de su Príncipe, o de los que siguen diversa secta, o de peregrinas gentes; agora sean Judíos, agora Moros, agora Gentiles, agora Cris-

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tianos: porque el gran ingenio ve en todas tierras siete leguas de mal camino, en todas partes hay bien y mal, lo bueno loa y abraza, lo malo vitupera y deshecha sin vituperio de la nación en que se halla (qtd. in Kamen 1996: 100).

Making this statement in a political treatise dedicated and received by Philip II, Furió Ceriol’s voice should be considered alongside the many critics of the harsh policies of the Duke of Alba in the Netherlands and the dissent around Philip III and Lerma’s expulsion of the Moors.3 Kamen’s larger point is, in fact, that an alternative discourse existed in Spain that was “never deprived of the right to express itself and that on occasion managed to prevail against the predominant view” (1988: 20). More specifically, the historian suggests that Lerma’s policies of expulsion were not put forth within a monolithic environment, but rather in spite of the many voices that called for tolerance in the context of a multicultural society. This is a point that Véguez picks up on in his analysis of the Ricote episode, emphasizing the initial general lack of support of Lerma’s decision: It was, in the eyes of many, a terrible decision. […] Prior to the expulsion, very few outside the government believed that the Moriscos were a threat —not common people, not the aristocracy, particularly those members of it who benefited from the labor of the Moriscos who worked the land, not the theologians who opposed the expulsion on the grounds that the Moriscos were baptized Christians, not the Pope, who on three occasions in 1606 sent to Spain briefs in support of the theologians’ position, and who was ultimately not informed of the decision […] (Véguez 2005: 106-7).

Ultimately, the decision seems to have been largely motivated, as Antonio Feros postulates, by purely political motivations. Having achieved a momentary truce with the Dutch and having the navy available, Lerma looks inward to the Peninsula and sees in the expulsion a way of rehabilitating Philip III’s reputation as a great defender of the Catholic faith: “The expulsion […] became central to the politics of propaganda aimed at presenting Philip III and Lerma as champions of the Catholic faith and protectors of the community; the expulsion itself was presented as a deed inspired and ordered by God” (Feros 2000: 204). This is political calculation, I may add, that corroborates Marx’s theory of exclusionary cohesion, an attempt at forging an ideal national identity superimposed over a context of dissent, disparity, and conflict. 3 I discuss at some length Furió Ceriol’s political theories in my forthcoming article titled “Althusser, Furió Ceriol, and Cervantes: Or why is Sancho Panza a Machiavellian Prince.”

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Pedro de Valencia, a jurist, biblical scholar, humanist and skeptic philosopher, who occupied the post of Royal Chronicler for Castile and Chronicler for the Indies during the reign of Philip III, is a key figure amongst the group of tolerant thinkers described by Kamen. As mentioned by Maravall and detailed at great length by Grace Magnier in her recent book Pedro de Valencia and the Catholic Apologists of the Expulsion of the Moors, Valencia’s preference for evangelization, as well as his legal training, drive him to reject expulsion as inherently unlawful since it would unilaterally punish members of society who were true converts to the Catholic faith alongside those who insisted in covertly practicing Islamism. The Tratado is dedicated to Philip III and written in a context where the discussions around the perception of the problem of the Moor were marked by a sense of urgency resulting from the legacy of the Alpujarras rebellion, the persistent ethic, cultural, and religious difference identified within the Moorish population, and the imagined military threat of a Turk-Moor or French-Moor alliance.4 Reacting to calls for immediate expulsion made by influential advisors such as the archbishop of Valencia, Juan de Ribera, Pedro de Valencia outlines a number of possible solutions: genocide, captivity, expulsion, transfer, dispersion, conversion, integration, and state subjection. Valencia discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each of the options, with the last four propositions closely related and bolstering his advocacy of full assimilation as the only fair route of action. A deeply religious man who guided his worldview according to Pauline virtues of faith, hope, and charity, he fully opposed the option of exile for in his opinion it was both unchristian and counterproductive. To expel from their homes and far from their children members of society who had been baptized in the Christian faith and whose conversion may be genuine seemed unjust and cruel, and thus would tarnish Spain’s reputation as a true Catholic nation: Volviendo a la consideración de la Justicia, como se puede justificar con Dios, ni con los hombres, ni qué corazón Cristiano había de haber que sufriese ver en los campos y en las playas, una tan grande muchedumbre de hombres, y mugeres bauptizados, y que diesen vozes a Dios y al mundo, que eran Cristianos, y lo querían ser, y les quitaban sus hijos y haciendas por avaricia y por odio, sin oirlos, ni estar con ellos a Juicio, y los enviaban a que se tornasen Moros (Valencia 1997: 112).

The condemnation here is significant for in the act of expulsion Spain would effectively negate its own claim to Christian charity and would be making infidels of believers. The motivation that Valencia perceives lies behind

4

See Domínguez Ortiz’s Historia de los moriscos, Chapter 8.

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this policy is one of personal avarice, which as a result would undermine any claim of legitimacy or necessity for “no son de provecho ni de dura las ganancias injustas, sino que acarrean y contienen en sí mayores pérdidas” (1997: 93). From a practical economic perspective, an expulsion would only further aggravate the depletion of the population and labor force: “Si ahora se hiciese esta cuenta en España comparando la tierra con la gente, se hallaría con muy menor número de moradores de los que otros tiempos ha tenido, y de los que es capaz, y puede sustentar” (Valencia 1997: 83). Moreover, by expelling the Moors, Spain would potentially create a large community of enemies who had intimate knowledge of the country’s culture and geography and who would unite forces with Spain’s plentiful enemies, most probably the Turks: “Pues si se habían de ir con sus haciendas bien armados irían, y de buena gana los recibiría el Turco” (Valencia 1997: 111). Valencia instead argues for a resolute effort at full assimilation of the Moors. Within a register of toleration, he bases his arguments on the premise that the Moors are not foreigners, that Christians have a responsibility to educate and convert, that Moors and Christians share some fundamental common beliefs, and that charity should reign over greed, fear, or demagoguery. The claim is not that Moors are de facto equal to Christians and should be accepted without limitations or suspicions. In fact, Valencia manifests great reservations when speaking about the way in which Islam condones duplicity and lying in order for its members to hide their true alliances and beliefs: [Mahoma] inventó una Máquina Diabólica, y es que les concede a los Moros, que si les hicieren fuerza y corrieren riesgo por la profesión de su ley, la nieguen libremente, y coman Puerco, y las demás cosas vedadas y hagan qualesquiera muestra de negación exteriores, sin que por eso incurran infidelidad, ni culpa alguna (Valencia 1997: 72).

This is a moment of apparent inconsistency in his argument if one considers the plea for assimilation that follows. Yet, within a logic of faith and the desire for true conversion, Valencia is convinced of the possibility of transformation in the Moorish community and in the ability of Christianity to gain souls and prevail over heresy. There are other factors that sway his analysis of the crisis. Even if it is true that many moriscos abhor their Christian neighbors the reason can be attributed to the abuses suffered under the Inquisition: Otra circunstancia nos los hace más enemigos, y que nos quieren más mal que los que están en Berbería, que aquellos están en salvo, y no temen que los prenda la Inquisición de España y los queme y confisque sus haciendas: pero estotros saben

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que viven con estos riesgos, y que si fuesen conocidos por Moros, padecerían estas cosas, y así nos aborrecen como a gente que los quieren matar, y de buena gana se librarían de este miedo si pudieran, aunque fuese matándonos a todos en un día, y no es de entender que ellos quieren que persevere y sea poderosa la República de España, cuyo poder les está tan mal, y en cuya perdición está su salvación y libertad (Valencia 1997: 77).

The refusal of the Moorish community to fully integrate is a reaction, therefore, to the suffering and fear they have endured at the hands of Christian institutions. Valencia also acknowledges the common qualities that Spaniards, Moors, and Christians share as a result of a long history of cohabitation and cultural exchange: “que todos estos Moriscos, en cuanto al ingenio, condición y brio, son españoles como los demás que habitan en España, pues ha casi novecientos años, que nacen y se crían en ella, y se hecha de ver en la semejanza o uniformidad de los talles con los demás moradores de ella” (1997: 81). In fact, there are aspects of the Moors’ way of life that Christians should appreciate and even imitate, especially given the country’s perpetual state of bankruptcy and war: Los Moriscos pues por la mayor parte son cavadores, segadores, pastores, hortelanos, correos de a pie, recueros, herreros y de otros oficios de trabajo, y ejercicio; están hechos a pasar con qualquiera, poca o mala comida, y gastar poco, y quando no fuese más de el no beber vino, es una grande ventaja, que nos tienen para en la guerra […] (Valencia 1997: 87).

The implicit point that should not be missed throughout is that for Valencia the expulsion would signify the severing of a whole. The Royal Chronicler considers the Moor a constitutive and productive part of a republic in need of all its members. Those that call for expulsion are asking not for the extrication of a corrupted foreign other but rather for the amputation of the social body itself. Nonetheless, Valencia frames Islam as an illness that must be eradicated and Spain as a sick body that needs to be tended to and cured: [E]s muy conveniente advertir de la gravedad y riesgo de la enfermedad, para hacer cuidadoso y obediente al enfermo, para que admita y se quiera poner en cura, qualquiera que se le ordene, por penosa y costosa que sea, […] se promete salud obedeciendo y haciendo lo conveniente […]. Pero ahora hay muy probable esperanza, que haciéndose lo conveniente sucederá salud, o a lo menos mejoría (Valencia 1997: 91).

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Valencia’s plea is not to accept the Moorish community in its hybridity, but rather to erase any outstanding differences all together. The success of integration and assimilation depends on a series of complex and not easily deployed policies and strategies, which would require an enormous effort on the part of the Catholic Church and other authorities. The proposal is multi-pronged: scatter the Moorish community all throughout the peninsula aiming at very low concentrations in each town or region, preventing the re-assemblage of dispersed communities; forcibly persuade the dispersed to erase all cultural and linguistic traits that identify them as Moor; and, equally as important, educate the priests and launch a spiritually committed conversion campaign that would once and for all Christianize the Moors and allow for a seamless homogeneity in the social landscape. In this regard Valencia goes so far as to advise that, in order to demonstrate to the Moors a true desire for ethnic and religious integration, priests should publicly fast and pray, “para encomendar a Dios este negocio, que no parecería, ni estaría mal, que los Moriscos vieran que nos afligíamos, y ayunábamos por su salvación, más les edificaría esto, que llamarlos de Perros Moros” (1997: 130-1). As it should be immediately evident, Valencia’s plan is largely unrealizable given the considerable amount of resources, coordination, and will that would be required. It is also, as I already suggested, not palatable to our present Western context where cultural and religious diversity, even if not always privileged, is largely accepted as a worthy social goal. However, Valencia’s appeal for integration depends on a number of broadminded notions about the status of the morisco that promote a worldview where Moors and Christians would exist in a common social, political, and religious community. Assimilation is possible precisely because the coordinates of Moorish and Christian identity intersect for Valencia in ways that, despite his necessary negation of Islam, are significant and irrefutable. Proof of his belief in the possibility of a homogenous Spain is Valencia’s endorsement of mixed marriages, which would lead to a society where all blood lines would be pure or, rather, indistinguishable: “Si los linages limpios se van maculando, y estas manchas han de quedar ineludibles para siempre, claro está lo que sigue” (1997: 132). What would follow, Valencia hopes, is a society where there is no distinction, ethnic or religious, within a society composed solely of faithful Christians. The points of contact between Valencia’s treatise and the Ricote episode are not difficult to spot. Cervantes’s knowledge of Valencia’s description of and solution for the “Moorish problem” allow for the two texts to be set in a productive dialogue. Márquez Villanueva takes up this interpretative route with convincing effects, remarking on how the Ricote episode confirms Valen-

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cia’s warnings regarding the injustices of expulsion.5 Ricote’s own assessment is seemingly ambivalent. His characterization of the moriscos as nonbelievers, enemies, and “sierpes en el seno” (1978: 451), coupled with his heartfelt and nostalgic “dulce amor de la patria” (1978: 451), may confound the reader who seeks an easily identifiable position regarding the recent expulsion of the Moors. Yet such an expectation is not only thwarted but also unwarranted given that in the Quixote there is no representation, whether historically anchored or fully fictional, that is not blessed with the narrative perspectivism and indeterminacy that largely characterizes Cervantes’s masterpiece. Moreover, as Márquez Villanueva has noted regarding our modern discomfort with Ricote’s assessment: Cervantes no es que, bajo una óptica simplista, deje con ello de mantener una visión matizada del problema morisco, solidaria con la opinión moderada en lo deseable de una definitiva conversión asimiladora. Lo allí desconectado es la ingenuidad de imaginar que en dicho trance el autor hubiera podido decir otra cosa en un libro de tal modo destinado a una inmediata lectura masiva. Bajo el momento histórico de una monarquía del Antiguo Régimen y ante un asunto de tan máximo calibre, el poder sólo podía ser objeto de aduladora conformidad, porque lo que hoy entenderíamos como leal oposición habría sido juzgado deslealtad sediciosa (Márquez Villanueva 2010: 227-8).

In a society where censorship was in full effect it is unreasonable to expect that Cervantes would condemn outright a royal edict. Yet, I would argue that in the Quixote Cervantes personalizes Valencia’s treatise and the policy driven logic that anchors similar discourses by delving into the complex set of affects and human relationships that map the coordinates of lived experience; and which require a nuanced understanding of the place of the morisco in Spain’s social fabric. In other words, whereas Valencia’s treatise presents itself as an objective analysis of the conditions that have led to the problem of the Moor and postulates possible solutions, Cervantes’s text explores the experience of exile from a local and personal perspective: Sancho’s witnessing of the departure of Ana Félix and her mother, the fortuitous encounter of the separated neighbors, Ricote’s telling of his experience about his travels through Europe in order to find refuge, his mixed feelings upon the return to a country that has exiled him but which he feels is his home, the hopeful search for material possessions and for family, and Sancho’s heartfelt and yet ultimately guarded welcome of his old village friend. 5

See Marquéz Villanueva’s Moros, moriscos y turcos de Cervantes, Chapter 4.

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Ricote and Sancho meet on the road, an in-between space where neither can claim social or economic preeminence, yet where each represents an identity invested with meanings and ideologies that far exceed them. Sancho, the quintessential cristiano viejo, a poor rural labrador whose purity of blood and indubitable Christianity was idealized in texts such as Lope’s Fuente Ovejuna, ironically represents a heteronormative true Spanishness. The irony stems from the inescapable fact that Sancho is also, in other contexts such as at the duke and duchess’s country estate, a poor simpleton who can be mocked for the entertainment of an idle nobility. Ricote, on the other hand, is an educated, industrious, and wealthy family man —a model for, I would suggest, the kind of reformed nobility called for by the arbitristas of the period— who is nevertheless powerless against the edict of exile. As such, both Sancho and Ricote are contradictory expressions of their emblematic stations as old Christian and Moorish other within Spanish society. In addition, they are also both exiles in so far as Sancho has just been deceived and forced to leave the Ínsula Barataria, a land he thought was his own to inhabit and rule, just as Ricote has been forced to leave his “dulce patria.” The first description offered by the narrator in regards to the mysterious pilgrim is that he spoke “en voz alta y muy castellana” (1978: 447), a qualifier that is again employed when the narrator reiterates that Ricote “sin tropezar nada en su lengua morisca, en la pura castellana le dijo las siguientes razones [a Sancho]” (1978: 450). As if looking at himself in a mirror, not recognizing a strange yet familiar image, Sancho remains silent only to be called by the stranger an “hermano,” a metaphorical blood relative. At this point Sancho, decoding the stranger’s face, figures out (the word used is rafigurarle, a verb used only once in the Quixote) the pilgrim’s identity and throws his loving arms around his neck. Sancho’s first reaction signals simultaneously a shared sense of familiarity and a demarcation of his neighbor’s baffling and unbecoming newfound foreignness when he mocks Ricote’s dress as that of a buffoon or moharracho and, worse yet, of looking like a despised Frenchman or franchote (1978: 448). Moreover, Sancho immediately demonstrates concern for his friend’s safety, questioning how Ricote dared return to Spain knowing that if discovered “tendrás mala ventura” (1978: 448). Ricote thus floats between what is recognizable and familiar and what has been made foreign when the expulsion decree forced him far away from his home, his family, and his neighbor/brother. For the rest of the episode Ricote’s identity remains in a subjective limbo, between an exiled Moor and a ham-eating Spaniard, between a pilgrim and an expatriate, between a Muslim and, as he characterizes it, an undecided Christian who nonetheless is husband and father to two faithful Catholic women:

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[Q]ue en resolución, Sancho, yo sé cierto que la Ricota mi hija y Francisca Ricota mi mujer son católicas cristianas, y aunque yo no lo soy tanto, todavía tengo más de cristiano que de moro, y ruego siempre a Dios me abra los ojos del entendimiento y me dé a conocer cómo le tengo de servir. Y lo que me tiene admirado es no saber por qué se fue mi mujer y mi hija antes a Berbería que a Francia, adonde podía vivir como cristiana (1978: 452).

Ricote’s lack of conviction, or rather lack of orthodoxy, waffling between an uncommitted Islamism and a hope for Christian revelation, is a masterful representation of the crux of the theological debate surrounding the treatment of suspect Moors in Spain: whether to punish and exile or persuade and convert. Ricote’s condition asks the reader to question, or at least contemplate, the value in punishing a fellow who could have easily been persuaded to follow in his wife and daughter’s footsteps and who did not pose any apparent threat to society. Moreover, Ricote’s wavering religious commitment would have allowed for a fulfillment of the mission of true conversion that was central to Spain’s Catholic ethos. Yet what is even more paradoxical in Ricote’s family situation is that his wife and daughter’s exile sends them in a quest to find a place where they are allowed to freely exercise their devout Christianity. Thrown out of a Spain that sought to construct itself as the holder of the true Christian faith, Francisca and Ricota will personify Spain’s idealized religious national identity, though in a foreign land. The Moorish serpent is reconfigured in these two women as missionaries and potential martyrs who will spread the word of Spanish Catholic values across the lands, whether at the Barbary Coast where Francisca’s unrepentant brother has initially taken them or in Germany where Ricote has found a religiously tolerant community. As just suggested, Ricote’s exile leads him to travel across Italy, France, and Germany, settling in the town of Augusta, or what today is known as Augsburg, where he asserts that “cada uno vive como quiere, porque en la mayor parte della se vive con libertad de conciencia” (1978: 451). To some extent, Ricote’s voyage to and from Germany and his reflection on this experience is parallel to Captain Pérez de Viedma’s own recollection of life in Algiers in Part One, showing the way in which an encounter with other cultures and ideologies reframes one’s understanding of self and nation.6 Moreover, as Véguez has rightfully observed, Cervantes masterfully imbeds within Ricote’s travel narrative key historical allusions such as Augsburg where, “a peace treaty had been signed between Protestants and Catholics that effectively created the concept of freedom of religion 6 For a relevant discussion on Pérez de Viedma’s encounter with the Arab other, see Diane E. Sieber’s article “Mapping Identity in the Captive’s Tale: Cervantes and Ethnographic Narrative.”

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within the empire, and indeed in the Western world” (2005: 107). What adds significance to this reference in the episode is that even after successfully occupying Lutheran territory, Charles V’s counselors helped design and signed on to the Augsburg Interim (1548) and later the Augsburg Settlement (1555). In the Augsburg agreements the emperor holds a position that, as Kamen notes, sustained a middle ground and resulted in the legitimization of both sets of beliefs throughout the Holy Roman Empire, ultimately allowing for regional princes to determine the religion that would be practiced in their territories. Kamen declares, “It is therefore worth recalling that Spaniards were as responsible as any for the terms of the Interim. The committee entrusted with drawing up the document consisted of fifteen theologians, including […] three prominent Spaniards,” which included Charles’s confessor Pedro de Soto (1988: 11-2). The historian further explains that the Interim received the full endorsement of the Spanish camp, which for him demonstrates how “a degree of toleration was not seen to be alien to the Spaniards, even in the age of the Reformation” (1988: 12). By alluding to this alternative tradition within Spanish religious and political practice, Cervantes seems to offer Ricote’s story of exile and loss as an example of the consequences that ensue when moderation is abandoned in favor of extremism or facile ideology. Philip III’s abandonment of Charles’s V and Philip’s II policies of moderation, or at least their consideration and at times adoption of alternative discourses on conversion and punishment, is implicitly contrasted to Lerma’s radical decision to excise the nation of the morisco community. Domínguez has emphasized the sense of estrangement felt by both the Moorish and Christian members of the social whole, one expulsed one amputated: El relato de su proceso de asimilación en Alemania ha dejado entrever lugares comunes del exilio como son los sentimientos de pérdida, escisión, fragmentación y nostalgia. Su aparición junto a Sancho sirve como metáfora para expresar la totalidad conformada por las dos Españas, la amputada y la exiliada: no se puede pensar en una sin evocar la presencia de la otra (Domínguez 2009: 190).

Domínguez is pointing at the human toll that cannot be denied, the dislocation of meaningful social ties in favor of a national identity based on a logic of exclusionary cohesion imposed by Philip III’s policies. It is this human aspect that Cervantes’s text delves into and which takes the reader into the arena of the self and his experience in a way that Valencia’s treatise can only intimate. The appearance of Ricote, a name that recalls the valley of Ricote, a fertile plain known for its plentiful waters and irrigation systems, as well for a morisco population that had largely successfully assimilated, allows the reader to con-

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sider the cost of forging a homogeneous national identity.7 But the Cervantine text is not a political manifesto, a theological treatise, or a human rights declaration. It instead treads in the murkiness of social exchange, in the ambiguous human need to conform to social law while simultaneously grappling with the complexities and exceptions of lived experience and the changing landscapes of human relationships. To this extent, in the Quixote the character’s and reader’s encounter with the point of view of the other allows for two apparently dissimilar subjects to share a core set of values and feelings —affection, friendship, communal pride, dignity— that exist within and beyond the political, cultural, and ethnic ideologies of that frame their circumstance. Sancho and Ricote are neighbors, friends, and in their present context also enemies. Ricote has to trust that Sancho will not bring him to the authorities and Sancho does not. Still, that trust can only go so far and Sancho refuses to accompany Ricote any further, opting ultimately to align himself with the side of the Christians, of those that rightfully belong to a “pure” Catholic state. Privileging loyalty to the king over economic gain, Sancho declares “como por parecerme haría traición a mi rey en dar favor a sus enemigos, no fuera contigo, si como me prometes doscientos escudos, me dieras aquí de contado cuatrocientos” (1978: 452). The Christian nation has to be populated by true Christians. The Christian nation has to be merciful and convert, not punish, those that it wants to bring into its fold. Both conservative and alternative discourses held on to these tenets, which at times seemed congruent and at times incompatible. What Chapter 54 of the Quixote explores is precisely the in-betweenness of these discourses, between a homogeneous national identity and the contradictions and human cost of that cohesiveness. As the friends are preparing to head off in different directions and thinking they will never again see each other, Sancho reassures Ricote, “conténtate que por mí no serás descubierto, y prosigue en buena hora tu camino, y déjame seguir el mío” (1978: 453), and parts way with the words “Ricote amigo” (1978: 454). There is one more aspect of Valencia’s treaty that I would argue the episode addresses and which can be best examined in Ana Félix’s appearance in the Barcelona interlude towards the end of Part Two. As mentioned above, in the Tratado Valencia adamantly proposes a policy of assimilation, carefully delineating what would be required in order to fully incorporate the morisco population as an undistinguishable component of Spanish society. Dispersion, education, linguistic purification, and the encouragement of mixed marriages are amongst the key strategies that would result in the true conversion and 7

See Márquez Villanueva’s Moros, moriscos y turcos de Cervantes, pp. 230-36.

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seamless integration of a segment of society that up to this point had been generally identified as purely other. Ana Félix, without a doubt, exemplifies the potential for success for this path. She is a morisco woman yet fully assimilated: faithfully Catholic, she can easily inhabit the category of the perfect Spanish lady going so far as to also fall in love with a pureblooded nobleman. More to the point, Ana Félix affirms for herself the category Spaniard and Christian, identifying publicly as a “mujer cristiana” (1978: 526) even as in a moment of pure Cervantine irony she is dressed as a Moor and has been branded as the commander of the captured Argelian brigantine. In what follows, she recounts her voyage of exile from “aquella nación más desdichada que prudente sobre quien ha llovido estos días un mar de desgracias, nací yo, de moriscos padres engendrada” (1978: 527). One can hardly ignore the disillusionment in Ana Félix’s voice both in terms of her personal experience as an exiled “cristiana […] verdadera y católica” and as a national subject who has witnessed and suffered a “miserable destierro” (1978: 527). Despite having been nurtured with the milk of the Christian faith, “mamé la fe católica en la leche,” neither those who banished her nor her uncles believed in her sincerity (1978: 527). The exception, of course, is her beloved Gaspar Gregorio who follows her to the north of Africa and whose Christian manhood is protected from the threat of Moorish homosexual desire by Ana Félix when she disguises him as a damsel. Ana Félix thus perfectly represents Valencia’s hope for a policy of absorption where the morisco other would be folded into Spanish society, denying the need for extreme measures such as annihilation or expulsion. Her story of expulsion, in turn, unveils the delusion of assimilation given a political context where religious and ethnic discrimination deny even the most loyal of subjects the possibility of belonging if they can be categorized as morisco.8 To conclude, we can consider once more how the Quixote, precisely because of its condition as an imagined fictional world, exceeds Valencia’s treatise. On the one hand, even if indirectly, the text seems to commend religious toleration as envisaged in the Hapsburg accords and as practiced in the contemporary Germany that Ricote’s mention of Augsburg brings to mind. Additionally, one could question how enthusiastically the text calls or advocates for Ricote’s full assimilation. What we find in the representation of Ricote is a neighbor, a friend, a father, an entrepreneur, and a royal subject who raised a family in

Nina Davies has examined Ana Félix’s testimony in a similar fashion stating: “The character of Ana Félix embodies an entire community of name-less innocent moriscos massacred less than fifty years before the publication of part two of Don Quixote, at the battle of Félix during the revolt of the Alpujarras” (2005: 278). 8

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which wife and daughter were free to genuinely practice the Christian faith. In Sancho’s relationship with Ricote, and later in the Viceroy of Barcelona’s acquittal of Ana Félix and Antonio Moreno’s welcoming acceptance of Ana Félix and Ricote in his home, the Quixote draws a society that in all its echelons does not seem to require the absolute erasure of the traits that distinguish Moors within the social fabric. The identification with Ricote that the characters in the Quixote demonstrate and that by extension the reader can form with the Moorish other sidelines the need for Valencia’s project of dispersion, cultural erasure, and full assimilation. Closer to historical experience, as demonstrated in recent findings on the integration of Christians and Moors such as the case of the village of Villarubia de los Ojos as examined by Trevor J. Dadson, one could argue that Cervantes’s text portrays and places into focus the complex local relationships of these groups during the period. The fictional world constructed in the Quixote is informed by how Christians and Moors inhabited material and personal geographies where the official need for absolute political and religious control competed and was often secondary to the affective and economic relationships that were experienced locally on a daily basis. Ricote is the Moor amongst us, the Moor that we know and with whom we share cultural, civic, and financial relationships, the Moor that need not disappear under the guise of assimilation, the other that mirrors the I in what reveals itself, in this Cervantine text, as a logic of connectedness and contiguity in the face of exclusionary, even if benign, ideologies. Works Cited Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de (1978): El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote De La Mancha. Madrid: Castalia. Dadson, Trevor J. (2007): Los moriscos de Villarubia de los Ojos. Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert. Davis, Nina (2005): “‘Don Quijote’: A collective legacy.” In: Romance Quarterly, 52, 4, pp. 271-80. Domínguez, Julia (2009): “El laberinto mental del exilio en Don Quijote: el testimonio del morisco Ricote.” In: Hispania, 92, 2, pp. 183-92. Domínguez Ortiz, Antonio/Bernard, Vincent (1985): Historia de los moriscos: vida y tragedia de una minoría. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Feros, Antonio (2000): Kingship and Favoritism in the Spain of Philip III, 1598-1621. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP. Furió, Ceriol F. (1996): Obra Completa I. Valencia: Alfons el Magnànim. Graf, E. C. (2007): Cervantes and Modernity: Four Essays on Don Quijote. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP.

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Hernández, Rosilie: “Althusser, Furió Ceriol, and Cervantes: Or why is Sancho Panza a Machiavellian Prince.” Forthcoming in: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America. Kamen, Henry (1988): “Toleration and Dissent in Sixteenth-Century Spain: The Alternative Tradition.” In: The Sixteenth Century Journal, 19, 1, pp. 3-23. Magnier, Grace (2010): Pedro De Valencia and the Catholic Apologists of the Expulsion of the Moriscos: Visions of Christianity and Kingship. Leiden: Brill. Maravall, José A. (1998): Antiguos y modernos: visión de la historia e idea de progreso hasta el Renacimiento. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. — (1974): La oposición política bajo los Austrias. Barcelona: Ediciones Ariel. Márquez Villanueva, Francisco (2010): Moros, moriscos y turcos de Cervantes: ensayos críticos. Barcelona: Bellaterra. Marx, Anthony W. (2003): Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford UP. Sieber, Diane E. (1998): “Mapping Identity in the Captive’s Tale: Cervantes and Ethnographic Narrative.” In: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 18, 1, pp. 115-33. Valencia, Pedro (1997): Tratado acerca de los moriscos de España: manuscrito del siglo XVII. Málaga: Algazara. Véguez, Roberto A. (2005): “Don Quijote and 9-11: The Clash of Civilizations and the Birth of the Modern Novel.” In: Hispania, 88, 1, pp. 101-13.

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From La Mancha to Manresa: Sancho Panza’s Incarnational Spirituality Michael J. McGrath Georgia Southern University The Catholic Church’s hegemony in Western Europe during the sixteenth century faced many challenges that threatened the integrity of traditional Catholicism. Several years before the Catholic priest Martin Luther (1483-1546) initiated the Protestant Reformation when he affixed his Ninety-Five Theses on indulgences to the castle church door in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517, the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466-1536) propagated Christian Humanism, the belief that humanist principles are not incompatible with the Christian faith. Erasmus believed that religion, therefore, should be an intimate and deeply personal experience between a person and God, as opposed to the opulent public displays of piety, such as ceremonies, parades and processions, that permeated Early Modern Spanish society. Furthermore, he criticized the Catholic Church for its immorality and extreme ritualistic practices, noting in particular the monastic orders. In spite of these criticisms, Erasmus’ writings soon became popular in Renaissance Spain, and his supporters included King Charles V (1556-1598), Alonso Manrique de Lara (1476-1538), who was Inquisitor General from 1523-1538, and Alonso de Fonseca (1475-1534), who was the Archbishop of Toledo. In 1522, Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros invited Erasmus to be one of several distinguished Spanish and foreign scholars who contributed to the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, which is a six-volume critical edition of the Scriptures that contains parallel text in Hebrew, Latin Vulgate, Greek, and Aramaic. As Erasmus’ influence spread throughout Spain, however, conservative Catholics, including several of Spain’s most well known theologi-

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ans, as well as Franciscans and Dominicans, who opposed Erasmus’ anti-monastic views, protested Christian Humanism. The strength of the anti-Erasmus movement, which began in earnest in the 1530s and included support from the Inquisition, weakened considerably Erasmus’ influence and made it possible for the Catholic Church to solidify its presence in Spain. At the same time Erasmus’ influence was spreading throughout Spain, St. Ignatius of Loyola was establishing the foundation for a new religious order whose members and followers were committed to transforming the world through an awareness of God’s presence in every circumstance of life (“finding God in all things”). St. Ignatius of Loyola was born in 1491 at Loyola castle in Guipuzcoa, Spain. At the age of sixteen he became a page to the treasurer of the kingdom of Castile. As a result of the time he spent at the court, he developed an affinity for women, an addiction to gambling, and a keen interest in weaponry, especially swords. When St. Ignatius was thirty years old, he fought for Spain against the French, who had attacked Pamplona. A cannonball wounded one of St. Ignatius’ legs and completely broke the other. The French admired St. Ignatius’ courage so much, they returned him to his home at the castle of Loyola instead of sending him to a prison. St. Ignatius read books about Jesus Christ and the lives of the saints incessantly during the many weeks of his recuperation, and he soon realized that his goals of fame and glory as a soldier did not provide him with the inner peace and fulfillment he experienced while reading these books. St. Ignatius writes about his conversion in the Spiritual Exercises, which he describes as: todo modo de examinar la consciencia, de meditar, de contemplar, de orar vocal y mental, y de otras espirituales operaciones, segun que se adelante se dirá: porque asi como el pasear, caminar, y correr son exercicios corporales, por la mesma manera todo modo de preparar, y disponer el ánima para quitar de sí todas las afecciones desordenadas, y, después de quitadas, para buscar, y hallar la voluntad de Dios en la disposición de su vida, para la salud del ánima (Loyola 1833: 1).

Inspired by his conversion, St. Ignatius decided to travel to Jerusalem in 1522. His first stop, however, was the Benedictine shrine of Our Lady of Montserrat, where he made a general confession and prayed all night at the base of the altar dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The next day, he left his sword and knife at the altar, gave away all of his fine clothes to a poor man, and dressed himself in worn clothes and sandals. St. Ignatius’ next stop was a cave outside of the town of Manresa, where he spent nearly ten months in prayer. While in Manresa, he had a vision in which he encountered God, and, from that moment forward, St. Ignatius saw creation in a new and more meaning-

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ful way. After becoming a priest in 1537, St. Ignatius went to Rome, where he met with Pope Paul III, who invited St. Ignatius to teach scripture and theology. Two years later, St. Ignatius and his companions formed a community that would become known worldwide as the Society of Jesus. St. Ignatius died in 1556, and the Catholic Church celebrates St. Ignatius’ feast day on July 31, the day Pope Gregory XV canonized him in 1622.1 The goal of the Ignatian experience, as St. Ignatius explains in the Spiritual Exercises, is to fulfill the purpose for which God created human beings: “El hombre es criado para alabar, hacer reverencia y servir á Dios Nuestro Señor, y mediante esto salvar su anima […]” (Loyola 1833: 16). Ignatian spirituality views Christ as the “exemplar both of God’s self-donation to the human person and of the human person’s self-donation to God” (Gray 2008: 69). As a youth in Cordoba and Seville, Cervantes received a Jesuit education, which he describes favorably in El coloquio de los perros: No sé qué tiene la virtud, que, con alcanzárseme a mí tan poco, o nada della, luego recibí gusto de ver el amor, el término, la solicitud y la industria con que aquellos benditos padres y maestros enseñaban a aquellos niños, enderezando las tiernas varas de su juventud, por que no torciesen ni tomasen mal siniestro en el camino de la virtud, que justamente con las letras les mostraban. Consideraba cómo los reñían con suavidad, los castigaban con misericordia, los animaban con ejemplos, los incitaban con premios y los sobrellevaban con cordura, y, finalmente, como les pintaban la fealdad y horror de los vicios y les dibujaban la hermosura de las virtudes, para que, aborrecidos ellos y amadas ellas, consiguiesen el fin para que fueron criados (Cervantes 1992: 316).

As a young man, however, Cervantes studied with the well known humanist Juan López de Hoyos, who was a proponent of Erasmian thought, at the Estudio de la Villa. While there is no concrete evidence that Cervantes ever read any of Erasmus’ literature, it is reasonable to conclude based on his relationship with López de Hoyos and the popularity of Erasmus’ doctrines in Spain that Cervantes was familiar with Erasmus’ writings. Marcel Bataillon believes that Cervantes “puede ser considerado, con el mismo derecho, el último heredero del espíritu erasmiano en la literatura española, pese a la profunda diferencia de tono que separa su obra de la de Erasmo” (Bataillon 1966: 798). Furthermore, Bataillon relates the following anecdote to support his affirmation of Erasmus’ influence on Cervantes: 1 The life of St. Ignatius of Loyola is based on Rev. Norman O’Neal’s biography of the saint The Life of St. Ignatius of Loyola: http://www.luc.edu/jesuit/ignatius_bio.shtml.

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Un testimonio tan precioso como inesperado viene a traernos la certeza de que semejante conclusión no tiene nada de arbitrario. Un humanista español del siglo XVII, que poseía en su biblioteca la Cosmografía de Münster [Basilea, 1550], se detuvo un buen día a considerar en ella un retrato de Erasmo salvajemente desfigurado por la censura inquisitorial, y escribió a un lado del rostro: “y su amigo Don Quijote,” y del otro: “Sancho Panza.” Desde luego nos es imposible reconstruir las reflexiones que guiaban su pluma cuando trazó estas enigmáticas palabras. ¿Sería un ortodoxo que entregaba mentalmente a las severidades de la censura los coloquios de Sancho Panza y de su amigo Don Quijote? ¿No sería más bien un espíritu libre que gozaba de sus sabrosas charlas como de un desquite por la prohibición de los Coloquios de Erasmo? Es imposible saberlo, y esto nos importa bien poco. La asociación de ideas que hizo surgir el recuerdo del Quijote en presencia de Erasmo mutilado basta, por sí sola, para probarnos que ese desconocido percibía entre Cervantes y Erasmo el secreto parentesco espiritual que aquí afirmamos (Bataillon 1966: 798-799).

Américo Castro also believes that Erasmus had a more profound impact on Cervantes than St. Ignatius of Loyola and the more traditional practices of Catholicism mandated by the Council of Trent: En Cervantes, visto en conexión con el momento en que vive, hallaremos reflejos de ese complicado espíritu en lo que atañe al pensamiento religioso. Católico, sí, hemos de repetirlo; pero en la forma en que lo eran otros hombres de genio, preocupados de novedades. […] Su cristianismo, según veremos, recuerda, en ocasiones, más a Erasmo que a Trento (Castro 1972: 255-256).

While I do not disagree with those critics who highlight Erasmus’ influence on Cervantes, I believe St. Ignatius’ influence on Cervantes merits further study, and I cite as specific evidence the numerous times throughout the novel Sancho manifests his faith in God as savior and protector. The squire’s words and actions reflect, in particular, the tenets of Ignatian spirituality, especially its incarnational view of the world, defined as “a governing principle of Christian living; of God’s way of relating to creation and our way of response” (Sheldrake 1999: 17). In St. Ignatius’ letters on the apostolic spirituality of finding God in all things, St. Ignatius discusses how God forms an inherent bond with the activities of everyday life: “They should practice the seeking of God’s presence in all things—in their conversations, their walks, in all things they see, taste, and hear, in all their actions since His Divine Majesty is truly in all things by His presence, power, and essence” (Loyola 1959: 240). Sancho often exhibits a willingness to surrender his will to God, and he does so with a frequency that denotes his awareness of God’s presence in his life. Sancho appeals to God’s protection and

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Providence in I, 21, for example, after listening to Don Quixote explain how the knight’s plan to marry a princess and provide for Sancho may include obstacles. Both the knight and his squire express an awareness of a conscious relationship with God in this episode: —Pues como eso sea—respondió Sancho—, no hay sino encomendarnos a Dios, y dejar correr la suerte por donde mejor lo encaminare. —Hágalo Dios—respondió don Quijote—como yo deseo y tú, Sancho, has menester, y ruin sea quien por ruin se tiene. —Sea par Dios—dijo Sancho—; que yo cristiano viejo soy, y para ser conde esto me basta (I.21, 303).2

In I.8, after Don Quixote is thrown off of Rocinante while battling the windmills, Sancho exclaims, “¡Válame Dios!” (168). Shortly thereafter, after Don Quixote informs Sancho that Frestón’s powers will be no match for Don Quixote’s sword, Sancho simply responds by saying, “Dios lo haga como puede” (168). Sancho’s response to Don Quixote’s plan to use a tree branch for a lance like the Spanish knight Diego Pérez de Vargas reflects, once again, the squire’s commitment to God’s protection: “A la mano de Dios” (169). In I.19, Sancho places his trust in God again when Don Quixote tells him to have courage as they witness the torches of the priests who accompany the knight’s body: “Sí tendré, si a Dios place” (271). Sancho’s complete trust in God reflects his awareness that God is active in his life, which is a foundational belief of incarnational spirituality: For Ignatius and his friends, finding God often meant noticing where God was already active in their lives. And we can notice God not only in peak moments, like the ones we just discussed, but also in daily events where God’s presence is often overlooked. God is always inviting us to encounter the transcendent in the everyday. The key is noticing (Martin 2010: 86).

If God so permits it, for example, Sancho says that he will return to his village with the basin that Don Quixote claims to be Mambrino’s helmet: “La bacía yo la llevo en el costal, toda abollada, y llévola para aderezarla en mi casa y hacerme la barba en ella, si Dios me diere tanta gracia, que algún día me vea con mi mujer e hijos” (I.25, 346). In II.3, Sancho manifests his conscious recognition of God’s active role in his life during a conversation with Sansón Carrasco: “Pero 2 All citations, which are referenced by part, chapter, and page number, are from John Jay Allen’s edition of the novel.

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dejando esto del gobierno en las manos de Dios, que me eche a las partes donde más de mí se sirva […]” (II, 3, 56). Sancho elaborates on his incarnational spirituality in II.4, professing his belief and trust in God and acknowledging an awareness of evil in the world: y si mi señor don Quijote, obligado de mis muchos y buenos servicios, quisiere darme alguna ínsula de las muchas que su merced dice que se ha de topar por ahí, recibiré mucha merced en ello; y cuando no me la diere, nacido soy, y no ha de vivir el hombre en hoto de otro sino de Dios; y más, que tan bien, y aun quizá mejor, me sabrá el pan desgobernado que siendo gobernador. Y ¿sé yo por ventura si en esos gobiernos me tiene aparejada el diablo alguna zancadilla donde tropiece y caiga y me haga las muelas? Sancho nací, y Sancho pienso morir; pero si, con todo esto, de buenas a buenas, sin mucha solicitud y sin mucho riesgo, me deparase el cielo alguna ínsula, o otra cosa semejante, no soy tan necio que la desechase […] (II.4, 64-65).

In a conversation with his wife Teresa, Sancho manifests once again his complete trust in God’s plan for his life: Llegó Sancho a su casa tan regocijado y alegre, que su mujer conoció su alegría a tiro de ballesta; tanto, que la obligó a preguntarle: —¿Qué traéis, Sancho amigo, que tan alegre venís? A lo que él respondió: —Mujer mía, si Dios quisiera, bien me holgara yo de no estar tan contento como muestro (II.5, 67)

Then, Sancho defends his decision to serve Don Quixote, arguing that God would have provided what he and his family needed if He wanted the squire to stay home: y si Dios quisiera darme de comer a pie enjuto y en mi casa, sin traerme por vericuetos y encrucijadas, pues lo podía hacer a poca costa y no más de quererlo, claro está que mi alegría fuera más firme y valedera, pues que la que tengo va mezclada con la tristeza dejarte; así que, dije bien que holgara, si Dios quisiera, de no estar contento (II.5, 68).

Sancho’s seemingly obsessive deference to God’s will may appear pantheistic or perhaps indicative of Sancho’s lack of free will. In the Spiritual Exercises, however, St. Ignatius warns the retreatant against an unhealthy trust in God, which, when extreme, diminishes a person’s ability to exercise his or her free will:

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[…] asimismo no debemos hablar tan largo instando tanto en la gracia, que se engendre veneno para quitar la libertad. De manera que de la fé y gracia se puede hablar quanto sea posible mediante el auxilio divino para mayor alabanza de la Su Divina Majestad: mas no por tal suerte, ni por tales modos, mayormente en nuestros tiempos tan periculosos que las obras y libero arbitrio resciban detrimento alguno, ó por nihilo se tengan (Loyola 1833: 173-174).

After serving as governor, Sancho realizes that his earthly ambitions had a negative impact on his relationship with God:

—Venid vos acá, compañero mío y amigo mío, y conllevador de mis trabajos y miserias; cuando yo me avenía con vos y no tenía otros pensamientos que los que me daban los cuidados de remendar vuestros aparejos y de sustentar vuestro corpezuelo, dichosas eran mis horas, mis días y mis años; pero, después que os dejé y me subí sobre las torres de la ambición y de la soberbia, se me han entrado por el alma adentro mil miserias, mil trabajos y cuatro mil desasosiegos (II.53, 474). Then, the squire chooses to abandon his governorship, exercising his free will to return to the life he believes God created him to live: —Abrid camino, señores míos, y dejadme volver a mi antigua libertad; dejadme que vaya a buscar la vida pasada, para que me resucite de esta muerte presente. Yo no nací para ser gobernador, ni para defender ínsulas ni ciudades de los enemigos que quisieren acometerlas. Mejor se me entiende a mí de arar y cavar, podar y ensarmentar las viñas, que de dar leyes ni de defender provincias ni reinos. Bien se está San Pedro en Roma: quiero decir, que bien se está cada uno usando el oficio para que fue nacido. Mejor me está a mí una hoz en la mano que un cetro de gobernador; más quiero hartarme de gazpachos que estar sujeto a la miseria de un médico impertinente que me mate de hambre; y más quiero recostarme a la sombra de una encina en el verano y arroparme con un zamarro de dos pelos en el invierno, en mi libertad, que acostarme con la sujeción del gobierno entre sábanas de holanda y vestirme de martas cebollinas (II.53, 474).

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus shares with His disciples how they can grow closer to God through their love for one another: You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on (your) right cheek, turn the other one to him as well. If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic, hand him your cloak as well. Should anyone press you into service for one mile, go with him for two miles. Give to the one who

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asks of you, and do not turn your back on one who wants to borrow. You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same? So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect (The Catholic Study Bible, Matt. 5.38-48).

Américo Castro notes that Cervantes values these same virtues: “Entre las virtudes cristianas, las que más destacan, las que sin duda pone Cervantes en primer plano, por entender que son la base de la armonía de amor predicada en el Evangelio, son la humildad y la caridad […]” (Castro 1972: 299). Sancho exemplifies Cervantine humility and charity in II,11, when he informs Don Quixote that he will not attack the demon dancer who beats Sancho’s donkey with the bladders inflated with air: —No hay para qué, señor—respondió Sancho—, tomar venganza de nadie, pues no es de buenos cristianos tomarla de los agravios; cuanto más que yo acabaré con mi asno que ponga su ofensa en las manos de mi voluntad, la cual es de vivir pacíficamente los días que los cielos me dieren de vida (II.11, 120).

Don Quixote seems to experience somewhat of a transformation after listening to Sancho’s words, as the knight no longer encourages his squire to attack the demon dancer. Instead, Don Quixote notes Sancho’s charity and humility, calling his squire, “Sancho bueno, Sancho discreto, Sancho cristiano y Sancho sincero” (II.11, 120). Don Quixote also recognizes Sancho’s spirituality, as the following exchange between the knight and the squire in II.20 illustrates: —A buena fe, señor —respondió Sancho—, que no hay que fiar en la descamada, digo, en la muerte, la cual también come cordero como camero; y a nuestro cura he oído decir que con igual pie pisaba las altas torres de los reyes como las humildes chozas de los pobres. Tiene esta señora más de poder que de melindre: no es nada asquerosa, de todo come y a todo hace, y de toda suerte de gentes, edades y preeminencias hinche sus alforjas. No es segador que duerme las siestas, que a todas horas siega, y corta así la seca como la verde yerba, y no parece que masca, sino que engulle y traga cuanto se le pone delante, porque tiene hambre canina, que nunca se harta; y aunque no tiene barriga, da a entender que está hidrópica y sedienta de beber solas las vidas de cuantos viven, como quien se bebe un jarro de agua fría.

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—No más, Sancho—dijo a este punto don Quijote—. Tente en buenas, y no te dejes caer, que en verdad que lo que has dicho de la muerte por tus rústicos términos es lo que pudiera decir un buen predicador. Dígote, Sancho que si como tienes buen natural y discreción, pudieras tomar un púlpito en la mano e irte por ese mundo predicando lindezas. —Bien predica quien bien vive—respondió Sancho—, y yo no sé otras tologías (201-202).

Sancho’s practice of the Christian virtues of charity and humility are indicative of the squire’s willingness to respond to Christ’s call from the Sermon on the Mount to be “perfect just as His Father is perfect.” Sancho Panza’s pragmatic yet whimsical character is one of the many reasons Don Quixote continues to fascinate scholars and non-scholars alike. The reader learns early in the novel that Sancho’s character, which the narrator introduces in I.7 as “de muy poco sal en la mollera” (163) is neither static nor one-dimensional. While Sancho’s ingenuity, guile, and intellect become more apparent to the reader, the squire’s spiritual acumen provides another dimension to his unpredictable behavior. The squire’s penchant for divine succor and guidance plainly reflects an Ignatian awareness of God’s presence in his daily life: En toda buena eleccion, y en cuanto es de nuestra parte, el ojo de nuestra intencion debe ser simple, solamente mirando para lo que soy criado; es á saber, para alabanza de Dios Nuestro Señor y salvacion de mi ánima. Y así, cualquier cosa que eligiere, debe ser á que me ayude para el fin que soy criado, no ordenando ni trayendo el fin al medio, mas el medio al fin (Loyola 1833: 76).

This incarnational view of the world differs from Erasmus, who rejected any spirituality based on finding Christ in physical or material forms. Furthermore, Erasmus, unlike St. Ignatius, does not necessarily see everything in this world as a means to an end: De igual modo, el vulgo de los hombres sienten la mayor admiración por las cosas puramente corporales, y casi piensan que son lo único que existe. Por el contrario, los hombres piadosos lo que más desprecian es lo que está más relacionado con el cuerpo y se entregan por entero a la contemplación de las cosas invisibles. Así pues, los unos conceden el primer papel a las riquezas, después a las comodidades corporales, y relegan el alma al último lugar, que la mayoría ni siquiera creen que exista, porque no llega a verse con los ojos (Stultitiae Laus, LXVI 341; translation appears in Vilanova 1988: 49).

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The extent to which Cervantes was a writer whose fiction was more influenced by Ignatian spirituality than Christian Humanism is more difficult to determine, however, as Alban Forcione notes in his seminal study Cervantes and the Humanist Vision: A Study of Four Exemplary Novels: Cervantes’s religious consciousness is profoundly undoctrinaire; it is alive with a complex ferment of spiritual and secular tendencies, and it can comfortably manifest itself at the opposite extremes of irreverent burlesque of the mental habits of the devout and hymns informed by the lofty spirituality of the most religious of his contemporaries (Forcione 1982: 354).

Sancho’s dream to live out the rest of his days as the governor of an island does not come to fruition, but his adventures with Don Quixote are not meaningless. The physical journey Sancho undertakes unleashes a metaphorical journey of the soul along which the squire recognizes the presence of God in the people, places, and things of everyday life. Works Cited Bataillon, Marcel (1966): Erasmo y España: Estudios sobre la historia espiritual del siglo XVI. Alatorre, Antonio (trans.). México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Castro, Américo (1972): El pensamiento de Cervantes. Barcelona: Editorial Noguer, S.A. Cervantes, Miguel de (1992): Novelas ejemplares. Sieber, Harry (ed.). Madrid: Cátedra. — (2005): Don Quijote de la Mancha II. Allen, John J. (ed.). Madrid: Cátedra. — (2008): Don Quijote de la Mancha I. Allen, John J. (ed.). Madrid: Cátedra. Forcione, Alban (1982): Cervantes and the Humanist Vision: A Study of Four Exemplary Novels. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Gray, SJ, Howard (2008): “Ignatian Spirituality.” In: Traub, George W. (ed.): An Ignatian Spirituality Reader. Chicago: Loyola P., pp. 59-84. Loyola, St. Ignatius of (1833): Ejercicios espirituales de S. Ignacio de Loyola. Madrid: Imprenta de D. M. de Burgos. — (1959): Letters of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Young, S.J., William J. (trans.). Chicago: Loyola UP. Martin, S.J., James (2010): The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. O’neal, S.J., Norman (2011): The Life of St. Ignatius of Loyola. . Senior, Donald (ed.) (1990): The Catholic Study Bible. New York: Oxford UP.

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Sheldrake, Philip (1999): Spirituality and Theology: Christian Living and the Doctrine of God. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Vilanova, Antonio (1988): “Erasmo, Sancho Panza y su amigo Don Quijote.” In: Cervantes 8, Special Issue, pp. 44-92.

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Don Quixote, the Skeptical Reader and the Nature of Reality Steven Wagschal Indiana University, Bloomington [T]ous les chats son mortels. Socrate est mortel. Donc Socrate est un chat. Eugène Ionesco, Rhinocéros1

Don Quixote often includes as one of his premises in reasoning that some kind of enchanter (alternatively called sabio or maligno encantador) is mutating the appearances or essences of objects, either for him or for others, especially when he is faced with a conflict between what he seems to perceive (for instance, armies) and what others seem to perceive (for instance, sheep). Such an idea is well established in Alonso Quijano’s favorite reading material, the chivalric romance, and Don Quixote’s niece draws on her own cursory knowledge of this tradition initially presenting her uncle with the enchanter excuse in order to explain what has happened to his books and library (I.7). Don Quixote immediately makes the connection between the niece’s “encantador” and the literature he loves, concluding that the encantador must be “Fristón,” the malevolent narrator of Jerónimo Fernández’s chivalric novel Belianís de Grecia, a volume to which, not incidentally, the narrator had already alluded in Part I, Chapter 1, in direct reference to Alonso Quijano’s going mad:

From Act I of Rhinocéros (1970: 32). This “syllogism” is told to the Old Man by the Logician. Just before this, Jean had made a clear allusion to Descartes’s Meditations, when he declares to Bérenger: “Vous n’existez pas, mon cher, parce que vous ne pensez pas! Pensez, et vous serez” (1970: 32). 1

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Con estas razones perdía el pobre caballero el juicio, y desvelábase por entenderlas y desentrañarles el sentido que no se lo sacara ni las entendiera el mesmo Aristóteles, si resucitara para sólo ello. No estaba muy bien con las heridas que don Belianís daba y recebía, porque se imaginaba que, por grandes maestros que le hubiesen curado, no dejaría de tener el rostro y todo el cuerpo lleno de cicatrices y señales (I.1, 72; emphasis added).2

In this passage from the very first chapter, then, the narrator links Don Quixote’s madness, Aristotelian reasoning, and, in the final sentence about Alonso Quijano’s doubts about Belianís’s scars, raises the question of realism in fictional worlds. This essay explores the convergence of these themes, examining the implications of the encantador for what the reader of Don Quixote (1605, 1615) may logically conclude about its Fictional World vis-à-vis the Actual World. I will argue that Cervantes’s reader is placed in a similar position to the reader-meditator of René Descartes’s Meditations (1641) with the caveat that Descartes’s reader can ultimately leave skepticism behind, while the reader of Don Quixote must continue to entertain serious doubts about the fictional world generally and about the eponymous character’s madness more particularly. From the reader’s perspective, there is considerable dramatic irony in the scene with the niece and the conclusion that the sabio is Fristón. Indeed, the belief in this enchanter seems to be a delusion in I.7. In this context, the reader knows from reading the previous two chapters that Don Quixote’s friends and family walled up the library and burned his books. It was not Fristón! But that the sobrina introduced just such a fictional being as a kind of white lie and that Don Quixote took it a certain way does not allow the reader to conclude that such beings never operate in the fictional world of Don Quixote. Indeed, such an assertion would involve drawing an over-hasty inference.3 This belief in Fristón which seems delusional in I.7 (and in other episodes) is connected with one that at first seems similar in II.2, in which Don Quixote learns from Sancho that “el hijo de Bartolomé Carrasco, que viene de estudiar de 2 The lack of permanent physical harm or scarring to Alonso Quijano is the specific problem alluded to in the case of the hero Belianís, which makes the alleged critique of novels of chivalry somewhat problematic, since Don Quixote, like Belianís, suffers multiple bruises and yet never seems seriously injured. This is one of the things which leads Martínez-Bonati to refer to the fictional world of Part I not as a “realist” but as a “comic realist” world (1992: 64). Readers who assume Don Quixote to be realistic or verisimilar are being duped by Cervantes. Please note that citations from Don Quixote are to Luis Murillo’s edition. 3 In like manner, a character in the 1970 film Catch-22, based on Joseph Heller’s novel of the same name, notes humorously that “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they aren’t after you” (Charles C. Doyle et al. 2012: 164).

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Salamanca” has read “la historia de vuestra merced con nombre de El Ingenioso Hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha” replete with private details “que pasamos nosotros a solas” to which Don Quixote explains “que debe ser de algún sabio encantador el autor de nuestra historia” (II.2, 57). Unlike the walled-up library episode, in which the reader knows what really happened, and unlike the cases of the sheep or the windmills, in which Don Quixote’s explanations seem implausible, this time the hypothesis is not implausible at all. And given that, the reader is granted an opportunity to doubt Don Quixote’s madness, at least in this instance. Indeed, there is considerable likelihood in Part II that some encantador like Fristón has been recording Don Quixote’s deeds and conversations with Sancho from Part I, and publishing these in record time in the book which is Part I.4 How else to explain the rapid writing and distribution of the novel across Spain and other parts of the world in less than thirty days? And how else to explain that the narrator seems to have gotten much of the actions and private conversations right? In Don Quixote: Hero or Fool, John Jay Allen describes and elaborates on the critical history of the effect that Part I has in the 1615 novel. While Richard Predmore viewed the effect of the juxtaposition of the fictional levels as one that enhances an “artistic illusion,” and Aubrey Bell considered this an enhancement that makes “the living don Quijote [of Part II] more real,” (qtd. in Allen 1969: 73), it was Américo Castro who first recognized that this juxtaposition is not so simple. For Castro, it leads to a “disturbing uncertainty of not knowing where one plane ends and the other begins” (Castro, “Cervantes y Pirandello” 480, qtd. in Allen 1969: 78). Allen agrees and yet concludes that Predmore, Castro and others neglect to discuss what Allen qualifies as “the conclusive manner in which [that] reality, the phenomenal world of Don Quixote, is totally unhinged precisely at the point we have been examining” (qtd. in Allen 1969: 76). For Allen, this is a “trick played by Cervantes on the reader (…) [which] seduces the reader into acquiescing in a wholly untenable perspective” (qtd. in Allen 1969: 78). Following these lines of thought, and trying to disentangle what the reader knows about the world of Don Quixote in this regard, I note that the reader is faced with an important dose of epistemic doubt, of a kind similar to that introduced by Descartes in his Meditations (1641). In that work, Descartes does not attempt to present at the start a fully fleshed-out philosophical system containing doctrines and proofs, but rather he employs methodological skepticism,

Thus, Don Quixote is not crazy for believing himself to be an important knight (at least not in Part II) because some necessarily preternatural force (the super-knowing narrator who in Part II has written and mentions Part I) has deemed his story important enough to narrate. 4

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inviting the reader to meditate along with him, to consider what we know with certainty and what we don’t know, by considering any possible reason for doubting our beliefs (Nadler 1997: 44). Descartes introduces skeptical arguments of increasing strength —first doubting his senses, then doubting that he is not dreaming, and third, the most severe of these, the mauvais génie or evil deceiver hypothesis— in order to sever completely the relationship between the truth and what he perceives as an external world, eventually building his way back via the famous Cogito Ergo Sum (I think therefore I am), which for Descartes is the first item he cannot doubt. Historian of philosophy Stephen Nadler has compared the Meditations to certain elements of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, relating the French philosopher’s first-person account of living in a world of radical skepticism with Don Quixote’s ideas about his own world.5 Nadler speculates that Descartes may have read Don Quixote, and suggests that even if he hadn’t, he surely would have heard of it, as it had been translated early into French: Part I, by César Oudin in 1614, and Part II by François Rosset in 1618 (the latter would become an important tome, containing, as it does, the first known illustration of Don Quixote and Sancho). As Nadler points out, the term “maligno encantador” is translated by Oudin as “le malin enchanteur” which is similar to Duc de Luynes’s French translation (from Latin) of the Meditations, “mauvais génie” (Nadler 1997: 43). Also, in his Discourse on Method (1637), published in French before the Meditations, Descartes seems to allude to Don Quixote when he warns of the perilous effects of dwelling on the past and reading imaginative literature. For Descartes, reading books of old is like traveling to a different place: “For to convene with those of other centuries is almost the same thing as to travel. It is good to know something of the customs of different peoples in order to judge more sanely of our own...” (1996: 6). Thus a little bit of knowledge of the past can help with reasoning and “judge more sanely.” However, some people abuse this: “But Anthony Cascardi has also compared Descartes’s Meditations with Don Quixote, examining the Cave of Montesinos episode as a kind of Cartesian dream sequence. See his “Cervantes and Descartes on the Dream Argument.” In addition, in Skepticism in Cervantes (1982), Mauren Ihrie has studied the major branches of Classical skepticism (Academic and Pyrrohnian) then explores these tendencies in pre-Cartesian, sixteenth-century Spanish thinkers, analyzing Quod Nihil Scitur (1581) by Francisco Sánchez, “The Skeptic,” and other works influenced by Classical skepticism, in order to contextualize her analysis of Don Quixote and the Persiles in these terms. Her study is focused on Don Quixote’s beliefs and what she interprets as his transformation, from Part I to Part II, from dogmatic to skeptic, assuming a reader who clearly knows what is what in the novel. In contrast, my study questions what the reader knows in light of the beliefs of the characters and the evidence presented by the narrators, contextualizing the text as an antecedent of Descartes Meditations. 5

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when one employs too much time in travelling, one becomes a stranger in one’s own country, and when one is too curious about things which were practised in past centuries, one is usually very ignorant about those which are practised in our own time” (1996: 6). Such a characterization is not a bad description of Don Quixote, whose appearance usually strikes others as odd, certainly archaic and out of place. The allusion to Don Quixote becomes more obvious as Descartes continues with a commentary on idealizing fiction and its effects on those who might take it seriously: Besides, fables make one imagine many events possible which in reality are not so, and even the most accurate of histories, if they do not exactly misrepresent or exaggerate the value of things in order to render them more worthy of being read, at least omit in them all the circumstances which are basest and least notable; and from this fact it follows that what is retained is not portrayed as it really is, and that those who regulate their conduct by examples which they derive from such a source, are liable to fall into the extravagances of the knights-errant of Romance, and form projects beyond their power of performance (1996: 6).6

It is hard to imagine that Descartes is not thinking here of Alonso Quijano, who certainly “fell into the extravagances of the knights-errant of Romance” as well as embarked on “projects beyond [his] power of performance.” Nadler’s essay is primarily concerned with highlighting what the “maligno encantador” does and does not do in Don Quixote, always from Don Quixote’s own perspective. As an example, in the episode of the windmills, it is Don Quixote’s perspective that the windmills are in fact giants but the enchanter transforms them into windmills just at the moment when Don Quixote was to strike them. So in this case, according to Nadler, the enchanter alters not just the appearance of the windmills but instead their material composition. Meanwhile, the enchantment had a different impact on Sancho, whose perception (from

“Car c’est quasi le même de converser avec ceux des autres siècles, que de voyager. Il est bon de savoir quelque chose des mœurs de divers peuples, afin de juger de nôtres plus sainement, et que nous ne pensions pas que tout ce qui est contre nos modes soit ridicule, et contre raison, ainsi qu’ont coutume de faire ceux qui n’ont rien vu. Mais lorsqu’on emploie trop de temps à voyager, on devient enfin étranger en son pays; et lorsqu’on est trop curieux des choses qui se pratiquaient aux siècles passés, on demeure ordinairement fort ignorant de celles que se pratiquent en celui-ci. Outre que les fables font imaginer plusieurs événements comme possible qui ne le sont point; et que même les histoires les plus fidèles, si elles ne changent ni n’augmentent la valeur des choses, pour les rendre plus dignes d’être lues, au moins en omettent-elles presque d’où vient que le rest ne paraît pas tel qu’il est, et qu’ils en tirent, sont sujets à tomber dans les extravagances des paladins de nos romans, et à concevoir des desseins qui passent leurs forces” (1963: 573-74). 6

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Don Quixote’s perspective) of the windmills was at first erroneous (while seeing the giants as windmills) but later accurate (once the giants had been materially transformed into windmills). In contrast, in the episode of the armies of sheep, Nadler purports that the enchanter has done something different, in Don Quixote’s view, which Nadler gleans from the fact that, after the attack on the sheep, Don Quixote tells Sancho that he should quietly follow the sheep, and in that way he’ll see that they’ll soon turn back to their true nature: Sábete, Sancho, que es muy fácil cosa a los tales hacernos parecer lo que quieren, y este maligno que me persigue, envidioso de la gloria que vio que yo había de alcanzar desta batalla, ha vuelto los escuadrones de enemigos en manadas de ovejas. Si no, haz una cosa, Sancho, por mi vida, porque te desengañes y veas ser verdad lo que te digo: sube en tu asno y síguelos bonitamente, y verás como, en alejándose de aquí algún poco, se vuelven en su ser primero, y dejando de ser carneros, son hombres hechos y derechos como yo te los pinté primero... (I.18, 224).

For Nadler, this is an example of a temporary change in an object’s appearance, which he distinguishes from the transformation of an object’s materiality.7 While Nadler analyzes what Don Quixote believes as a pre-Cartesian who employs the evil enchanter hypothesis and hence focuses on the character of Don Quixote, I would argue that there is another important point of comparison, which Nadler does not investigate, and that is, namely, Cervantes’s reader’s epistemic doubt with respect to a sabio or maligno encantador. As Descartes invites the reader to join him in the skeptical meditation, Cervantes’s text also presents the reader with an opportunity to engage in skeptical thinking. As I outlined above, following Allen, the existence of an encantador is a plausible hypothesis for explaining how the thoughts and actions of Don Quixote and Sancho are recorded in a history entitled El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha.8 The enchanter’s powers would help explain, as well, the record pubThe hard distinction that Nadler draws here between a material transformation in one case and a change only in appearance in the other does not seem to be supported by the original Spanish or Cohen’s translation which Nadler reproduces, for clearly the text says “turned” and “turn back” in reference to their shape: “If you do not believe me, Sancho, do one thing, I beg of you, and you will discover that you are mistaken and that I am speaking the truth. Get on your ass, and follow them stealthily. Then you will see that as soon as they get a little way from here they will turn back to their original shapes, and will not be sheep any more but well-built proper men, as I first described them to you” (Don Quixote, trans. J. M. Cohen, New York and London, Penguin Books, 1950, I.18, 139; qtd. in Nadler 50). 8 Although it goes beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth mentioning that all of Descartes’s skeptical arguments are in some way prefigured in Don Quixote, including not trusting our senses 7

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lication and distribution time of Part I, making it possible for the readers to discuss the “history” in the ensuing discussion only some thirty days after the events themselves took place. Don Quixote, as I mentioned, adduces this very hypothesis: “Yo te aseguro, Sancho, dijo don Quijote, que debe de ser algún sabio encantador el autor de nuestra historia, que a los tales no se les encubre nada de lo que quieren escribir” (II.2, 57). It is not at all clear that he is wrong.9 While Cervantes’s reader surely needs to be skeptical about the existence of the sabio encantador, the reader needs also, in a Cartesian manner, to question the unquestioned belief that the wizard comes into being only as a figment of Don Quixote’s imagination or as the sobrina’s fabrication. That is to say, the reader needs to remain somewhat skeptical of the dominant hypothesis that there is no sabio encantador. Not only Don Quixote himself, but Cervantes’s reader —like Descartes’s— is brought into an exercise in extreme skeptical thinking, with the caveat that Cervantes’s reader may not be consciously aware of her/his skepticism, unlike Descartes’s who has been explicitly asked to meditate on the problematic.10 Returning now to the question of the thirty day turn-around time for writing, publishing and distributing thousands of copies of Part I of Don Quixote, the reader may wonder, and I will ask explicitly, how is this possible? My question is rhetorical in the purest sense, and rests on a commonsense assumption or premise that the fictional world of Part II is similar to the Actual World in which the reader and I live and in which the flesh and blood Miguel de Cervantes once lived. Such a premise is widespread and practiced by prominent critics in Cervantes studies: it is necessary, for instance, for Carroll Johnson to reconstruct a psychoanalytic pre-history for Alonso Quijano, in which he examines Quijano’s anxieties psychoanalytically. Teresa Soufas also relies on this kind of assumption in analyzing Don Quixote’s melancholy, treating Alonso Quijano as a character whose thoughts and actions in the world are completely comprehensible according to Early Modern medical texts: “There is every indication... that the country

(Descartes’s 1st argument in Meditation 1) and not being able to distinguish dream states from waking states (as in the “Cueva de Montesinos” episode): Descartes’s 2nd argument in Meditation 1). 9 Here I disagree with Ihrie’s position that the reader clearly knows what is going on. For instance, she writes, “[e]ven though the ultimate truth of the situation remains clear to the reader, conflicting points of view for the first time [in the Mambrino Helmet episode] have been presented as equally legitimate” (41). 10 Admittedly, this is a serious disanalogy between the Spanish work and the Meditations. Descartes’s reader can and must imitate the narrator’s doubt in order for the philosophical thought experiment to work; quite dissimilarly, only the Romantics thought Don Quixote to be a model for serious imitation.

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gentleman Quijano is a classic melancholic scholar, which means, following the medical teachings of Cervantes’s day... that the Manchegan hidalgo is originally cool and dry, though a certain amount of heat is present in his brain for studious activities” (1990: 20). Soufas’s assessment is that his memory is damaged from the excessive dryness and thus he cannot form new images, which leads to his seeing things as they are not. This line of argumentation takes for granted that the world of Don Quixote is identical in all important respects to beliefs about the Actual World by readers of Don Quixote. However, returning to my rhetorical question, it is rhetorical precisely because these worlds are significantly different. Indeed, there is no way that the time conflict is soluble in the Actual rather than Possible World, given the strictures on time and space in the Actual World that you and I inhabit. In the Actual World of Cervantes and of his contemporary readers, some ten years have passed, between the publication of Parts I and Parts II, and in that time, we know that Part I was published, distributed, translated, re-published, and read by many. If I were to ask, “how is it possible that Part II was published ten years after Part I, and that readers actually read Part I in the ten years before Part II was published?” then the question would no longer be rhetorical but just silly, because the publication of both Parts I and II are considered historical facts (we rarely ask hypothetically if the actual is possible, since, of course, what is actual entails its possibility). Furthermore, knowing what we know experientially about how time and space seem to operate in our Actual World, there is nothing to preclude the publishing, distribution and reading from taking place: ten years is more than ample time. There is a fundamental dissimilarity, then, between things that happen in the fictional world of Part II, on the one hand, and the things that can happen in the Actual World either today or in the early seventeenth century. The inclusion of Part I in Part II is certainly the most severe but by no means the only problem with equating the Fictional World of Don Quixote with the Actual World of Cervantes. Other temporal inconsistencies abound, many of which have been examined by Luis Murillo in The Golden Dial: Temporal Configuration in Don Quixote. In fact, it is quite impossible to ascertain with precision when the main plot occurs in historical time: the first narrator of Part I alludes to searching “archivos” in La Mancha for long-lost manuscripts suggesting that these must be remnants of an almost forgotten oral history of Don Quixote de la Mancha, which implies that the title character left his village on his first sally scores of years, if not centuries, earlier. Furthermore, the publication history of tomes from the Actual World that are discovered in Alonso Quijano’s library indicate that the main action of Alonso Quijano’s transformation into Don Quixote occurs some time after the publication of the latest books in that

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library: El pastor de Iberia, published in 1591. So, assuming that events in the 1605 Quixote occur in chronological order as they do in the Actual World, the earliest possible date for the action of Don Quixote’s first sally is 1591. At the opposite end of the possible time frame for the action, the reader assumes that the action of Part I takes place before 1604, when the book was sent, in the Actual World, to the printer. The Captive’s tale adds additional chronological information from the Actual World and helps to locate the plot towards the early end of the 1591-1604 range but doesn’t help to clarify the date of the action more specifically. In fact, the details of this tale vex any attempt to situate the plot in a comprehensible timeline. In Part I, the Captive begins his story by saying that the events he will relate began twenty-two years earlier: “Éste hará veinte y dos años que salí de casa de mi padre, y en todos ellos, puesto que he escrito algunas cartas, no he sabido dél ni de mis hermanos nueva alguna” (I.39, 475). He explains that he was present at various historical events, starting in the late 1560s, and participated in the decisive battle over La Goleta in Tunisia, in 1574. With his years of captivity, and travel time during the escape, these factors put the main narrative in which Zoraida and the Captive meet Don Quixote and other characters at the Inn either in or before 1589. This “possible” date is thus earlier than the publication date of El pastor de Iberia (1591) mentioned in I.6, which means that the timeline is impossible assuming normal chronological time.11 Whether it takes place in 1589 or 1591 is problematic enough in Part I. But the problem of chronology is exacerbated exponentially with the 1615 Quixote: if Part I occurs between 1591 (or 1589) and 1604, and if Part II begins only thirty days after Don Quixote’s return to his village at the end of Part I, then how can the reader make sense of references in Part II, to the expulsion of the 11 The Captive recounts, “lo que en este discurso de tiempo he pasado lo diré brevemente. Embarquéme en Alicante, llegué con próspero viaje a Génova, fui desde allí a Milán, donde me acomodé de armas y de algunas galas de soldado, de donde quise ir a sentar mi plaza al Piamonte; y estando ya de camino para Alejandría de la Palla, tuve nuevas que el gran duque de Alba pasaba a Flandes” (I.39, 475-76). As Murillo points out in a footnote to this passage, the Duke of Alba arrived in Brussels on August 22, 1567. Since the reader doesn’t know exactly how long it took the Captive to travel to Brussels from Alicante (although it is clear that he stopped along the way), it is impossible to know precisely in which year he left Spain, that is, from whence to begin counting the twenty-two years he had mentioned in the previous sentence. However, it is possible to determine the latest possible date for the main action (i.e., the present in which he is recounting his experiences) according to this calculus. Assuming that the Captive is telling the truth and that he remembers the number of years that have passed correctly, then this date would be 1567 plus twenty-two, that is, 1589. Furthermore, the longer it took the Captive to arrive in Brussels, the earlier this would make the date of the main action.

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moriscos in the dialogue between Sancho and Ricote in II.54?12 Furthermore, what can the reader make of the letter from Sancho to his wife Teresa Panza, which is clearly and specifically dated “July 20, 1614”? In rehearsing these chronology issues, I’m aware that I’ve employed the verb “assuming” more than a couple of times, in reference to how the fictional world operates in Don Quixote, that is, to which rules govern it. In making such an assumption, I am relying implicitly on a common way of reading fiction that has been made into an explicit theoretical principle by Marie-Laure Ryan, which she calls the “Principle of Minimal Departure”: We can derive a law of primary importance for the phenomenology of reading. This law —to which I shall refer as the principle of minimal departure— states that we reconstrue the central world of a textual universe in the same way we reconstrue the alternative possible worlds of nonfactual statements: as conforming as far as possible to our representation of AW [the Actual World]. We will project upon these worlds everything we know about reality, and we will make only the adjustments dictated by the text. When someone says ‘If horses had wings they would be able to fly,’ we reconstrue an animal presenting all the properties of real horses, except for the presence of wings and the ability to fly (Ryan 1991: 51).13

Cervantes himself seems to problematize a version of the concept of minimal departure in several instances. A good example is found at the end of Part I, when Sancho wants to convince his caged master that he is not enchanted, making his infamous inquiry into Don Quixote’s excretory functions and appealing to Don Quixote’s knowledge of what would be appropriate in the genre of chivalric fiction, which, for Don Quixote, is an accurate, historical account of the Actual World of the past. Sancho asks, “pregunto, hablando con acatamiento, si acaso después que vuestra merced va enjaulado y, a su parecer encantado en esta jaula, le ha venido gana y voluntad de hacer aguas mayores o menores, como suele decirse” (I.48, 574-75). Don Quixote replies affirmatively that he has had such necessity “muchas veces” (“quite often”) which leads Sancho to retort that that he has proof that there are no enchanters responsible for Don Quixote’s caging: “Ah! —dijo Sancho—. Cogido le tengo: esto es lo que yo deseaba saber...” (I.49, As Murillo explains in a footnote in his edition, the edict of expulsion was decreed for Valencia in 1609; for Castilla, Murcia, Granada, and Aragon in 1610; and in some other areas through 1613 (II.54, 448, fn 9). 13 Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: IU Press, 1991. “We perform the same operation when we read about a flying horse in a fairy tale, when a child tells us ‘Last night I dreamed about a flying horse,’ and when a poet writes about the flying horse of imagination” (Ryan 51). 12

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575). Sancho, then, is positing that for Don Quixote’s story of enchantment to be veridical, that his account of his fictional world (his enchanted caged state) should align with what is known of their Actual World (based on the imagined historical world that characters have read about in books of chivalry), that is, that it should have explicit antecedents.14 But clearly, in chivalric fiction, there are never any narrations of the hero going to the bathroom while enchanted. Don Quixote, however, counters (anticipating perhaps Hume’s philosophical distrust of general rules based on constant conjunction) that while there may be rules of enchantment in past situations (perhaps the heroes of old did not have bowel movements in their enchanted states), these have no probative value for later cases (that is, for his present situation): Verdad dices, Sancho—respondió don Quijote—; pero ya te he dicho que hay muchas maneras de encantamentos, y podría ser que con el tiempo se hubiesen mudado de unos en otros, y que agora se use que los encantados hagan todo lo que yo hago, aunque antes no lo hacían. De manera, que contra el uso de los tiempos no hay que argüir ni de qué hacer consecuencias (I.48-49, 575).

In this self-conscious metaliterary passage then, Don Quixote and Sancho use a principle of minimal departure implicitly, but Don Quixote questions this principle for Humean reasons, as if to say that Sancho, as reader of Don Quixote’s current circumstance in the cage, may not assume that things are one way just because it is not explicitly stated that they are not another way, thus contradicting avant-la-lettre the applicability of a principle of minimal departure. Indeed, in Don Quixote, there is a significant breakdown of Ryan’s principle given the chronological and narratological quagmire I mentioned earlier. Sure, as readers we can depart minimally each time we encounter an anomaly; but the cumulative effect of these is that the world is not minimally but, indeed, quite different with respect to the basic way in which time works, and in which beings operate. In addition to the impossibility of the chronology, there is a fundamental and troubling lack of bewilderment on the part of the “sane” characters towards the problems that deal with narration. As John Jay Allen notes, Even if the reader is able to suspend not only his disbelief, but any consistent and rational understanding of the world in which the characters live, what can be the attitude of Sansón Carrasco, of the duke and duchess, of Antonio Moreno in Barcelona, of all the characters in the second part who have read the book and 14 I am not trying to suggest that the chivalric world is a historical account of the Actual World, but only that Don Quixote equates the two.

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now meet the knight in his travels? The attitudes and activities of all of these characters in Part II are based upon a disbelief in enchanters, yet all accept that the Don Quixote they meet is the same knight faithfully presented in the account of the Moorish enchanter (Allen 1969: 77).

Indeed, one way to minimize or explain the differences between our actual world and the main fictional world of Don Quixote would be to posit a superpowerful and super-knowing being at work in the fictional world.15 In fact, I would argue that this solution makes the most sense of the problems thus described, that such a being is in fact necessary. That the apparently sane and reasonable characters in the work (Sansón Carrasco, the Duke and Duchess and the village priest) don’t seem to have a problem with the impossibility of a book being published and distributed in one month, or with the existence of a superknowing author who has recorded the private conversations of Sancho and Don Quixote, thus presents a new problem: how come these characters —assuming they are like today’s humans in their most basic psychology— are not disturbed by the necessity of a super-knowing enchanter with special power over time and matter? To this question, there are no direct or concrete answers. Among a variety of speculative ones, it is even possible that the super-knowing being has altered their thinking on this one point, making them find it easy not to believe in enchanters and act as if enchanters did not exist. This is, in fact, one of Descartes’s own worries about the security of his knowledge in mathematical principles, when he doubts what he knows of basic arithmetic. Could the evil enchanter have altered Descartes’s mind to make him believe that three plus two are five when in fact they might add up to four? Is it possible that a deceiver has simply planted such an erroneous idea in his mind? How would he know if this were the case?16 Since there must be an enchanter or something like an enchanter in Part II of Don Quixote, the reader can then speculate on what the enchanter has done. For instance, while Don Quixote is not troubled at all by this, the reader may wonder (i.e., doubt) whether the enchanter has implanted 15 It is necessary that this being be supernatural in the sense that it must know more and be more powerful than humans. It is possible, but not necessary, that the being be omniscient and omnipotent. 16 “… since I sometimes believe that others go astray in cases where they think they have the most perfect knowledge, may I not similarly go wrong every time I add two and three or count the sides of a square, or in some even simpler matter, if that is imaginable?” (From Meditation I, qtd. in Nadler 1997: 45, his translation). In Alquié’s edition, the Latin original reads as follows: “Imò etiam, quemadmodum judico interdum alios errare circa ea quae se perfectissime scire arbitrantur, ita ego ut fallar quoties duo & tria simul addo, vel numero quadrati latera, vel si quid aliud facilius fingi potest?” (1963: II, I.180).

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ideas in Don Quixote’s mind. That would explain, among other things, why he seems to believe that Maese Pedro’s puppets are humans and not puppets. While Descartes is ultimately able to dispel his skeptical worries about the mauvais génie and claim secure knowledge about the Actual World, the same is not true for the reader or for Don Quixote. In a section called “Challenging minimal departure,” Ryan presents some potential challenges to the principle, like how we would be misreading the laws of Wonderland if we assumed that the Queen of Hearts played croquet by the same rules as they do in Wimbledon (for instance): “My reply to these objections is that every text is placed under the authority of the principle of minimal departure, but that it is textually feasible to challenge this authority by either frustrating or subverting the principle” (Ryan 1991: 57). I would argue that the lines quoted in my epigraph operate in such a way, parodying real philosophy: Thus, Ionesco’s Logician employs seemingly logical reasoning —associated with the quintessentially rational, Aristotelian syllogism— but it leads to absurd conclusions. In the world of Rhinocéros, minimal departure is subverted because seemingly educated people speak nonsense. As Ryan points out, Thomas Pavel discusses fictional worlds of dreams and madness structured according to “maximal departure” —such as, for instance, Alice in Wonderland: The other way of challenging the principle is to frustrate it through systematic inversion or contradiction. The worlds of dreams and of madness, of ritual and of nonsense may be patterned according to what Thomas Pavel (1986: 93) calls a principle of maximal departure. The reader of Alice in Wonderland quickly learns the futility of real-world knowledge (while Alice never fully assimilates the lesson)” (Ryan 1991: 58). 17

However, Don Quixote is not clearly a case in which maximal departure is patterned, for it seems that certain rules of verisimilitude are obeyed (including the meta-rule of appeals to verisimilitude by the narrator and the main character in I.1, and the Canon of Toledo in I.67). If encantadores do exist —and an encantador or something like an encantador must exist in the fictional world in order for the history of the ingenioso hidalgo not to be bound up with the usual restrictions on matter and the principles of time as experienced in the Actual World— then Don Quixote’s hypotheses and inferences about the world are not demonstrably wrong and In “Towards a Formal Ontology of Fictional Discourse,” Martínez-Bonati argues avant-lalettre against a notion like that of “minimal departure” on the grounds that it should not apply to non-realistic fictional worlds, as Ryan herself points out. 17

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are, in fact, sometimes more right than those of other characters like Sansón and the village priest. Such a line of reasoning, however, leads to what many or most readers might consider to be an unpalatable conclusion: that Don Quixote may not be mad. Clearly, there are several reasons why Don Quixote should be considered mad: he is presented as going crazy by grappling with the illogicality and incommensurability of the fictional world of Belianís de Grecia in I.1. Also, the narrator uses the word “locura” to describe his thinking many times and presents his case in humoral terms, stating in I.1 that “his brains dried up,” which is, as several critics have elaborated, a medical allusion to the effects of sleeplessness on the body according to contemporaneous medical doctrine. Other characters believe him to be a madman outright (e.g., the merchants) or a madman with “lucid intervals” (e.g., Diego de Miranda). However, if one of the main reasons that Don Quixote is considered mad for the reader is that he believes that enchanters are transforming objects or the way they appear, and if an enchanter really does exist who transforms objects or the way they appear, then, he may not be mad. If Don Quixote is judged mad because he believes that he can resuscitate the rules of chivalry from a fictional by-gone era, well, then he may not be mad either, because time and matter work very differently than they do in the Actual World. Thus, it appears that there are important reasons for which to conclude either way, that Don Quixote may or may not be mad. It is understandable that many readers would judge him mad and for those readers who find a sane Don Quixote unpalatable, I will point out that the unpalatable conclusion stems from reading Don Quixote with minimal departure, and more specifically from assuming foremost that Don Quixote has a verisimilar fictional world and that the character possesses a verisimilar psychology. Holding such assumptions is to gloss over the serious problems with the operations of time and space, which suggest different kinds of physical rules at the most basic level. While Martínez-Bonati argued that Cervantes “exposed the traditional and natural limits of the human understanding” (1992: 85), I would go even further to argue that what Cervantes is questioning goes beyond the tenets of a Weltanschauung, to the most fundamental elements, what Kant called the forms of intuition and the categories of understanding, which are the conditions for the possibility of experience.18 Indeed, to assume a minimal departure is to assume far too much about the similarity of the fictional world of the main plot and 18 Kant argues at length for these doctrines in the “Transcendental Aesthetic” and “Transcendental Deduction” sections of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/revised ‘B’ version 1787).

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of the Actual World. These non-minimal departures strike at what it means to live in time, what it means to know, and call into question the ability of a conceptual framework to comprehend the universe. In sum, the fictional world that Don Quixote inhabits in Part II is a world very unlike our own, not because times have changed, but because Time and Space are radically different. In disentangling his beliefs and what the reader knows about these beliefs, the reader is faced with a similar line of skepticism to that which Descartes would invite readers to follow some twenty years later in the Meditations. Cervantes’s skeptical reader becomes aware that for Don Quixote to be considered “mad” there would have to be additional, unstipulated differences between the worlds that would clarify why the reader needs to judge him mad. It will not do to take for granted a minimal departure from our actual world, that is, to assume that Don Quixote’s world is a verisimilar one. The evidence to the contrary would show Don Quixote to be sane about some of his most questionable beliefs (i.e., that he is the subject of an enchanter’s attention). And whether Don Quixote is sane or mad or some combination of these is of primary importance to an interpretation of Cervantes’s work. Ultimately, the implications of the reader’s skeptical doubt, and the concomitant logical necessity of a supernatural enchanter’s existence, lead to the creation of a Fictional World that is not minimally different from the reader’s Actual World. Bringing the reader into this skeptical process, Don Quixote anticipates major notions of modernity by raising questions about the nature of reality and the way humans understand the universe. Works Cited Allen, John Jay (1969): Don Quixote: Hero or Fool? A Study in Narrative Techniques. Gainesville:  U. of Florida P. Bell, Aubrey (1947): Cervantes. Norman, OK: U. of Oklahoma P. Cascardi, Anthony (1984): “Cervantes and Descartes on the Dream Argument.” In: Cervantes 4, 2, pp. 109-22. Castro, Américo (1967): “Cervantes y Pirandello.” In: Hacia Cervantes. Madrid: Taurus, pp. 477-85. Cervantes, Miguel de (1978): El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. 2 vols. Murillo, Luis (ed.). Madrid: Castalia. — (1949): L’ingénieux hidalgo Don Quichotte de la Manche. Trans. César Oudin and François Rosset. Revised, corrected and annotated by Jean Cassou. Paris: Gallimard. Descartes, René (1963): Oeuvres Philosophiques. Alquié, Ferdinand (ed.). Paris: Garnier Frères.

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— (1970): Meditationes de prima philosophia. Méditations métaphysiques. Latin text and translation by Duc de Luynes; introduction and notes by Geneviève RodisLewis. Paris: Vrin. — (1996): Discourse on the Method. In Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Weissman, David (ed.). New Haven and London: Yale UP. Doyle, Charles C./Mieder, Wolfgang/Shapiro, Fred (2012): The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs. New Haven: Yale UP., pp. 164. Hume, David (2007): An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Peter Millican. New York: Oxford UP. Ihrie, Maureen (1982): Skepticism in Cervantes. London: Tamesis. Ionesco, Eugène (1970): Rhinocéros. Suivi de La Vase. Paris: Gallimard. Johnson, Carroll (1983): Madness and Lust: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Don Quijote. L.A. and Berkeley: U. California P. Kant, Immanuel (1999): Critique of Pure Reason. Guyer, Paul/Wood, Allen W. (trans. and eds.). New York and Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Martínez-Bonati, Félix (1983): “Towards a Formal Ontology of Fictional Worlds.” In: Philosophy and Literature, 7, 2, pp. 182-195. — (1992): “Don Quijote” and the Poetics of the Novel. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Murillo, Luis (1975): The Golden Dial: Temporal Configuration in Don Quixote. Oxford: Dolphin. Nadler, Steven (1997): “Descartes’s Demon and the Madness of Don Quixote.” In: Journal of the History of Ideas, 58, 1, pp. 41-55. Pavel, Thomas (1986): Fictional Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Predmore, Richard (1967): The World of “Don Quixote.” Cambridge: Harvard UP. Ryan, Marie-Laure (1991): Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Soufas, Teresa Scott (1990): Melancholy and the Secular Mind in Spanish Golden Age Literature. Columbia and London: U. of Missouri P.

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Contributors David R. Castillo is Professor of Spanish and chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at SUNY Buffalo. He is the author of Awry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes, and the Early Picaresque (Purdue UP, 2001) and Baroque Horrors: Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities (The University of Michigan Press, 2010; reprinted in paperback in 2012). Castillo has also co-edited Reason and Its Others: Italy, Spain, and the New World (Vanderbilt UP 2006), and Spectacle and Topophilia: Reading Early and Postmodern Hispanic Cultures (Vanderbilt UP 2012). In addition, Castillo has published some thirty essays on different aspects of Early Modern literature and culture, including journal articles and book chapters on the work of Miguel de Cervantes, Baltasar Gracián, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, María de Zayas, and other authors of the Spanish Golden Age. William H. Clamurro is Professor of Spanish at Emporia State University. His B.A. (English) is from Amherst College, and his M.A. (English) and Ph.D. (Comparative Literature) are from the University of Washington. He is the author of two books, Beneath the Fiction: The Contrary Worlds of Cervantes’s Novelas Ejemplares (1997) and Language and Ideology in the Prose of Quevedo (1991), as well as several articles on 16th- and 17th-century Spanish literature. His edition (for nonnative speakers of Spanish) of the last four of Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares was published in 2011. Prof. Clamurro is a charter member of the Cervantes Society of America and is currently the book review editor of the Society’s journal. Julia Domínguez (Ph. D., University of Arizona) is Associate Professor of Spanish at Iowa State University. Her primary field of research is Early Modern Spanish literature, particularly Cervantes and the picaresque through current theories of cognitive mapping, space, and cartography. She has published in

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journals such as Hispania, Cervantes, The Bulletin of Comediantes, and Revista de estudios hispánicos. In addition, she has co-edited with Chad Gasta Hispanic Studies in Honor of Robert L. Fiore (Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, 2009). Currently, she is working on a monograph focusing on cognitive studies, memory, and autobiography in Early Modern Spanish literature. Edward H. Friedman is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Spanish, Professor of Comparative Literature, and director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He has served as president of the Cervantes Society of America, and since 1999 he has been editor of the Bulletin of the Comediantes. His primary field of research is Early Modern Spanish literature, with emphasis on the picaresque, Cervantes, and the Comedia. His research also covers contemporary narrative and drama. Recent publications include Cervantes in the Middle: Realism and Reality in the Spanish Novel and Into the Mist, a play based on Miguel de Unamuno’s Niebla. Wit’s End, an adaptation of Lope de Vega’s La dama boba, was performed by Vanderbilt University Theatre in 2006. Charles Victor Ganelin, Professor of Spanish at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) has written on the comedia (particularly Tirso and Calderón), Early Modern Spanish poetry and more recently Don Quixote. He has published a critical edition of Andrés de Claramonte’s La infelice Dorotea (Tamesis, 1988), Rewriting Theatre: The Comedia and the Nineteenth-Century Refundición (Bucknell University Press, 1994) and, co-edited with Howard Mancing, The Golden Age Comedia: Text, Theory and Performance (Purdue University Press, 1994). His current work focuses on the five senses and Early Modern Spanish literature. Chad M. Gasta (Ph.D., Michigan State University) is Associate Professor of Spanish at Iowa State University where he serves as Director of International Studies and Director of the Languages and Cultures for Professions program. Gasta also co-directs Iowa State’s largest study abroad program, the ISU on Mediterranean – Summer in Valencia, Spain, which features coursework in Spanish and several other disciplines. He has been honored with many all-university teaching awards, has been named a Master Teacher, and is the recipient of a college and Iowa State International Service Award. Gasta’s research deals with Early Modern theater in Spain and the New World (especially opera), Cervantes, the picaresque, and global education through study abroad. His forthcoming monograph, Imperial Stagings: Empire and

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Ideology in Transatlantic Theater of Early Modern Spain and the New World, will be published by the University of North Carolina’s Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures series. He is currently completing another book project on the first operas in Spain and the New World. Rosilie Hernández is Associate Professor of Early Modern Spanish Studies and Acting Director of the School of Literatures, Cultural Studies, and Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Bucolic Metaphors: History, Subjectivity, and Gender in the Early Modern Spanish Pastoral (Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures Series, University of North Carolina Press, 2006), as well as numerous articles focusing on Cervantes and women writers in journals such as Hispanic Review, Romance Quarterly, Cervantes, The Bulletin of Spanish Studies, and Hispania. She has begun a new book project on Early Modern Spanish accounts of women’s history —its production, reception, and reproduction— in fictional and pictorial texts. Michael J. McGrath is Professor of Spanish at Georgia Southern University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky. His research interests center on Don Quixote, cultural studies, and comedia studies. He is the author of Religious Celebrations in Segovia, 1577-1697 and the forthcoming La vida urbana segoviana: Historia de una ciudad barroca en sus documentos. He is the editor of four editions in the Cervantes & Co. series, and his edition of El gran teatro del mundo is forthcoming. In addition, his articles have appeared in Cervantes, Bulletin of the Comediantes, Comedia Performance, Estudios Segovianos, and Graffylia. He is the editor of Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs and the interviews editor for Comedia Performance. He recently served a three-year term as a member of the Cervantes Society of America’s Executive Council. James A. Parr is Distinguished Professor of Spanish at UC Riverside, where he offers a variety of courses and seminars, with emphasis on the Golden Age and on Don Quixote and Don Juan in particular. His undergraduate course on Don Quixote regularly enrolls 40 students. Two rather unique graduate seminars are “Spain and the Western Tradition” and “The Satiric Tradition in Hispanic Literature,” both of which reflect an abiding interest in history of ideas and genre theory. He also directs a summer program in Madrid, in tandem with his wife Patricia, for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. He considers his main contributions to the field to be ‘Don Quixote,’ Don Juan, and Related Subjects: Form and Tradition in Spanish Literature, 1330-1630 (Susquehanna UP, 2004) and ‘Don Quixote’: A Touchstone for Literary Criticism

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(Reichenberger, 2005), along with his editorship of the Bulletin of the Comediantes, vols. 25-50, and three terms as associate editor of Hispania. Recent projects include co-editing and expanding Julio Cejador’s 1905-06 critical-etymological dictionary of Don Quixote (Barcelona: El Serbal, 2011), co-editing an updated version of Approaches to Teaching Cervantes’s ‘Don Quixote’ (MLA; expected 2013), and a set of proceedings. He has served as president of the Cervantes Society of America and the AATSP, as well as local chapters of Phi Beta Kappa and the AAUP. A highlight of his career was the presentation at MLA in 2006 of a homage volume, titled Critical Reflections: Essays on Golden Age Spanish Literature in Honor of James A. Parr (Bucknell UP). Steven Wagschal (Ph.D. Columbia) is Associate Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research focuses on Early Modern Spanish poetry, prose fiction and drama as these intersect with art history, philosophy and cognitive studies. He is the author of The Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes (Missouri UP, 2006) as well as articles and book chapters on texts by Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón, Góngora, Garcilaso and Castillejo, and has published in such venues as Hispanic Review, Revista de estudios hispánicos, Cervantes, Bulletin of the Comediantes, and Calíope. In addition, he has edited Peribáñez y el Comendador de Ocaña by Lope de Vega (Cervantes & Co., 2004). He is currently writing a book on the senses of smell and taste, from the perspective of cognitive embodiment, in Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

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