International Don Quixote

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Studies in Comparative Literature 57 Series Editors C.C. Barfoot and Theo D’haen

International Don Quixote

Edited by

Theo D’haen and Reindert Dhondt

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

Front cover illustration: Lorenzo Coullaut Valera, Monument to Cervantes (1930), Plaza de España, Madrid. Back cover illustration: Lorenzo Coullaut Valera, Statue of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (1989), Place d’Espagne, Brussels. Cover photos: Reindert Dhondt Cover design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence’. ISBN: 978-90-420-2583-7 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in The Netherlands

Table of Contents

Preface

3

Dagmar Vandebosch Quixotism as a Poetic and National Project in the Early Twentieth-Century Spanish Essay

15

Patrick Collard A Portrait of Cervantes as “A Learned Sancho Panza”: The Quixote in Ramón J. Sender’s Thought before the Civil War 33 Kristine Vanden Berghe The Quixote in the Stories of Subcomandante Marcos

53

Reindert Dhondt The Intrusive Incertitude of the Quixote or the Emergence of World Literature According to Carlos Fuentes 71 Nadia Lie Who is the Reader of Pierre Menard? Borges on Cervantes Revisited

89

María Stoopen Cervantine Instances of Unreliability in Ricardo Piglia’s “Assumed Name”

109

Christian De Paepe Don Quixote on Belgian Staves

137

Hendrik van Gorp Don Quixote in the Netherlands: Translations and Adaptations of Cervantes’ Novel

157

Lieven D'hulst Don Quixote Travelling Through the Young Belgium

169

Jan Herman Did Don Quixote and Cervantes Read the Same Books?

183

Bart Van Den Bossche Of Humorous Heroes and Non-Existent Knights: Don Quixote in Twentieth-Century Italian Literature

197

Ulla Musarra-Schrøder Cervantes in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy

219

Theo D'haen Don Quixote on the Mississippi: Twain’s Modernities

237

Brigitte Adriaensen Getting Lost in La Mancha: The Unma(s)king of Gilliam’s

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote

251

Notes on Contributors

271

Preface The fourth centenary of the publication of (Part I of) Don Quixote in 2005 provoked, predictably so, a plethora of editions, books and articles. A very incomplete list of books would include, for instance, Autores del Quijote and Lectores del Quijote, both edited in 2005 by Sarah de Mojica and Carlos Rincón, Inspiración y pretexto. Estudios sobre las recreaciones del Quijote (2005) by Santiago Alfonso López Navia, Leer El Quijote. Siete tesis sobre ética y literatura (2005) by Iris M. Zavala, Fighting Windmills: Encounters with Don Quixote (2006) by Manuel Durán and Fay R. Rogg, Don Quijote Across Four Centuries: 1605-2005 (2006) by Carroll B. Johnson, Cervantes and Modernity: Four Essays on ‘Don Quijote’ (2007) by Eric C. Graf, Don Quichotte, pour combattre la mélancolie by Françoise Davoine (2008), Don Quijote als gelebte Metapher (2008) by Bernhard H. Taureck, and Quijote e hijos (2008) by Julián Ríos. Perhaps most significantly, the year 2005 also yielded Cervantes’ Don Quixote: A Casebook, edited by Roberto González Echeverría, Viaje alrededor de El Quijote by Fernando del Paso, and Don Quichotte: du livre au mythe, quatre siècles d’errance by Jean Canavaggio. Several journals dedicated all or substantial part of an issue to Cervantes’ work, for instance Monatshefte (Vol. 97, No. 1, 2005) and Comparative Literature Studies (Vol. 43, No. 4, 2006), and other periodicals published more than their usual share of articles on Cervantes that same year. Paradoxically, the novel that William Somerset Maugham once said to be the only absolutely original creation he knew, itself claims to be a mere translation of and commentary on an Arabic manuscript. In Part II of the Quixote, the protagonist presents himself as the reader of a book that relates his personal story, a story that still continues to be written by a fictive chronicler as the narration of the knight’s adventures keeps unfolding. Almost four centuries later this continues to be the case. A palimpsest itself, the Quixote has been praised ad

4 | INTERNATIONAL DON QUIXOTE

nauseam as the first modern novel to which all contemporary novelists continue to be indebted. Canavaggio’s Don Quichotte: du livre au mythe, quatre siècles d’errance details four centuries of editions, translations, imitations and re-figurations of Cervantes’ knight-errant hero in literature, music, and the media. Alexander Welsh, in his chapter on “The Influence of Cervantes” in The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes (2002), edited by Anthony J. Cascardi, limits himself to literature. Labelling the Quixote “not a staple of Western civilization but a renewable source of its literature” (2002: 80) Welsh sets out to “name the most distinctive descendants of Don Quixote in the European novel.” Drawing upon his own Reflections on the Hero as Quixote (1981), as well as Anthony J. Cascardi’s The Bounds of Reason: Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Flaubert (1986) and Eric Ziolkowski’s The Sanctification of Don Quixote: From Hidalgo to Priest (1991), and referring neither to American, both Latin and other, descendants of the knight, nor to the “far greater number of novels that may be fairly called quixotic because they tell of a hero’s or heroine’s disillusionment after initial misunderstandings about their world” (2002: 97), Welsh portrays the Quixote as precursor to, or inspiration for, Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Sir Walter Scott’s historical romances, Stendahl’s Le Rouge et le Noir, Honoré de Balzac’s Illusions perdues, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Bouvard et Pécuchet, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Franz Kafka’s Der Prozess and Das Schloss, and Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. Cervantes’ novel is not least the result of various readings and (re)writings; it refers to a kaleidoscope of referents that produce infinite resonances, thus anticipating “self-conscious” writing. This self-referentiality, together with the novel’s highly ambiguous and ironic tone, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s description of the Quixote as “the classic and purest model of the novel as genre” (1981: 324), constitute the starting point of twentieth-century Cervantes studies, thereby practically reducing the contemporary novel to a series of footnotes to the Quixote. “Everything is already in the Quixote,” the Spanish writer Francisco Ayala claimed in an interview (1991: 38). As the Quixote contains the germ of all the possible novelistic developments, it

PREFACE | 5

should not surprise us that Cervantes’ descendants include writers from all eras and regions of the world, creating a literary genealogy without peer, and whose ultimate heir may have been James Joyce, author of Quijotes Wake or El ingenioso hidalgo don Finnegan de Irlanda, in the words of Carlos Fuentes (1976: 99). The fame, so richly deserved, of Cervantes’ novel has on various occasions been seized upon by the Instituto Cervantes in order to promote Hispanic culture around the world. In addition to numerous conferences and events that aim at boosting the Spanish language, this Spanish state agency in 2005 also published a volume of essays entitled Don Quijote alrededor del mundo, in which a select company of famous non-hispanic authors such as Tahar Ben Jelloun, Ismail Kadare, Margaret Atwood, J.M.G. Le Clézio and Claudio Magris reflected upon the contemporary “global” significance of a novel that at the same time continues to inspire a strong sense of local pride in the region of Castilla-La Mancha. All these writers affirm Cervantes’ centrality in their respective cultures, thus joining a chorus of famous predecessors, such as Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, Gustave Flaubert, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Vladimir Nabokov and Thomas Mann, who likewise admired and imitated the Quixote. All these “Cervantine” writers, and virtually all modern Hispanic writers of fiction, have put into practice what Harry Levin (1970) has called the “quixotic principle,” according to which the hero struggles to face the world that evades him, thus widening the gap between life and its representation, between a realistic world and the romantic imagination. Cervantes holds such a prominent position in world letters that every self-respecting author feels compelled to dedicate at least one meditation to the endless pleasure the reading of the Quixote has given him. This “first great novel of world literature” (Lukács 1971: 103), whose hero strangely enough never leaves the Iberian Peninsula, has thus become a treasure and a model for novelists of all latitudes, and the universal touchstone of a wide reading experience. According to Milan Kundera, the Quixote is the “first European novel” (1981: 237), whereas Carlos Fuentes called the Quixote “la más española de todas las novelas” (1976: 81) (the most Spanish of all novels). The affirmation that this novel could only have been written by a Spaniard at the dawn of modernity (pace Pierre Menard) did not refrain Fuentes


from calling Cervantes the “founding father” of Latin American literature,1 showing thus that the Mexican literary nationalism, that was so strong some decades before, had completely been overcome. On the usability and topicality of the myth of Don Quixote, Margaret Atwood declared that the ingenious nobleman becomes whatever whoever reads his adventures wants him to be: for the realists, Cervantes was the first realist, while the surrealists claimed him as their direct precursor. It seems, then, as if some readers become as single-minded and biased as the knight of the mournful countenance himself: the reduction of the novel’s complexity to a mere illustration of (a wide range of) critical interpretations is at least a quixotic symptom. For Claudio Magris, too, the Quixote contains all and this “globality” authorizes us to read the novel at our own discretion. But, in contrast to a common writer about whom we may all have our own personal opinion, “ante el Quijote todos somos intercambiables” (in front of the Quixote we are all interchangeable; 2005: 107), although it was in fact written by an obscure Spanish author and failed playwright whose reputation largely rests upon a single book. What is it, then, that makes that authors such as William Faulkner and Carlos Fuentes reread this book every year, as if it were their bible, and why has a myriad of imitators and emulators paid such continuous tribute to this novel? In his preface to the commemorative volume mentioned, Harold Bloom asks the famous question about the deserted island in order to conclude that the three most notable must-reads are contemporary of each other, namely the King James Bible, Shakespeare and Cervantes. Polls regularly confirm the Quixote’s status as a long seller and as one of the greatest novels ever written. In spite of the fact that he does not rise from a legendary substrate, the figure of Don Quixote is universally known, not so much because the novel continues to be widely read – thus exemplifying Pierre Bayard’s practice of “not reading” –, but rather because the visual images linked to it are so emblematic and its myth everlasting. The successive translational waves of the Quixote emanating from the Spanish peninsula in Franco 1

In January 1975, Carlos Fuentes delivered an abbreviated, English version of “Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura” at the University of Austin under the title “Cervantes, the Founding Father”.

PREFACE | 7

Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (1998: 171-173) suggest that Cervantes’ novel did not exert any influence in some peripheral regions until it was actually translated in the local language. Influenced by Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, Moretti’s map of the diffusion of the Quixote distinguishes “three Europes” according to the date of the first translation, but it is clear that the knight-errant’s fame preceded him through other means. According to Bloom, Don Quixote remains the best (while also being the first) of all novels, and yet is more than a novel. Bloom does not focus on the novel’s narrative techniques or on Cervantes as the originator of the modern genre par excellence. In the opinion of Bloom, the two literary giants Shakespeare and Cervantes, the only worthy rivals in the imaginative literature of the past four centuries, have contributed to the elaboration of human personality and individuality as we know it today. One of the reasons for the enduring universality of the Quixote is the psychologically authentic relationship between the hidalgo and his servant: whereas the author of Hamlet taught us how to talk to ourselves, Cervantes instructed us about how to talk to our fellow human beings. Moreover, the dualities that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza represent are far from monolithic. Like Shakespearian drama, the Cervantine novel may have been superseded in the eyes of some contemporary writers (e.g. Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, José Saramago) who fall back on romantic and picaresque forms that flourished before Cervantes. Unlike the generic conventions they favor, however, Bloom claims that the masters of psychological representation will never be outdated, despite the oftproclaimed death of the novel. In a similar vein, J.M.G. Le Clézio asserts that Cervantes heralds an entirely new humanism in literature, closely related to the philosophy of Michel de Montaigne. Writing in a time characterized by the expulsion of the Moriscos, Cervantes explored nothing less than the human condition. Le Clézio detects numerous similarities between this very topical novel and the immigration debates of a world closed to alterity and locked in conformism and suspicion. Along similar lines William Childers, in Transnational Cervantes (2006), dis-connects Cervantes’ fiction from early modern Spain in order to relate it to multiple temporalities and geographies, and in particular with present-day minority cultures. By focusing on the


“centrifugal,” transnational forces at work in Cervantes’ novel, Childers situates his study in the emerging field of “global” literary studies and draws analogies between the historical period of preEnlightenment modernity in the Mediterranean world and the concerns of twenty-first-century post-national states. By means of an exercise in “presentism,” Childers examines the Quixote as a symbol of resistance to Anglo-American culture in Chicano literature, thus resituating Cervantes in world literature. Don Quixote as the personification of an ideal dates back to the romantic revolution. In “Instrucciones para olvidar el Quijote” (1985), the Basque philosopher Fernando Savater sharply criticizes the tragedization of an essentially comical character, which gave rise to two fundamental transfigurations: the knight-errant as symbol of the Spanish character and as emblem of the human condition. His strong plea to “forget” Don Quixote is especially directed at the character’s glorification and ideological manipulation, which in reality constitutes an impoverishment of the Quixote. That is why we need to return to the text of this rich and highly entertaining novel. The various contributions making up this volume try to demythologize the ingenious gentleman as a national redeemer and to do justice to the novel’s complexity and international reception and success. If the impact of Cervantes on world literature, or at least on the canonized “greats” of the Western part of it, has been amply detailed, this is perhaps less the case with some minor literatures or cultures, and with some more contemporary authors. In what follows we try to address some of these issues. Needless to say, nowhere has Don Quixote’s cultural legacy been as significant and sustained as in Spain. The knight’s wit and wisdom not only have given rise to numerous popular proverbs and sayings, Cervantes’ novel has also served as a springboard for the projection of a plethora of ideas about truth, honor, the force of literature, and so on. In their contributions to this volume, both Dagmar Vandebosch and Patrick Collard focus on the recuperation of the figure of Don Quixote in twentieth-century Spanish political discourse, a question to which comparatively little attention has been paid up to now.

PREFACE | 9

Dagmar Vandebosch concentrates on the different readings of Don Quixote by the philosophers Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset, who both seek a remedy for the “problem of Spain” in Cervantes’ work. Whereas Unamuno advocates the idealism and spiritual greatness of the mythical figure of Don Quixote and the necessity of “noble” fiction, Ortega argues for the self-conscious reality of Cervantes’ art. Vandebosch provides the reader with an insight into how these leading intellectuals conceive different forms of “quixotism” as both a poetic and national project. The Aragonese novelist and essayist Ramón J. Sender’s reflections on the Quixote on the brink of the Spanish Civil War form the subject of Patrick Collard’s essay. Influenced by anarchist and Marxist ideology, Sender sees in Cervantes a representative of the “illegal” – i.e., heterodox and anti-dogmatic – culture of Spain and sharply criticizes the appropriation of the figure of Don Quixote by the Spanish ultra-right in the nineteen-thirties. He goes so far as to assert on the basis of stylistic and rhetorical peculiarities that the fifth chapter of Part II is apocryphal; a claim that, as Collard convincingly demonstrates, cannot be substantiated with textual evidence, and therefore must be seen as rooted solely in Sender’s own ideological commitment. The Quixote impacted not only political discourse in Spain. It also appealed to the imagination of Latin American revolutionary movements. Kristine Vanden Berghe reveals how Cervantes’ novel served as a source of inspiration and intellectual legitimization for Subcomandante Marcos, the main spokesman of the Mexican rebel army EZLN. Focusing on the beetle Don Durito de la Lacandona as a postmodern and anti-neoliberal imitator of Don Quixote, Vanden Berghe examines to what extent the stories of the Subcomandante differ from the subcontinent’s traditional literature of commitment. Reindert Dhondt’s contribution aims primarily at systematizing the various reflections the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes made on the Quixote in the course of his impressive oeuvre. By postulating an allembracing uncertainty as the underlying principle governing the novel, Fuentes connects the “tradition of La Mancha” – which Sender would qualify as “illegal” – with the poetics of postmodernism, the baroque, and the multiculturalism of Latin American societies. According to Fuentes, Cervantes’ novel lies at the origin of a new


literary geography that is radically polycentric. It is therefore the starting point of a “world literature” that ignores national borders and binary opposites. For Jorge Luis Borges, as for Fuentes, Cervantes is our contemporary. In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” Borges suggests that influence can be construed ex post facto. Nadia Lie shows how this story invites us to think of the “author” as a mere reading hypothesis: rather than an intertextual récriture of Cervantes, Pierre Menard’s text is a relecture. By focusing on the interpretation of modernity by Menard’s contemporary William James, Lie in her own “re-reading” of Borges’s short story arrives at the thoughtprovoking conclusion that the Quixote is not only the first modern novel, but also the first work of pragmatism. The view that the Quixote is a never-ending palimpsest is also advanced by María Stoopen in her article about Ricardo Piglia’s “Assumed Name”. Stoopen concentrates on such narrative devices as the topos of the “found manuscript,” intertextuality, parody, and the unreliability of the author-narrator. Although the influence and mediation of Borges and Arlt are evident in Piglia’s story, Stoopen is able to shed new light on the text by spelling out the similarities between the Quixote’s preface and “Author’s Note” and the report that introduces “Assumed Name”. In “Don Quixote on Belgian Staves,” Christian De Paepe takes a look at the reception of Cervantes’ masterpiece in European musical history. Whereas until the nineteenth century the musical rendering of Don Quixote runs parallel to the traditional interpretation of the character, the composers of the romantic era start to single out the hero’s duplicity. Throughout his synoptic article, De Paepe pays special attention to the rich legacy of the Quixote in the work of Belgian composers and performers. The Low Countries played an important role in the edition, the distribution, and the iconography of the Quixote. Curiously, they lagged far behind as to translation. In his contribution Hendrik van Gorp discusses the successive Dutch translations and adaptations of Cervantes’ novel in their literary and cultural contexts. As the translations of the Quixote clearly reflect the changing interpretation of the protagonist, Van Gorp is able to trace the evolution of the

PREFACE | 11

ingenious gentleman from a flat and one-dimensional character in the mid-seventeenth century to a rather complex and ambiguous character in the twentieth century. Focusing on Les voyages et aventures de M. Alfred Nicolas au royaume de Belgique by the long-forgotten Belgian writer Joseph Grandgagnage, Lieven D’hulst reflects on the formation of a Belgian literary and cultural identity. His article studies a number of “Cervantine” devices, such as satire, parody and pastiche, which express the inability of nineteenth-century Belgian literature to emancipate itself from French models. D’hulst observes that these writers of a nascent literature that clearly lacked internal impulses entered upon a lost battle with themselves, as did Cervantes. Jan Herman raises the intriguing question of whether Don Quixote and Cervantes read the same books. Rather than trace the intertextual dimension of Don Quixote, Herman studies the imaginary books that spring to life in the brain of the knight-errant. More specifically, he distinguishes between the “book of fame”, in which Don Quixote’s invisible biographer registers what is happening to him, and the “book of fate” that dictates what is still to happen. According to Herman, the modernity of the Quixote lies fundamentally in the way in which both these imaginary books are treated. Elaborating on the representation of Cervantes’ protagonist as a mythical hero of the modern condition, Bart Van Den Bossche retraces Don Quixote’s wanderings in the work of two giants of the Italian Novecento. Van Den Bossche points out that for Luigi Pirandello the knight of the mournful countenance is the first humorous hero in western literature, whereas Italo Calvino’s playful rewritings of poems of chivalry cast doubt, through plot and character, as well as through metafictional elements, on the possibility of interrelating fiction and reality. Interestingly, Van Den Bossche also takes into account the way in which these different readings are intertwined with both writers’ poetics. The borderline between fiction and reality is dealt with more extensively in Ulla Musarra-Schrøder’s article on Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, in which she elaborates on an interpretation of Don Quixote – voiced in the first part by a certain “Paul Auster” – that posits that it was Don Quixote himself who invented Cervantes’


novel. Exploring the similarities between the Quixote and Auster’s work (e.g. a reversal of the roles of author and character, the theme of the Doppelgänger), Musarra-Schrøder extends this particular interpretation to the entire trilogy, in which it functions as a mise en abyme. Mark Twain’s masterpiece Adventures of Huckleberry Finn starts off with a tell-tale reference to the Quixote. In his contribution Theo D’haen argues that both the Quixote and Huck Finn mark specific stages in Euro-American modernity, and that Twain makes his point precisely by picking up on a number of themes and techniques also present in Cervantes’ masterpiece. No doubt, few novels have so often been adapted for the screen as the Quixote. But, Brigitte Adriaensen suggests, perhaps none is quite as “Cervantine” as Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s Lost in La Mancha (2001), a documentary based on Terry Gilliam’s failed attempt to produce the movie The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. By drawing parallels between Don Quixote’s adventures and Gilliam’s quixotic quest, Adriaensen interprets the documentary movie as a baroque “desengaño,” or disillusionment, with parodic intention. The majority of the essays in this volume result from a colloquium held at Leuven University in 2005 to mark, precisely, the fourth centenary of the publication of Part I of the Quixote. The editors

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret; Ben Jelloun, Tahar; Esterházy, Péter; et al. 2005. Don Quijote alrededor del mundo. Preface by Harold Bloom. Barcelona: Instituto Cervantes / Galaxia Gutenberg-Círculo de Lectores. Ayala, Francisco. 1991. “Todo ya en el Quijote,” in Ínsula 538. 38-40. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Tr. C. Emerson. Austin: University of Texas Press. Canavaggio, Jean. 2005. Don Quichotte: du livre au mythe, quatre siècles d’errance. Paris: Fayard.

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Cascardi, Anthony J. 1986. The Bounds of Reason: Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Flaubert. New York: Columbia University Press. ––––. (Ed.). 2002. The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes. Cambridge - New York: Cambridge University Press. Childers, William. 2006. Transnational Cervantes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Davoine, Françoise. 2008. Don Quichotte, pour combattre la mélancolie. Paris: Stock. Durán, Manuel & Rogg, Fay R. 2006. Fighting Windmills: Encounters with Don Quixote. New Haven: Yale University Press. Fuentes, Carlos. 1976. Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura. Mexico: Joaquín Mortiz. González Echeverría, Roberto (Ed.). 2005. Cervantes’ Don Quixote: A Casebook. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Graf, Eric C. 2007. Cervantes and Modernity: Four Essays on ‘Don Quijote’. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Johnson, Carroll B. 2006. Don Quijote Across Four Centuries: 16052005. Newark: Juan de La Cuesta-Hispanic Monographs. Kundera, Milan. 1981. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Tr. M. H. Heim. London: Penguin. Levin, Harry. 1970. “The Quixotic Principle,” in Morton W. Bloomfield (Ed.), The Interpretation of Narrative: Theory and Practice. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press. 45-66. López Navia, Santiago Alfonso. 2005. Inspiración y pretexto. Estudios sobre las recreaciones del Quijote. Madrid - Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana / Vervuert. Lukács, Gyorgy. 1971. The Theory of the Novel: A HistoricoPhilosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Tr. A. Bostock. London: Merlin Press. Mojica, Sarah de & Rincón, Carlos (Eds). 2005. Autores del Quijote. Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. ––––. 2005. Lectores del Quijote. Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Moretti, Franco. 1998. Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900. London - New York: Verso. Paso, Fernando del. 2005. Viaje alrededor de El Quijote. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica.


Ríos, Julián. 2008. Quijote e hijos. Barcelona: Galaxia GutenbergCírculo de Lectores. Savater, Fernando. 1985. “Instrucciones para olvidar el Quijote,” in Instrucciones para olvidar el Quijote y otros ensayos generales. Madrid: Taurus. 13-24. Taureck, Bernhard H. 2008. Don Quijote als gelebte Metapher. München: Wilhelm Fink. Welsh, Alexander. 1981. Reflections on the Hero as Quixote. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zavala, Iris M. 2005. Leer El Quijote. Siete tesis sobre ética y literatura. Barcelona: Anthropos. Ziolkowski, Eric. 1991. The Sanctification of Don Quixote: From Hidalgo to Priest. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Quixotism as a Poetic and National Project in the Early Twentieth-Century Spanish Essay DAGMAR VANDEBOSCH Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Campus Kortrijk

This essay explores how two of Spain’s leading intellectuals, in the aftermath of the “Disaster” of 1898 (the defeat in the so-called Spanish-American war with the US and the subsequent loss of Spain’s last major colonies), conceived a form of “quixotism” as both a poetic and a national project. Although setting out from the same premise, holding that the solution for the “problem of Spain” is to be found in Cervantes’ work, Miguel de Unamuno (Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, 1905) and José Ortega y Gasset (Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914) engage in two fundamentally different readings of Don Quixote, which in turn inspire their own writing: whereas Unamuno idolizes the mythical figure of Don Quixote and the form of fiction, Ortega proposes the hybrid and self-conscious reality of Cervantes’ art as an artistic model and a remedy for the problem of the nation.

In his first book, entitled Meditaciones del Quijote [Meditations on the Quixote], published in 1914, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset launches an attack on the “quixotism” of contemporary Spanish intellectuals. He criticizes their exclusive focus on the figure of Don Quixote, at the expense of the rest of the book. The knight errant is thus taken out of his literary and historical context or “circumstance” and transformed into a sad parody of himself: a gothic Christ tortured by modern anxieties. Ortega ironically depicts Don Quixote as the “Savior of the Nation,” as a Redeemer or Messiah who unites and “nationalizes” the Spaniards in moments of distress: Cuando se reúnen unos cuantos españoles sensibilizados por la miseria ideal de su pasado, la sordidez de su presente y la acre hostilidad de su porvenir, desciende entre ellos Don Quijote, el

16 | DAGMAR VANDEBOSCH

calor fundente de su fisonomía disparatada compagina aquellos corazones dispersos, los ensarta como un hilo espiritual, los nacionaliza, poniendo tras sus amarguras personales un comunal dolor étnico. “¡Siempre que estéis juntos – murmuraba Jesús – me hallaréis entre vosotros!” (1984: 86) Whenever a few Spaniards who have been sensitized by the idealized poverty of their past, the sordidness of their present, and the bitter hostility of their future gather together, Don Quixote descends among them and the burning ardor of his crazed countenance harmonizes those discordant hearts, strings them together like a spiritual thread, nationalizes them, putting a common racial sorrow above their personal bitterness. “For where two or three are gathered together in my name,” said Jesus, “there I am in the midst of them.” (1963: 51)

Ortega’s reading of Don Quixote is a strong reaction to the contemporary tendency to convert the figure of Don Quixote into an icon of an idealistic attitude towards life. This tendency was commonly known as quixotism. Despite his objections to the mythification of Don Quixote, Ortega doesn’t renounce quixotism in his own work. Instead, he chooses to redefine it, opposing his “quixotism of the book” to the traditional “quixotism of the character” (1963: 50). Ortega stresses that Don Quixote, as a literary character, is made of a different “substance” than “real things” and should be approached as such. The substance of Don Quixote is identified as “style”, a notion that, as I will explain below, constitutes the core of his proposal for the regeneration of Spain. Quixotism and the “Disaster” of 1898 The quixotism Ortega decries reached its peak on the occasion of the third centenary of the publication of the first volume of Don Quixote in 1905. A few years earlier, the shameful outcome of the war against the United States of America and the loss of the last colonies (commonly referred to as the “Disaster” of 1898) had made clear to the entire Spanish nation that the glory days of the Empire were long gone. Writers and intellectuals showed their concern for the future of the Nation and started to see Spain in terms of a “problem” which

QUIXOTISM AS A POETIC AND NATIONAL PROJECT | 17

required a solution (Laín Entralgo 1962: xviii). In the context of the centennial commemoration of Don Quixote, several publicists, including Spain’s most prominent scientist, Dr. Ramón y Cajal, referred to “quixotism” as part of such a solution. Cajal defined quixotism as the “fervent cult of an elevated ideal of conduct” (1954: 62). In his book on quixotism, Christopher Britt Arredondo uncovers the nationalist objectives of the idolization of Don Quixote: Faced as they were with the final crisis of Spanish imperialism in 1898, these thinkers did not only seek to make sense of modern Spain’s decline from empire, but to also offer their compatriots an imaginative program for national and imperial regeneration. They identified Spain’s new role in the modern world with the idealistic mission undertaken by Don Quixote in Cervantes’ famous seventeenth-century novel. (2005: 6)

According to Britt Arredondo, Don Quixote is portrayed by these authors as an ascetic idealist and a tragic hero, a figure who is at the same time the personification of Spain – a nation whose decadence is seen as the direct consequence of its incapacity to adapt to “modern” values – and its savior: a Messiah who rescues the nation by the example of his sacrifice. Interestingly, Britt Arredondo also conceives of quixotism as a new, “iconoclastic” critical category that offers an alternative to the traditional classification of twentieth-century Spanish literature, and especially to the concept of the “generation of ’98”. His main objection to the latter concept is that it “allows for an uncritical perpetuation of the nationalist elitism and imperialist messianism inherent in the thought of the same writers it purports to understand” (2005: 7). Focusing on the continuity in the discursive (“narrative” according to Britt Arredondo) construction of Spanish national identity, the category of “quixotism” redraws the lines of literary categorization. A clear example of the impact of this is the classification of the leader of the supposedly “modern” and “europeanist” “generation of ’14”, Ortega y Gasset, in the same category as his “casticist” predecessors Unamuno, Ganivet and Maeztu, on account of the nationalist scope of his discourse.


In this article, I will consider quixotism not only as an ideological project, but also as a poetics and a discursive praxis which characterizes the writings of several “quixoticist” authors. More specifically, I will study Ortega’s Meditaciones in relation to one of the most representative works of early twentieth-century quixotism, Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho by Miguel de Unamuno. I will focus especially on the relation between these essays and Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and on the way they conceive of the relation between literature, nation and society. The analysis of quixotism as a poetic project will reveal significant differences between various forms of quixotism, which broadens and nuances the concept, both in its traditional sense and in Britt Arredondo’s use of it. Unamuno’s Don Quixote: Living the Dream of Fiction Unamuno’s work on Don Quixote was published in 1905, in the same year that Cajal and other influential intellectuals launched their quixoticist proposals. The complete title of the book, Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho según Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Explicada y comentada por Miguel de Unamuno [The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho according to Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra explained and commented upon by Miguel de Unamuno] gives a fair idea of its complexity and its resistance to genre classification. The title refers to three levels, which intersect constantly within the work: (a) the life of Don Quixote and Sancho (“the actual facts”); (b) the narration of these facts by Cervantes; (c) Unamuno’s comments on (a) and (b). Especially the first word of the title reveals to be of crucial importance. The main object of Unamuno’s work is not Cervantes’ text, but rather the lives of its two protagonists, whom Unamuno refuses to consider as fictional characters. The most visible consequence of this premise is the minimization and redefinition of the author function in the Quixote. From the title on, Cervantes’ book is taken to be a mere representation – one single representation – of the real lives of Don Quixote and Sancho. In the last chapter,


Unamuno goes even further, suggesting that the only part Cervantes – according to Unamuno a mediocre writer if judged by his complete works – played in the genesis of the book, consisted in taking down the dictations of Don Quixote, disguised as Cide Hamete Benengeli (1966: 226). Cervantes is thus presented as a mere clerk; Don Quixote, on the other hand, is turned into the author of his own biography. Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho is somewhere between a literary essay, a gloss on Cervantes’ Don Quixote and a rewriting of the life story of the knight and his squire. Unamuno’s account of the famous battle against the windmills (I, 8) offers a clear and brief example of the mix of literal intertextuality, rewriting and essayistic reflection that characterizes the book: En tales pláticas iban cuando “descubrieron treinta o cuarenta molinos que hay en aquel campo”. Y Don Quijote los tomó por desaforados gigantes, y sin hacer caso de Sancho encomendóse de todo corazón a su señora Dulcinea y arremetió contra ellos, dando otra vez con su cuerpo en tierra. Tenía razón el Caballero: el miedo y sólo el miedo le hacía a Sancho y nos hace a los demás simples mortales ver molinos de viento en los desaforados gigantes que siembran mal por la tierra. (1966: 43) They were going along, engaged in their conversation, when “they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills which stood thereabouts”. Don Quixote took them for impudent and monstrous giants. And without paying any heed to Sancho, he commended himself with all his soul to his Lady Dulcinea, charged into their midst and once again rolled in the dust. The Knight was right: fear and only fear made Sancho see – makes the rest of us simple mortals see – windmills where impudent giants stand, spewing wickedness about the world. (1976: 57)

Unamuno repeatedly indicates that his book is not about literary criticism or erudition and that his interest lies more with the figure of Don Quixote than with the novel of Cervantes. Nonetheless, the novel Don Quixote holds an extremely prominent place in Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho. Unamuno comments on it chapter by chapter, which makes the table of contents of his book an almost exact copy of that of


Cervantes’ work. His text also contains innumerable and extensive direct quotes from Don Quixote. But the very fact that Unamuno does not recognize Don Quixote as a fictional character gives him more freedom of movement with respect to Cervantes’ text. If Don Quixote exists separately from Cervantes’ fiction, his life can also be told by another narrator. Unamuno does not stick to comments on and explanations of Don Quixote, but actually rewrites the work. The voice of the commentator alternates with that of a narrator who conveys the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho in the past tense, often using archaic language. In this sense, Unamuno takes up the pen that Cide Hamete had hung up at the end of the novel, and puts himself in the place of Cervantes. Unamuno’s relation to Cervantes is in fact comparable to the relation between Cervantes and Cide Hamete Benengeli. Sentences such as: “At this point Cervantes, not overly confident of the attractiveness of his hero’s story, interposes that of Cardenio” (1976: 110), are highly reminiscent of the references to Cide Hamete’s manuscript in the original Quixote. Unamuno’s Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho is clearly autonomous with respect to Cervantes’ work, as shown by his selective approach to Don Quixote. Some chapters of the original work are dwelt upon a length; others are summarized in a single sentence. It is worth noting that Unamuno’s standards of appreciation can be quite different from those of “professional or professorial criticism” (1966: 10). For example, one of the favorite passages of Cervantine criticism, the scrutiny of Don Quixote’s library by his friends, is skipped over with the sole remark that it is all “about books and not about life” (1966: 40). Similar selectivity is extended to certain aspects of the novel, especially the comic dimension. This is clearly the case in chapter X of Part II, another well-known passage, in which Sancho tries to convince Don Quixote that the evil-smelling and coarse peasant woman they meet is the enchanted Dulcinea. Unamuno claims to be so distressed by the scene that he is unable to reproduce it in detail. In his brief account of the facts, he changes the tone from comic to tragic and adopts exclusively Don Quixote’s point of view: Leed vosotros la respuesta grosera que la moza dio a Don Quijote, y cómo dio con ella en tierra a corcovos su borrica y cómo Don Quijote acudió a levantarla, cosa que evitó ella


subiéndose de un salto sobre la borrica y dándole un olor a ajos crudos que le encalabrinó y atosigó el alma. No puede leerse sin angustia este martirio del pobre Alonso. (1966: 128) Read [yourselves] of the coarse answer given Don Quixote by the country wench, and of how the ass threw her with his capering, of how Don Quixote went to succor her and lift her up, which she avoided by leaping on the ass in one jump, and of how she left behind the odor of raw garlic to make his head reel and poison his soul. This martyrdom of the poor Alonso cannot be read without anguish. (1976: 180)

The genre difference is also the source of another fundamental dissimilarity. Unamuno’s work does away completely with the dialogism of Cervantes’ novel, which features Sancho’s voice and perspective in counterpoint to that of his master. Unamuno, in fact, reduces Sancho to silence and follows Don Quixote’s vision without problematizing it, as he makes clear in his final comment on the passage of the cave of Montesinos, stating that we should not “pay any attention to Sanchopanzesque words when it is a question about having faith in visions” (1976: 193). All these reductions isolate and emphasize the figure of Don Quixote as a tragic and idealistic hero. According to Gérard Genette, Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho is an “anti-text” of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, a “serious hypertext to an ironic text” (1982: 371). Indeed, the work teems with references to figures from Spanish epic and mystic literature who lived fully prepared to die for their faith. Unamuno creates a net of subtle analogies between figures ranging from the Cid to Saint Ignatius of Loyola (“chevalier of Christ’s Militia”) and to Calderón’s Segismundo. All seem to come together in Don Quixote as the messianic proto-hero of Spanish faith and idealism. As a reader, Unamuno thus seems to be what Jan Herman, in his contribution to the present volume, calls a “non-laugher”: he sees Don Quixote as a man looking for meaning and striving for a utopian ideal. As a writer, however, Unamuno exploits and enjoys his autonomy, both with regard to Cervantes’ text and to “reality”. In spite of his claim to prefer “life” over “books”, Unamuno does not distinguish any more between “reality” and “fiction” than Don


Quixote does. This is perfectly illustrated by the numerous parallels drawn between Cervantes’ Don Quixote and the biography of Ignatius of Loyola by Pedro de Rivadeneira (Vida del bienadventurado padre Ignacio de Loyola, 1583). For Unamuno there doesn’t seem to be any significant difference between the life of Saint Ignatius as drawn in Rivadeneira’s biography, and that of Don Quixote, as narrated by Cervantes. Ultimately, the representation of Don Quixote and Sancho as real historical figures is in itself an act of fiction. Unamuno assents to the baroque thesis that life is a dream, an illusion, fiction. However, in contrast to Calderón, to whom “all life is dream and dreams are dreams” [toda la vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son], Unamuno defends the opposite thesis too: dreams are life too, for they instigate action: Si la vida es sueño, ¿por qué hemos de obstinarnos en negar que los sueños sean vida? Y todo cuanto es vida es verdad. Lo que llamamos realidad, ¿es algo más que una ilusión que nos lleva a obrar y producir obras? El efecto práctico es el único criterio valedero de la verdad de una visión cualquiera. (1966: 138) If life is a dream, why should we obstinately deny that dreams are life? And whatever is life is truth. Is what we call reality anything more than an illusion which leads us to act and which produces deeds? The practical effect is the only worthwhile criterion of the truth of any vision of whatever kind. (1976: 195196)

Don Quixote’s heroism – and therefore the lesson of quixotism – lies in the passion with which he strives to realize his dream. This very lesson is at the basis of the essayistic component of the work, as Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho not only establishes a close relation with the intertext of Cervantes’ work, but also with the broader social context of Spain around the turn of the century. The more peripheral parts of the book – a short text entitled “The sepulcher of Don Quixote”, which prefaces the work from the second edition onwards,1 and the final chapter, narrating the death of Don 1

Cf. Marías, in Ortega (1984: 86, n. 73).


Quixote – are the most interesting in this respect. In the first text, Unamuno expresses his desire to “incite delirium, vertigo, any madness whatsoever among these orderly and placid masses” (1976: 9). Don Quixote’s madness represents passion and contrariness, necessary conditions for the achievement of lasting and fruitful works. Unamuno’s discourse is bellicose and messianic, pleading for a “crusade” to set free the tomb of Don Quixote, the Knight of Madness, from the hidalgoes of Reason (1966: 13). In the last chapter of the book, this idea is associated with the political and cultural crisis of Spain. Unamuno draws a parallel between Don Quixote who, in the face of death, returns to reason and forswears the ideals of chivalry, and contemporary Spain which, awakened from its dream by the trauma of 1898, has returned from its imperial “quest”. However, Unamuno fears that the “healing” from its madness and the loss of ideals might entail the death of Spain, as in the case of Don Quixote. Yet the death of Don Quixote doesn’t necessarily mean the end of quixotism, as Unamuno cherishes the hope that the “quixotized” Sancho will continue his master’s quest: Mira, pobre Alonso Quijano, mira a tu pueblo y ve si no sanará de su locura para morirse luego. Molido y maltrecho y después de que allá, en las Américas, acabaron de vencerle, retorna a su aldea. ¿A curar de su locura? ¡Quién sabe! Tal vez a morir, si no quedara Sancho, que te reemplazará lleno de fe. […] Sancho, que no ha muerto, es el heredero de tu espíritu, hidalgo, y esperamos tus fieles en que Sancho sienta un día que se le hincha de quijotismo el alma […] salga al campo y vuelva a la vida de aventuras. (1966: 220) Look at your people, my poor Alonso Quijano, and see if they might be coming to their senses only in order to die. Beaten and battered, and finally vanquished in America, they return to their village. To cure themselves of their madness? Who knows?... Perhaps only to die. Almost certainly to die, had there been no Sancho left to replace you, a Sancho full of faith. […] Sancho, who did not die, is the heir to your spirit, good hidalgo, and we your faithful followers hope that some day his soul will swell with quixotism […] and he will take the field and return to the life of adventures. (1976: 313-314)


Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho is thus a sample of Unamuno’s own quixotism, which is both patriotic and poetic. By transforming Don Quixote and Sancho from fictional into real historical figures, Unamuno breaks away from Cervantes and creates his own fictional universe. Eschewing any sense of reality, he seeks the ultimate solution for Spain’s “problem” in the deliberate defense of fiction, illusion and dreams; in a crusade to liberate an imaginary sepulcher. Ortega’s “Quixotism of the Book” Unlike Unamuno, who does not reflect on the hybrid nature of his work, Ortega gives ample attention to the genre of his Meditations – as a matter of fact, auto-reflection is one of the things he most appreciates in Cervantes. The Meditaciones del Quijote were conceived as the first in a series of “meditations” on the most modest as well as the most glorious aspects of Spanish cultural reality or circunstancia (1963: 44 and 62). Although driven by “philosophical desires”, these “meditations” are not philosophical – and therefore scientific – texts, but “merely” essays, whose only purpose is to offer new possible ways of looking at things (1963: 60-61). The planned set of Meditations would never see the light of day, and even the first volume was only partially completed: the Meditaciones del Quijote consist of a large prologue (“To the Reader”), an introductory chapter (“Preliminary meditation”) and a first chapter (“First meditation”). Originally, a further two meditations were planned. The two existing chapters respectively contain philosophical and literary reflections on Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The “Preliminary meditation” explores the particularity of the book and its importance in the Spanish context. Central concepts in this essay are “depth” (profundidad) and “surface” (superficie). The opposition between depth and surface or superficiality is related to the contrast between conceptual thinking and sensuality or “sensism” (1963: 82), which in its turn is linked to the difference between Germanic and Mediterranean cultures. Ortega (1984: 148) considers the “concept” as a “mission” or a “national need” (“un menester nacional”) for the essentially “impressionistic” Spanish culture, basing his argument on


the fact that depth can only manifest itself in surface. This thesis is illustrated with the example of perspective drawings (a technique called escorzo in Spanish), in which the foreshortened forms, although they remain surface, widen into depth. Don Quixote is the Spanish literary work which comes closest to the libro-escorzo: the ideal combination of depth and surface, of reflection (“meditation”) and sensual impression. That is why the question of Spanish identity deserves to be concentrated on in this work: “It is doubtful that there are any other truly profound Spanish books. All the more reason for us to focus on Quixote, our great question: O God, what is Spain?” (1963: 102). The second chapter or “First meditation,” subtitled “A short treatise on the novel,” is dedicated to the question of literary genre. Ortega defines Don Quixote de la Mancha as a modern novel, no more distant from the sensibility of the contemporary reader than the work of Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert or Dostoyevsky. According to his theory of genre, the modern novel originates with the entry of reality as a new dimension in art. The hegemonic genres of the pre-modern period – epics and fantasy literature or literature of imagination, which included chivalresque fiction – focused on the representation of, respectively, a mythical past or an imaginary world of adventures. Everyday reality was excluded from poetic representation. Ortega ascribes the poeticization of ordinary reality in the modern novel to the urge to parody. The function of reality in the modern novel – the role of Sancho in Don Quixote – is to destroy the myth and to stimulate an ironic or oblique reading of the adventures of Don Quixote: Esto ofrece una explicación a lo que parecía inexplicable: cómo la realidad, lo actual, puede convertirse en sustancia poética. Por sí misma, mirada en sentido directo, no lo sería nunca: esto es el privilegio de lo mítico. Mas podemos tomarla oblicuamente como destrucción del mito, como crítica del mito. (1984: 216) This provides an explanation of what seemed inexplicable: how reality, the actual, can be changed into poetic substance. By itself, seen in a direct way, it would never be poetic: this is the


privilege of the mythical. But we can consider it obliquely as destruction of the myth, as criticism of the myth. (1963: 139)

The interest Ortega takes in the role of irony and parody in Cervantes’ work, and in the problem of genre and representation, is one of the most innovative elements of the Meditaciones. These aspects of Don Quixote had raised little interest in Spanish Cervantes criticism, although they had been studied by foreign critics, especially the German romantics (Castro 1972: 80; Close 1978: 38). Later in the 20th century, these same aspects drew the attention of European literary theoreticians such as Michel Foucault, who celebrated Cervantes as the founding father of the modern novel, and Mikhail Bakhtin, whose dialogical reading of Cervantes is related to Ortega’s by José María Pozuelo Yvancos (2004). In this sense, the “First meditation” offers a “European” – that is, non-Spanish – reading of Don Quixote. However, such a perception of the Meditaciones del Quijote as a non-Spanish approach to Cervantes’ work contrasts with Ortega’s nationalist – rather than imperialist – writing intentions. From the beginning, the essays are presented as a “pretext and an appeal for a wide ideological collaboration on national themes” (1963: 40). This appeal should be interpreted in the context of Ortega’s philosophy of circumstance (circunstancia). The nucleus of this philosophy is the inextricable link between the individual and its spatio-temporal “circumstance”, which is determined to a very high degree by ethnic and cultural factors. Don Quixote is a part of Spanish circumstance to the point that Ortega concentrates the question of Spanish identity in it, as I have mentioned before. That explains why a Spanish reading of the work, according to Ortega, inevitably differs from European interpretations: for a Spaniard Don Quixote is not just a “divine curiosity,” it is closely associated with his fate (“el problema de su destino,” 1984: 167). This stated link between literature and cultural identity is at the base of Ortega’s “patriotic” literary criticism (crítica como patriotismo). This patriotism is not about cultivating the existing tradition, but rather about rescuing the nation’s unrealized potential: in a huge, painful bonfire the Spaniards ought to burn “the Spain that has been and then, among the well-sifted ashes, we shall find the


iridescent gemlike Spain that could have been” (1963: 106). Don Quixote represents one of the rare moments when this alternative tradition, this “possible” Spain was fully realized and therefore stands as a model for contemporary Spain. Ortega is especially intrigued by the power of Cervantes’ “style”, in which he sees the key to the solution of Spain’s problems: ¡Ah! Si supiéramos con evidencia en qué consiste el estilo de Cervantes, la manera cervantina de acercarse a las cosas, […] bastaría con que prolongáramos sus líneas sobre los demás problemas colectivos para que despertáramos a vida nueva. (1984: 173) Alas! If we only knew with certainty the secret of Cervantes’ style, of his manner of approaching things, […] it would suffice for us to prolong its lines over our other collective problems and we would awake to a new life. (1963: 107)

Understanding Cervantes’ style would then be the beginning of a new national experiment (“un nuevo ensayo español”), since Ortega is convinced that at these high spiritual levels such solidarity reigns that “a poetic style brings with it philosophical, moral, scientific, and political conceptions” (ibid.). The mission of “patriotic criticism” is to take the first steps in unlocking Cervantes’ secret. It is clear that Ortega, when talking about the “style” of Cervantes, does not refer to the formal aspects of the author’s literary language. Apart from some vague descriptions, such as the passage cited above (“Cervantes’ manner of approaching things”), Ortega doesn’t make any effort to define the concept. This approach matches his conception of the Meditaciones as a collection of essays. In his preface to the reader, Ortega states that the secret of an artistic masterpiece does not yield to the “intellectual attack” of a scientist who approaches it like a hunter, going straight at it with his weapons in hand. Instead, a work like Don Quixote must be conquered as Jericho was taken: slowly and in wide, meditated circles (1963: 52). The interpretation of the concept of “style” in de Meditaciones is complicated considerably by the fact that Ortega never completed his book, as a result of which the “inner circles” of the intellectual siege


of Cervantes’ Quixote are missing. The concept has often been interpreted in a philosophical sense, in relation to the notion of circunstancia. Cervantes’ style is then to be understood as the author’s approach to early modern Spain. Tatjana Gajic, for instance, defines style as “an interplay between the general features of an epoch and the particularity of an author's approach to it” (2000: 208). Antonio García Berrio relates the concept to the theoretical concept of “chronotope”, using the famous quote from Gustave Flaubert (“Comme on voit ces routes d'Espagne qui ne sont nulle part décrites!”) to illustrate the oblique and suggestive representation of time and space in Cervantes’ work. García Berrio considers Cervantes’ style as indicative and based on the principle of the unsaid (2005: 124). The key to Cervantes’ secret indeed seems to lie in Ortega’s literary appreciation of Don Quixote as a refined piece of art and intellectual craftsmanship in tune with the complexity of its social and cultural “circumstance”. The most crucial notion in this matter is the concept of the libro-escorzo, defined in the “Preliminary meditation”: Don Quixote is a novel of perspective (escorzo), integrating depth and surface, as well as reality and myth, and inviting an ironic, oblique reading. While Unamuno chooses to cultivate the illusion in the figure of Don Quixote, Ortega celebrates fiction as critical self-awareness in Cervantes and his work. Quixotist Poetics The difference between these readings of Don Quixote is very striking in the interpretation of the chapter about the puppet show of master Peter (II, 26), in which Don Quixote, totally caught up in the story represented, takes part in a battle, in the process destroying master Peter’s puppet theatre. According to Ortega, Cervantes reflects in this chapter on the psychology of reading, opposing two ways of reading. Don Quixote represents the “naïve” reader, who is absorbed by an orb of fantasy, adventure and myth. More critical and lucid readers are conscious of the difference between this orb of imagination and that of reality, represented in Cervantes’ text by the theatre (retablo) and the room (aposento) in which the performance takes place. Ortega takes a


strong interest in the seventeenth-century paintings of Velázquez which bring together the “ideal” spaces of representation – the “aesthetic bodies” of a painting or a tapestry – with the “real spaces” in which they were produced. The most important thing, he stresses, is the interaction between the two spaces (“the osmosis and endosmosis between the two”) (1963: 134). Unamuno’s interpretation of the same passage, on the other hand, distinguishes between two types of fiction based on their moral value: stories which are worth believing, and stories no-one believes to be true. For Unamuno, in fact, faith is more important than truth: “error believed is more respectable than truth disbelieved” (1976: 199); and a fiction which is not truly believed is nothing but a farce (farándula). In Unamuno’s version of the facts, Don Quixote’s fury is aroused by these “authorized fictions” (ficciones sancionadas), rather than by his identifying with the hero Don Gaiferos in his fight with his Moorish persecutors. Don Quixote is not naïve or blinded by fiction, but acts willingly against fiction without faith. Both Unamuno and Ortega derive a poetics from Don Quixote which informs their own work. Meditaciones del Quijote encourages an oblique, non-linear reading, symbolized by the circled siege of Jericho. The work itself carries out an ironic and critical “reading,” not of Cervantes’ text, but of the myth of Don Quixote. Thus, the irony in the passage quoted at the beginning of this article, in which Ortega derides the figure of Don Quixote as unifier of the nation, is not aimed at the concept of the nation, or even at the messianic calls for its salvation,2 but at the idealistic nature of traditionalist quixotism. Against the passionate enthusiasm of Don Quixote, Ortega opposes the art and skill of Cervantes. In the end, his “quixotism of the book”

2

The idea of “salvation” is very present in the Meditaciones. Ortega even proposes “salvaciones” as an alternative denomination for these essays, whose aim is to take their object by the shortest route to its fullest significance (“la plenitud de su significado”, 1984: 46). Ortega considers (intellectual) love and understanding as the most adequate means to deal with the subjects of his Meditations and achieve their “salvation”. Christopher Britt Arredondo relates both concepts – “salvation” and “love” – to the discourse of other “quixotist” writers such as Unamuno and Ganivet (2005: 161).


amounts to a form of “cervantism”,3 a cult of the author and his talent which assumes mythical proportions comparable to those of Don Quixote in traditional quixotism. One myth that is not criticized in Ortega’s “oblique” reading of contemporary discourse is that of the nation. It is clear that Ortega’s “cervantism” does not break with the patriotic presuppositions of quixotism. Cervantes’ skill – his ability to comprehend and represent a changing social context and a complex cultural reality in an ingenious work of art – sets an example for a nation which is to be built anew. Ortega conceives of literature as an instrument for remedying a problematic concept of nation, and that goes for the novel of Cervantes as well as for his own essay. In this sense, Meditaciones del Quijote is no less the product of the “Disaster” of 1898 than Unamuno’s Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho. The most important difference between the two forms of quixotism is the nature of their solution to the “problem of Spain”: whereas Unamuno posits the idealism of a mythical figure and the necessity of “noble” fiction, Ortega argues for the exemplary reality of (self-)critical art.

Works Cited Britt Arredondo, Christopher. 2005. Quixotism. The Imaginative Denial of Spain’s Loss of Empire. Albany: State University of New York Press. Castro, Américo. 1972 [1925]. El pensamiento de Cervantes. Barcelona: Noguer. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. 1950. The Adventures of Don Quixote. Tr. J.M. Cohen. London: Penguin Books. Close, Anthony. 1978. The Romantic Approach to Don Quixote. A Critical History of the Romantic Tradition in Quixote Critiscm. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 3

This idea is reinforced by the fact that the second and third “meditations” on the Quixote, which were never written, would imply an even stronger focus on the figure of Cervantes. In the introduction to his edition of the Meditaciones, Julián Marías briefly discusses these chapters (1984: 31-32). The concept of “cervantism” is rejected by Ortega because of its biographical and erudite connotation (1984: 87).


Gajic, Tatjana. 2000. “Reason, Practice and the Promise of a New Spain: Ortega's “Vieja y nueva política” y Meditaciones del Quijote,” in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 77(3): 193-215. García Berrio, Antonio. 2005. “Ortega, meditador ‘circunstancial’ del Quijote,” in Revista de Occidente 289: 106-127. Genette, Gérard. 1982. Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré. Paris: Seuil. Laín Entralgo, Pedro. 1962. España como problema. Madrid: Aguilar. Ortega y Gasset, José. 1984 [1914]. Meditaciones del Quijote. Ed. Julián Marías. Madrid: Cátedra. ––––. 1963. Meditations on Quixote. Tr. Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marín. New York: Norton. Pozuelo Yvancos, José María. 2004. “Bajtín, Ortega y la renovación del lenguaje narrativo,” in Ventanas de la ficción. Narrativa hispánica, siglos XX y XXI. Barcelona: Península. 15-35. Ramón y Cajal, Santiago. 1954. La psicología de los artistas. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe. Unamuno, Miguel de. 1966 [1905]. Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho según Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Explicada y comentada por Miguel de Unamuno. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. ––––. 1976. Our Lord Don Quixote: The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho with Related Essays. Tr. Anthony Kerrigan. Princeton (N.J.): Princeton University Press.

A Portrait of Cervantes as “A Learned Sancho Panza”: The Quixote in Ramón J. Sender’s Thought before the Civil War1 PATRICK COLLARD Universiteit Gent

In the nineteen-thirties of the previous century, Ramón J. Sender (1901-1982) was already a well-known novelist and journalist. In the brief and turbulent period of the Second Republic, the young Marxist-oriented writer, who was committed to the social function of literature, called upon the ingenious gentleman Don Quixote de La Mancha in order to enforce his political and literary ideas. When it seemed necessary, he did not hesitate to take the road that transforms a text into a pretext. Cervantes, who would accompany him for the rest of his life, was for the Sender of the nineteen-thirties a stimulating reference for political action (the revolutionary and antifascist militancy) and for reflection on the basic concepts used by the Aragonese writer: realism, style and the other Spain, heterodox and “illegal”. The present essay discusses the articles Sender wrote in 1933-1935.

According to his most recent biographer (Vived Mairal 2002: 44), Ramón Sender read the Quixote for the first time at the age of eleven or twelve when his family was living in Tauste (Zaragoza): “Con desazón lo cerraba a menudo al ver las ridiculeces que Cervantes obligaba hacer a su caballero, que no conseguía ninguna victoria limpia y de veras plausible” (I often closed it dismayed at the ridiculous things Cervantes put his knight through, without ever obtaining a clear or convincing victory.) A few lines further on Vived Mairal quotes Sender’s Valle-Inclán y la dificultad de la tragedia: “Soñaba con Don Quijote y con él sufría. Supongo que lo que me pasaba a mí, les pasa más o menos a todos los chicos. Desde entonces 1

This contribution is a completely revised and updated version of parts of chapter IV of my book about Ramón J. Sender en los años 1930-1936 (Collard 1980).

34 | PATRICK COLLARD

considero una crueldad poner ese libro en manos de los niños. Es el libro más tristemente adulto que existe.” (I dreamed of Don Quixote and suffered with him. I presume that what happened to me, happens more or less to all children. Since then I consider it a cruelty to give this book to children. It is the most sadly adult book that exists.) (ibid.) In an interview he gave late in life Sender stated that (Peñuelas 1970: 163) “estoy lo mismo que cualquier español, sobre todo un escritor, profundamente enamorado de Cervantes” (Like every other Spaniard, especially when he is a writer, I am deeply in love with Cervantes.) The presence of the author of the Quixote, then, is quite palpable in Sender’s works: the figure of Don Quixote appears in almost every essay of Examen de ingenios. Los “noventayochos” (Sender 1961a); Donde crece la marihuana (theatre, in: Sender 1969) is an adaptation of the Curioso impertinente; Cervantes himself is the main character in Las gallinas de Cervantes (Sender 1967); and the Novelas ejemplares de Cíbola (Sender 1961b) are twelve in number, as are those of Cervantes. Sender even transforms himself, at least for the time of the writing and publication of an article, in a one-day and impetuous Cervantes scholar who does not hesitate to question the authorship of one of the chapters of the Quixote, as we shall see later. In the present essay I concentrate on the particular, and very politicized, vision on Cervantes and his masterpiece in the texts that Sender wrote before the outbreak of the Civil War. Apart from being a well-known republican left-wing journalist and essayist, Ramón J. Sender (Chalamera, Huesca, 1901 – San Diego, California, 1982) in 1936 was also the most distinguished novelist of his generation, famous for texts such as Imán (1930), Siete domingos rojos (1932), La noche de las cien cabezas (1934) and Míster Witt en el Cantón (1936). Profoundly influenced by Marxism, Sender between 1932 and 1938 sympathized with, but never joined, the Communist Party (PCE). In 1938 he went into exile: first to France and then to Mexico and the United States, where he wrote a substantial oeuvre. With Max Aub and Francisco Ayala, Sender is one of the most important novelists of the Republican diaspora. Given the theme that I wish to discuss in this article, it may be useful to recall that the Civil War cruelly affected Ramón J. Sender,

A PORTRAIT OF CERVANTES AS “A LEARNED SANCHO PANZA” | 35

both in his private and public life.2 In exile, he changed his ideological stance. The former PCE sympathizer abandoned Marxism and became not only an anti-Stalinist, but also re-wrote his own past. I state this without polemical intention, but simply to warn the reader who is only familiar with the work of the mature Sender, the author of Los Cinco Libros de Ariadna and Crónica del alba, that he or she may be surprised by some of what follows. The essential texts to understand the Senderian interpretation of the Quixote in the nineteen-thirties are the important, and dense, essay “La cultura española en la ilegalidad,” published in the journal Tensor (n° 1-2, October 1930, 1-21) and three newspaper articles: “Protección de los molinos de viento” (La voz de Guipúzcoa, April 1, 1933, 1, El Luchador, same date, 1, and El Mercantil Valenciano, April 2, 1933, 3; collected in Proclamación de la sonrisa, see Sender 2008), “El saludo de don Quijote” (La voz de Guipúzcoa, April 22, 1933, 1, and El Mercantil Valenciano, April 23, 1933, 3, also collected in Proclamación de la sonrisa, see Sender 2008), and “Cervantes, el estilo y un capítulo apócrifo” (Sender 1934e). Occasionally I will refer to other articles of those years. The core of the aesthetic thought of the young Sender is a certain idea of realism that is closely related with his vision of Spain’s cultural history and his political inclination, in those days of Marxist orientation.3 For an approximation to the role Cervantes fulfilled in the ideas of Sender in those years, it is indispensable that we begin by

2

Amparo Barayón, his wife and Manuel Sender, the brother of the writer, were executed by the rebels in 1936; and Ramón Sender, at that time Chief of Staff of the First Mixed Brigade had a very serious incident with his commander, the famous Enrique Líster, who accused him of desertion in front of the enemy. See in this respect Enrique Líster (1977: 166-168), Jesús Vived Mairal (2002: 333-340) and Donatella Pini Moro (1994: 73-101).

3

In a letter/questionnaire that Sender filled in at my request, I asked him after his degree of familiarity with Marx’s work. His answer (May 17, 1976) reads as follows: “Yes. I knew all Marx and Engels in Spanish or French.” On a more literary level, the reading of Georgi Plekhanov’s Art and Social Life (1912-1913) in 1929 had a decisive impact on the structuring of Sender’s ideas about the social function of art (see Collard 1980: 62-66).


summarizing the essential article “La cultura española en la ilegalidad”. “Horcas y hogueras poblaron las llanuras castellanas y las huertas levantinas” (Gallows and stakes populated the Castilian plains and the fertile region of the Levante) (Sender 1935: 12): by means of this sentence Sender tries to characterize Habsburg Spain. Under the influence of Marxist ideology, the names of Ramón Llull, Cervantes, Galdós, Baroja, etc. appear in a context that easily reaches beyond the strictly literary sphere. The central idea is that the history of Spain, from the Muslim invasions to ‘nowadays’ (= the Second Republic), is nothing but the history of a struggle between popular currents and the feudal power, a conflict that is still ongoing in 1935. Let me summarize what Sender expounds in this text: a basic idea, actually rather unorthodox, is that the Arabs could so easily invade the Peninsula because “libraban al pueblo de la opresión de la Iglesia y del naciente feudalismo […] la pasión de la libertad y de la igualdad no nos viene a nosotros de la Revolución francesa, sino del Atlas” (they set free the people from the oppression of the Church and the emergent feudalism […] our passion for liberty and equality does not stem from the French Revolution, but came to us from the Atlas range […]) (1935: 5). Sender had already earlier formulated the same thesis via the description of the return from Morocco of Viance, the protagonist of Imán (Sender 1930: 263-264), in his periodical articles on the 1933 massacre of Casas Viejas,4 and in Viaje a la aldea del crimen (Documental de Casas Viejas),5 trough a dialogue between the journalist and “María Mármol,” a statue of unknown origin that survived different epochs and that, therefore, represents the continuity in the history of the Spanish people. This dialogue is a meditation on the centuries-old struggle between the North, from where originate “el estado, la ley y la Iglesia” (the state, the law and the Church) (1934:

4

Casas Viejas (today Benalup-Casas Viejas) is a town in the province of Cádiz where on January 10, 11 and 12 of the year 1933 the militarized police forces (the Guardia Civil and the Guardia de Asalto) crushed an anarchist uprising of peasants. Nineteen villagers and two officers died. In a famous series of articles in the newspaper La Libertad, Sender reported on the circumstances of the massacre.

5

The adaptation in the form of a book and with deliberately fictitious dimensions (Sender 1934a) of Sender’s periodical articles about the events in Casas Viejas.


178), and the Mediterranean, whence comes “el hermano de África” (the African brother). Since the Middle Ages, the State and the Church suppress all thoughts that disturb the existing orthodoxy and the official culture (which Sender actually identifies with barbarism). They continuously repress what for Sender represents the deepest and the most authentic tendencies of Spanish culture: the oriental mysticism, the Jewish humanism, the fusion of realism and mysticism in the work of the great mystics (Juan de la Cruz, Teresa de Ávila), without forgetting the influence of the liberalism of the European humanists. In passing, it is worth remarking that Sender here promotes a historical-cultural thesis, that is to say the profound orientalization of Spain, that after the Civil War will be most forcefully and tirelessly developed by another exile, the historian Américo Castro, and which also finds expression in the work of the novelist Juan Goytisolo. But the most ferocious repression will not succeed in preventing the anti-dogmatic, heterodox and anti-feudal – that is to say: “illegal” – current of thought from opening up a subterranean channel that points out “el camino de nuestra verdadera cultura” (the way of our true culture) (1935: 7). Among its most illustrious representatives figure the Archpriest of Hita, Fernando de Rojas, Miguel de Cervantes, Francisco de Quevedo and José Zorrilla. Interestingly, the classical authors that are quoted in “La cultura española en la ilegalidad” are practically identical with those that already figured some years before in “El realismo y la novela” (1933a: 1-2): Rojas, Cervantes, Quevedo, Teresa de Ávila are realist authors because they remain “en pura y simple hombría” (in pure and essential humanity)6 and because both as to style and content they unhesitatingly integrate the popular. To continue this “illegal” current is equivalent to carrying on and to developing the realist current, in accordance, of course, with the context of every period. Needless to say that the concept of realism in Sender goes easily beyond the limits of its definition as a nineteenth-century literary school. “La cultura española en la ilegalidad” offers a rather complete synthesis of Sender’s ideology, the frame in which his considerations

6

For the content of the concept of “hombría” in Sender, see Collard 1980: 122-125.


about the writer’s mission and about Cervantes and the Quixote have to be situated: - politically and culturally Spain has always been and still is (in the nineteen-thirties of the twentieth century) divided into two fronts (in other words, the theme of “the two Spains”); - revolutionary literature dates back to the Middle Ages, which represent the most authentic values of the Spanish culture; - with respect to the historical evolution, to continue to fight for the culture is equivalent to taking the side of the proletariat. Sender works so hard to underscore the paralysis and the feudal character of the political power since the end of the fifteenth century that the reader is almost compelled to believe that Sender continues to lend the works of Cervantes, Quevedo, etc. the same political significance they could have had in their own time, should one interpret them from a Marxist perspective. Sender constantly reinterprets them from his own contemporary vantage point, and continues to consider them as exponents of “illegality” and consequently as fit to be seized upon for the benefit of his own revolutionary ideology. What is highlighted here is the well-known paradox of the work that at a particular moment clashes with the moral and the established order – and that enters therefore the “illegal” field – but that subsequently, if it does not vanish, joins the common cultural and “legal” patrimony. Ramón Sender defines himself as the heir and the perpetuator of the “illegal” culture, although he knows that what was centuries ago a subterranean channel came to the surface as a fast-flowing river and that his adversaries can appeal to the same great figures. In “El saludo de Don Quijote,” for instance, Sender ridicules the tendency of the Spanish ultra-right to appropriate the figure of Don Quixote, and warns them that, if the raised hand of the ingenious gentleman in the statue of the Plaza de España in Madrid is a fascist salute, as some would like to believe, they may not forget that: la bandera política del quijotismo no tiene ninguna seriedad. Es la bandera de la impotencia y del ridículo. […] Cervantes se burla constantemente de él a lo largo del libro y en los comentarios en verso que lo anteceden. […] Si los fascistas buscan en el saludo de don Quijote una bandera, no olviden que


nadie sufrió más palos, pedradas, puñadas, candilazos, burlas y gateamientos que el pobre hidalgo manchego […] Tomar por lema al caballero de los leones sería […] salir al campo con el cerebro tan huero y lleno de fantasmas –hitlerianos, mussolinescos – como don Quijote y, sin otro bagaje, montar un rucio y enfilar contra los molinos. Un estúpido delirio. (Sender 2008: 56)7 the political banner of quixotism is not to be taken seriously at all. It is the banner of impotence and ridicule. […] Cervantes constantly makes fun of him [= Don Quixote] throughout the book and in the commentaries in verse that precede it. […] If the fascists search for a banner in the salute of Don Quixote, they should not forget that nobody suffered more drubbings, stonings, cuffs, lamp-whacks, mockeries and scratches than the poor gentleman of La Mancha […]. To take the knight of the lions as motto is […] like going to the country with a brain as vacuous and full of delusions – Hitlerian, Mussolinesque – as Don Quixote and, without further knowledge, to mount a grey horse and to tilt at windmills. Stupid nonsense.

This quotation, characteristic of the political context of its time, immerses us in Sender’s interpretation of the Quixote and the pair Don Quixote / Sancho in those years. Cervantes was without doubt one of the main cultural heroes of Sender and continued to be so in exile, although with different accents. In the nineteen-thirties, every time when Sender invokes Don Quixote the same basic interpretation emerges: it is a book of materialist content whose revolutionary significance is of current interest, because if originally it was a critique of feudalism, it currently functions as a critique of bourgeois idealism. Take for instance the following passage, from the evocation of an encounter with Soviet students and intellectuals in the International Library of Moscow in July 1933: Como había dicho que el “Quijote” es un libro de inspiración materialista y de honda intención revolucionaria, un muchacho 7

Similarly, in “En el aniversario de Emile Zola” (1934b: 1), Sender irritably argues that bourgeois culture recuperated the great naturalist writer by means of official ceremonies.


me preguntó si creía que Cervantes no fue un escritor burgués de clase, producto de las condiciones económicas de su tiempo. Yo le dije que sí; pero que no se trataba de discutir sobre marxismo sino de informar sobre los fenómenos particulares de la literatura española. El público acogió bien esta respuesta y el muchacho se dió por satisfecho: había dicho que Cervantes intentó crear el gran mito nacionalista y no lo consiguió, porque su héroe le resultó una caricatura sarcástica del idealismo feudal y todavía hoy lo es del idealismo burgués. En este aspecto el libro podía ser una consecuencia de las condiciones del tiempo en que se produjo. De todas formas es un libro revolucionario. (Sender 1933b: 6) As I had said that the Quixote is a book of materialist inspiration and of profound revolutionary intention, a boy asked me if I did not believe that Cervantes was a bourgeois writer, a product of the economic conditions of his time. I answered him that this was true, but that we were not supposed to argue about Marxism, but to discuss the specificities of Spanish literature. This answer was well received by the public and the boy was satisfied: I had said that Cervantes tried to create the great nationalist myth and that he had not succeeded, because his hero turned out a sarcastic caricature of feudal idealism, as still today he is of bourgeois idealism. In this respect, the book could be a product of the conditions of the period in which it was written. In any case, it is a revolutionary book.

Some months before, on the first of April 1933, Sender had written in “Defensa de los molinos de viento”: “tenemos la evidencia de que la obra de Cervantes es una epopeya materialista que nada tiene que ver con los suspiros, los gemidos y las lágrimas de sus comentadores” (it is obvious that the work of Cervantes is a materialist epic that has nothing to do with the sighs, moans and tears of its commentators) (Sender 2008: 237). Three weeks later, in “El saludo de don Quijote” he states that “Cervantes hizo en su libro una epopeya contra lo que hoy se llamaría el idealismo burgués, hecho de cristianismo, humanitarismo anarquista y pasión de dominio” (Cervantes’ book is an epic against what today is called bourgeois idealism, made up of Christianity, anarchist humanitarianism and a lust for control) (Sender 2008: 58). The underlining is Sender’s, and by criticizing “anarchist


humanitarianism”, the author pays tribute to his new political companions, the communists, all the while distancing himself from the anarcho-syndicalists. Sender’s admiration for Cervantes and the Quixote, then, is profound and sincere, but his ideological inspiration distorts interpretation and leads him to affirmations that lack real justification and historical foundation. Thus, on numerous occasions Sender asserts that Cervantes was a “materialist”. The explanation he gives is rather unwarranted and very doubtful, because if we take into account the historical-cultural context, it is little likely that the “choques que padeció con la iglesia” (quarrels with the church) and his “desventura de Lepanto, de la que no saca sino la ingratitud de los reyes y las burlas de los Avellanedas” (misfortune in Lepanto, where he gained nothing except the ingratitude of the king and queen and the laughter of the Avellanedas) (Sender 2008: 39) would have been enough to transform the writer into a materialist. And even if this would have been the case, the materialist surely repented along the way. In fact, Sender is mute about the intensification of Cervantes’ religious life in his final years: he belonged to the Congregation of the Slaves of the Holy Sacrament of Olivar and to the venerable Third Order of San Francisco; and he was buried in a serge Franciscan habit. Let us also recall that on Cervantes’ deathbed he inscribed Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, the posthumous novel that was his outstanding contribution to the spirit of the Counter-Reformation and Tridentine Spain. Sender’s readers know that in exile he gradually moved away from the materialist interpretation he upheld during the Republic,8 just as, in more general terms, he withdrew from political commitment in the more narrow sense of the word.9 8

It has already been said that the figure of Don Quixote runs through almost every essay of Examen de ingenios (1961a).

9

See in this respect the introduction of José Domingo Dueñas Lorente (Sender 2008: 238) to his edition of Proclamación de la sonrisa: “Tras la Guerra Civil, Sender perdió interés por la interpretación política de las cosas y ahondó en referencias de orden antropológico y filosófico. Este cambio de óptica se percibió también en la manera de entender el Quijote. Sender continuó repudiando la percepción noventayochista del libro. […] Sender siempre defendió la clarividencia y la hondura humana del autor del Quijote.” (After the Civil War, Sender lost interest in political interpretations and absorbed himself rather in anthropological and philosophical


The materialism he supposedly recognizes in Cervantes leads Sender to posit a peculiar and reductive image of the relation Don Quixote-Sancho-Cervantes: Sancho speaks on behalf of Cervantes, who is cast as a “Sancho Panza letrado” (learned Sancho Panza), and Don Quixote “habla por los caballeros que quizá en la juventud del escritor le deslumbraron con sus hazañas y sus bellaquerías” (speaks on behalf of the noblemen who perhaps when the author was still young dazzled him with their heroic deeds and rogueries) (Sender 2008: 58). Sancho Panza is a “buen escudero” (a good squire), of “hombría firme y centrada” (firm and well-balanced integrity), a symbol of the healthy and rational “people.” Don Quixote, with his troubled personality, affected by a “vanidad monstruosa” (monstruous vanity) (Sender 2008: 55), “no serviría hoy para nada” (would be of no use today) (Sender 2008: 237). This is the couple that Sender stages, specifying, in case this would still be necessary, that: “Entre don Quijote y Sancho votamos por el escudero, que tenía los ojos limpios y el espíritu yermo” (between Don Quixote and Sancho we prefer the squire, who had bright eyes and an uncultivated spirit) (ibid.). The qualities attributed to Sancho make of him a figure of the new man. Ramón Sender thus propounds a strangely literal, first-level reading of the Quixote: the main character is a poor madman who, corrupted by feudal idealism, commits all kind of blunders which Cervantes – whose spokesman in the novel would be Sancho – highlights “con alegría desenfrenada” (with insatiable delight) (Sender 2008: 58), and of whom he makes fun “como suelen hacer todos los lectores no contagiados por la brillantez del mito intelectualista” (as all readers that are not infected by the brilliance of the intellectualist myth are wont to do) (Sender 2008: 56). Not infected, that is to say: healthy representatives of the revolutionary spirit. Because this is what all this is about: Sender uses Cervantes in order to expose the supposed imposture of the adherents of the spirit of a sick and reactionary society that takes refuge in fascism as a bastion. Of course, the vision that is discussed here does not appear out of the blue. As writes J. D. Dueñas (2008: 237-238): references. This change of viewpoint also affects the interpretation of the Quixote. Sender continued to repudiate the perception of the book by the Generation of ’98. […] Sender always defended the discernment and the human insight of the author of the Quixote.) See also Dueñas Lorente 2005 in this regard.


[…] la visión materialista de la obra cervantina no fue exclusiva de Sender durante los años treinta. Ya en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX Nicolás Díaz de Benjumea percibía en Cervantes “un librepensador republicano”; poco después, en los inicios del siglo XX, otros estudiosos entendieron que la parodia cervantina de los libros de caballería suponía en última instancia una expresión del colapso del feudalismo. […] the materialist vision of Cervantes’ work was not exclusive of Sender in the nineteen-thirties. Already in the second half of the nineteenth century Nicolás Díaz de Benjumea perceived Cervantes as “a Republican freethinker”; later on, at the beginning of the twentieth century, other scholars thought that Cervantes’ parody of the novels of chivalry in the final account implied the collapse of feudalism.

In the last months of 1934, as a result of the insurrectionist movement that culminates with the revolutionary situation in the coalfields of Asturias, the censorship severely limited the freedom of the press in political matters. For the newspaper La Libertad Sender wrote three articles about the concept of style in literature, a theme aimed at eluding, at least in theory, the censor’s scissors. In the third article (La Libertad n° 4602, of 30 December), “Cervantes, el estilo y un capítulo apócrifo,”10 he formulates for the first time a hypothesis that will be reasserted many years later in the essay “Baroja y las contradicciones latentes” in Examen de ingenios. Los “noventayochos” (Sender 1961a: 126): the supposedly apocryphal nature of the fifth chapter of Part II of the Quixote.11 The essential elements of Sender’s argumentation occur passim. After this definition of Cervantes’ prose: “[…] blanda, maleable, pero precisa. Se ciñe a los accidentes del paisaje, del hecho y de espíritu de cada tipo suavemente, sin violencia. Es una prosa tibia, de temperatura uniforme […]” ([…] weak,

10 The two previous ones are “Hablemos del estilo, si usted quiere” (1934c: 1) and “Una manera de entender el estilo” (1934d: 1). 11

To be more precise, in “Baroja y las contradicciones latentes” Sender refers to “algunos capítulos apócrifos” (some apocryphal chapters), but he only mentions the same chapter as in 1934.


malleable, but precise. It is gently, without violence, restricted to the features of the landscape, the event and the spirit of every figure. It is a lukewarm prose, of constant temperature […]), Sender insists on “la escasez de su escolasticismo” (the very limited presence of scholasticism) and the “poca influencia de la retórica de Alcalá y Salamanca” (limited influence of the rhetoric of Alcalá and Salamanca), in order to arrive at the key statement: Y sin embargo, en el “Quijote” hay un capítulo retórico, artificioso, duro y silogístico. Un capítulo que, digan lo que quieran los eruditos más autorizados, nunca creeremos que lo haya escrito Cervantes: el capítulo V de la segunda parte. […] [E]n este caso hay que pensar que la seguridad de Cervantes en su propia creación y la despreocupación de la forma le llevaron al extremo de permitir que metiera la pluma en su obra una inteligencia tosca. […] Es un capítulo violento, retorcido, en el que Sancho adquiere de pronto licencias de Alcalá – o habla como si las tuviera –, y Teresa Panza, aunque hace lo que puede por ruralizar su léxico, habla también como una cortesana. Pero fuera del diálogo, el escritor abandona el período largo, natural y especioso, por otro corto, seco y falso. […] Ese capítulo no puede ser de Cervantes. […] La verdad es que Cervantes, después de las acometidas que sufrió en los corros cortesanos con motivo de la primera parte de su libro, tiene puesta en él muy poca fe. […] Escribe y publica la segunda parte acuciado por las dificultades económicas […] Cervantes pudo dejar a cualquier bachiller o licenciado amigo suyo que intercalara unas páginas en la segunda parte. And nevertheless, in the Quixote there is a rhetorical, artificial, tough and syllogistic chapter. A chapter of which, whatever the most authoritative experts may say, we will never believe that Cervantes wrote it: the fifth chapter of the Second Part. […] [I]n this case we have to think that the confidence of Cervantes in his own creation and his indifference to form induced him to the extreme of allowing an unrefined intelligence to creep into his work. […] It is a violent, convoluted chapter in which Sancho suddenly acquires a learned degree from Alcalá – or speaks as if he has –, and Teresa Panza, although he does what he can in order to countrify her lexicon, also speaks like a courtier. But apart from the dialogue, the writer abandons the long, natural


and specious period, for a short, dry and false one. […] This chapter cannot be of Cervantes. […] The truth is that Cervantes, after the attacks he suffered in the circles of the court as a result of the first part of his book, has very little faith in himself. […] He writes and publishes the second part driven by economic difficulties. […] Cervantes may have allowed any high school or university graduate friend to insert some pages into the second part.

Then, after having invited the specialists to investigate the matter more thoroughly, he formulates his conclusion to which we will come back later. At first glance, Sender’s proposal is tempting; but it seems to me that it does not withstand a rigorous analysis. Let us consider how Sender casts Teresa as using a “rural” lexicon. In reality, the wife of Sancho does not speak in a different manner in chapter L of the same part. If there is one person who has made an effort, it is above all Sender: it was he who pointed out that, apart from the dialogue, the period becomes “short, dry and false”. Yet the passages that are not dialogues are very rare: there are three of them, altogether less than 150 words, because all the rest – and this is the most evident feature – is dialogue in this chapter, except for the interventions of the narrator and constructions such as “replicó Sancho” (said Sancho) or “respondió Teresa” (said Teresa). In none of the critical editions of the Quixote do the notes to the style of the chapter in question voice the slightest suspicion about the intervention of others. The argument based on an alleged lack of concern for form is doubtful for it is diametrically opposed to the essence of a work like the Quixote. Even though it is true that Cervantes had pecuniary problems (he fought against them almost his entire adult life), one may not forget that the Second Part was, among other things, a reaction against the Quixote of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda the publication of which in 1614 so embittered Cervantes. This in itself was already sufficient reason for Cervantes to assert in different ways that the work belonged to him and nobody else. Lucien Dällenbach (1977: 115-118) summarized the issue in his comments on the autoreflexivity of the Second Part of the Quixote: in 1615 Cervantes feels already secure enough about his creation to reflect and to praise the


first part in the second; this demonstrates not only accurate selfknowledge but also serves as a strategy to prevent others from appropriating his own heard-won glory. Therefore, when Don Quixote dies, Cide Hamete Benengeli draws the following conclusion, while speaking to his pen: “para mí sola nació don Quijote, y yo para él: él supo obrar y yo escribir […]” (for me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him; it was his to act, mine to write) (Cervantes 2004: 1105). “Noli me tangere” (Dällenbach 1977: 117) would be the motto of the work. Contrary to what Sender asserts, Cervantes still has faith – a great deal of faith – in his book after the success of Part I. And although pressured by financial penury, would an author who is so fond of his creation entrust the writing of one or more chapters to “any high school or university graduate friend”? It seems to me most unlikely in the case of Cervantes. Apart from the hypothesis itself, there is another curious thing, a sort of mental juggling, going on in the article of Ramón Sender. He insists that the reader “de fino paladar” (with a discerning palate) grasps immediately “la diferencia de manjar y condimiento” (the difference between food and condiment) and consequently detects without external help the presence of an apocryphal text; but at the same time Sender is obliged to recall that in the initial words of the fifth chapter, it is the narrator himself who says “que le tiene por apócrifo” (that he considers it apocryphal), words in which our author sees “el guión para avisar al lector” (the sign to notify the reader). One must admit that this already affects the originality of Sender’s idea. What is more, Sender fails to say that the narrator’s warning is repeated twice more in the same chapter. The first sentence of the fifth chapter is actually quoted in the article: Llegando a escribir el traductor de esta historia este quinto capítulo, dice que le tiene por apócrifo, porque en él habla Sancho Panza con otro estilo del que se podía prometer de su corto ingenio y dice cosas tan sutiles, que no tiene por posible que él las supiese, pero no quiso dejar de traducirlo, por cumplir con lo que a su oficio debía […] (Cervantes 2004: 581) (As he comes to set down this fifth chapter of our history, the translator desires to make it plain that he looks upon it as


apocryphal, since in it Sancho Panza speaks in a manner that does not appear to go with his limited intelligence and indulges in such subtle observations that it is quite impossible to conceive of his saying the things attributed to him. However, the translator in question did not want to leave his task unfinished…)

A couple of pages further on, he adds: “Por este modo de hablar, y por lo que más abajo dice Sancho, dijo el traductor de esta historia que tenía por apócrifo este capítulo” (It was this way of speaking, and what Sancho has to say a little further on, that led the translator of the history to remark that he looked upon this chapter as apocryphal) (2004: 584); and finally: “Todas estas razones que aquí va diciendo Sancho son las segundas por quien dice el traductor que tiene por apócrifo este capítulo, que exceden a la capacidad de Sancho” (These remarks of Sancho’s are another reason for the translator’s saying what he did about the apocryphal character of this chapter, since they are beyond the mental capacity of the squire) (2004: 586). As is well known, from the ninth chapter of Part I onward, Cervantes introduces the figure of Cide Hamete and the fiction of the found manuscript, which are both starting points to develop a complex (sometimes even disconcerting) narratological mise-en-scène, articulated around the fiction of the Quixote as a true history and “the Arab historian” as the only reliable author. Within this framework, and the systematic exploitation of the possibilities it offers, it is hardly surprising that Cervantes fully played with his fiction, creating a false apocryphal text. It is doubtful whether Miguel de Cervantes would have drawn so much attention to this text if it was really apocryphal. Notice by the way that the “translator of this story” only censored the unlikelihood of the squire’s speech, whereas Sender extends it to Teresa. Likewise, it is curious that Sender did not underline some words of the woman that possibly contain a key: “– Mirad, Sancho – replicó Teresa –, después que os hicistes miembro de caballero andante, habláis de tan rodeada manera, que no hay quien os entienda” (2004: 582) (“Listen to me, Sancho,” his wife replied, “Ever since you joined up with a knight-errant, you’ve been talking in such a roundabout way that there’s no understanding you”) Perhaps the reservations expressed by “the translator” invite the reader to focus on some transformation of


Sancho’s, due to the contact with his master, into a progressive and timid quixotization of the squire. This and the device of the fake apocryphal text do nothing but reinforce and give more variety to the fiction of Cervantes. What happens is that this quixotization does not fit in with Sender’s ideas on the subject. In reality, the entire context, in the strict sense (the article itself and the series of three of with it is a part), as well as in the broadest sense (the writings of Sender about the social function of literature), indicates that the real interest of Sender in the supposedly apocryphal nature of the chapter he commented upon is directly related to his ideological commitment and his confrontation with the literature of the so-called “faústicos”. This term covers everything the young Sender rejected as a writer in the name of realism and materialism: aestheticism, dehumanized art, literature of spiritualist and elitist orientation. Let us not forget that in 1934 the big controversy caused by Ortega y Gasset – and even more by the literary production of his disciples – as a result of the publication in 1925 of La deshumanización del arte e ideas sobre la novela, had still not subsided. The conclusion of “Cervantes, el estilo y un capítulo apócrifo” is revealing about the use Sender makes of Cervantes’ text: A nosotros – para mí es evidente la condición apócrifa del capítulo – nos revela eso, entre otras cosas, el relativo valor que daban los hombres de gran capacidad creadora a la expresión cuando el héroe estaba ya en pie ante un mundo suyo y propio. To us this reveals – for me the apocryphal nature of the chapter is evident – among other things, the relative value that the men of great creative ability gave to matters of expression when the hero is already faced with his own world.

Let us prudently shift the responsibility of the image of a Miguel de Cervantes little concerned with “expression” onto Sender. But the conclusion to the third article also forms the joint conclusion to all previous articles, in which Sender attacks a certain conception of style, namely that in which style is an end in itself, something purely ornamental, without (social) significance. This is a style that Sender associates with authors who write “de oído” (by ear), whose “escritura


es más de tónica y de ritmo que de pensamiento” (writing is more tonic and rhythmic than thoughtful) (1934c, italics ours). Instead, Sender champions what he calls the “fourth dimension”. He explains that length, latitude and depth are the dimensions that academies usually demand of a canvas or a sculpture in order to recognize its plasticity; that a whole sector of the Spanish literature of his time confines itself to those formal elements that only concern the “parte más fútil de la expresión del hombre” (most trivial part of man’s expression), in the absence of a fourth dimension in which it would be possible to establish a dialogue between the reader and the world vision of the creative genius. The fourth dimension would be something like a bridge between two banks. It is style conceived as a privileged and essential world vision; “una noción del universo capaz de fecundar las conciencias” (a notion of the universe able to fertilize human consciences) (1934d); but it is also “la manera que cada cual tiene de comprender o de percibir la posición subjetiva del autor ante su propia obra” (the way that everyone has to understand or perceive the subjective position of the author with regard to his own work) (1934d). And he turns to Cervantes: “La cuarta dimensión en el Quijote la percibe el que sepa identificar en los estímulos del héroe y en desarrollo y realización de esos estímulos el camino entre el dolor cósmico y la noción que Cervantes tiene de la vida” (The fourth dimension in the Quixote can be perceived by the person who knows how to identify in what makes the hero “tick,” and in how he goes about to achieve his aims, the road that leads from the sorrow of the world to Cervantes’ conception of life) (1934d). It is worth underlining that the reader as imagined here by Sender already preludes somewhat upon Borges’s Pierre Menard: a reader that Sender in his second article depicts as quick-witted, well-balanced, educated, prepared for the effort, and who thanks to his efforts to penetrate the “fourth dimension” turns the reading into “una nueva creación deleitante” (a new and delightful creation). Needless to specify that Sender believes in the genius and in the innate talent. If there are any profound thoughts and ideas present with an author, they will impose an adequate expression upon what he writes: the real style is that which originates in that “fourth dimension”, which “no se obtiene, sino se posee” (one cannot earn, but which one owns) (1934d).


Within this context, it suits Sender very well that Cervantes would have entrusted one or more chapters to some “high school or university graduate friend,” especially if such chapter or chapters would be embedded (as is the case with the fifth chapter of Part II) in Cervantes’ “own” work, that is to say when the quixotic universe was already formed and the creative genius of Cervantes could allow itself the luxury of being helped a while in order to relieve its material difficulties. Up to now, this curious hypothesis, quite sui generis, formulated in 1934 by a young writer who was an unconditional admirer of Miguel de Cervantes, has – as far as I know – not had any impact, acknowledgment, or continuation among Cervantes scholars. I think it has become clear how in the short, restless, but exciting and passionate period of the Second Republic, a young writer, brilliant and committed to the social function of literature, called for Don Quixote’s help in order to re-enforce his own political and literary ideas. In some instances, when it seemed necessary to him, he did not even hesitate to take Cervantes’ text for pretext, as we have seen. Cervantes, who in various ways was to prove a constant presence in Sender’s life and work, for the Sender of the 1930s constituted above all a stimulating reference for a political attitude (revolutionary, and militantly anti-fascist), and for reflection on a number of key concepts in the Aragonese writer’s ideological arsenal: realism, style and that other, i.e. heterodox and “illegal”, Spain. Translated from the Spanish by Reindert Dhondt

Works Cited Cervantes, Miguel de. 1949. The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de La Mancha. Tr. Samuel Putnam. New York: The Modern Library. ––––. 2004. Don Quijote de la Mancha. Edición del IV Centenario. Ed. y Notas de Francisco Rico. Madrid: Real Academia Española / Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española / Alfaguara.


Collard, Patrick. 1980. Ramón J. Sender en los años 1930-1936. Sus ideas sobre la relación entre literatura y sociedad. Gent (“Werken Uitgegeven door de Faculteit van de Letteren en Wijsbegeerte”, 167). Dällenbach, Lucien. 1977. Le récit spéculaire. Essai sur la mise en abyme. Paris: Ed. du Seuil. Dueñas Lorente, José Domingo. 2005. “Cervantes y el Quijote, según Ramón J. Sender”. Alazet, 17 (Boletín Senderiano 14): 461-468. Líster, Enrique. 1977. Memorias de un luchador, Madrid, G. Del Toro, 1977. Peñuelas, Marcelino C. 1970. Conversaciones con Ramón J. Sender. Madrid: Magisterio Español. Pini Moro, Donatella. 1994. Ramón José Sender tra la guerra e l’esilio. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’ Orso. Sender Ramón J. 1930. Imán. Madrid: Cenit. ––––. 1933a. “El realismo en la novela”. La Libertad (6 de enero): 1-2 ––––. 1933b. “Preguntas sobre España”. La Libertad (28 de julio): 6. ––––. 1934a. Viaje a la aldea del crimen (Documental de Casas Viejas). Madrid: Pueyo. ––––. 1934b. “En el aniversario de Emile Zola”. La Libertad (3 de octubre): 1. ––––. 1934c. “Hablemos del estilo, si usted quiere”. La Libertad (9 de diciembre): 1. ––––. 1934d. “Una manera de entender el estilo”. La Libertad (19 de diciembre): 1. ––––. 1934e. “Cervantes, el estilo y un capítulo apócrifo. La Libertad (9 de diciembre): 1. ––––. 1935. “La cultura española en la ilegalidad”. Tensor (nº 1-2), octubre 1935: 1-21. ––––. 1961a. Examen de ingenios. Los “noventayochos”. New York: Las Americas. ––––. 1961b. Novelas ejemplares de Cíbola. New York: Las Américas. ––––. 1967. Las gallinas de Cervantes y otras narraciones parabólicas. México: Mexicanos Unidos. ––––. 1969. Comedia del Diantre y otras dos. Barcelona: Destino.


––––. 2008. Proclamación de la sonrisa. Ed. de José Domingo Dueñas Lorente. Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de de Zaragoza / Instituto de estudios Altoaragoneses / Instituto de Estudios Turolenses / Dpto. de Educación, Cultura y Deporte del Gobierno de Aragón (“Larumbe. Textos Aragoneses” n° 3). Vived Mairal, Jesús. 2002. Ramón J. Sender. Biografía. Madrid: Páginas de Espuma.

The Quixote in the Stories of Subcomandante Marcos KRISTINE VANDEN BERGHE Université de Liège / FUNDP Namur

The principal spokesman of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Mexico, 1994), Subcomandante Marcos, devotes himself simultaneously to armed resistance and literature. Some of the stories he wrote are about an anti-neoliberal beetle, Don Durito de la Lacandona, who is endowed with speech and who presents himself as an emulator of Don Quixote. The play with Cervantes’ novel allows Marcos to give his personal interpretation of the various forms of hierarchy at stake in the Zapatista guerrilla war, to dismiss the importance of authorship within the ranks of the revolutionary group, and to enable every reader, according to his or her own personal horizon of reading, to actualize the figure of the beetle. It has been suggested that the tales about Durito are a pastiche of the novel of chivalry. We can add to this that, in the same way that Cervantes rewrote old genres by parodying them, Subcomandante Marcos’s texts about Durito, as far as they are a sincere homage to the Quixote, move away from the literature of commitment as traditionally practised in Latin America.

At the time of the struggles for independence, the Mexican writer Agustín Pomposo Fernández de San Salvador (1756-1842) published a play entitled Las fazañas de Hidalgo, Quixote de nuevo cuño, facedor de tuertos, etc. (The exploits of Hidalgo, a new-style Quixote, maker of one-eyed persons, etc.). His objective was to attack the priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costillo who, in 1810, launched an uprising that would rapidly turn into a war of independence (Azar 1992: 49). The flood of newspaper serials and pamphlets was already subsiding when another text appeared on the royalist side, this time anonymously, entitled “Nuevo encuentro del valiente mameluco D.Quijote con su escudero Sancho en las riberas de México, diálogo en verso entre amo y criado, para instrucción de la presente historia revolucionaria, en que

54 | KRISTINE VANDEN BERGHE

igualmente se ridiculiza el execrable proyecto del cura Hidalgo y sus socios” (González Peña 1975: 129) (New encounter of the valiant mameluke Don Quixote with his squire Sanch on the shores of Mexico, dialogue in verse between master and servant, for the instruction of the present revolutionary history, in which the execrable project of the priest Hidalgo and his followers is also ridiculized). In the furious polemic, the royalists were inspired more than once by the figure of the gentleman of La Mancha in order to ridiculize the insurgents, comparing them to Don Quixote for being foolish and unrealistic. The knight-errant was used again in the political literature of Mexico that aimed at the discursive construction of the nation in the period following the Revolution, the second struggle for liberation in Mexican history. The revolutionary man of letters Isidro Fabela pronounced a discourse that consisted of a reading impression of the Quixote when he was received in the Academia Mexicana Correspondiente de la Española on September 23, 1953. An extended version of the text was published posthumously in 1966 under the title “A mi señor Don Quijote” (To my Lord Don Quixote). Fabela’s objective was not to study or to interpret the Quixote, but to indicate how much comfort the reading of Cervantes’ novel had given him and to show what the ingenious gentleman had made him feel. Contrary to the anti-independence parties that saw in Don Quixote an out of place, mad idealist, Fabela identifies himself with the knight of La Mancha and admires him for his altruism that prompted him to help the weak.1 He also confessed that he was very sad when Don Quixote recovered his sanity: “no encuentro una tristeza más punzante en la vida dolorida del caballero andante que cuando deja de serlo, cuando despejada su mente enferma de la obsesión que le aquejaba volvió a la realidad para morir penando” (1988: 18) (I do not find a more stabbing sadness in the distressing life of the knight-errant than when he stops being a knight, when, his sick mind having been freed from the obsession he

1

In the prologue to the edition of 1988, José María González de Mendoza underlines the quixotic character of Fabela himself who never stops defending the causes that seemed fair to him and who asked President Cárdenas for clarification on the little movement in the United Nations with regard to foreign interventions in the Spanish Civil War as well as to fascist and Nazi violence and Hitlerian aggression (1988: V).

THE QUIXOTE IN THE STORIES OF SUBCOMANDANTE MARCOS | 55

was suffering, he came back to reality in order to die in torment). He illustrates this sadness with some poems of a “vate” (bard) of his youth whom he does not identify but whose verse he claims to have learned by heart:2 Nada he visto jamás tan doloroso, Cual Quijote volviendo a ser Quijano; Después de ser divino, ser humano; Ser celaje que se alza de asqueroso pantano, y tras cruzar el cielo hermoso, volver otra vez hacia el pantano. I have seen nothing so painful, As Quixote becoming Quijano again; After having been divine, to be human again; To float, a cloud, high above the hateful swamp, and after having travelled the beautiful sky, to return to the swamp again.

During the third and most recent major rebellion in Mexico, the insurrection of the Maya natives of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional or EZLN) in 1994, Cervantes’ novel was used again in support of a political cause. The principal spokesman of the rebels of the EZLN, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, – even though using other words and a different register –says something quite similar to what Isidro Fabela and the poet he quotes said at the beginning of the century. The words with which Marcos also refers to the moment when Don Quixote becomes Alonso Quijano again, prove this. In the following fragment Marcos compares the attitude of the Zapatistas (characterized by innovation, subversion, madness and a lack of interest in taking power) to Don Quijote’s madness: Recuerdo la parte más llamativa del Quijote, cuando termina diciendo Alonso Quijano: “Estuve loco, ya estoy cuerdo”, y

2

I have not been able to verify to whom these verses belong. However, they remind us of those composed by Manuel José Othón about Don Quixote (1997).


cómo a pesar de eso el Quijote es recordado precisamente por sus locuras. La derrota de la locura, la imposibilidad de sensatez y la prudencia, es lo más doloroso de este libro. Pero a pesar de eso la gente siempre recuerda las acciones heroicas y locas del Quijote y no las partes en donde se vuelve a la vida normal, donde vuelve a entrar al aro. Esto siempre lo quisimos evitar: decir que estuvimos locos, que entrábamos al aro otra vez y que nos íbamos a poner cuerdos. (Durán de Huerta 1994: 21) For me the most striking part of the Quixote is when Alonso Quijano at the end says: “I was mad, now I have come to my senses,” and how, in spite of this, the Quixote is remembered precisely because of his insanity. To succumb to madness, to not be able to use one's senses wisely, these are the most painful elements of this book. Still, people always recall the heroic and crazy acts of Don Quixote and not the parts in which he comes to his senses, in which he is in control of himself again. This is what we would always want to avoid too: to have to say that we had been mad, that we were going to toe the line again, and that we were going to regain our lucidity.

This is one of Marcos’s many references to Cervantes’ novel which intend to construct the image of the EZLN and to explain its characteristics and demands. In order to understand the implications of these allusions, it is worth recalling some of the basic aspects of EZLN discourse and of the problems of the different voices in the guerrilla ranks. Next, I will concentrate on those aspects of Zapatista discourse related to the construction of the characters, as far as they are inspired by the Quixote and appear in stories published between 1994 and 1999.3 This concerns mainly those stories which Marcos wrote about Don Durito de la Lacandona, a speaking, anti-neoliberal beetle.4 By way of anecdote, let us recall that this recent play with the Cervantine text is set in Chiapas, a state in the southeast of Mexico that includes the Soconusco region where, about 1590, there was a 3

For a more comprehensive analysis of the stories of Marcos, see Vanden Berghe and Maddens (2004) and Vanden Berghe (2005).

4

Marcos collected most of these stories in the volume Don Durito de la Lacandona (1999). Henceforth, all communiqués are quoted from this edition, unless stated otherwise.


vacancy for the position of governor for which Cervantes applied without success. The EZLN On January 1, 1994, thousands of Maya natives, their faces covered by a balaclava, occupied a number of municipalities in Chiapas and declared war on the Mexican government. After twelve days of combat and strong pressure of the civil society, the guerrillas started to use their pens instead of their guns as their favored weapon, and they began to flood the national press with communiqués. Given that they believed they could put an end to the dominant hegemony by transforming the common way of thinking which sustained this hegemony, the Zapatistas can consider themselves true disciples of Gramsci. But Gramsci also pointed out that this subversive activity would only be succesful if the intellectuals managed to elaborate new ideas which might reconcile the government with the civil society and impose an alternative common sense. In the ranks of the EZLN this role was occupied by a half-caste from the North of Mexico: Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos.5 Marcos himself, however, insists that, even though he sometimes appears as the representative of the natives, he is not their leader. On the contrary, he asserts that, in his capacity of Subcomandante, he has to justify himself before the native rebel leaders of the Comité Clandestino Revolucionario Indígena (CCRI) which represents the EZLN. This means that the content of the Zapatista press releases was endorsed by the CCRI and that their circulation to a wider public – the translation work – was the Subcomandante’s responsibility. Thus, Marcos claims to speak for the natives who do not speak Spanish, who do not have a forum at their disposal and who cannot be heard. Those who sympathize with these ideas confirm the image of the “sup” by representing him as a spokesman, a translator and an intermediary (see, for instance, Le Bot 1997 and Vázquez Montalbán 1999).

5

According to Bruhn (1999), Marcos must have read Gramsci, since in his college days the Italian philosopher was almost obligatory reading in Latin-American progressive intellectual circles.


Other observers are more critical with respect to the Subcomandante. As a university graduate who is tall (according to native standards), mestizo and Spanish-speaking, he pretends to represent the natives, who are illiterate, rather small, dark-skinned and Maya-speaking. Those discrepancies make them question the legitimacy of Marcos as interpreter of native demands. In the most famous anti-Marcos book (Sous-Commandant Marcos. La géniale imposture, 1998), the journalists Bertrand de la Grange (Le Monde), and Maite Rico (El País) declare that Marcos takes advantage of the natives, from whom he demands enormous sacrifices, in order to increase his own political and literary capital. According to these authors, Marcos might be the real leader of the Zapatistas while the CCRI only serves to create the illusion of an indigenous command. This is, more or less, the image diffused by the Mexican government and by the Mexican intellectuals most sceptical about the Zapatista movement. As was the case with Cervantes in a certain moment of the past, the apologetic quasi-hagiography of Marcos is accompanied by a kind of black legend, portraying Marcos as a violent, selfish and authoritarian leader. In order to defend themselves against such accusations, the Zapatistas wrote various communiqués. These press releases are usually introduced by or conceived as letters, often including postscripts constructed as Chinese boxes: a postscript may serve as a frame to a comment in which a sonnet is inserted, followed by another postscript, etc. In this way, the Zapatista communiqués involve different discursive genres, by which the reader’s need of diversion is satisfied, as in the Quixote. In addition to the fact that the postscripts play with the meanings and the sounds of the words, some of them are made up of complete stories. In this way, they constitute a ‘literary’ supplement to the communiqués that report on the situation in the conflict zone, the demands of the EZLN or Mexican policy. They form part of the political project of the Zapatistas not because they represent their ideas or their real objectives, but because they reflect, due to their public character, the efforts to construct their image and to influence society in their favor. The author of the fictional texts is none other than Subcomandante Marcos. One of the first texts Marcos published as part of the Zapatista struggle is entitled “Chiapas: el Sureste en dos vientos, una tormenta y


una profecía” (Chiapas, the Southeast in two winds, a storm and a prophecy, January 1994). The narrator invites the reader to image that he is visiting Chiapas and he describes what he is seeing in a travel story. An ironic tone prevails, as can be seen in the introduction to the first chapter that marks the beginning of a long series of pastiches of the Quixote: Que narra cómo el supremo gobierno se enterneció de la miseria indígena de Chiapas y tuvo a bien dotar a la entidad de hoteles, cárceles, cuarteles y un aeropuerto militar. Y que narra también cómo la bestia se alimenta de la sangre de este pueblo y otros infelices y desdichados sucesos. (communiqué of January 27, 1994, in EZLN 1994: 50) This chapter tells how the supreme government was affected by the poverty of the indigenous peoples of Chiapas and how it endowed the area with hotels, prisons, barracks, and a military airport. It also tells how the beast feeds on the blood of the people, as well as other miserable and unfortunate events.

In this paragraph it is clear that the “Utopias” defended by the Zapatistas coincide with the principal Cervantine Utopias: first, the demand for a more equal system which in Cervantes’ text we encounter in the episode of the galley slaves and, according to certain critics, in the episode of Roque Guinart; and, second, the Utopia of the good sense of power, embodied by Sancho Panza’s government on his isle (Maravall 1991). Other ingredients contributing to the pastiche of the Quixote in Marcos’s stories are the confusing multiplication of authors, the theme of a mythological dawn described in an affected style, the amorous proposal, the linguistic archaisms and the theme of war. Although these aspects are interesting, in the next sections we will concentrate on the construction of the characters. Don Durito de la Lacandona Durito, one of the protagonists of the stories, appeared for the first time in a communiqué (April 10, 1994) that Marcos wrote for a girl to


express his appreciation for a drawing that she had sent him, and he reappeared from 1995 onwards. Like El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, the Durito stories are composed of a constant succession of rather dissociated episodes which are cleverly organized around a protagonist. Although in principle Durito is a beetle, he presents himself under different identities, a diversity that reminds us of the instability of the name of Don Quixote or, even more, of the occasional splitting up of the hidalgo’s personality. Most of the time the beetle appears as a knight-errant called Don Durito de la Lacandona. In the Durito stories, the allusion to Cervantes’ novel is clear from the titles, which orient the reading and consist of a relative pronoun, followed by a verb in a subordinate clause – “Que, aunque no os deis cuenta, encierra un misterio” (1999: 32) (“Which, although you don't realize it, contains a mystery,” 2005: 67; communiqué of April 4, 1995) or “Que habla del amor, el desamor y otras necedades” (1999: 85) (“Which speaks of love, indifference and other foolishness,” 2005: 145; communiqué of December 23, 1995) and which reflect the syntax of the subtitles in Cervantes’ novel. With regard to the texts themselves, the most striking allusions to the Quixote are located on the level of the characters. It is Durito who sets the intertextual play in motion, since it is he who identifies most with the quixotic model, an identification made evident by his habit to quote entire passages from the Quixote. In order to play the role of the knight-errant correctly, Don Durito de la Lacandona carries some attributes. A medicine bottle top serves as a shield, a straightened paperclip is his lance, a small branch his sword, Excalibur. Half a shell of hazelnut on his head is used as a helmet and a turtle – his steed – completes his outfit (communiqué of April 15, 1995). Durito’s imitations reflect the way Don Quixote conceived the imitation of models as a means to improve himself. The beetle’s imitation of Don Quixote determines two fundamental features of the character: his excentric nature and an extravagant form of knowledge. First, the character of Durito is representative of the social misfits for more than one reason. Not only does he not even belong to the human species, but, as a beetle, he is also among the smallest and most vulnerable animals. When he appears for the first time, he is studying the neoliberal strategies in Latin America. He acts purely out


of self-interest since he wants to know how long it will take for neoliberalism to be defeated. Only then the soldiers’ boots and the guerrillas will disappear (letter dating from April 10, 1994). On another occasion he announces the foundation of an “anti-boot” circle: “para cartas de admiración, solicitud de entrevistas, claveles y firmas de apoyo para la ‘Sociedad Escarabajil Antibototas’, favor de dirigirse a…” (1999: 159) (“For fan letters, interview requests, carnations, and signatures of support for the Beetle ‘Anti-Big-Boots Society’ please write to…,” 2005: 231; communiqué of October 12, 1996). The beetle’s association with the figure of Don Quixote reinforces this image: being vulnerable, utopian as well as ingenuous, the Cervantine protagonist in many senses is marginal and out of place. None of the two fits the typical image of the heroic and extraordinary gentleman whom they desire to imitate and whose miraculous force is paradigmatic. On the other hand, the little Durito is the one associated with knowledge. In the communiqués, he is the intellectual, as he carries the attributes linked to this status on his back, from a pipe to a minimicrocomputer, and all the explicitly didactic tasks such as giving classes and conferences are passed on to him. This is another similarity to the novel of Cervantes where everything related to teaching and moral is associated with Don Quixote and the other characters who, as a consequence, only proclaim their truths, which the reader can take into consideration or not (Neuschäfer 1999: 15). Far from sublimating such lessons, Marcos sometimes makes fun of his character and puts the lessons into perspective by associating the beetle with the figure of Don Quixote, a figure that evokes the limits of sanity. By relating the texts about Durito to the context of the Zapatista struggle, it becomes clear that from a certain point of view the errant beetle represents the natives. They are marginalized as well as vulnerable, longing for the end of neoliberalism and the restoration of peace. Moreover, in the Zapatista ranks they are respected for having gathered knowledge that was forgotten or that had been repressed for more than five centuries. The guerrillas want to restore this wisdom of the natives by giving them a voice. Nevertheless, it would be inappropriate to insist too much on this analogy between Durito and the native, since the natives’ prominence in the context of the


Zapatista struggle does not correspond to a leading role at the level of the texts about Durito, in which they are surprisingly absent. On the one hand, this absence has made it easier for Marcos to avoid the trap of the idealization of the natives and all forms of nativism that might discredit the Zapatistas. On the other hand, the fact that he refused to create a realistic character, that he changes the appearance of that character and that he associated it with Don Quixote, a figure which is so universal that it has been interpreted in many different ways, makes it possible that every reader, according to his or her personal reading horizon, identifies the figure of the beetle with any marginalized group he or she is sympathetic with. The absence of nativism, the variety of Durito’s appearances and his “multi-interpretability” probably explain why the Zapatista communiqués have awakened the interest and the adhesion of a rather heterogeneous international public. A Sancho with a Big Nose Another effect that derives from the quixotic hypotext is related to the Subcomandante and deliberately reinforces some features of the portrait that he paints of himself. The guerrilla and author Marcos is not only the first narrator in the Durito stories, but he presents himself also as a character, a character that can be interpreted as a literary replica of the Subcomandante, in response to whoever blames him for being authoritarian and for acting as a leader rather than as a mere spokesperson. Contrary to Durito, who revives the knight-errantry full of enthusiasm, the character of Marcos, as suggested by the narrator Marcos, is involved in the project willingly or unwillingly. After Durito has recited a part of the Quixote (of Part I, chapter XXV), the first narrator takes over again: Durito ha dicho todo de corrido y con notable entonación. De pie sobre una piedrita, y enarbolando en la diestra mano una ramita que, según supe luego, era una espada, Durito ha volteado a mirarme cuando dijo aquello de “¡Oh tú, escudero mío, agradable etcétera!”. Yo volteo a mis espaldas por ver si se refiere a alguien más, pero no hay nadie.


– Sí, tú – dice Durito señalándome con su ramita. – Tú serás mi escudero. – ¿Yo? – digo visiblemente sorprendido. Durito no hace caso de mi pregunta y sigue: – Además, no es una ramita… Es una espada… la única, la mejor… ¡Excalibur! – dice blandiendo la ramita. (1999: 32; communiqué of April 4, 1995) Durito recited it all by heart and with impressive intonation. Standing on a little stone, and raising in his right hand a twig that I later learned was a sword, Durito turned to look at me when he said that part about, “Oh you, my squire, cheerful companion, etc.” I turn and look behind me to see if he’s referring to someone else, but there isn’t anyone there. “Yes, you”, says Durito pointing toward me with his twig. “You will be my squire.” “I?” I say, visibly surprised. Durito pays no attention to my question and continues, “Furthermore, it isn’t a twig… it’s a sword… the only, the best… Excalibur!” he says, brandishing the twig. (2005: 68)

In this way, Don Durito de la Lacandona made Subcomandante Marcos his squire. On the one hand, the portrayal of the quixotic pair allows the narrator to reproduce the dialogic character of Cervantes’ work, which gives a greater appeal to the communiqués. But it is also possible to argue that there exists a structural analogy between the literary figure of Marcos and the position which the Subcomandante allots himself in the Zapatista ranks. Just as Marcos declares being subordinate to the natives, he appears in the texts as the assistant of Durito. This is significant of the way in which the narrator Marcos describes himself as a character. By doing so, he always manages to reverse his supposed superiority into subordination. This is the case when he appears as Sancho Panza, the consort of Durito/Don Quixote. But, even here Marcos intensifies the relation of subordination. While, in his capacity of squire, he should serve his master, instead he constantly begs him to help him. To one of those pleas Durito responds: “Yo, señor mío, soy un caballero andante, y los caballeros andantes no podemos dejar de socorrer al necesitado, por más narizón


y delincuente que sea el desvalido en cuestión” (1999: 60) (“I, dear sir, am a knight-errant, and we knights-errant cannot refuse to help the needy, no matter how large-nosed or delinquent the helpless soul in question is,” 2005: 89; communiqué of June 11, 1995). In other words, Marcos is doubly dependent. To these literary borrowings that highlight his subordinate position, other elements are added which portray Marcos as an anti-hero in the image of Sancho Panza: he does not manage to respect the deadlines imposed by periodicals or organizers of colloquia (if it comes to that, Durito has to lend him a hand), he is a real sleepyhead and, furthermore, he has a very large nose. Durito takes advantage of this latter feature to call Marcos “mi escudero narizón” (my large-nosed squire; La Jornada Semanal, January 14, 1996) and to draw a comparison with Cyrano de Bergerac, although not without observing that the French duelist had more panache (communiqué of April 6, 1996 and of September 20, 1996). Marcos also constructs an antiheroic self-portrait by showing the problems he has to survive as a mestizo, intellectual and townsman in the Lacandon jungle. He is not able to follow the rhythm of the natives, he always arrives exhausted wherever he needs to be. Like Sancho Panza, he asks himself a thousand times why he got into this trouble and he announces a thousand times his intention to end his adventures. The fact that he is an intellectual, that he is a city dweller of mixed blood, who suddenly finds himself in the middle of a guerrilla struggle in a tropical forest, is a source of inconvenience and makes his life a misery. Hence, Marcos reinterprets the features that his opponents underline in order to show his alleged superiority towards the natives and implicitly reacts against the discourse that represents the indigenous as victims of the rhetoric of the power of an outsider mestizo. In the jungle, Marcos is the victim of the forces of nature and of his own physical limitations. The previous interpretation of the character Marcos/Sancho Panza allows us to formulate a hypothesis with respect to the characteristic Zapatista balaclava. It is possible to draw an analogy between the literary character Marcos/Sancho Panza and the balaclava. At the discursive and physical level, respectively, they function as masks by which the narrator and guerrilla Marcos distracts attention from his real identity and conceals his “superior” features that distinguish him


from the other, indigenous, Zapatistas. They simultaneously illustrate that Marcos aspires to be seen as a poor among the poor and as a black-skinned fellow among the natives. In the Zapatista ranks, Marcos suggests, it is not the natives who conform to the mestizos, but the other way around: the mestizos pattern themselves on the natives and keep themselves at their disposal. Play of Identities However, as the communiqués are polysemous, we can suggest a second interpretation regarding this subject. In fact, Durito does not only present himself as Don Quixote, and Marcos does not only appear “disguised” as Sancho Panza. As more texts are published, the identities become more numerous and blurred. On the occasion of the opening of the “First intercontinental encounter for humanity and against neoliberalism” Marcos addressed his public in the following terms: Buenas tardes a todos. Hemos llegado un poco tarde y les pedimos que nos disculpen, pero es que nos hemos topado con unos gigantes multinacionales que nos querían impedir llegar. El mayor Moisés nos dice que son molinos de viento; el comandante Tacho dice que son helicópteros. Yo les digo que no les crean: eran gigantes. (quoted in Vázquez Montalbán 1999: s.p.) Good evening, everyone. We have arrived a little late and we apologize for this delay, but the thing is that we have bumped into some multinational giants who tried to prevent us from getting here. Major Moisés tells us that they are windmills; Commander Tacho says they are helicopters. I tell you not to believe them: they were giants.

In this quote the natives Moisés and Tacho serve as a fake ironic counterpoint to the quixotic vision of reality which Marcos adopts in assigning himself the role of Don Quixote instead of Sancho Panza’s. At another moment Durito calls him “mi querido Guatson” (my dear Watson, communiqué of July 17, 1995) or “Whatson-sup”


(communiqué of March 11, 1995). From this we can deduce that Durito presents himself as Sherlock Holmes. However, once more, the roles are reversed as Durito is not Sherlock Holmes, since the latter is presented as a former pupil of the beetle who is surprised by the fact that “Jolms” has become a well-known literary character. A writer who became famous thanks to Durito is Bertolt Brecht. Durito turns out to be the real author of the works of Brecht, to whom he gave the honor of signing his texts: “Bueno debo advertirte que Bertolt se limitaba a transcribir lo que yo le iba dictando. Algo muy parecido a lo que tú haces ahora. Pero ese detalle no lo hagas público” (1999: 133) (“But I should warn you that Bertolt only transcribed what I was dictating to him. Something very similar to what you are doing right now. But do not make that detail public,” 1995: 192; communiqué of July 5, 1996). In honor of Brecht, Durito is prepared to behave as if they had written the text together. The title reads “Ponencia conjunta del Bertolt y el Durito” (Joint Proposal by Bertolt and Durito). The place and date line are as follows: “Berlín-San Cristóbal, 1949-1996”. “Creo,” Marcos says to Durito “que te están confundiendo los tiempos y las novelas” (1999: 32) (“I think you are confusing the times and the novels,” 2005: 68; communiqué of April 4, 1995). As a rebuttal of this critique, Durito repeatedly refers to Umberto Eco’s theory about the opera aperta (see La Jornada Semanal of January 14, 1996), while regretting that Marcos does not share this vision. Apart from being a follower of this theory, Durito is convinced that nature imitates art (communiqué of April 4, 1995 and of June 30, 1995). This statement confirms the priority function that the signs have in the Zapatista guerrilla and illustrates how certain questions of literary criticism become a substantial part of the characterization of Durito, as is the case with Don Quixote (Riley 1986). Moreover, just like Don Quixote, Durito portrays himself as a character, notwithstanding the opinion which Marcos, his alter ego and creator, might have. Durito’s identity invented by the writer-guerrilla has thus been corrected by his character. Finally, as with Don Quixote (Maspoch-Bueno 1995), it is suggested that Durito fulfills all requirements for a writer’s career. The confusion between characters and voices and the questioning of the authorial function leads us to see the character of Marcos/Sancho Panza in relation to the insignificance of individual identities in the Zapatista ranks. Among the guerrillas, each individual


is everyone and everyone is each one. In other words, Marcos does not matter since it makes no difference who happens to be the voice of the community. Once more we can relate this interpretation to the image of the balaclava. We no longer consider it in function of the dark color that enables the Subcomandante to cover his face, but in function of the lack of significance of the individual voice in the Zapatista army. Marcos and Cervantes Some commentators have claimed that the impact of the EZLN can be explained by the diversity of contents and registers used in its press releases. While some of these are dispatches, others have a more essayistic nature and analyze Mexican policy or the consequences of neoliberal globalization. They range from a declaration of war to parody, from prophetic visions to stories. Even though these stories have no literary pretentions, Marcos attaches a lot of importance to the form of his messages, in which he accumulates alliterations, metaphors and allusions to canonical literary texts. The way in which he plays with the Quixote is illustrative in this respect. On the one hand, this play is in line with a long tradition, as it illustrates once again that the urge to comment on Cervantes and to reflect on his most famous novel is innate to every Spanish-speaking writer or aspirant writer, also in Mexico, as the examples provided at the beginning of the essay demonstrate. On the other hand, the numerous playful references to Cervantes’ novel illustrate to what extent Marcos’ texts deviate from dominant political discourse as well as from traditional leftist “mester de rebeldía” or protest literature. In this sense, the Durito stories, for instance, are not only a pastiche of the novel of chivalry, as Armando Bartra (1998: 12) contends. In the same way in which Cervantes rewrote old genres by parodying them and confronting them with elements of contemporary popular culture, the texts about Durito, as far as they are a heartfelt homage to Cervantes, move away from the traditional works of engaged literature in Latin America. If sometimes these texts politicized literary genres, Marcos “literalized” the political genre of the guerrilla communiqué. He demystifies the messianism of traditional left-wing discourse – solemn, dogmatic and constantly lamenting the victims – just like


Cervantes made fun of the traditional novels of chivalry. The literary resources he uses for this purpose are the same as many of those used by Cervantes. Marcos combines and intertwines popular and academic language; he diversifies his stylistic devices and accumulates them by playing on words. And, above all, Marcos shares with the Spanish writer the ambition to balance instruction and delight. Translated from the Spanish by Reindert Dhondt

Works Cited Azar, Héctor (Ed.). 1992. Teatro mexicano: historia y dramaturgia. Vol. XII: Escenificaciones de la Independencia (1810-1827). Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. Bartra, Armando. 1998. “Mitos en la aldea global,” in Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, Relatos de El Viejo Antonio. Chiapas: CIACH. 7-17. Bruhn, Kathleen. 1999. “Antonio Gramsci and the palabra verdadera: the political discourse of Mexico’s guerrilla forces,” in Journal of Interamerican Studies & World Affairs 41: 2. 29-56. De la Grange, Bertrand & Maite Rico. 1988. Sous-Commandant Marcos. La géniale imposture. Paris: Plon/Ifrane. Durán de Huerta, Marta (Ed.). 1994. Yo, Marcos. Mexico: Ediciones del Milenio. EZLN. 1994. Documentos y comunicados I. Mexico: Era. Fabela, Isidro. 1988 [1966]. A mi señor Don Quijote. México, UAEM/Instituto Mexicano de Cultura. González de Mendoza, José María. 1988 [1966] “Prólogo,” in Isidro Fabela, A mi señor Don Quijote. México: UAEM/Instituto Mexicano de Cultura. I-VII. González Peña, Carlos. 1975. Historia de la literatura mexicana desde los orígenes hasta nuestros días. Sepan cuantos 44. Mexico: Porrúa. Le Bot, Yvon. 1977. Subcomandante Marcos. El sueño zapatista. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés.


Maravall, José Antonio. 1991. Utopia and Counterutopia in the Quixote. Tr. Robert W. Felkel. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Maspoch-Bueno, Santiago. 1995. “Don Quijote, novelista constructor de personajes,” in Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of América, 15: 1. 142-146. Neuschäfer, Hans-Jorg. 1999. La ética del Quijote: función de las novelas intercaladas. Madrid: Gredos. Othón, Manuel José. 1997. Obras completas I. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Riley, Edward C. 1986. Teoría de la novela en Cervantes. Madrid: Taurus. Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos. 1999. Don Durito de la Lacandona. Chiapas: CIACH. Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos. 2005. Conversations with Durito. Stories of the Zapatistas and Neoliberalism. Edited and introduced by the Acción Zapatista Editorial Colective. New York: Autonomedia. Vanden Berghe, Kristine. 2005. Narrativa de la rebelión zapatista. Los relatos del Subcomandante Marcos. Frankfurt-Madrid: Vervuert-Iberoamericana. Vanden Berghe, Kristine & Bart Maddens. 2004. “Ethnocentrism, Nationalism and Post-nationalism in the Tales of Subcomandante Marcos”, in Mexican Studies (University of California), 20: 1. 123144. Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel. 1999. Marcos. El señor de los espejos. Madrid: Aguilar.

The Intrusive Incertitude of the Quixote or the Emergence of World Literature According to Carlos Fuentes REINDERT DHONDT Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Don Quixote, a permanent novel, origin but also destiny of the genre, is our novel and Cervantes is our contemporary because his aesthetics of instability and uncertainty are those of our own world. (C. Fuentes, “New Novel, New World”)

This article seeks to examine and systematize the rather various reflections Carlos Fuentes made on the Quixote, the first modern – i.e., truly polyphonic – novel and hence the starting point of the “tradition of La Mancha” of which Fuentes himself claims to be a part. For Fuentes, the descendants of Cervantes conceive a world with multiple points of view characterized by a pervasive sense of ambiguity. Firstly, we will analyze how Fuentes conceives the universality and current interest of the Quixote. Clearly influenced by the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin and by poststructuralist theory, Fuentes identifies the novel’s fundamental uncertainty as the underlying principle of Cervantes’ late poetics. This open, pluridimensional tradition is then connected to the postmodern moment, the baroque and the multicultural society of Latin America. Next, the paper explores how this basic assumption gives rise to a re-conceptualization of literary geography, with Latin American literature no longer – as is traditional – occupying an eccentric position, but rather emerging as one center amongst others. Finally, we will discuss how this scattered constellation of the literary universe enables Fuentes to rethink the notion and genealogy of “world literature”.

Since the publication of La region más transparente (1958), the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes is widely regarded as an unavoidable reference with regard to the literary construction of the Mexican, mestizo identity. Although his texts are punctuated with references to the Aztec pantheon or to the cyclic conception of time in the Maya cosmology, his novelistic work basically explores the historical and

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cultural significance of the mutual influence between the Old and the New World, and, in addition, between North and South America. In spite of the cultural and geographical embedding of most of his novels, Fuentes is undoubtedly heavily indebted to European literature, not in the least to the Spanish literary tradition, from La Celestina to El burlador de Sevilla, as can be deduced from the innumerable references and allusions in his short stories as well as in the carnivalesque novel Cambio de piel (1967), his ambitious magnum opus Terra Nostra (1975), or the love triangle drama Gringo Viejo (1985). It goes without saying that the Quixote, a work that Fuentes, by his own account, rereads each year during the Holy Week, has its place in this complex web of intertextual references. It sounds rather paradoxical that Fuentes, both in his creative oeuvre and in his essays, frequently alludes to a novel in which the main character went mad because of intertextuality, but it is hardly necessary to recall that The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha is as much a part of Mexican literature as it is of Spanish literature: the Hispano-American palimpsests of the Quixote, which crossed the Atlantic as early as the spring of 1605 (Leonard 1992: 270), are indeed legion. In the twentieth century, the progeny of the gentle nobleman has been particularly noteworthy in Latin America: Cervantes’ masterpiece has marked the oeuvre of authors as diverse as José Eustasio Rivera, Augusto Roa Bastos and José Emilio Pacheco, to name but a few. In a considerable number of interviews and speeches Fuentes has meditated on the impact of this “novela fundadora del Occidente” (foundational novel of the West) on the literary production of both Europe and Latin America, which he termed “el extremo Occidente” (the quintessential West) after Alain Rouquié’s 1987 study. Both regions belong unmistakably to what Fuentes calls “el reino de Cervantes,” a notion that consequently receives not only a thematic but also a geographical meaning. According to Fuentes, the Quixote even announces the emergence of a new genealogy of the novel, in which the characters’ devotion to books (going from Walter Shandy and Emma Bovary to Pierre Menard) borders on obsession (cf. 1980: 55). After all, Don Quixote’s insanity is his “locura de la lectura” (madness of reading), which incites him to undo injustice and to redress inequalities.

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In his reflections on the art of literature, Fuentes has regularly appealed to the poetics of Cervantes. His literary criticism presents some obvious clues to decipher his novelistic production, but is obviously not restricted to a comment on his own work. In the volume Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura (1976), which constitutes the essayistic counterpart of the Quixote parody Terra Nostra,1 Fuentes analyzes the transition from the closed world of the Dark Ages to the open, pluridimensional world of Renaissance thought as exemplified in (Spanish) Erasmism, a basic component of the Cervantine ideology. Nevertheless, as a worthy disciple of Américo Castro, Fuentes also seeks to recognize the heterodoxy beneath the appearance of orthodoxy during the nine hundred years of Christian-Islamic-Jewish interaction and mestizaje on the Iberian Peninsula. To a certain extent, he states in the opening piece, Cervantes was as ingenuous as Columbus: they both ignored that they had discovered a new continent, respectively that of the modern novel and that which was to be named after Amerigo Vespucci. The Quixote is not just a satire on the chivalric novel, but a new way to read the world, characterized by a plural look (cf. 1976: 15) – in short, a new “world literature”. In this sense, the Quixote inaugurates what Fuentes later called the “poetics of La Mancha,” which gave rise to a certain kind of Western novel as we know it today (cf. 1989: XXXVf). The peculiarity of Don Quixote consists in his self-reflexivity: he is conscious of being read. Unlike the novels of the so-called “tradition of Waterloo,” which only reflect reality and whose characters ignore that they are read by the world, the Quixote grounds reality in the imagination: “Al radicar la crítica de la creación dentro de la creación, Cervantes ha fundado la imaginación moderna” (1976: 93) (By situating the critique of the creation inside the creation, Cervantes has founded the modern imagination.) According to Fuentes, it is no coincidence that the world vision expressed in the Quixote is contemporaneous with Erasmus’ Praise of Folly – which would be a perfect subtitle for Cervantes’ book – and of the formulation of the heliocentric model of the solar system. By way of Nicholas of Cusa, an experimental scientist who anticipated the work of Copernicus by discerning a movement in the 1

The bibliography of Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura lists the sources of Terra Nostra, which seems to corroborate the parallel genesis of both works.


universe that did not center in the earth, Fuentes recalls that each thing is a diverse point of view in the universe and that reality itself is multidirectional: El centro desaparece de toda composición y se multiplican las visiones, en sentido estricto, herejes: la visión de la realidad deja de ser única e impuesta jerárquicamente […]. Las fuerzas centrífugas sobrepasan a las centrípetas. (1976: 25) The center of every composition disappears and the heretic views, in the strict sense of the word, multiply: the view of reality is no longer unique or hierarchically imposed […]. The centrifugal forces exceed the centripetal ones. (My translation)

For Fuentes, the Quixote is the first modern novel because of the “encuentro de lenguajes” or the multiplicity of languages spoken in it. The mutual incomprehension between Sancho Panza and Don Quixote is highly significant in this respect. Although the similarity with Mikhail Bakhtin’s distinction between monologic and dialogic novels is at least remarkable, it seems that the Fuentes of the 1970s was not yet familiar with the thought of the Russian scholar (see Joset 1995: 87), who regarded the Quixote as the classic example of the dialogic genre of heteroglossia. From his 1990 collection of essays Valiente Mundo Nuevo (1990) onwards, however, Fuentes repeatedly invokes the work of Bakhtin in order to characterize the novel as a “Galileic” expression of language. This essay marks a shift in Fuentes’s reflection from a more temporal preoccupation to a spatially inflected one. In his reading of Cortázar through the legacy of Erasmus, Fuentes baptizes the contemporary South-American writers as “hijos de La Mancha” (children of La Mancha) and exhorts them to liberate their language of orthodoxies in order to render account of the many different cultures in a multipolar world: “Nosotros tampoco sabemos, como don Quijote, dónde se encuentra la verdad.” (1990: 280) (We also, like Don Quixote, do not know where the truth is to be found.) In Geografía de la novela (1993), a collection of essays that is the outcome of a number of separate lectures, prologues and journal articles, Fuentes sheds light on the work of authors such as Salman Rushdie, Artur Lundkvist and Juan Goytisolo. In these thirteen essays,


Fuentes develops some of his ideas about the novel as outlined in previous essays, but this time his scope transcends the borders of Latin America. His cross-border vision on literature comes clearly to the fore in the manifesto-like article “¿Ha muerto la novela?” and in the title essay, which is dedicated to the notion of world literature. In the opening essay about the supposed death of the novel, of which an early version appeared as “New Novel, New World” (1989), Fuentes inveighs strongly against the plain realism, the narrow nationalism and the dogmatism as expressed in the tendentious novels that dominated the literary landscape of his youth. Until the 1950s, reading a foreign author such as Proust in Mexico amounted to “proustitution”. Slowly but surely, the calls for burning Kafka’s The Castle because of its supposed “antirealism” gave way to the recognition of the work’s “(hyper)realism.” Likewise, Mexican authors of the mid-twentieth century progressively rejected a narrow sense of nationalism and a blind political commitment implied in “the demand for a single reality” (1993: 23). Initiated by Alfonso Reyes, the heated discussions about the dependence on the national-political relations, which are symptomatic of the progressive emancipation of the literary space, would eventually lead to a new literary constellation. As has been pointed out by Raymond Leslie Williams (1996: 231), the term “nueva novela,” coined by Fuentes to refer to a new kind of fiction written in Spanish in the 1960s (see La nueva novela hispanoamericana, 1969), now defines a multilingual group of contemporary novelists (among them György Konrád, Naguib Mahfouz, Italo Calvino and so forth) who recognize the potential of the novel not only to reflect, but also to anticipate reality. Their permanently open and unfinished work demonstrates that the lessons of Cervantes have not been neglected – on the contrary even. Fuentes labels the diagnosis of the historical avant-gardes about the novel’s anemia premature and places himself firmly in the tradition of La Mancha. For Fuentes and many of his contemporaries, the key question in the 1950s was not if the “age of Gutenberg” had definitively ended with the advent of new technologies. Instead, they focused on the particularity of the novel with regard to other media: the refrain “The novel is dead” was eventually replaced by the question “What can the novel express that cannot be said otherwise?” Following Baudrillard’s


theory on sign saturation, Fuentes asserts that the absorption of society in representation was not as much an assault on the narrative language as it was a challenge: it inaugurated a new literary constellation, a new “geography” in which the novelists were no longer classified according to nationality or mother tongue. According to the Mexican author, the contemporary literary field situates the authors in the common territory of the critical imagination; they have all become citizens of the “nation of the novel”: [Milan Kundera] is read not because he is a Czech, or because he writes in that language, but because of the quality of his writing. The news of the novel is then, first of all, verbal imagination, not mere information. And this imagination is a shared thing; it is fed by the common work of other novelists in communication around the world. (1989: XXXI)

It has become almost a commonplace to state that the attraction of the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha is so overpowering that many people quixotically read more into it than intended: the novel has been successively explained as a precursor of romantic, realistic, modern and postmodern conceptions. The fact that a book gives rise to a diversity of interpretations is, according to Fuentes, a fundamental feature of every “major” novel. The reality of a novel is its functioning at all levels of the critique of reading. For Fuentes, Cervantes’ book is a pre-eminently polyphonic and unfinished work that promotes a radically open and dynamic conception of history. Although the main character is an errant anachronism that more frequently looks back than ahead, the Quixote inaugurates a “democratic society of readers and writers” (Fuentes 2003: 15). As in Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura, Fuentes sets forth Lukács’ conception of the novel as a product of fragmented societies: the constant displacement, the transgression of (generic, national, chronological, cultural, etc.) borders is the hallmark of the modern novel: its nomadic, always incomplete character contrasts sharply with the univocal lecture of the traditional verse epic that deals with “closed cultures”. The modern novel, born as a refusal of purity and a mestizaje of genres, is a repertory of possibilities, of past and present, of writing and reading. Because of this openness and the susceptibility


to many explanations, Cervantes’ work proclaims the intrinsic plurality of reality. Following Borges, who suggests in “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” that every new reading of a text also implies its rewriting, Fuentes argues that each of us is the author of the Quixote because every reader recreates the novel by translating the finite act of writing into a basically infinite, but always actual act of reading. In the essay “Geografía de la novela,” Fuentes states that contemporary literature has become not only polycentric in geographical terms, but also eccentric with respect to the central truths of modern society. Drawing a map of the literary globe, Fuentes pointedly observes that the age in which Goethe coined the term Weltliteratur did not allow a really universalistic vision on culture: Goethe himself was far from being a multiculturalist. As a reaction to the exhaustion of the metanarratives of Enlightenment modernity, Fuentes proposes non-linear, minor narratives that contain multiple centers. Those “polynarratives” originate frequently but not exclusively in border territories or regions that are eccentric with regard to the alleged European center. In our time, the old Eurocentrism and the binary model of center and periphery have given way to a widespread polycentrism: there is no longer a single point of reference. Whereas Pascale Casanova’s conception of The World Republic of Letters (1999) is still regulated by Paris functioning as the “Greenwich meridian of literature,” Fuentes’s model of world literature as a transnational space is radically decentered. But strangely enough, Fuentes sticks to a division in linguistic areas when he illustrates this new literary geography by means of the literature produced in “english” in the former colonies of the British Empire. Without authors like Coetzee from South Africa or Walcott from Santa Lucía, Fuentes observes, it would be impossible to conceive a truly universal literature written in English. As has been rightly noticed by Maarten van Delden, Fuentes continues thus to link each writer to a specific place or culture since, paradoxically, “[…] a world where we are more aware of differences is also a world were we are more aware of identities.” (Van Delden 1998: 200) Yet, in our increasingly multicultural societies, the notion of “universality” is no longer restricted to a world vision of middle-class Europeans as in the age of the Enlightenment, but has broadened itself


to a genuinely pluralistic universality, a “pluriversality”. Cultivating a neobaroque sensibility that is informed by a tripartite civilization that incorporates the Iberian, Indian and African legacies, Fuentes calls into question the claims of any culture to possess a fixed and homogeneous body of values. In his multi-centered map of the world, Fuentes highlights the numerous interconnectivities between the different literary traditions and does not limit himself to a simplified “bifocal” approach: in the language of poetry, of literature, North and South, East and West will come together; it is the place where the “twain shall meet” (pace Kipling). Because of the fact that nothing is central, we are all eccentric and this is, in the opinion of Fuentes, the only way to be universal. Hence his conclusion that the Quixote has finally prevailed: the modern novel is not the expression of one single voice or one lecture, but it is the battle scene of many registers, the meeting place of many heterogeneous traditions and cultures. In this sense, Cervantes brings about a shift in the production of literature: instead of presenting one particular world view, he introduces multiple characters with a variety of perspectives. This centrifugal “estética de la encrucijada” (crossroad aesthetics), which is clearly indebted to Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony, allows us to explore the universal reach of “great” literature. The concept of “world literature” refers thus no longer to a fixed corpus of classical texts, neither to a particular strategy of reading, but rather to a “literature of difference,” permeated by polyphony and indeterminateness, as epitomized in the Quixote: Al antiguo eurocentrismo se ha impuesto un policentrismo que, si seguimos en su lógica la crítica posmodernista de Lyottard [sic], debe conducirnos a una “activación de las diferencias” como condición común de una humanidad sólo central porque es excéntrica. […] La “literatura mundial” de Goethe cobra al fin su sentido recto: es la literatura de la diferencia, la narración de la diversidad. (1993: 167) The old Eurocentric perspective has been replaced by a polycentrism that, if we follow in its logic the postmodernist critique of Lyotard, inevitably conducts us toward an “activation of the differences” as a common condition of a humanity that is only central because it is eccentric […]. Goethe’s “world


literature” is finally taking on its true meaning: it is the literature of difference, the narration of diversity. (My translation)

This kind of literature forces us, readers, to become eccentric in relation to ourselves, to live in the “circle of Pascal,” whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. Fuentes argues that a generalized eccentricity equals a ubiquitous centrality: “[…] si todos somos excéntricos, entonces todos somos centrales.” (1993: 173) ([…] if we are all eccentric, then we are all central.) This baroque image of the infinite circle, which is the subject of Borges’s essay “La esfera de Pascal” (Otras Inquisiciones, 1952), stands for the vastness and the generalized interconnectedness of the universe in Pascal’s Pensées. Throughout the essays that compose Geografía de la novela, Fuentes praises this kind of universal literature (world literature in the sense of world-class literature) that has been “cervantized,” or that aims at “cervantizing” reality (the term is borrowed from the critic Francisco Márquez Villanueva). To “cervantize” is virtually synonymous with “mesticize” or hybridize: to cross cultures and languages and to encourage diversity. This implies the rejection of every form of exclusion in favor of the acceptance or assimilation of the other. It is the responsibility of the novelist to relate what goes against the ruling doxa and to undo the reader’s prejudices. To put it differently, to “cervantize” means to marginalize the single center and to redefine the margins as so many centers. In the year of the quadricentennial of the Quixote, Fuentes wrote a number of essays in which he systematized and developed his ideas about Cervantes’ novel as being the founding stone of “the novel.” Both in “Elogio de la incertidumbre” (2005), his vote of gratitude for the honorary doctorate that the University of Castilla-La Mancha granted him, and in “In praise of the novel” (2006), the opening speech of the International Literature Festival of Berlin, Fuentes emphasizes once again that the Quixote is a radically plurivocal text that leads us to the essence of reality because in it all truths are suspect. Interestingly, he elaborates in both texts on the relevance, also for the present, and the socio-ethical dimension of Cervantes’ work. In “Elogio de la incertidumbre,” Fuentes exalts the incertitude, the privilege of being equivocal as the central idea of the knight errant’s universe. Writing at a time in which ambiguity was


considered a shortcoming rather than a merit, Cervantes has introduced the “incertitude principle” of the modern novel: he violates not only generic conventions, he also uses an unreliable narrator and he relishes in causing confusion about the name of the main character, about the setting of the story and even about the fact of authorship itself: “Uncertainty is compounded by the great democratic revolution wrought by Cervantes, which, as the creation of the novel, is a common place – lieu commun, lugar común – that is, the meeting place of the city, the central plaza, the polyforum, the public square where everyone has a right to be heard, but no one has the right to exclusive speech.” (2006: 612) This understanding of the novel also conveys the idea that the open urban framework, characterized by continuous displacements and threshold spaces, is one of the distinctive features of the modern novel.2 The fact that the Quixote was written during the reign of Philip III, a period of decline in which the religious orthodoxy of the CounterReformation and the ideology of the “pureza de sangre” (clean bloodlines) operated (a potent image that has been reinforced by the Black Legend), is all the more striking. In a post-Tridentine world that presupposes a monolithic discourse, Cervantes founds the “genre of genres” and celebrates what Max Weber called a “polytheism of values,” without which we face authoritarianism.3 Don Quixote and his squire leave the pre-modern world of the Middle Ages, where everything had a recognizable and immovable place, and set forth on a journey to a modern world, where everything is in doubt. In The

2

This principle bears a remarkably close similarity to what Milan Kundera has called “la sagesse de l'incertitude” (the wisdom of incertitude) in his essay about “l’esprit du roman” (the nature of the novel) and the lost inheritance of Cervantes (1986: 17). For Kundera, Don Quixote’s adventure heralds the modern age and the loss of Cervantes’ heritage would eventually announce the end of modernity as such (1986: 25).

3

Inspired by the minute linguistic analysis of Leo Spitzer, the German scholar Helmut Hatzfeld in 1927 tried to demonstrate the dogmatic and reactionary world-view of Cervantes, by listing keywords and motifs in Don Quixote that allude to the catholic liturgy. Using this method, it would be possible to reveal that the language of Don Quixote accurately reflects the ideas of the Counter-Reformation and Ignatian spirituality. No wonder, then, that Cervantes is proclaimed “el más espiritual campeón entre todos los escritores de la Contrarreforma” (1966: 137) (the most spiritual champion of all Counter-Reformation writers).


Buried Mirror (1992),4 Fuentes draws an illuminating, albeit common, parallel between Don Quixote and Las Meninas of Diego Velázquez: both works are penetrated by a profound self-awareness and enable us to see the world in multiple ways (1992: 179). This is also what Foucault was referring to in Les mots et les choses when he argued that thought ceases to move in the element of resemblance during the baroque period. The hilarious exploits of the hidalgo demonstrate that similarities have become deceptive, while the multiple focal points and the self-awareness of Velázquez’s painting introduce uncertainties in visual representation. Notwithstanding the attempts of the Spanish Inquisition to resist modernity, Fuentes signals a similar epistemic shift by means of the principle of uncertainty that haunts the peninsular arts at the beginning of the seventeenth century: whereas the political and religious system of the Hapsburg territories sealed off Spain from the rest of Europe and the winds of change, the dynamic art of the baroque accelerated the emergence of modernity. By defining the European baroque as “the art of a changing society swirling behind the rigid mask of orthodoxy” (1992: 195), Fuentes counters Werner Weisbach’s reductionist description of the (Jesuit) baroque as a propaganda tool for the Counter-Reformation ideology (Der Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation, 1921) and José Antonio Maravall’s interpretation of the baroque as a “guided culture” that supports monarchical absolutism (La cultura del Barroco, 1975). It is therefore not surprising that the Mexican author sees the very same principle that underlies the Quixote at work in the baroque of the New World: just as Golden Age Spain managed to lay bare the fissures in the edifice of orthodoxy through Cervantes and Velázquez, so the nascent colonial society of Latin America sought a vehicle to express its self-doubt and found it in the shifting art of the baroque: Nothing expressed this uncertainty better than the art of paradox, the art of abundance based on want and necessity, the art of proliferation based on insecurity, rapidly filling in the vacuums of our personal and social history […] (1992: 196)

4

Since the Spanish edition (El espejo enterrado, 1992) slightly differs from the English adaptation, we only refer to the latter.


Being an art of displacements, “a mirror in which we see our constantly changing identity” (ibid.), the baroque is for Fuentes not a technique that affirms the power of a dominant class, but rather a manner in which the mestizo population – which prefigures our present-day identity – could express its own ambiguities. By asserting that uncertainty is an essential ingredient of the baroque,5 Fuentes seems to imply that the first modern novel is less a product of Renaissance thought than of the baroque aesthetic. These compelling correspondences between the “Cervantine incertitude,” the paradoxes of representation in Las Meninas, and the eternally mutating New World baroque also help us to fully appreciate the relevance of a novel such as Don Quixote in the current globalized, neobaroque constellation. Deliberately embracing the style and concerns of baroque literature in his novelistic production, Fuentes in Casa con dos puertas – whose title manifestly evokes Calderonian reminiscences – acknowledges that “la presencia de la nueva cultura universal es de signo barroco” (1970: 273) (the new universal culture has been created under the sign of the baroque). According to Fuentes, the principle of uncertainty enables literature not only to reflect the diversity and mutability of the universe, but also to enlarge the borders of reality by means of the imagination. At the same time, this incertitude does not have to entail an unbridled ethical relativism whereby “everything goes,” as Fuentes explains in the entry “Quixote” in his personal alphabet En esto creo (2002): La moderna incertidumbre de Don Quijote no excluye, sin embargo, la persistencia de valores que la modernidad debe

5

To view the baroque as an era marked by confusion and a growing defiance of immutable systems is not unusual among scholars of the baroque. In his groundbreaking La littérature de l'âge baroque en France. Circé et le paon (1953), Jean Rousset founds the notion of a literary baroque, defined by two aesthetical principles: inconstancy, metamorphosis and trompe l’oeil (symbolized by the Greek goddess Circe), on the one hand, and ostentation, scenery and ornamentation (the peacock), on the other. See in this respect also “L’art des incertitudes” (interview with Philippe Beaussant in Magazine littéraire (special issue on “L’âge du baroque”), 1992) and, more recently, Benito Pelegrín’s D’un temps d’incertitude (2008).


preservar o prolongar para no dispersarse moralmente. (2002: 229) The modern uncertainty of Don Quixote does not, however, exclude the lasting values that modernity must save, or perpetuate, so as not to dissipate into moral ambiguity. (2004: 207)

Indeed, the Quixote is not only an ambiguous text that puts the reader time and again on the wrong track; it is also and perhaps foremost an ode to values such as love, justice and honor. Yet precisely because of its ambiguity, Cervantes’ novel is also a stronghold against totalitarian demands and black-and-white ways of thinking. As a democratic vehicle, the literature of difference in the tradition of Cervantes is indispensable to an increasingly Manichaean world that is menaced by terrorism, xenophobia and religious fundamentalism. In this sense, Pierre Menard’s attempt to rewrite the Quixote in the twentieth century is unmistakably a healthy experience. But by invoking the inheritance of the Quixote for the present, Fuentes implicitly draws a parallel between the decadent Spain of the Council of Trent and the Holy Office, on the one hand, and our contemporary societies, on the other: As Cervantes responded to the degraded society of his time with the triumph of the critical imagination, we, too, face a degraded society and must reflect upon it as it seeps into our lives, surrounds us, and even casts us upon the perennial situation of responding to the passage of history with the passion of literature. (2006: 615)

As a member of a syncretistic society, Fuentes is particularly sensitive to multi-voiced writings that show respect for cultural diversity. Although his thought is far from being original from a literarytheoretical point of view, his merit is to have underscored the topicality and the universalism of the Quixote and its epigones in the current multicultural moment. Therefore, he cannot accept Huntington’s apocalyptic vision of a clash of civilizations, because the cultures of Latin America, no matter how different they may be, are “not clashing, but talking” (2006: 617). Fuentes advocates instead a


dialogue of civilizations through the (trans)formative, humanizing power of literature. Nevertheless, this multiculturalist rhetoric is less unequivocal than it might appear: as a herald of an idiosyncratic (pan-)Hispanic identity, Fuentes celebrates cultural and racial intermingling, yet at the same time he draws a border around Hispanic identity in order to highlight the difference between Latin and Anglo America (cf. Van Delden 2009). For Fuentes, the Quixote is not only a novel rooted in a specific locale (literatura manchega) that has unanimously been hailed as a masterpiece of the Spanish Golden Age literature, it also pre-eminently reflects the mestizo, “stained” IberoAmerican identity (literatura manchada) and as such it ties together all the peoples of Spain, Portugal and Latin America. On receiving the first international “Don Quijote de la Mancha” Award from the hands of King Juan Carlos of Spain in October 2008, Fuentes praised Cervantes’ novel above all as an expression of a pan-Hispanic cultural space. Still, he stated that the Quixote has not only contributed to the consolidation of Spanish as a world language of knowledge and thinking, but that its influence reaches far beyond the “territory of La Mancha” shared by all Spanish speakers: Cervantes nos dio una voz, es la voz que nos une a todos los hispanoparlantes. Pero Cervantes también nos dio una imaginación. Una imaginación del mundo en la que se reconocen autores y lectores de todos los países y de todas las lenguas. (2008: 06’37’’) Cervantes gave us a voice; it is the voice that unites us as Spanish speakers. But Cervantes also gave us a vision. A vision of the world in which authors and readers of all countries and languages can recognize themselves. (My translation)

Fuentes sees proof of Cervantes’ universality in the work of the Brazilian author Joaquim Machado de Assis, whom he calls “Machado de la Mancha” because he is “el fabulador de un mundo manchado, impuro, sincrético, barroco, que es el nuestro” (2008: 07’12’’) (the inventor of a stained, impure, syncretic, baroque world that is ours). Without Cervantes, he adds, the work of Dostoyevsky, Faulkner or Machado de Assis would be virtually unthinkable. Thus,


by conceiving the modern novel as a dialogue of languages, genres and historical times, Fuentes is able to overcome the old nation-based thinking: Cervantes not only prefigures contemporary Spanish fiction, but first and foremost he inaugurates a new literary cartography in which Sterne, Diderot and Kundera are part of the same family. Moreover, Fuentes’s geography of the novel is constantly changeable, ignores national borders, homogeneous cultures or binary opposites because the center is everywhere. In this shattered constellation of the literary universe, the open-endedness and the overall incertitude of the Quixote and, by extension, of the eccentric tradition of La Mancha prefigure the true encounter with the Other and this is, according to Fuentes, what world literature is really about.

Works Cited Beaussant, Philippe. 1992. “L’art des incertitudes,” in Magazine littéraire 300 (special issue on “L’âge du baroque”): 22-26. Borges, José Luis. 1994 [1952]. “La esfera de Pascal,” in Otras Inquisiciones. Madrid: Alianza. 14-19. Casanova, Pascale. 1999. La République mondiale des lettres. Paris: Seuil. Foucault, Michel. 1966. Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard. Fuentes, Carlos. 1970. Casa con dos puertas. Mexico: Joaquín Mortiz. ––––. 1976. Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura. Mexico: Joaquín Mortiz. ––––. 1989. “New Novel, New World,” The Modern Language Review 84-4: XXXI-XLII. ––––. 1990. Valiente Mundo Nuevo. Épica, utopía y mito en la novela hispanoamericana. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. ––––. 1992. The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World. Boston (Mass.): Houghton Mifflin. ––––. 1993. Geografía de la novela. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. ––––. 2002. “Quijote,” in En esto creo. Barcelona: Seix Barral. 225230.


––––. 2003. “Tilt. The errant knight of La Mancha rides again in a new English translation,” New York Times Book Review (02/11/2003), 15. ––––. 2004. This I Believe. An A-Z of a Writer’s Life. Tr. K. Cordero. London: Bloomsbury. ––––. 2005. “Elogio de la incertidumbre,” El País, Babelia (23/04/2005), 10-11. ––––. 2006. “In praise of the novel,” Critical Inquiry 32: 610–617. ––––. 2008. Speech of the 2008 Premio Internacional Don Quijote de la Mancha Awards Ceremony. 13 October 2008. Online video clip. El boomeran(g). Blog literario en español. Accessed on 15 December 2008. Fuentes, Carlos & Tittler, Jonathan. 1980. “Interview: Carlos Fuentes,” Diacritics. 10-3: 46-56. Hatzfeld, Helmut. 1966 [1921]. El Quijote como obra de arte del lenguaje. Madrid: CSIC-Revista de Filología Española. Joset, Jacques. 1995. Historias cruzadas de novelas hispanoamericanas. Frankfurt am Main/Madrid: Vervuert/Iberoamericana. Kundera, Milan. 1986. L'art du roman. Paris: Gallimard. Leonard, Irving. 1992. Books of the Brave. Being an Account of Books and Men in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the SixteenthCentury New World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Maravall, José Antonio. 1980 [1975]. La cultura del Barroco. Barcelona: Ariel. Pelegrín, Benito. 2008. D’un temps d’incertitude. Europe, XVIIeXVIIIe siècles. Paris: Sulliver. Rousset, Jean. 1953. La littérature de l'âge baroque en France. Circé et le paon. Paris: José Corti. Van Delden, Maarten. 1998. Carlos Fuentes, Mexico and Modernity. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. ––––. 2009. “Carlos Fuentes: Pan-Hispanism in the Age of Multiculturalism,” in Maarten van Delden & Yvon Grenier (Eds), Gunshots at the Fiesta: Literature and Politics in Latin America, forthcoming from Vanderbilt University Press.


Weisbach, Werner. 1921. Der Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation. Berlin: Cassirer. Williams, Raymond Leslie. 1996. “Carlos Fuentes: The Reader and the Critic,” Hispania 79-2: 222-233.

Who is the Reader of Pierre Menard? Borges on Cervantes Revisited NADIA LIE Katholieke Universiteit Leuven The Quixote is a contingent book; the Quixote is unnecessary. (J. L. Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”)

Interpretations of “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” – one of Borges’s most famous short stories – have invariably focused on Pierre Menard as the central character of the text. In this essay, however, it is argued that a crucial role is fulfilled by another instance in the text: the anonymous literary critic. If Borges’s story is concerned with the deconstruction of a romantic view of the author, as is generally believed, then this interpretation should be complemented by an equal attention to the constructive role of this anonymous friend of Menard’s. After showing how attention to this figure obliges us to revise traditional views on the intertextual relationship between Cervantes and Borges, we formulate a reply to González Echevarría’s deconstructive reading of “Pierre Menard” by drawing attention to the story’s affinities with American pragmatism.

Cervantes and Latin America According to Roberto González Echevarría (1999, 2005a), the LatinAmerican reception of the Quixote differs from the Spanish in two respects. First, it does not construct the Quixote as a mirror of Spanish national identity but insists on the accidental, contingent nature of the links between literary works and national identity. Second, it centers on Cervantes as the author of the work, instead of on Don Quixote as

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its main character.1 What interests Latin-American authors in the Quixote, this leading literary critic argues, is the fact that in this work Cervantes explores the possibilities of the concept of the author up to the point of pretending to be an author produced by his own work. Through its critique on the supposedly essentialist character of the Quixote in terms of nationhood, and through its ironic play with the concept of the author, traditionally considered to be the “source” of the literary work, the Latin-American reception participates in a view on the literary classic that, following in the footsteps of Michel Foucault,2 considers the Quixote to be the first expression of Modernity. “In the Quijote the modern mind finds that literature, as a human product, cannot escape the limitations of the human; hence the author can only feign to be outside of his work looking in, controlling his fictional world externally like Maese Pedro his puppet show. This modern agent who thinks and writes and invents and therefore is, has no nationality. In this Cervantes is anticipating Vico and pointing to the universalism of the Enlightenment.” (González Echevarría 2005a: 239-240, my emphasis) Among the cases González Echeverría analyses is “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (1939). As can be deduced from its very title, this short piece by Borges perfectly illustrates the distinctive features that Roberto González Echevarría attributes to the Latin-American

1

González Echevarría opposes Latin America to Spain in general terms (e.g. “Cervantes in Latin America; Don Quijote in Spain” (1999: 5, 2005a: 237), but his analysis basically deals with the writers of the “modern Latin American narrative” (Borges, Carpentier, Fuentes) on the one hand, and the writers of the Generation of ’98 (Maeztu, Unamuno, Azorín) on the other. The original essay by González Echevarría was included, in a slightly adapted version, in the last chapter of Love and the Law in Cervantes (2005a). In the following we quote from the most recent version.

2

“Don Quixote is the first modern work of literature, because in it we see the cruel reason of identities and differences make endless sport of signs and similitudes; because in it language breaks off its old kinship with things and enters into that lonely sovereignty from which it will reappear, in its separated state, only as literature; because it marks the point where resemblance enters an age which is, from the point of view of resemblance, one of madness and imagination.” (Foucault 1970: 48-49) Though subscribing to the Foucaldian view on Cervantes’ modernity, González Echevarría himself considers La Celestina (Fernando de Rojas, 1499) to be the first work of Modernity. (1993: 10)

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reception of Cervantes’ major literary work: the Spanish masterpiece is attributed to a French author, thus undoing the deterministic bonds between a literature and the nationality of its authors, and the whole piece centers on the figure of Cervantes and his supposed double in the twentieth century, Pierre Menard. What is more, in this equation González Echevarría integrates Borges’s name too: “Menard is the Cervantes Cervantes would have been in the twentieth century had he been able to skip the Spanish eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; a Cervantes, that is, who could have been an Argentine educated in Geneva and working in a Buenos Aires library.” (2005a: 240) For González Echevarría, the character of Menard symbolizes not only Cervantes and Borges, but also the figure of the author himself, taken in an ironic way that deconstructs the romantic notion of the author as the source of his work. Indeed, Menard’s ambition as a writer is nothing less than to create the Quixote in a literally identical way, while remaining himself, a person living in a different era and used to express himself in a completely different language. To enhance the play with the notion of the author, the short story obfuscates its fictional character by presenting itself as a ‘real’ essay written on the occasion of the death of Pierre Menard. Though the validity of González Echevarría’s interpretation is widely recognized, I believe that his view on the author in “Pierre Menard”– which is paradigmatic for the dominant reception of the story – should be complemented by an equal attention to the figure of the reader in this story. This commemorative text on the late Menard is indeed the product of a friend and admirer of his, whose identity remains unknown.3 González Echevarría briefly points at the enigmatic character of this anonymous voice, which in his terminology belongs to “the narrator of the story” (2005a: 240) and is supposed to rehearse, by some factual mistakes, the more fundamental unreliability of Menard as an author.4 However, this anonymous voice 3

One should not mistake this critic for the author’s voice! One telling example for the difference between both is the rather pedantic style of this literary critic, which contrasts with the more concise formulations in the essays of Borges himself.

4

According to González Echevarría, the anonymous voice gives a wrong date for the Quixote and misreads the fragment about history, quoted from the Quixote, not taking into account that it has a parodic dimension. Menard’s unreliability, for his part,

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belongs to a literary critic, a professional reader in other words, who takes it upon himself to save Menard’s name from erroneous perceptions. Rather than a vague reflection of Menard as an author, then, I believe the anonymous literary critic plays a crucial role in the short story, and more precisely in the construction of Menard as an author. Indeed, the success of Menard’s mad ambition is derived from the differences observed by the literary critic between passages of the original text that, despite being verbally identical, turn out to be quite different in meaning. A case in point is the quotation “truth, whose mother is history” (Borges 2000: 69), from chapter 9 of the Quixote (1949: 73). This sentence is interpreted as an ode to history in the case of Cervantes, whereas in the context of Menard’s writing the same quotation is construed as a redefinition of the notion of ‘historical truth’. It is this friend who produces and construes the difference in meaning to buttress the claim that Menard has succeeded in creating an autonomous Quixote. In this view, the story’s title, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, is not the point of departure of the text: it is its outcome, the thesis that needs to be proven, the story’s QED. Stressing the importance of the anonymous critic in “Pierre Menard” has several bearings on the interpretation of the story and can be related to a more recent attention to the intimate relationship between Borges and other mediating activities, such as translation.5 In the following pages, I will examine its impact on a more traditional, though still authoritative focus on the text: its intertextual relationship with the work by Cervantes. More precisely, I will single out some aspects of the way in which attention to the role of the reader alters Gérard Genette’s presentation of Borges’s short story in Palimpsests, his well-known study of the relationships between texts.

consists in his tendency to express the opposite of what he really thinks, at least this is what his friend gives as a characteristic of his (González Echevarría 2005a: 240). 5

Various books have appeared on Borges and translation in recent years, one of them even taking its clue from “Pierre Menard” for its title: Invisible Work. Borges and Translation (Kristal 2002). Sagastume & Martínez (2005: 815), however, believe their article to be the first more elaborate commentary on this specific aspect for the “Pierre Menard” story.


From ‘rewriting’ to ‘rereading’ Gérard Genette’s Palimpsests touches upon Borges’s story on several occasions, but its most important remark seems to be that “the mere displacement of context turns even the most literal rewriting into a creation.” (1997: 17) Not interested in the specific character of the Latin American reception of the Quixote, Genette nevertheless indirectly agrees with González Echevarría on the importance of authorship in this short story: his term ‘rewriting’ (récriture) indeed focuses the attention on the act of writing, not on that of reading. However, the priority given to the figure of the author, as the ‘origin’ of the text, finds an equivalent in Palimpsests in the priority given to the ‘original’ Spanish masterpiece in the process of rewriting. Indeed, according to Genette’s model, Menard’s version of the Quixote is a hypertext, because it establishes a relationship with an ‘anterior’ (antérieur) work by Cervantes, which for this reason appears as the hypotext. Emphasis is on the concept of ‘repetition’ (‘re-writing’ or re-écriture), which corresponds to the (chrono)logical presentation of the facts. This does not take into account the stance of Menard’s anonymous friend, who enriches and attributes meaning to the intertextual divide (Cervantes/Menard) by means of a third text, namely his commentary or a ‘metatext’ (Genette 1997: 4). One aspect of this metatext is the fact that it presents Cervantes’ text as ‘secondary’ to Menard’s on an axiological level: the French writer’s text is considered both incomparably more complex and more subtle than Cervantes’. It is supposedly more complex, because it did not originate spontaneously and “somewhat à la diable” (Borges 2000: 67) but was created intentionally; it is more subtle and ambiguous because it draws on the knowledge of three centuries of history and literature. The anonymous friend even pushes this axiological inversion one step further by suggesting that it is possible to read the whole of Cervantes’ Quixote as though it were written by Menard, who in fact only recreated specific fragments of it.6 The question of 6

“Shall I confess that I often imagine he did finish it and that I read the Quixote – all of it – as if Menard had conceived it? Some nights passed, while leafing through chapter XXVI – never essayed by him – I recognized our friend’s style and something

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intertextuality, which in Genette still relies on binary distinctions that are reminiscent of older notions such as ‘original’ and ‘copy’, ‘model’ and ‘imitation’, ‘originator’ and ‘disciple’, becomes blurred through this surprising viewpoint: from the perspective of the befriended reader, the more recent work ends up looking as the ‘original’, the ‘influence’ being construed ex post facto. The inverted perspective is a direct consequence of the shift from author to reader: it is from the perspective of the anonymous critic that the more recent version of the Quixote imposes itself on the older one. The reversal of perspectives is in line with ideas uttered by Borges in his essays. In “Kafka and His Precursors”, for instance, he made the assertion that “every writer creates his own precursors” (Borges 2000: 236),7 and elsewhere he stated that famous works are never really read for the first time, since we already know them from their fame (in Souillot 2006: 463).8 Besides inverting the categories of hyper- and hypotextuality, Borges’s short story blurs the distinction between these two categories and métatextualité, defined by Genette as the relationship between a literary text and the commentary upon it.9 If the collective memory of a text, the sum of comments circulating in society, functions as a kind of first reading, then métatextualité becomes confused with hypotextualité. One could even go further and state that every hypertext is also a metatext in that there can be no rewriting without a previous reading and interpretation.10 of his voice in this exceptional phrase: ‘the river nymphs and the dolorous and humid Echo.’” (Borges 2000: 66-67) 7

In this context, Borges coined the example of Robert Browning who, only in retrospective, seems to announce Kafka and ‘become’ a precursor: cf. “our reading of Kafka perceptively sharpens and deflects our reading of Browning, namely as a precursor of Kafka.” (Borges 2000: 236)

8

Besides, classics are very often read in translation: Borges, being raised bilingually, read the Quixote in English and later on experienced the original Spanish version as “a bad translation” (Borges 1971: 209).

9

The tension between Genette’s model and this particular story of Borges has been mentioned before (Toro 2000: 58).

10

That Borges deemed a rereading of the Quixote long overdue is suggested in a short passage in his story: Menard claims that what used to be “above all, an entertaining book” has degenerated into “the occasion for patriotic toasts, grammatical insolence and obscene de luxe editions.” He concludes with the remark that “[f]ame is a form of


Foregrounding the role of the anonymous literary critic, however, invites us to move beyond this terminological discussion and make a more productive use of Genette’s ideas. Indeed, since ‘inter’-textuality also evokes the idea of reciprocity between texts, a new set of questions appears: to what extent is Pierre Menard’s text not a récriture of the Quixote but its relecture (‘re-reading’)? What exactly is Cervantes’ work seen from the viewpoint of Borges’s Menard? If “Pierre Menard” first and foremost is a story on reading as a creative, interpretive activity, then the Quixote appears as a book that is particularly about this kind of ‘reading’. It goes without saying that its main character has an intimate relationship with reading, but it is striking that his madness consists of interpreting, ‘reading’ the world in such a way that no differences exist between things that objectively are different: windmills and giants, taverns and castles, farm maids and princesses.11 Seen from the perspective of the novel of chivalry, the difference between the world and the text disappears, just as fast as it appears in Borges’s story when we peer through the eyes of the anonymous critic. In other words: the protagonist of the Quixote displays a kind of reading that is an inversion of that in “Pierre Menard”, where reading consists of seeing a difference between things that are identical. The most eloquent example of this attitude in “Pierre Menard” is, of course, the passage in which the transition between two completely identical fragments of the Quixote is assured by the following sentence: “Menard, on the other [hand], writes […].” (Borges 2000: my emphasis).12

incomprehension, perhaps the worst.” (70) The intention of his story thus in part could very well be to eliminate this incomprehension, to move back from the fame to the work itself. 11 Cf. “He [Don Quixote] takes things for what they are not, and people one for another […] he is Different only in so far as he is unaware of Difference; he sees nothing but resemblances and signs of resemblance everywhere; for him all signs resemble one another, and all resemblances have the value of signs.” (Foucault 1970: 49) 12

In “Don Quixote: Crossed Eyes and Vision” (2005b), González Echevarría states that “Don Quixote’s madness is inscribed in his good eyesight. He can see straight and clearly because he rarely has doubts about the nature of the things he sees” (236). The main part of his analysis centres on the character of Ginés de Pasamonte, rather than on Don Quixote.

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At the same time, both kinds of reading – both that producing sameness and that producing difference – can be considered mere variants of a single form that takes the power of reading as it thematic center. In the Quixote the power of reading is so strong that it inverts the traditional relationship between author and reader: in the same way in which the anonymous reader/literary critic in Borges’s story ultimately ‘proves’ Menard’s authorship of the Quixote, the character Don Quixote reads the books of the man who invented him. I am of course referring to the famous scene in chapter 6, in which the barber and the priest critically survey Don Quixote’s library and discover Cervantes’ Galatea. In his essay “Partial Magic in the Quixote” Borges refers to this chapter and to Part II of the Quixote, in which this kind of metalepses occurs even more frequently. And in a typically Borgesian fashion he concludes that these works borrow their disquieting effect from their suggestions that “if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers and spectators, can be fictitious and be subject to someone else’s reading as well.” (Borges 2000: 231) Another point of convergence is that both works tell the story of an ambition that was brought forth by an act of reading, leading to an “imitative recreation”: just as Menard wants to recreate (or rather ‘write’) a Spanish masterpiece, Don Quixote aims to revive (or rather ‘be’) the knight errant who by that time had disappeared from real life. One of the chapters in which the technique of “imitative recreation” is discussed in great detail is chapter 25 of Part I. There, the lovelorn Don Quixote conceives the mad plan to imitate Amadis de Gaul, whom he first characterizes as “one of the most perfect of knightserrant” – to which he immediately adds that he was “not correct in saying that he was ‘one of the’; he was the sole and only one, the very first, the lord of all those in the world in his time” and therefore Don Quixote asserts that “the knight-errant who most closely models himself upon Amadis will come the nearest to attaining the perfection of chivalry.” (1949: 198) However, when Don Quixote wants to retire to a secluded place in order to go mad, as happened to his much admired hero Amadis de Gaul, his project is presented as more difficult than Amadis’: Don Quixote wants to go mad ‘deliberately’. In this context, his squire Sancho Panza observes:


It strikes me […] that those knights who did all that had provocation and some cause for such foolish penances, but what reason has your Grace for going mad, what damsel has rejected you, or what signs have you found that lead you to think the lady Dulcinea of Toboso had been up to some foolishness with a Moor or Christian?

To which Don Quixote replies: That […] is the point of the thing; that is the beautiful part of it. What thanks does a knight-errant deserve for going mad when he has good cause? The thing is to go out of my head without any occasion for it […] (1949: 199)

In this passage we find exactly the same line of reasoning that pushed the anonymous critic to consider Menard’s work as more important than Cervantes’: the opposition between spontaneous creation and artificial memory, crucial for Menard’s plan. With Borges’s essay on Kafka in mind (cf. supra), we might say that – in retrospect – Don Quixote appears as a direct forerunner of Menard’s. Finally, a focus on the figure of the reader in “Pierre Menard” shifts our attention in the Quixote from the figure of the author Cervantes to that of the anonymous friend in the prologue to Part I, where we encounter Cervantes in the middle of a writer’s block and even resigning himself to not publishing his book at all. The cause of the writer’s block supposedly is Cervantes’ incompetence to provide erudite sources for his work, but this problem is quickly resolved when his friend advises him to simply invent them, or select them at random from the vast, collective memory of the classics. Cervantes delegates then one of his later trademarks in the literary world – the play with facts and fiction – to this anonymous friend, who moreover takes over the traditional decision of the author to publish the work. In this respect, the anonymous friend resembles the anonymous friend of Pierre Menard since both characters ‘author’ the author.

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From ‘inverted’ to ‘rhizomatic’ intertextuality There would be many more ways to encounter the themes of “Pierre Menard” in the Quixote and –via this kind of intertextualité à rebours (‘inverted intertextuality’, coined after Antoine Compagnon’s “influence à rebours” [n.d.]) – view the original work, as it were, as being derived from the more recent. However, this kind of intertextual analysis remains a game between two poles that are viewed alternately in hindsight and foresight. The concept of ‘rhizomatic’ intertextuality, on the contrary, inserts these poles in a network of multiple texts between which relationships are constantly shifting. Taking their clue from the botanic world, Deleuze and Guattari coined the term ‘rhizome’ in A Thousand Plateaus (2004 [1980]: 3-28) in order to describe phenomena that have neither a center nor a clear-cut identity but that are profoundly marked by multiplicity. Contrary to trees, indeed, rhizomes have no roots – they are always ‘in the middle’ as is suggested also by their association with the word ‘plateau’.13 For the study of the relationship between texts, rhizomaticity implies that the identity of the terminus ab quo and the terminus ad quem of the intertextual relationship dissolves, since “a rhizome has no beginning or end” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 27).14 In the case under discussion, this phenomenon can be illustrated by the commentary in the already mentioned prologue to Part I of the Quixote: as is observed by his friend, Cervantes’ book is supposed to lay bare the shortcomings of the very popular novel of chivalry in its time. Whether or not the Quixote can be reduced to this parodic effect is a question that is of no importance here; what this description of Cervantes’ objective implies is that the origin of this ‘modern’ work is not absolute but related to previous texts: the text reread by Menard explicitly presents itself as a polemical dialogue with other texts. As a rereading of the novel of chivalry, moreover, the Quixote appears to 13

“A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus.” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 24) 14

“A rhizome is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb ‘to be’, but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and… and… and…’.” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 27).


employ a technique that was supposedly invented by Menard: “Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution.” (Borges 2000: 71; my emphasis) It is precisely the difference in time or epoch, indeed, which bestows everything with new meaning in the quixotic novel of chivalry Cervantes aims to write. The claim of novelty of Menards technique of deliberate anachronism is thus undermined by the Quixote itself: the idea of an ‘original’ concept is blurred, which is in line with the absence of a ‘center’ or ‘beginning’ in a rhizomatic structure. The rhizomatic character of the Borges-Cervantes-connection also surfaces in one of the passages selected by Menard for his project: chapter 9 of Part I of the Quixote. This chapter contains the famous passage in which the narrator finds an older (but identical!) version of his story on the market of Toledo in an Arabic manuscript by Cide Hamete Benengeli, an “Arab historian” (73) who is said to have lived in La Mancha.15 The narrator of the Quixote founds the rest of his story on an intermediate version, namely a translation into Spanish. In this sense, the whole text of the Quixote takes the shape of a palimpsest: beneath the existing Spanish layer we encounter an older tale in Arabic. Or maybe even – as the anonymous critic suggested – Pierre Menard’s text: I have reflected that it is permissible to see in this ‘final’ Quixote a kind of palimpsest, through which the traces – tenuous but not indecipherable – of our friend’s [Pierre Menard’s] ‘previous’ writing should be translucently visible. (Borges 2000: 70)

The ‘finished’ Quixote thus appears as the logical continuation of the ‘unfinished’ work of Pierre Menard. 15

Borges does not pursue this matter further in “Pierre Menard”, but in his essay “Partial Magic in the Quixote”, he draws attention to the same chapter: “It is also surprising to learn, at the beginning of the ninth chapter, that the entire novel has been transplanted from the Arabic and that Cervantes acquired the manuscript in the market-place of Toledo and had it translated by a morisco whom he lodged in his house for more than a month and a half while the job was being finished.” (Borges 2000: 229)

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Rhizomatic thinking, finally, affects the beginning and the end of “Pierre Menard”: several other texts are evoked in these parts that form, not by accident I believe, its structural terminus ab quo and terminus ad quem. The first part of “Pierre Menard”, indeed, consists of a careful listing of his previous texts, his so-called “visible work”. (Borges 2000: 62) If this list is intended to sketch Menard’s development and if it contains the idea of an embryonic origin of the later work of genius, “the subterranean, the interminably heroic, the peerless” (Borges 2000: 65), then it is highly ironic that the anonymous critic refuses to go into the theory that Menard made a similar attempt of rewriting a Spanish masterpiece in the case of Quevedo.16 This suggestion, made by his supposed antagonist Madame Bachelier, is relegated to a footnote and rejected on the basis that “[t]here are no traces of such a work in Menard’s library.” (Borges 2000: 65) But here again, of course, differences could have been construed by the act of reading, such as that applied later on by the anonymous critic, who talks without hesitation about a ‘heroic’ work, that is as invisible as the first one. In the same way, the ending of the text activates the idea of rhizomatic intertextuality by expanding the discussion on the relationship between Menard and Cervantes to other authors, such as James Joyce and Thomas à Kempis, and suggesting the possibility to read their texts as though they were written by other authors. This technique of ‘the erroneous attribution,’ which our anonymous friend considers to be the other aspect of the Menardian revolution in the art of reading, explicitly revises – anticipating Michel Foucault17 – the notion of the author from an external origin of the text to an interpretative category in the hands of readers and literary critics. Moreover, it should be pointed out that in the paragraphs quoted above the word “palimpsest” is used explicitly. In this context,

16

Which by itself was already a literal translation: “Madame Henri Bachelier also lists a literal translation of Quevedo’s literal translation of the Introduction à la vie dévote of St. Francis of Sales.” (Borges 2000: 65) 17 “The third characteristic of this author function is that it does not develop spontaneously as the attribution of a discourse to an individual. It is, rather, the result of a complex operation that constructs a certain being of reason that we call ‘author.’” (Foucault 1994b: 213)


however, Genette’s concept functions in a very different way: as Alfonso de Toro remarks, here the word “palimpsest does not refer to the dialogue with a previous text, the hypotext, but, in the postmodernity prefigured by Borges, to the loss of origin of which only a slight trace remains.” (Toro 2000: 55)18 To read the word ‘palimpsest’ from the point of view of the anonymous critic, then, yields a quite different result than reading it from the point of view of the structuralist literary critic Gérard Genette. More importantly, it points at the fact that our discussion of the relationship between Borges and Cervantes is also informed by previous interpretations and methodological concepts that mediate between the text and our interpretation, and ‘make us see’ differences and resemblances. If reading is the main subject of “Pierre Menard,” if the central figure is not the one named, but the anonymous voice, not the writer under discussion but the literary critic discussing him, then this short story also contains a reflection upon the way it is read. By critics such as González Echevarría, for instance. Reading González Echevarría19 When returning to the starting point of our essay, the first remark to be made is that González Echevarría, contrary to critics such as de Toro (2000) or Souillot (2006), is not interested in the relationship between Borges and Cervantes as such, but rather in the way Cervantes was read. In this sense, and in spite of his own insistence on the figure of the author, González Echevarría is directly in line with the foregrounding of the power of reading in “Pierre Menard”. What’s more, González Echevarría, as a literary critic, is interested in discovering ‘differences’, in the same way that the anonymous reader was in “Pierre Menard”, only now the terms of the comparison are not two individuals, but two reading communities: Spain and Latin America. 18 “Pero, ‘palimpsesto’ no significa un diálogo con el texto previo, con el hipotexto, sino en la postmodernidad prefigurada por Borges, la pérdida del origen del que queda sólo una leve huella.” 19 For a previous analysis of González Echevarría’s discourse on Spanish-American literature and Modernity, centred around La Celestina, see Lie 2003.

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Towards the end of the essay, the idea of a specifically Latin American reception of the Quixote even expands into a specifically ‘American’ reception (González Echevarría 2005a: 237): the Cervantine fascination with authorship, indeed, is supposed to bespeak a more general anxiety with origins that – according to a wide-spread view in American comparative literature (see e.g. also Parkinson Zamora 1997) – is the trademark of writers of the New World. What (Latin) American writers would feel attracted by in the Quixote is the expression of their own problematic identity. In this way, González Echevarría translates their denial of Spanishness of the play, and of (national) identity as such, into the very token of their own (non-)identity. However, identitarian discourses based upon this kind of reading of the Quixote also encounter serious limitations of expression. At the end of his analysis, González Echevarría therefore raises a set of disquieting questions: “Is the search for a non-essential kind of essentialism the basic American story that Cervantes enables Latin American writers to author? Can something this negative and abstract be a founding story? How long does an origin, even a negative one, endure?” (1999: 12; see also 2005: 236) According to González Echevarría, the fact that “Pierre Menard” is, after all, a story on a dead author, marked by elegy, suggests a negative and sceptical view on these matters. My insistence on the role of the reader in “Pierre Menard” (instead of on the death of the author), however, also entails the possibility of pointing at a more optimistic side in Borges’s short story. In this context, it is striking that González Echevarría does not pay attention to the fact that Menard is presented as a contemporary of William James and that the commentary on Menard’s Quixote turns Cervantes’ masterpiece by the anonymous reader into a pragmatist book avantla-lettre. Borges, Cervantes and Pragmatism If it is true that “Jorge Luis Borges’s affinities with pragmatism, while certainly no secret to his critics, have rarely been studied before with the intensity and seriousness they otherwise undoubtedly deserve”


(Bosteels 2007: 135), the same goes for the ties between “Pierre Menard” and this particular philosophical current. This is not the place, at the end of my essay, to engage in an in-depth-discussion of this issue, but some brief remarks should still be made. The fact is that pragmatism is discussed in Borges’s text itself not only by its explicit mention of William James, but also by the interpretation of particular sentences in the Quixote as “brazenly pragmatic.” (Borges 2000: 69) Surprisingly, it has never been pointed out that the very method used by the literary critic to state the French authorship of the Quixote can be interpreted as a direct allusion to this philosophical current, especially when taking into account that Borges was familiar with the work of William James from his early childhood, and even wrote a foreword to the Spanish translation of Pragmatism. (Borges 1945) The method used by the anonymous friend to demonstrate the existence of Pierre Menard, indeed, fully depends on the notion of difference, which is also crucial to William James’ definition of pragmatism as a method: “The pragmatic method […] is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.” (1995: 18) First defined as a method, pragmatism is also defined by William James as a “genetic theory of truth” (1995: 18): instead of seeing truth as absolute, James insisted upon its ‘plastic’ and discursive nature: “truth is what we say about them [the new contents]” (1995: 25; emphasis in original); hence, truth and theories are there to be used as instruments. For this reason, it should come as no surprise that the anonymous friend of Menard’s specifically foregrounds the following sentence in his reading of Menard’s Quixote: “history, mother of truth”, and explains that “historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened.” (Borges 2000: 69) Whereas González Echevarría does not see any ground for this specific quotation (1999: 8), we believe this definition completes the first part of James’ definition of pragmatism – the one that refers to it

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as a method – by recalling the second part of it: pragmatism’s stance on truth.20 At the same time, it would go too far to state that Borges’s story is an outright defence of pragmatism.21 “Pierre Menard” indeed also points at the relativity of the pragmatist criterion of difference, because its dynamic and humoristic effect is based upon the fact that the implied reader does NOT see a difference between the passages by Cervantes and Menard respectively.22 Or is this pragmatism at its top, the system turned into fiction, itself being used in the way it wants theories and concepts to function: as instruments? And did not James himself briefly point at the ‘plastic’ character of his methodological principle?23 The only conclusion to be drawn at the moment is that the main contribution of the anonymous reader is perhaps not his demonstration of the ‘existence’ of Menard. It is the fact that he shows the power of reading, and leaves us wondering whether the Quixote, apart from having been presented by Foucault as the first work of Modernity, and more precisely as the “negative of the Renaissance world” (1970: 47), might be reread as the first text on pragmatism as well. Maybe, a pragmatist rereading of this Spanish masterpiece would yield a more positive reply to the ultimately negative framing of its modernity in González Echevarría. In this context, it is interesting to quote Borges’s own words of admiration for William James: “For an aesthetic appreciation the universes of other philosophies might be superior […] ethically, William James is superior. He is the only one, perhaps, 20

“Such then would be the scope of pragmatism: first a method; and second, a genetic theory of what is meant by truth.” (James 1995: 18) 21 See also the short controversy on the subject between Jaime Nubiola (2000) and Matthew Stephens (2000). Borges himself took a very positive stance on the writings of William James in his introductory note to William James’ book on pragmatism (Borges 1945), as is recalled by Bosteels (2003: 443), but he refused to include it in his compilation of prefaces, as is pointed out by Nubiola (2000: 7). 22

It is also possible to relate these opposed perceptions of ‘differences’ to the motif of the cross-eyed vision, singled out by González Echevarría (2005b: 217-239). 23 “We say this theory solves it [the problem] on the whole more satisfactorily than that theory; but that means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize their points of satisfaction differently. To a certain degree, therefore, everything here is plastic.” (James 1995: 24; my emphasis).


for whom human beings have something to do.” (quoted in Bosteels 2007: 136-137; my emphasis) And what they have to do, perhaps, is precisely this: to find a creative solution to the problem of “nonessential identity” as formulated by González Echevarría. Origins and absolutes, then, not to be taken for granted, but not to be abjured either. Origins and absolutes to be imagined and constructed.24

Works Cited Bosteels, Bruno. 2003. “El fin de la eternidad: en torno al pragmatismo de Jorge Luis Borges,” in Nicole Delbecque, Nadia Lie & Brigitte Adriaensen (eds.), Federico García Lorca et Caetera. Estudios sobre las literaturas hispánicas en honor de Christian De Paepe. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 435-444. ––––. 2007. “Truth is in the Making: Borges and Pragmatism,” in The Romanic Review 98(2-3): 135-151. Borges, Jorge Luis. 2000. Labyrinths. Selected Stories and Other Writings. Edited by Donald E. Yates and James E. Irby. With an introduction by James E. Irby and a preface by André Maurois. ––––. 2000 [1951]. “Kafka and His Precursors,” in Labyrinths, 234236. ––––. 2000 [1952]. “Partial Magic in the Quixote,” in Labyrinths, 228231. ––––. 2000 [1939]. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in Labyrinths, 62-71. ––––. 1971 [1970]. “An Autobiographical Essay,” in Id., The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933-1969. Together with Commentaries and an Autobiographical Essay. Tr. Norman Thomas Di Giovanni. London: Jonathan Cape, 203-260. ––––. 1945. “Nota preliminar.” In: William James, Pragmatismo: un nombre nuevo para algunos viejos modos de pensar. Tr. Vicente P. Quintero. 9-14. 24

An earlier version of this text was translated from the Dutch by Iannis Goerlandt, who also revised the final version. My sincere thanks to him, and also to Peter Venmans for his insightful comments.

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Cervantes, Miguel de. 1949. The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de La Mancha. Tr. Samuel Putnam. New York: The Modern Library. Compagnon, Antoine, n.d., Intertextualité. Cours d’Antoine Compagnon. Accessed on 19 December 2008. . Deleuze, Gilles and Félix, Guattari. 2004 [1980]. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizofrenia. Tr. And Foreword by Brian Massumi. London-New York: Continuum. Foucault, Michel. 1970 [1966]. The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books [Translator Unknown]. ––––. 1994 [1969]. “What is an Author?” in Id., Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Edited by James Faubion. Tr. Robert Hurley and Others. London: Penguin Books, 205-222. Genette, Gérard, 1997 [1982]. Palimpsests. Literature in the Second Degree. Tr. by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. University of Nebraska Press. González Echevarría, Roberto. 1993. Celestina’s Brood. Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Spanish-American literatures. Durham: Duke University Press. ––––. 1999. “Cervantes and the Modern Latin American Narrative,” in Ciberletras. Revista de crítica literaria y de cultura 1 “Borges y otros ensayos,” August 1999. Accessed on 19 December 2008. . ––––. 2005a. “The Novel After Cervantes: Borges and Carpentier” in Id., Love and the Law in Cervantes. New Haven - London: Yale University Press, 231-249. ––––. 2005b. “Don Quixote: Crossed Eyes and Vision” in Id., Cervantes’ Don Quixote: a Case-Book. New York: Oxford University Press, 217-239. Kristal, Efraín. 2002. Invisible Work. Borges and Translation. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Lie, Nadia. 2003. “Memoria, brujería y modernidad. Un análisis intertextual de Aura de Carlos Fuentes,” in América. Cahiers du Criccal, 31, 241-248.


James, William. 1995 [1907]. “What Pragmatism Means,” in Id., Pragmatism. New York: Dover Publications, 17-32. Nubiola, Jaime. 2000. “Jorge Luis Borges and William James,” in Streams of William James. Newsletter of the William James Society 2 (3): 7. Parkinson Zamora, Lois. 1997. The Usable Past. The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction in the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sagastume, Jorge & Martínez-Sanz, Miguel. 2005. “Desmantelamiento y reconstrucción textual: Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote y la traducción,” in Bulletin of Spanish Studies 82(6): 815-829. Souillot, Florent. 2006. “Borges et Don Quichotte,” in Revue de littérature comparée 320(4): 159-173. Stephens, Matthew. 2000. “Borges and William James Revisited,” in Streams of William James. Newsletter of the William James Society 2 (3): 1-2. Toro, Alfonso de. 2000. “Cervantes, Borges y Foucault: la realidad como viaje a través de los signos,” in El siglo de Borges. Literatura – Ciencia – Filosofía. Edited by Alfonso de Toro and Suzanna Regazzoni, Vol. 2, 45-65. Also online: .

Cervantine Instances of Unreliability in Ricardo Piglia’s “Assumed Name”1 MARÍA STOOPEN Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

In the present essay I will try to follow the footsteps of Don Quixote in “Assumed Name” by Ricardo Piglia. In order to do so, I will not focus on the thematic parallels, but on narrative and literary devices, such as the palimpsest, the parody, the false historicity, the multiplicity of roles played by the authors and narrators, the search and the discovery of supposedly existing manuscripts, the participation in the fictional universe of historical characters (including the author himself), the unreliability of the authornarrator that provokes a suspicious reading, the explicitness of the textual poetics. Through these devices, I aim to show how both texts raise doubts about the authorship and question the integrity and centrality of the subject: the humanist in the Quixote by means of a baroque aesthetics and the subject of the capitalist ideology in the novella of Piglia, in which the authorial property and the writing itself are called into question.

Without doubt, its comical qualities have always been among the main causes of success of the Quixote. Cervantes’ work has made readers of almost every generation laugh. Through the ages, however, the text has lent itself to a plethora of often incompatible readings. For instance, contrary to the readership of the seventeenth century, whose first reaction was laughter, Vladimir Nabokov found there to be a strong component of cruelty to the book. The work allows both possibilities and, in addition, adumbrates themes and narrative procedures unknown until its date of publication. 1

The present article has been published in 2008 as “Infidencias cervantinas en ‘Nombre falso’ de Ricardo Piglia,” in José Ángel Ascunce y Alberto Rodríguez (Eds). Cervantes y la modernidad. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger. 201-222.

110 | MARÍA STOOPEN

As a novel of chivalry with a clear ironic bias, the Quixote laid the foundations of the modern novel and, by extension, of the so-called postmodern novel. It is usually considered to be the first polyphonic story drawing upon a wide variety of social and literary registers. Moreover, it introduces humor and irony as critical weapons, and by means of a diversity of world-views it calls into question the existence of any single truth. It mixes multiple narrative levels, creates a profound sense of verisimilitude, and at the same time questions the nature of reality. Finally, it stages an inseparable pair of protagonists who constantly interchange conceptions of life and who through such interaction keep on altering each other mutually. The Quixote is also a book that recognizes the transformational power of the process of reading, an alternative to the harassment of the immediacy, the possibility to desire and to become the other. Think of Madame Bovary, unmistakably a disciple of the hidalgo of La Mancha. The reading of El ingenioso hidalgo also gives rise to an endless series of mirror-like reflections: fictitious characters or narrators and non-fictitious readers behold each other in the very act of reading. Jorge Luis Borges suggests that the fact that the priest Maese Pedro reads La Galatea and the bachelor Sansón Carrasco knows Part I of the Quixote – two works of Cervantes that actually circulate outside Don Quixote’s universe – disrupts and permeates the levels of reality and fiction. Indeed, do not many stories of Borges himself, and of his fellow-countryman Julio Cortázar – “The Continuity of the Parks” is a notable example – follow the example of the Quixote here? Similarly, El ingenioso hidalgo, by presenting itself as a “true story,” is nothing but an irrefutable confirmation of its fictitious nature. It stages a series of textual sources that are supposed to guarantee the story’s historicity, but which are at the same time undercut when one of the narrators accuses Cide Hamete of being a deceitful historian for being Moorish. The reader, however, goes on reading because the story has managed to catch his attention by bringing the poetical truth to the fore. This literary lesson has been assimilated by many great writers. The story of Orlando, of Virginia Woolf, for instance, is narrated by an alleged biographer who, when the male protagonist changes sex and appears as a woman, multiplies the historical sources that document this transformation. It is this

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consciousness of a text’s fictionality that usually goes by the name of “metafiction” today. On the other hand, the passages where the author himself has his suspicions about his authorship – “yo, que, aunque parezco padre, soy padrastro de don Quijote” (“I, however, who am but Don Quixote’s stepfather,” 1949: 11) – and where, as a consequence, he invents fictitious authors who occupy his position – the most important of them is of course Cide Hamete Benengeli –, raise serious doubts about the textual authorship. The author no longer occupies a comfortable and privileged space; he distrusts his role, assumes a fragmented stance, and adopts multiple points of view. Several contemporary Latin-American works assume a similar stance: Morirás lejos (1967) of José Emilio Pacheco and “Nombre falso” (1975) of Ricardo Piglia are only two examples among many others. As a work that is open to a rich variety of readings, the Quixote is an inexhaustible literary lode the veins of which continue to be exploited by readers and writers of all languages, creating thus a never-ending palimpsest.2 In this paper, I aim to trace Don Quixote in the tale of Piglia mentioned earlier. I will not focus on themes, but rather on narrative and literary procedures. Anyone who has read “Assumed Name” – labeled this way by Piglia in the “Author’s Note” to a volume of six stories, of which the present story is the final one, also giving its name to the volume as a whole3 – has noticed the conscious practice of the palimpsest, for the story is a combination of various other texts of different origin and it bears all the signs – both implicitly and explicitly – of various writings. Many stories by Piglia, and this one in particular, transtextually relate to the work of other Argentine authors such as Jorge Luis Borges (see Díaz Quiñones 1998, Corbatta 2001, Berg 1998) and, even more obviously, 2

I am using the term, referring to a manuscript written over a partly erased older manuscript, that gave Gérard Genette’s study about transtextuality and parody (1989) its title.

3

Siglo XXI in 1975 published the first edition of Nombre falso in Buenos Aires. The “Author’s Note” was inserted in later editions, published by Seix Barral (Buenos Aires, 1994) and Anagrama (Barcelona, 2002). All quotes in Spanish refer to the latter edition.


Robert Arlt (see Di Meglio 2005, Schuchard 2003, Luna 1998, Fornet 1994, Rodríguez Garrido 1999).4 Nevertheless, as far as I know, this particular novella has not been related to the work of Miguel de Cervantes.5 This is what I intend to do here. I will pay attention primarily to the “Author’s Note” and the report that introduces “Assumed Name,” which occupies a little more than six pages, footnotes and all, and I will only refer to the rest of the story when necessary. In the paratext, the novella is qualified as “lo mejor que he escrito” (2002: 11) (“the best thing I have written,” 1995: 14). The story begins with the voice of a narrator who declares to be the author of the text in question. This narrator and manifest author, apart from defining the false nature of his writing, announces the alleged performance and functions he will carry out: Esto que escribo es un informe o mejor un resumen: está en juego la propiedad de un texto de Roberto Arlt; de modo que voy a tratar de ser ordenado y objetivo. Yo soy quien descubrió el único relato de Arlt que ha permanecido inédito después de su muerte. (2002: 97) What I am writing here is a report, or better yet an abstract: at issue is the ownership of a text by Robert Arlt, so I will try to be orderly and objective. I am the one who discovered the only story of Arlt’s that has remained unpublished after his death. (1995: 91)

4

Cf. Rodríguez Garrido (1999: 59): “La obra de Arlt y su posición en la cultura literaria de la Argentina han sido tema de la reflexión crítica de Ricardo Piglia en varias oportunidades, especialmente en “Sobre Roberto Arlt” (en Crítica y ficción, Buenos Aires: Siglo Veinte, 19 [sic], “Roberto Arlt: la ficción del dinero” (en La Argentina en pedazos, Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Urraca, 1993) y en la “Introducción” a su edición de El juguete rabioso de Roberto Arlt (Buenos Aires: Espasa Calpe, 1993).” (The work of Arlt and its position in the literary culture of Argentina have on many occasions been an object of study in the work of Ricardo Piglia, especially in “Sobre Roberto Arlt,” “Roberto Arlt: la ficción del dinero” and in the introduction to his edition of Arlt’s El juguete rabioso). 5 In his book El último lector (2005), Piglia refers to the reading activity carried out by Don Quixote.


In this way, the narrator from the outset caters to the curiosity of the reader, and of the devotees of Arlt’s work in particular, while simultaneously testing his literary cunning and skills, and asking from the reader an alert and active participation. Although text and narrator initially adhere to the declared features of a report by a literary scholar and critic, after a while they start to behave differently, and, still without giving up their primary nature, to complicate their condition. The report establishes the first diegetic level, to which are then added new ones, ascribed by the author-narrator to the pen of Roberto Arlt, and in which the critic takes part by commenting the text in footnotes, exactly as happens in Part I of the Quixote, of 1605, with the inserted novellas,6 and with the interference of the second author in the transcription of the original manuscript written in aljamía.7 Apart from what the critics have pointed out on the basis of the declarations and the initial conduct of this narrative instance, that is to say “a narrator / critic / detective” (Di Meglio 2005: 3),8 I aim here to examine – from a Cervantine perspective – the multiplicity of the functions that this agency fulfills in the story and, subsequently, to show to what extent his conduct is that of an unreliable narrator,9 on

6

Avalle Arce (2006: 146) comments that, with the episodes of the Sierra Morena – to which, according to his hypothesis, initially could have belonged the story of Grisóstomo and Marcela – “Para el novelista ha llegado el momento de plegarse al principio estético fundamental del Renacimiento de variedad en la unidad. Es obvio que la figura de don Quijote establece la unidad, ahora es propio desplegar la variedad.” (For the novelist the moment has come to adhere to the fundamental aesthetic principle of the Renaissance, which is that of the variety in unity. It’s clear that the figure of Don Quixote establishes the unity; now it is appropriate to display the variety.)

7

Spanish written in Arabic characters [translator’s note].

8

Di Meglio (2005: 3) observes that “Reformulando la línea borgeana del género policial, Piglia coloca al crítico literario en el centro de la escena policiaca y detectivesca. Dicho sujeto tradicionalmente aparece como el policial que puede descubrir ‘la verdad’.” (Reformulating the Borgesian line of the detective novel, Piglia places the critic in the center of the crime and the detective scene. This subject traditionally appears in detective stories in which it is possible to find out the ‘truth’.)

9

Juan Bautista de Avalle Arce (1991: 5-6) coined the term “narrador infidente” in Spanish in order to refer to the unreliable narrator of the Quixote: “[...] Por primera vez en los anales de la novelística nos hallamos ante el caso de un narrador infidente, del que no se puede fiar el lector. [...] El narrador infidente es artificio narrativo


whom it largely depends that fiction masquerades as historical events and as unpublished texts of Arlt’s, making up an explicit palimpsest. “El Narrador Moderno, el post-cervantino,” Avalle Arce observes, “es un narrador que se inmiscuye en el texto para ocultar parte de él […]” (2006: 15) (The Modern, post-Cervantine Narrator is a narrator that interferes in the text in order to conceal a part of it). Such kind of unreliability, exercised by the author-narrator of the novella, establishes a profound, though implicit, link with the foundational work of modern fiction, and on its nature depends the recycling in “Assumed Name” of the other devices furnished by the Quixote which I will discuss in what follows. Still acting with the authority which the first qualities (manifest author / narrator / investigator / critic / detective) granted him, this inaugural subject of the enunciation reports on the discovery of the unpublished work and, with the intention of passing it off as an authentic text, links it to plausible dates from Arlt’s biography: “Arlt lo escribió [el texto llamado “Luba”] aproximadamente entre el 25 de marzo y el 6 de abril de 1942. Es decir, poco antes de su muerte” (2002: 97) (“Arlt wrote it [the text called “Luba”] approximately between March 25 and April 6, 1942. That is to say, shortly before his death,” 1995: 91). At this moment and later on he behaves as a fake historian who mixes up real data with more dubious information in order to uphold the historical veracity of the story. The author-narrator

inventado por Cervantes, si bien no prospera en su época. La concepción ética de la literatura conservaba su dominio casi intacto, sobre todo en esos momentos de Reforma Católica. Toda obra literaria presuponía un pacto tácito entre narrador y lector que descansaba con toda solidez sobre relaciones de absoluta confianza, de honorabilidad absoluta.” ([…] For the first time in the history of the novel we are faced with an unreliable narrator, not to be trusted. […] The unreliable narrator is a narrative artifice invented by Cervantes, even if he did not find many imitators in his own time. In Cervantes’ time the ethical conception of literature remained firmly in control, especially so during the so-called Catholic Reformation. Every literary work posited a tacit pact between narrator and reader solidly grounded in absolute trust, of absolute accountability.) In a recent publication (2006: 18), Avalle Arce develops the theme at length: “[…] la singularidad [humana] de mentir comenzará a definir al surgiente tipo de Narrador, quien hallará su nueva vocación en mentir vale decir en acallar la verdad o bien en suprimir su evidencia.” ([…] the unique [human] capacity to lie begins to define the emerging figure of the narrator, a narrator that will find his new vocation precisely in lying, that is to say in keeping mum about the truth or in suppressing its evidence.)


mentions a volume he edited on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of Arlt’s death (1972), an event that, in principle, would justify the title of the first part of the story, “Homage to Roberto Arlt”.10 Eventually, the tribute consists in writing texts that will be attributed to Arlt and whose authorship is to be determined by the reader. What the reader is presented with, however, is not the supposed publication in homage that would circulate throughout the world – as a result of which the book in preparation maintains its virtual nature –, but the transcription of the unpublished texts that are inserted in the report. The trap of historical verisimilitude is also reinforced by the fact that Piglia really displays the activities of critic and investigator. As a consequence, the reader, who has suspended his scepticism by becoming more and more absorbed in the story – the “suspension of disbelief” of Samuel Coleridge – tends, from the very outset, to identify the author-narrator of the first diegesis – who professionally manages the rules of the game: footnotes, comments, relevant explanations, etc. – with the historical author. The criticinvestigator, by combining the roles of author, narrator, transcriber and actor of the events, “se abriga con el manto de la Verdad” (wraps himself in the cloak of truth), to use the words of Avalle Arce (2006: 17). Something similar occurs in the Prologue to Part I of the Quixote: the manifest author, who plays similar roles, mentions biographical data of the historical author and thus creates in the mind of the reader an association between his identity and that of Miguel de Cervantes, in spite of the fact that, as we shall see later, he undergoes a process of fictionalization already in that very preliminary text.

10

Cf. Rodríguez Garrido (1999: 59): “¿En qué consiste, en tanto forma discursiva, un homenaje? Bajo el título de “Homenaje a Roberto Arlt” de Ricardo Piglia, incluido en su libro Prisión perpetua (1988), el lector se enfrenta a un texto que se aparta del modelo de lo que suele designarse como un homenaje: en lugar del típico discurso laudatorio que ofrece una semblanza biográfica o crítica de un personaje, la obra de Piglia nos aproxima a la figura de Roberto Arlt de una manera compleja e inusual”. (In what consists a homage as a discursive form? In “Homage to Roberto Arlt” of Ricardo Piglia, included in his book Prisión perpetua (1988), the reader is confronted with a text that distances itself from what is usually called a homage: instead of the typical laudatory speech that offers a biographical sketch or a critique of a character, the work of Piglia approaches the figure of Roberto Arlt in a complex and unusual way.) Di Meglio (2005: 2) almost literally asks the same question, but without quoting Rodríguez Garrido.


In the novella, the initial subject of enunciation, in his capacity of critic, investigator and editor, offers an inventory of the content of the commemorative publication, in which he draws up “textos publicados en diarios y revistas pero no recogidos en libro” (2002: 97) (“texts published in newspapers and magazines but not collected in books,” 1995: 91), whose authorship is true and verifiable by the reader, as well as “[e]l conjunto de sus escritos inéditos” (2002: 98) (“the entirety of his unpublished writings,” 1995: 92), whose authenticity, due to their unpublished nature, can be determined by neither the critic nor the reader. However, the transcription of the notebook provides some clues for its own fictitious nature, given that it contains several annotations for the writing project of “Luba” – a story to which its author has still not given a title –, some of them in provisional versions made by Arlt, which differ from the definitive transcription – in reality, a free translation of a text of Andreiev (2002: 120, 121 ff)11 –, which is included as an appendix (2002: 158-189). The reader is challenged to undertake a meticulous close-reading to determine the legitimacy of such unpublished works. So the textual author skillfully starts interweaving truth with falseness, and if the reader does not want to be tricked, he will be required to investigate matters on his own, and to inquire into Arlt’s literary production. Therefore, one of the lessons that every reader of “Assumed Name” has to learn is that of reading with circumspection, and of distancing himself from a credulous reading. Nevertheless, in view of the fact that it is a parodic text, the reading continues with delight once the device is recognized, amongst other reasons because of the cleverly constructed traps. “Assumed Name” thus presents us with two possible readings: a credulous and a suspicious one.12 11 Cf. Berg (1998: 49): ““Luba”, el relato inédito de Arlt, no es otra cosa que la “traducción” y reescritura del texto de Andreiev. ¿Quién no recuerda las travesías de reescritura de Pierre Menard? Doble homenaje, las escrituras de Arlt y de Borges como dos espejos invertidos pero paradójicamente simétricos.” (“Luba,” the unpublished story of Arlt, is nothing else than the “translation” and rewriting of Andreiev’s text. Who does not remember the cross-writing of Pierre Menard? Double homage, the writings of Arlt and Borges are like two reversed mirrors that are symmetrical in a paradoxical manner.) 12 Cf. Díaz Quiñones (1998: xiii): “Algunos lectores cayeron en la trampa tendida por la ficción, aceptando el texto apócrifo reescrito por Piglia [“Luba”] como un texto


These attitudes, as we shall try to show, connect our authornarrator with his Cervantine homologue who appears in the prologue and the first eight chapters of the Quixote of 1605. Firstly, in the “Author’s Note,” signed with the initials R.P., the author presents Arlt and a friend of his, a certain Kostia, as historical personae, as he does with the representation of the space – the accuracy of which can be easily demonstrated – in which he used to listen to the anecdotes of the latter about the former. Such characters, which form part of the diegesis, and those data (altogether easy to verify) render plausible the historical events that the author-narrator recounts in the novella, and, in combination with some feasible dates, they make sure that the related events revolve around the notion of credibility. Moreover, the fact that the historical author, with whom the initials R.P. are associated, maintains that he was an eye-witness to the conversations of Kostia, in that “frange du texte imprimé, qui en réalité commande toute la lecture” (Lejeune 1975: 45) (this fringe of the printed text that, in reality, organized the entire reading), that is to say, those preliminary pieces that are generally designated as “prologues,” gives legitimacy to those talks, because they are followed by the writer’s signature. In the margins of the text, through the characters and historical events, the writer attests to the historicity of the events he is going to tell, and this will be consolidated through similar procedures in the actual story. Although he proceeds differently from the manifest author in the Prologue to the Quixote of 1605, who ensures us that his fictitious hero lived on the plains of Montiel and that the locals still remember him, the signatory of the “Author’s Note,” by engaging two historical characters in the fictional universe, uses similar devices. Both the fictitious characters from La Mancha and the historical Argentineans move from one level to another: from fiction to history and vice versa, confounding and making both levels malleable, as Borges suggests with regard to the Quixote (1989: II, 45-47). Something analogous occurs with the sources on which both author-narrators base their stories, inasmuch as the author-narrator of the Prologue of 1605 claims to have written an historical account with material found in ‘auténtico’ de Arlt.” (Some readers fell into the trap laid by the fiction and accepted the apocryphal text written by Piglia [“Luba”] as an ‘authentic’ text of Arlt.)


inexistent archives of La Mancha, while the narrating instance in the “Author’s Note” asserts that he knew Kostia, the informant of the “anécdotas de Roberto Arlt” (2002: 11) (“anecdotes about Roberto Arlt,” 1995: 16). Kostia and the critic-investigator are the protagonists of the events told in the story, which are not grounded in reality. Both share the same diegetic level with other fictitious characters until, towards the end of the first diegesis, the critic himself reveals his name: Ricardo Piglia (2002: 153). Consequently, the author undergoes a process of autofictionalization – like Cervantes in the preliminary pages of the two parts of the Quixote – and confirms our initial supposition about the identity of the author-narrator and the writer. In the second list that the critic-narrator draws up in the novella, that of the “escritos inéditos” (2002: 98) (“unpublished writings,” 1995: 92), he mentions two texts which were attributed to Roberto Arlt, but which turn out to be apocryphal. It is up to the attentive and experienced reader to unveil the true nature of these texts, as the procedure is the same as in the case of the possible dates: that is to say, a mixture of authentic and unpublished (i.e., apocryphal) texts. The three unpublished works constitute the main body of the novella and join the original diegesis, of which the author-narrator is in charge. The reader is able to read them thanks to the reading and the transcription undertaken by the instance responsible for the resulting and complex intra-textual play. From its publication, the novella gets complicated and reaches a nature that is quite distinct from its initial nature as declared by the author-narrator, which consisted in a report or an abstract. This abstract is further on enriched by the intervention of another collaborator, the honored writer himself. “Roberto Arlt” likewise undergoes a double mutation: he not only proves to be fictionalized as a character by participating in events that are realistic yet fictitious, but his writing is also subjected to a parodic game, because of Piglia’s mimicry, which constitutes a real homage.13

13 Cf. Celina S. de Cortázar (1984: 63): “Si la parodia literaria no existe sin modelo, es preciso que el receptor conozca el modelo, base de la transformación paródica; y si la parodia se ejerce sobre los cánones de un género consagrado, el lector debe conocer las normas que lo rigen. Lector sabio, por supuesto [...].” (If literary parody does not exist without a model, it is necessary for the receiver to know the model, which is the basis of the parodic transformation; and if the parody affects the canons of a


Commentators of Piglia’s work have noted that the author-narrator in “Assumed Name” also acts as detective, because in his guise as critic he indefatigably searches to localize the alleged unpublished papers, in order to prepare the anniversary edition he is working on. Is his comment that “Para reunir estos materiales pasé largas tardes en la Biblioteca Nacional” (2002: 99) (“To gather these materials [an autobiographical story, some unpublished letters and notes for a novel in preparation and “Luba”], I spent long afternoons in the National Library,” 1995: 93) to be interpreted as a wink that connects the documents found in that library with the archives of La Mancha consulted by the author of the prologue of 1605 in order to write the story of Don Quixote? He also informs the reader of the vicissitudes of the search and the discovery, which make up the first diegesis in which the author-narrator acts as a character. Nor is it difficult to find resemblances between the aforementioned detective role and the performance of the second author who appears in chapter 8 of Part I of the Quixote. Let me explain: it is well known that in chapters 8 and 9 of Part I of the Quixote the book itself becomes more and more prominent, given that the “author of this story” (autor desta historia) has exhausted the written sources on which he based his story and, in some digressive paragraphs, a new instance, identified as the second author, recounts the ups and downs he experienced in order to continue the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. This second author, who is also an eager reader, is looking for the continuation, until he finds, and succeeds in buying, some manuscripts in Toledo. In these he discovers, thanks to the translation made by a Spanishspeaking Morisco, the material he needs not only to continue reading, but also to transcribe and to intervene in the translated text. The critics (see a.o. Socrate 1974, Percas de Ponseti 1975, Fernández Mosqueras 1986, Stoopen 2002) have considered this second author as an editor and a guardian of material of different sources, namely Part I ascribed to the Christian author-narrator and Part II that starts with the translation of the text written in Arabic characters.14 As the authorconsecrated genre, the reader has to know the norms governing it. The knowledgeable reader, of course […].) 14 Cf. Fernández Mosqueras (1986: 57): “Editor porque se empeña en buscar lo que supone que falta, editor porque lo encuentra, manda traducir la historia y además paga


narrator of “Assumed Name” declares, it is also one of his functions to edit the text. Needless to say that in his story the second author behaves himself as an autodiegetic narrator, as he converts himself into a character and conceives a diegesis which is different from the one the liminal author-narrator was in charge of until then. As far as he is concerned, the industrious critic-detective of “Assumed Name” declares that he placed […] avisos en diarios de Buenos Aires y del interior anunciando mi intención de comprar cualquier material inédito de Arlt que se pudiera conservar […] (aparte del cuaderno autobiográfico y una docena de cartas) conseguí el cuaderno de apuntes en el que Arlt escribió casi diariamente durante marzo de 1942. Me lo trajo, una mañana, un hombre de edad, tímido y afable: era un obrero ferroviario jubilado y se llamaba Andrés Martina. (2002: 100-101) […] notices in newspapers of Buenos Aires and in the interior announcing my intention to buy any unpublished material by Arlt which could be preserved. Through this medium (besides the autobiographical portrait and a dozen letters) I obtained the notebook in which Arlt wrote almost daily during March of 1942. One morning, an older man, timid and affable, brought it to me; he was a retired railroad worker and his name was Andrés Martina. (1995: 93)

por ello. Y probablemente es también el cristiano que se ocupó en mandarla imprimir. Por ello llamamos (coincidiendo con H. Percas) al segundo autor EDITOR. Un editor que comparte características con su otro nombre, segundo autor, porque no es un Editor convencional sino que deja su impronta en la obra. En (I, 9, 141-142) el Editor reclama alabanzas por su labor, acentuando más su calidad de personaje responsable de la obra. El Editor no sólo ayuda a completar su texto – y parece ser en este capítulo, consciente de ello.” (Editor because he is at pains to search what he supposes is lacking, editor because he what he is looking for, orders it to be translated and, what is more, pays for it. Probably he is also the Christian who bothers to have the thing printed. Therefore we call (following H. Percas) the second author the EDITOR. An editor who shares characteristics with his other name, second author, because he is not a conventional Editor, but one who leaves his mark on the work. In the ninth chapter of the First Part, the Editor demands words of praise, thus underlining his quality of character responsible for the work. The Editor does not merely help to complete the text – and he seems to be fully aware of this in this chapter.)


In the remainder of the first fragment of the novella, before the description of the content of the notebook, the fortunate critic – as well as the second author – relates how he acquired the valuable material and, as he engages in a dialogue with Andrés Martina, who supposedly provided him with the notebook, he takes part as a character in the diegesis, thus assuming a fictional quality, like the author of the prologue of Part I of the Quixote who is similarly fictionalized when he enters into conversation with his “shrewd” (discreto) and “clever friend” (bien entendido). In both cases we are dealing with an historian, a faithful witness of the events, some discovered manuscripts and a transcription of the latter: an old artifice reused by Ricardo Piglia with the same Cervantine awareness of the inherent lie.15 The “organized” and “objective” report or abstract is more and more enriched by the transcription produced by the critic-investigator of the unpublished texts. In this manner, the autobiographical portrait of Arlt is inserted as a footnote and it suspends the search and the discovery of the material; which also happens, albeit differently, in the Quixote when, in the midst of the battle between the Manchegan knight and the Basque, the reader finds that the “author of this story” stops writing because his sources are exhausted. Likewise, from the moment Arlt’s manuscripts have appeared, new stories are added to the initial one, which keeps on narrating the vicissitudes of the 15 Those literary devices rely on a long tradition that goes back, at least in the case of the Quixote, to the novels of chivalry. Cacho Blecua (1991: 41) lists them as follows: “a historian, faithful witness of the events” (un historiador, fiel testigo de los hechos), “a discovered manuscript” (un manuscrito encontrado) and “a translation” (una traducción). In the case of “Assumed Name,” the translation emerges from a text by Andreiev, the real author of the story called “Luba”. However, this information is not made explicit for the reader, as does happen in the Quixote and its predecessors. According to Avalle Arce (2006: 16), the use of the trick of the historian dates back at least several centuries: “Artificio muy socorrido desde los primeros tiempos en estos intentos de dignificar el naciente género es el presentarlo como ‘historia’, y esto ya desde la época de Luciano (siglo II de C.) Y sus Verae Historiae […] El novelista (contador de mentiras) se ha adjudicado a sí mismo la dignidad del historiador, quien sólo cuenta verdades.” (In these attempts to dignify the emerging genre much use was made of the artifice of presenting it as “history,” beginning with Lucian (second century AD) and his Verae Historiae […]. The novelist (teller of lies) has appropriated to himself the dignity of the historian, who only tells truths.)


discovery, and, as also happens dramatically in the Quixote, not only the narrative and authorial instances (the initial author-narrator and the honored writer) diverge in the novella, but the author-narrator also plays the same roles – i.e., those of the reader, the transcriber and the editor of the unpublished works – as the second author. This way, the authors that participate in “Assumed Name” fulfill a complex authorial function, all the while emulating those of the Quixote. The autobiographical story aims at persuading the reader of its legitimacy through various devices: in the report this text is referred to by the critic-investigator as a possible prologue to a single volume containing two authentic works of Arlt, Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen) and Los lanzallamas (The Flamethrowers), and it reveals various dates that confirm the well-known eccentricity of the writer, such as his dedication to inventions, which will be one of the topics of conversation between the author-narrator and Andrés Martina, who both participate in the inaugural diegesis. Besides, it is a first person text transcribed between quotation marks in which the writings of Arlt are being parodied, who makes a mockery of his name’s origin, of his activity as an inventor, of his practice of writing in comparison to that of his colleagues, of the pragmatism of such a practice,16 whereby he demonstrates the falseness of the occupation. Such sources of textual legitimacy – the use of the first person to attribute words to a subject different from the enunciation, and the phrases in inverted commas – are exploited in Part II of the Quixote as well to produce the same effect of authorial authenticity. In II, 8 some exclamations uttered by Cide Hamete Benengeli are quoted, transcribed without mediation of the Morisco translator, nor of the second author: “‘¡Bendito sea el poderoso Alá! – dice Hamete Benengeli al comienzo deste octavo capítulo – ¡Bendito sea Alá!’, repite tres veces” (2004: 748) (“‘Blessed be the mighty Allah!’ exclaims Hamete Benengeli at the beginning of this eighth chapter; and he repeats it three times: ‘Blessed be Allah!’” 1949: 555).

16

Cf. “Todos nosotros, los que escribimos y firmamos, lo hacemos para ganarnos el puchero. Nada más. Y para ganarnos el puchero no vacilamos en afirmar que lo blanco es negro y viceversa.” (Piglia 2002: 100) (“All of us, those who write and sign our names, do it to make ends meet. Nothing else. And to make ends meet we do not hesitate in affirming that white is black and vice-versa,” Piglia 1995: 93).


In the autobiographical story, which appears in the first footnote, the author-narrator ironically threatens the auto-image of Roberto Arlt and his conception of writing.17 The cynical assertion of the author of the autobiographical story reads as follows: […] La gente busca la verdad y nosotros le damos moneda falsa. Es el oficio, el “métier”. La gente cree que recibe la mercadería legítima y cree que es materia prima cuando apenas se trata de una falsificación burda, de otras falsificaciones que también se inspiraron en falsificaciones. (2002: 100) […] People are looking for the truth and we give them counterfeit money. It is the trade, the “métier.” People believe they receive legitimate merchandise and they believe it is prime material, when it merely entails a base falsification, of other falsifications, which were also inspired by falsifications. (1995: 93)

However, this confession attributed to Roberto Arlt, which is later corroborated in a transcription that Arlt makes of Melville in his notebook,18 can be interpreted as the novella’s hidden poetics. In principle, it points at the title “Assumed Name,” which from the 17

Di Meglio (2005: 3-4) believes that “[…] a lo largo de todo el relato correspondiente a las dos partes que organizan y dividen “Nombre Falso”, la cita a pie de página cobra un importante lugar y es un espacio de enunciación (no marginal ni desechable) donde se revelan verdades ocultas. La misma, estrechamente vinculada con los textos apócrifos borgeanos, no opera siempre como precisión o como lugar de la autorización erudita (por esto se entiende la recurrencia a la “cita de autoridad”), sino como superficie de una trama propia que cuestiona, parodia, ironiza o critica algunos supuestos de la trama principal en el texto en cuestión.” ([…] throughout the entire story, i.e. the two parts that make up “Assumed Name,” the footnote occupies an important place, serving as a space of enunciation (neither marginal nor dismissable) for the revelation of hidden truths. These footnotes, closely related to the Borges’s “apocryphal texts,” do not invariably serve the interest of clarification or erudite authorization (this is how we have to understand the recurrent “citations of authority”). Rather, they trace a secondary plot that questions, parodies, satirizes or criticizes some suppositions of the main plot of the text in question.) 18 “Leo esto en Melville: ‘Qué insensato, qué inconcebible que un autor – en ninguna circunstancia posible – pueda ser franco con sus lectores.’” (Piglia 2002: 117) (“I read this in Melville: ‘How insincere, how inconceivable that an author – in any possible circumstance – could be frank with his readers,’” Piglia 1995: 105)


beginning arouses suspicion about the authorship: the assumed name of what or who?19 It also reveals that the fraud, in order to be accepted by the reader, depends on the writer’s skills and on the assumption that literature is a falsification of other falsifications. What is more, it hands us a clue as to how to read the novella because Arlt’s unpublished works are products of Piglia’s pen, if they have not been written by Andreiev, as in the case of “Luba”. Apart from their clear cynicism, these statements also reveal the true nature of literature: the inevitability of the palimpsest structure, which is taken here to its ultimate consequences, creating a mise en abyme in which texts and authors take part.20 This structure is evident and at the same time it 19 Cf. Di Meglio (2005: 2): “Si consideramos que el mismo se denomina “Nombre Falso”, como premisa básica intuimos que el mismo se articula o sienta sus bases en dos conceptos muy “delicados” para su abordaje: la cuestión del nombramiento en relación con la autoría; y la falsedad recurrente en todo el relato pigliano.” (If we take into account that the story is called “Assumed Name,” we presume as a basic premise that it is organized around or that it grounds itself in two very “delicate” concepts with which to approach it: the question of the name proper as related to the authorship of the text, and the recurrent falseness in the stories of Piglia.) 20

In the “esbozo y plan de la novela” (2002: 104) (“outline and plan of a novel,” 1995: 96), material transcribed from the found notebook and that forms the first section of the novella, its author, Roberto Arlt, unveils the literary and journalistic sources that lie at the back of Letiff, one of the characters of that novel in the making (“Letiff: un joven puro. (Hamlet + Mishkin + Luis Castruccio), (criminal, famoso en el Buenos Aires de principios de siglo),” 2002: 104-105 (“Letiff: an innocent youth. (Hamlet + Mishkin + Luis Castruccio),” 1995: 96)) – a famous criminal in turn-ofthe-century Buenos Aires, the transcriber clarifies in a footnote –, an expedient that is oft repeated. Likewise, the author of the outline informs us about the reading matter of his character: a.o. “eighteenth-century philosophers,” Flammarion, and Victor Hugo, of whom Letiff respectively makes “a long transcription” (una larga trascripción) and copies “a speech” (un discurso) (1995: 99). The author of the plan of the novel finds out about the works written by his character ““(ver su Tratado sobre el veneno) (mejor: Elogio del arsénico)” (2002: 104) ((see his Treaty on Poison.) (Better yet: Eulogy of Arsenic),” 1995: 99). Moreover, he relates finding a manuscript: “En 1924 – a los veintiún años – [Letiff] resolvió suicidarse y así lo consigna en un testamento ológrafo redactado en papel sellado, que se encontró en su domicilio” (2002: 108) (“In 1924 – at the age of twenty-one – he [Letiff] decided to commit suicide; this he states in a holograph will drawn up on sealed paper, which was found in his home,” 1995: 99). The mirror-like construction also translates into acts that reproduce those of another great Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, who – as is well-known – worked as director of the above-mentioned library for eighteen years, from the year 1955 onwards: “Para decidir el veneno [con el que envenenará a su mujer, Letiff] pasa las tardes estudiando en la Biblioteca Nacional todos los tratados que cayeron en sus


constitutes the purpose of the text, which are characteristics that connect the work with postmodern tendencies.21 It follows that the textual author – who has constructed an author-narrator with multiple functions – constructs a masquerade, a play of appearances, since he shares fictitiously his own authorship with that of Roberto Arlt, altering the latter by falsely attributing a tale of Andreiev to Arlt: assumed names and false attributions. Having reached this point, I want to stress that exactly the same thing happens in the Quixote, beginning with the Author’s Preface of 1605. Well-known and widely commented on (see o.a. El Saffar 1968, Canavaggio 1977, Parr 1988, Molho 1989a, Calabrò 1987-1988, Presberg 1995, López Navia 1996, Paz Gago 1995, Stoopen 2002, Ascunce Arrieta 2005) is the never-ending masquerade to which the authorial instance is subjected; a great many intermediaries join this masquerade. The author shares the authority of the preliminary text with the “shrewd” and “clever friend,” whose arguments make him write the prologue. In this prologue he is already fictionalized when he participates in an imaginary scene as interlocutor of this fictitious friend. Moreover, he sets himself up as a false historian who, in order to write his story, consults the archives of La Mancha – obviously written by other authors – and, as proof of the historicity of Don Quixote, decides to hear the opinion of “the inhabitants of the district of the plains of Montiel” (los habitadores del distrito del campo de Montiel) about the knight. Throughout the story, the authorial and manos sobre toxicología” (2002: 110) (“To decide on the poison he [Lettif, having decided to kill his wife] spends the afternoons studying in the National Library all the treaties on toxicology that fall into his hands,” 1995: 100), as does the criticinvestigator of the first diegesis in search of materials for the commemorative publication. It turns out that the writer (the critic) transcribes another writer (Roberto Arlt), whose characters in the making transcribe other writers, in a literary abyss without bottom, while they both reply to each other’s actions and to actions that others carried out more successfully in phenomenal reality. 21

Cf. Victor Burgin, quoted in Hutcheon (1995: 99-100): “Unacknowledged modernist assumptions about closure, distance, artistic autonomy, and the political nature of representation are what postmodernism sets out to uncover and deconstruct. In postmodernist parody: ‘modernist pretensions to artistic independence have been further subverted by the demonstration of a necessarily ‘intertextual’ nature of the production of meaning; we can no longer unproblematically assume that ‘Art’ is somehow ‘outside’ of the complex of other representational practices and institutions with which is contemporary […].’”


narrative instances progressively multiply and assume new functions: the initial author-narrator, the different “authors who write on the subject” (autores que deste caso escriben), a sage magician (un sabio encantador) imagined by Don Quixote as the chronicler (cronista) of his achievements, the “author of this history” (autor desta historia), the “second author of this work” (segundo autor desta obra), as well as the “wits of La Mancha” (ingenios de la Mancha) – all of them fictitious authors who participate in the first eight chapters –, until the moment comes when the second author discovers the text in aljamía, which is nothing less than the Historia de don Quijote de la Mancha, escrita por Cide Hamete Benengeli, who, together with the Morisco, translator and intermediary of the version of the “Arab historian” (historiador arábigo), and the second author are responsible – to a greater or a lesser extent – for Part II onwards (1605 and 1615).22 The similarities increase: Cide Hamete is a “real author,” as is the Roberto Arlt of the newly discovered unpublished works, and the second author is reader, transcriber and editor, just like the manifest author / narrator / investigator / critic / detective of “Assumed Name”. With the purpose of supporting and recapitulating what I have been suggesting until now, I quote a pertinent comment of a critic of Piglia’s work about the literary devices that are present in “Assumed Name”: En el “Homenaje” se encuentra la novela policial, la parodia, lo literario como falsificación inevitable, “el nombre falso”. Podría formularse en los siguientes términos: la literatura como investigación detectivesca, pero llevada mucho más lejos, pues la investigación termina por inventar una realidad virtual para que alguien la descubra después, quizás otro escritor u otro investigador. […] En última instancia, dándole una vuelta de tuerca a Borges, se trata de la escritura como acto de lectura y de la pasión de repensar la relación de la narrativa con la tradición. (Díaz Quiñones 1998: xiii-xiv) In “Homage to Roberto Arlt” is to be found the crime novel, the parody, literature as inevitable falsification, the “assumed 22 Another matter is that of the different narrators of the inserted stories in the main story of the adventures of Don Quixote and his squire.


name”. One could formulate it in the following terms: literature as a detective investigation, but carried much further, as the investigation ends up inventing a virtual reality for someone who discovers it later, perhaps another writer or another investigator. […] In the final analysis, because it gives a twist to Borges, the text is about writing as a reading act and about the passion to rethink the relation of the narrative to the tradition.

The parody in the Quixote openly alludes to the literature of chivalry, as the then most prevalent of all genres; the falsification passes – besides what has been put forward about the palimpsest, the false historicity and the spurious authorship – in the sense that, whatever the “friend” in the Prologue may think about novels of chivalry, the Quixote is generally considered as an exercise in that genre. The study of the original source material undertaken by the different authors of the book itself leads to the creation of a “virtual reality,” the “writing” of which is veiled with an Arab name, behind which Miguel de Cervantes hides himself (Molho 1989b). Finally, the twist that, according to Díaz Quiñones, Piglia gives to Borges in connection with “the writing as reading act and […] the passion to rethink the relation of the narrative to the tradition,” is comparable to that Borges gave to Cervantes.23 23

In support of the transition between reading and writing that occurs in the Quixote, as well as in “Assumed Name,” I find it appropriate to quote what I have written on another occasion (2002: 296): “Vigilante de dicha actividad [la de la lectura], duplicada por el hidalgo, por sus autores y por los demás personajes que también leen, y capturado por ella, se sitúa el lector del Quijote quien, al mirar ese espejo, además de su propia imagen, descubre la de Miguel de Cervantes: ‘suspenso, con el papel delante, la pluma en la oreja, el codo en el bufete y la mano en la mejilla’, un volumen abierto del Amadís de Gaula; los Romances del marqués de Mantua y la Crónica de Lisuarte de Grecia a la mano, algunos de los libros de la biblioteca de Alonso Quijano frente a él y muchos más en la memoria, disponiéndose a escribir El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, persuadido – a la inversa de Borges [(1989ª, 289)] – de que leer es una actividad anterior a la de escribir, aunque sabedor de que el circuito, como Oroborus que se muerde la cola, nunca acaba”. (Vigilant of the reading activity, which is doubled by the hidalgo, by his authors and by the other characters who read as well, and captured by it, the reader of the Quixote discovers the image of himself and of Miguel de Cervantes by looking at this mirror: “pondering with the paper before me, a pen in my ear, my elbow on the desk, and my cheek in my hand,” (1952: xi) an open volume of the Amadís de Gaula, the Romances del marqués de Mantua and the Crónica de Lisuarte de Grecia close at hand, some


It is now convenient to reflect upon the meaning of the parody, which is, according to Linda Hutcheon (1995: 93), “often considered central to postmodernism” and “often called ironic quotation, pastiche, appropriation, or intertextuality,” to which I may add the terms of palimpsest, in the Genettian sense (1989), and that of dissemination, of Derridean origin (1975). We might begin by asking ourselves what this recirculation of quixotic devices in a twentieth-century short story means. The initial answers to these questions are easily set out: to play a parodic game, not only with respect to the immediate literary past (Borges, Arlt), but also with respect to more remote predecessors, so as to pay secret tribute to a book that would fix the course of the modern and postmodern novel;24 to recognize the literary affiliation of every Spanish-speaking storyteller; to prove that the Quixote’s narrative conventions – as inaugurated, or at least intentionally used by Miguel the Cervantes – continue to be valid. At this point I have to take a step forward and look for the broader sense of the textual intentions that emerge from a literary practice of this nature. What is at stake, for instance, in the deviation or concealment of the authorial property, as happens in the Quixote and in “Assumed Name”? Why this deceit of the reader? Why does Piglia autoplagiarize himself and attributes his own writings to someone else? And finally, what is the function of those Cervantine devices – among which perhaps the most important is the technique of the unreliable narrator – that are parodied by Piglia? At the outset I mentioned that, since the invention of fictitious authors in the Quixote – the outcome of the parody of false historians who guaranteed the historic truth of the chivalresque stories (see Riquer 1961, Nelson 1973, Eisenberg 1974, Cacho Blecua 1991, Wardropper 1965, Williamson 1991), which cannot openly declare their imaginative nature –, the author himself arouses suspicion about books of the library of Alonso Quijano in front of him and many more in his memory, preparing to write El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, persuaded – contrary to Borges [(1989ª, 289)] – that reading is an activity prior to writing, although he knows that this circuit, like the Ouroborus that swallows its own tail, never ends.) 24

See Genette (1989) and Hutcheon (1995: 94): “[…] twentieth-century art forms teach that parody has a wide range of forms and intents –from that witty ridicule to the playfully ludic to the seriously respectful.”


his authorship and, consequently, the textual authority is displaced and questioned, as the story leaves space for the deceit of the fiction. This breaks up a privileged center of truth and leads to a plurality of views: could there be a better illustration of this than the antagonism between the Moorish author and the Spanish-speaking translator, on the one side, and, on the other, the Christian authors responsible for the story, who represent different ways to conceive the world? Due to these practices, the humanist subject – considered to be universal, unique and autonomous – experiences a crisis at a moment when philosophy and literary theory recognize such a fracture as a phenomenon inherent to contemporary thought and writing.25 Although for different reasons from those that lead to the Baroque aesthetics of the seventeenth century,26 the centrality of the subject is nowadays again the focus of debate.27 Linda Hutcheon formulates it in the following terms:

25

See Hutcheon (1995: 108): “The challenge to the humanist concept of a coherent, continuous, autonomous individual (who paradoxically also shares in some generalized universal human essence) have come to all sides today: from poststructuralist philosophical and literary theory, Marxist political philosophy, Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis, sociology, and many other domains.” For their part, feminist studies also criticize the traditional concept of the subject: “For feminist theory, the deconstruction of unitary identity has meant dismantling the humanist fiction of Western Man as universal subject and of Woman as the negative term which guarantees his identity.” (Robinson 1991: 3) 26

Cf. Severo Sarduy (1974: 19 n.5) in this respect: “El paso de Galileo a Kepler es el del círculo a la elipse, el de lo que está trazado alrededor del Uno a lo que está trazado alrededor de lo plural, paso de lo clásico a lo barroco [...].” (The move from Galileo to Kepler is comparable to that from the circle to the ellipse, from what is drawn around the One to what is drawn around the plural, the transition from the classical to the baroque […].) Consequently, the artistic language is characterized as “[...] vuelta sobre sí, marca del propio reflejo, puesta en escena de la utilería. En él, la adición de citas, la múltiple emisión de voces, niega toda utilidad, toda naturalidad a un centro emisor: fingiendo nombrarlo, tacha lo que denota, anula: su sentido es la insistencia de su juego.” (1974: 52) ([…] turning inward, signaling its own reflection, the staging of the (narrative) equipment. Its incorporation of quotations, the multiplicity of voices, negate the utility or naturalness of any central intelligence to the text: by pretending to give it a name it erases what it what it denotes, and annuls it: its meaning lies in its revelation of its own play.) 27 Cf. Hutcheon (1995: 13): “In a capitalist context, as Adorno argued, the pretence of individualism (and thus, of choice) is in fact proportional to the ‘liquidation of the


If, as is frequently the case, postmodernism is identified with ‘decentering’ of this particular notion of the individual, then both humanist and capitalist notions of selfhood or subjectivity will necessarily be called into question. (1995: 13)

I believe that this also happens in “Assumed Name”. Here, the personal property of art and culture, as well as originality and authenticity, has been questioned. It is clear that the literary text traces synchronic and diachronic connections with other texts – i.e., intertextual relations –, as well as with cultural productions that surround, precede or follow it. The palimpsest makes the subjects of enunciation reproduce exponentially, which leads to contradictory world-views that coexist in discordance. The literary text and the authorship become never exhausted; they are not autonomous. Among the pioneers who theorized the intertextual nature of literature and who proclaimed the death of the author as an institution figures Roland Barthes, whose ideas Terry Eagleton has lucidly summarized: A specific piece of writing thus has no clearly defined boundaries: it spills over constantly into the works clustered around it, generating a hundred different perspectives which dwindle to vanishing points. The work cannot be sprung shut, rendered determinate, by an appeal to the author, for the “death of the author” is a slogan that modern criticism is now confidently able to proclaim. […] It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming ‘polysemic’ plurality, no the author himself. If there is any place where this seething multiplicity of the text is momentarily focuses, it is not the author but the reader. (1988: 138)

Also, in both the Quixote and “Assumed Name,” history has been absorbed by fiction and the boundaries between the two categories have become blurred.28 The reader is thus forced to realize that the individual’ in mass manipulation, carried out, of course, in the name of democratic ideals – the mask of conformity.” 28

It is not for nothing that “narrative” is a discourse that, since Classical Antiquity, literary and historiographical texts have shared. “Story” and “history” are related genres that in the Western tradition share a common origin: Homeric epic.


effects of poetic verisimilitude and of historic veracity do not lie in the facts, but in a construction in which the language gives them sense, as well as in the mediation of the narrator as interpreter of the – factual or fictitious – events that he recounts. As is the case in the Quixote, the supposed historic truth in the story of Piglia lacks a tangible referent. This shows up the real nature of “verisimilitude,” and it also shows a critical attitude in relation to the story as a discourse that reflects reality. The unreliable author-narrator performs a double trick, on the historical and the literary level; he has falsified information and has convincingly parodied another person’s writings. Consequently, by means of these cunning devices he analyzes the auto-reflexive quality of art, which – in the Quixote and once again today – is resolved to draw attention to its own fictional and performative nature.29 Translated from the Spanish by Reindert Dhondt

Works Cited Ascunce Arrieta, José Ángel. 2005. El Quijote como tragedia. Kassel: Reichenberger. Avalle Arce, Juan Bautista de. 1991. “Las voces del narrador,” Ínsula 538: 4-6. ––––. 2006. Las novelas y sus narradores. Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos. Berg, Edgardo. 1998. “Ricardo Piglia, lector de Borges,” Iberoamericana 69: 41-56. 29 See Iser (1989: 6): “How can we describe the status of a literary text? The first point is that it differs from any text presenting an object that exists independently of the text. If a piece of writing describes an object that exists with equal determinacy outside it, then the text is simply an exposition of the object. In Austin’s terms, it is a “constative utterance,” as opposed to a “performative utterance,” which actually creates its object. It goes without saying that literary texts belong to the second category. There is no concrete object corresponding to them in the external world, although of course they produce their objects out of elements to be found in the external world.”


––––. 1996. “El relato ausente. (Sobre la poética de Ricardo Piglia),” in Elisa Teresa Calabrese (Ed.). Supersticiones del linaje. Genealogías y reescrituras. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1989. Historia universal de la infamia. Prólogo a la primera edición, in Obras completas I (1923-1949). Buenos Aires: Emecé. ––––. 1989. “Magias parciales del Quijote,” in Otras inquisiciones. Obras completas II (1952-1972). Buenos Aires: Emecé. 45-47. Cacho Blecua, Juan Manuel. 1991. “Introducción,” in Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo (Ed.). Amadís de Gaula. Madrid: Cátedra. Calabrò, Giovanna. 1987-1988. “Cervantes, Avellaneda y Don Quijote,” Anales Cervantinos XXV-VI: 87-100. Canavaggio, Jean. 1977. “Cervantes en primera persona,” Journal of Hispanic Philology 2: 35-44. Cervantes, Miguel de. 1949. The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de La Mancha. Tr. Samuel Putnam. New York: The Modern Library. ––––. 2004. Don Quijote de la Mancha. Edición del Instituto Cervantes 1605-2005 dirigida por Francisco Rico. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de Lectores (2 vols.). Corbatta, Jorgelina. 2001. “Ecos de Borges en la narrativa argentina actual,” Borges Studies Online. J. L. Borges Center for Studies & Documentation. Accessed on 03 June 2006. Cortázar, Celina S. de. 1984. “El Quijote, parodia antihumanista,” Anales Cervantinos XXII: 59-75. Derrida, Jacques. 1975 [1972] La diseminación. Tr. J. Martín. Madrid: Fundamentos. Díaz Quiñones, Arcadio. 1998. “Para empezar, Ricardo Piglia,” in Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones, Paul Firbas, Noel Luna & José Antonio Rodríguez-Garrido (Eds). Ricardo Piglia: Conversación en Princeton. Princeton: PLAS Cuadernos 2: viii-xvi. Accessed on 06 June 2006. Di Meglio, Mariangel. 2005. “El ‘valor’ de la letra: las versiones especulares en Nombre falso,” Espéculo. Revista de estudios literarios. Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Accessed on 03


June 2006. Eagleton, Terry. 1988. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Eisenberg, Daniel. 1974. “The Pseudo-Historicity of Romances of Chivalry,” Quaderni Ibero Americani 45/46: 253-259. El Saffar, Ruth. 1968. “The function of the Fictional Narrator in Don Quijote,” Modern Language Notes. LXXIII: 164-167. ––––. 1975. Distance and Control in Don Quijote: A Study in Narrative Technique. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Fernández Mosquera, Santiago. 1986. “Los autores ficticios del Quijote,” Anales cervantinos XXIV: 1-19. Fornet, Jorge. 1994. “Homenaje a Roberto Arlt o la literatura como plagio,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica XLII (1): 115-141. Genette, Gérard. 1989 [1962]. Palimpsestos. La literatura en segundo grado. Tr. Celia Fernández Prieto. Madrid: Taurus. ––––. 1989-1990. “El paratexto. Introducción a Umbrales,” Criterios 25-38: 43-53. Hutcheon, Linda. 1995 [1989]. The Politics of Postmodernism. London-New York: Routledge. Iser, Wolfgang. 1987. “Indeterminacy and the Reader’s Response in Prose Fiction,” Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore-London: The John Hopkins University Press. 3-30. Lejeune, Philippe. 1975. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil. López Navia, Santiago. 1996. La ficción autorial en el Quijote y en sus continuaciones e imitaciones. Madrid: Universidad Europea de Madrid-CEES Ediciones. Luna, Noel. 1998. “Informe a la academia: Piglia y Arlt,” in Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones, Paul Firbas, Noel Luna & José Antonio Rodríguez-Garrido (Eds). Ricardo Piglia: Conversación en Princeton. Princeton: PLAS Cuadernos 2: 53-58. Accessed on 03 June 2006. Molho, Mauricio. 1989a. “Instancias narradoras en Don Quijote,” Modern Language Notes 104: 273-285.


––––. 1989b. “El nombre tachado,” in Mélanges Maurice Molho. Limoges: Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines. 1-9. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1997. “Engaño y crueldad,” in Curso sobre el Quijote [1983]. Tr. María Luisa Balseriro. Barcelona: Ediciones B. 103-147. Nelson, William. 1973. Fact or Fiction. Boston: Harvard College. Parr, James A. 1988. Don Quijote: an Anatomy of a Subversive Discourse. Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta. Paz Gago, José María. 1995. Semiótica del Quijote. Teoría y práctica de la ficción narrativa. Amsterdam - Atlanta: Rodopi. Percas de Ponseti, Helena. 1975. Cervantes y su concepto del arte. Estudio crítico de algunos aspectos y episodios del Quijote. Madrid: Gredos (2 vols.). Piglia, Ricardo. 2002 [1975]. Nombre Falso. Barcelona: Anagrama. ––––. 1995. Assumed Name. Tr. S. Gabriel Waisman. Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review Press. ––––. 2005. El último lector. Barcelona: Anagrama. Presberg, Charles. 1995. “‘This is not a Prologue’: Paradoxes of Historical and Poetic Discourse in the Prologue of Don Quixote, Part I,” Modern Language Notes 110: 215-239. Riquer, Martín de. 1961. “La technique parodique du roman médiéval dans le Quichotte,” in La littérature narrative d’imagination. Des genres littéraires aux techniques d’expression. Colloque de Strasbourg, 23-25 avril 1959. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 55-69. Robinson, Sally. 1991. Engendering the Subject. Gender and SelfRepresentation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press. Rodríguez Garrido, José A. 1999. in Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones, Paul Firbas, Noel Luna & José Antonio Rodríguez-Garrido (Eds). Ricardo Piglia: Conversación en Princeton. Princeton: PLAS Cuadernos 2: 59-61. Accessed on 20 August 2008. Sarduy, Severo. Barroco. 1974. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana.


Schuchard, Bárbara. 2003. “Arlt-Borges-Piglia,” Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. Centro Virtual Cervantes. Accessed on 20 August 2008. Socrate, Mario. 1974. Prologhi al don Chisciotte. Padova: Marsilio. Stoopen, María. 2002. Los autores, el texto, los lectores en el Quijote de 1605. México: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM / Universidad de Guanajuato / Gobierno del Estado de Guanajuato. ––––. 2005 [2nd ed.]. Los autores, el texto, los lectores en el Quijote. México: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras / Dirección General de Publicaciones, UNAM. Wardropper, Bruce W. 1965. “Don Quixote: Story or History?,” Modern Philology LXIII (1): 1-11. Williamson, Edwin. 1991. El Quijote y los libros de caballerías. Madrid: Taurus.

Don Quixote on Belgian Staves CHRISTIAN DE PAEPE Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Campus Kortrijk

Closely linked to the vicissitudes of its literary and iconographic reception, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha also inspired a long series of musical ventures. The present article first sketches some general characteristics of this specific kind of reception of Cervantes’ masterpiece in Europe. Then, special attention is paid to Belgian composers and performers. In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and large part of the nineteenth century, the musical rendering of Cervantes’ hero runs completely parallel to the traditional interpretation of this character in the book itself. The composers single out some merry adventure, the content, action, liveliness and figuration of which give occasion to a series of cheerful arias, comical scenes and festive dances. Numerous ballets, comedies, opéras comiques and divertimenti teatrali originate in France, Italy, England and Germany. It is only at the end of the nineteenth century that Don Quixote first appears as the true main character of a musical composition in which his heroism, his tragicomedy, his utopian search for ideals and values, are interpreted musically. In other words: the romantic interpretation of the hero as a tragically tortured soul, a lonely utopian defender of social ideals, doing battle with a mocking and hostile society, only surfaces at the end of the century. From then on, Spain too for the first time enters the lists of the musical interpretation of the knight of La Mancha. Throughout the twentieth century, Don Quixote continues his musical existence in all possible ways and in all possible keys. Even though the tested and traditional paths of opera and ballet continue to be followed, many innovative creative musical compositions continuously enrich the interpretation of the hero. Some of the most remarkable are the chamber opera of Manuel de Falla, the artistic series of songs by Ravel, Ibert and others, the numerous light and serious chansons and the renowned musical L’homme de la Mancha. Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Don Quixote still gallops along the Belgian staves, in search of new musical adventures.

138 | CHRISTIAN DE PAEPE

Introduction From the moment of publication of Part I of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (Madrid, late 1604 – beginning 1605) Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s masterpiece underwent a rapid process of dissemination in the Spanish speaking territories (the Iberian Peninsula, the American New World, the southern part of the Low Countries and part of Italy) as well as in England, France, Germany and the northern part of the Low Countries; in the latter regions this rapid spread happened thanks to translations. During the second half of the seventeenth century the publication of the first illustrated editions of Don Quixote gave an enormous boost to the novel’s popularity. The Low Countries, both North and South, played a crucial role in this process of dissemination and reception. Not only did the interested public suddenly have the opportunity to vividly imagine the work’s (anti)hero during a silent personal lecture of the printed book. Now they were also able to see him in person – preferably during a cozy meeting with friends – in ingenious illustrations accompanying the text. These illustrations project the Don’s characteristic physical appearance, riding Rocinante (possibly into battle), on his own or in the company of his loyal sidekick Sancho Panza, in continuously varying surroundings and conditions, in his own or other people’s houses, in the countryside, in the city, in palaces, inns and squares, during innumerable encounters with colorful characters from all walks of life, engaged in crazy, tender or wild adventures, and which take in all of Spanish society from the beginning of the seventeenth century. Parallel with this process of artistic reception, which develops from a merely imaginative “leer al Quijote” to an actual “ver al Quijote,” a second process of artistic osmosis takes place: from “to see while reading and to read while seeing” (ver leyendo y leer viendo) to “to see while listening and to listen while seeing” (ver oyendo y oir viendo), or, in other words, to experience the wonderful adventures of the tragicomic duo of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in musical arrangements. As happens in the novel itself, Don Quixote also sets out on the most diverse journeys when it comes to his artistic reception. First, he is tied to the printed lines of the book. Less than half a century later (around 1660) he starts his second journey through

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the illustrated editions of his story. He makes a third trip while tirelessly galloping through the staves of a number of musical scores. His fourth and (for now) final journey arises during the twentieth century when first the silent (1900-1933), and later (from 1933 onwards) the talking movies take on our hero. I here want to concentrate on Don Quixote’s musical journeys. For this fantastic ride through the heavenly spheres we take place on the flying horse Clavileño, together with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, as is told in chapter XLI of the novel’s second part. High up from these heavenly spheres we are able to distinguish some of the general characteristics of these particular artistic interpretations. Throughout this endeavor special attention is paid to Belgian composers and performers. Our journey “with Don Quixote through the staves” is ordered chronologically. The Seventeenth Century: Ballet and Farce It has been claimed that as early as 1614, a year before the publication of the novel’s Segunda parte (Madrid, 1615), a certain Monsieur Santenir performed a Ballet de Don Quichotte in Paris. Whether this is true or not, the mere fact that the claim exists proves that from very early on Don Quixote is considered suitable matter for dance suites, ballet, light opera and farces. Italy takes the lead. In 1655 the Teatro Ducale in Modena performs Sancio, an anonymous drama per musica with text by Camilo Rima. In Venice in 1680 this is followed by Don Chisciotte della Mancia, with a libretto by Morosini and music by Carlo Sajón. In Germany Johann-Philipp Förtsch presents Der irrende Ritter Don Quixote de la Mancia in Hamburg in 1690. In London Henry Purcell, the grandmaster of English baroque opera, composes The comical History of Don Quixote between 1694 and 1696. The seventeenth century is characterized by the rapid and massive spread of Cervantes’ novel in English, French, German, Italian and Dutch translations. After the publication of the beautifully illustrated editions of Dordrecht (1657, Jacobus Savry) and Brussels (1662, Juan Mommarte), the European musical world starts to take an active interest in the novel. In this regard it is remarkable that Spanish composers remain completely absent here, an absence that lasts until


the beginning of the nineteenth century. These first musical journeys of Don Quixote are characterized by their exclusively comical interpretation of the hero. The titles of some of these works make this abundantly clear: comical history, muzikaal kluchtspel. This tallies completely with the idea the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had of Don Quixote. Furthermore, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in almost equal measure arouse the interest of composers. Obviously, to include the entire novel in these musical adaptations is impossible. Therefore, the composers fasten upon specific adventures or episodes that because of their content, the action portrayed, the agility and figuration of their characters, give occasion for the inclusion of cheerful and dynamic arias, festive scenes and especially dance groups. The oldest known composition from the Low Countries is ‘t Gouvernement van Sancho Pança in’t Eylandt Barataria, with libretto by Guillelmus Ignatius Kerricx and music by Alphonse d’Eve, first published in Antwerp in 1700. The text of this “musical farce” consists of a free adaptation of randomly chosen passages from chapters forty-two to fifty-three of the novel’s second part. Unfortunately, d’Eve’s score has been lost. Born in Brussels in 1666 he became music master of the Antwerp cathedral in 1718. He died there in 1727. Barely anything has been preserved in manuscript from his countless motets, masses, operas and other worldly compositions in Italian stilo galante. We can therefore only imagine d’Eve’s musical interpretation of the episode in which Sancho Panza acts as governor of the island of Barataria. The Eighteenth Century: Opéra Comique and Divertimento Teatrale In the eighteenth century Don Quixote’s textual history is, amongst other features, characterized by massive dissemination and popularization. This is mainly due to the innumerable publications and republications “de surtido” in the original Spanish as well as in translations in all major European languages. These small and practical volumes were, like pocket editions today, easy to carry around. They also featured an ever growing number of illustrations.


However, they also suffered from a decline in quality of both text and illustrations. Those adventures of the Don and his companion that are most easily visualized were depicted in endlessly repeated series of drawings, engravings and copperplates. These often served the production of tapestries, carpets, wainscotings, all sorts of decorations for drawing rooms, table-linens and cutlery. Of course they also served for illustrated text editions. Some of these comic tableaux, emotionally interesting scenes, or depictions of funny, dynamic adventures with colorful characters eventually end up on the music scene. Some recurring themes are: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza at the court of the dukes, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza at Camacho’s wedding, Don Quixote’s encounters and penance in the Sierra Morena, and Sancho Panza as governor of the island of Barataria. Once again Italy, France and Germany take the musical lead. A small enumeration of names and works pointedly illustrates the abundance and quality of the musical production concerned. In Vienna in 1719 Francesco Bartolomeo Conti creates a tragicommedia about our hero’s “desert experiences”, called Don Chisciotte in Sierra Morena. This piece was recently revived by a musical and theatrical group from the University of Salamanca, in Spain. The Venetian Antonio Caldara, who like Conti served the royal house of Austria, takes on the Quixote twice, and in rapid succession: in 1727 he delivers Don Chisciotte in corte della duchessa, followed six years later by Sancio Panza. The successful Don Chisciotte della Mancia (1769) by the master of the opera buffa, Giovanni Paisiello, in 1976 was fully revised and updated by the German composer Hans Werner Henze. Antonio Salieri, bandmaster at the imperial court of Vienna, author of numerous operas based on literary works by among others Molière, Beaumarchais, Goldoni, Torcuato Tasso, and Ben Johnson, and unfortunately better known for his alleged rivalry with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as portrayed in the success movie Amadeus (1984, Milos Forman), gave us the divertimento teatrale: Don Chisciotte alle nozze di Gamace (1770-1771). In France too there appeared music scores based on Cervantes’ novel. A few examples suffice here. In 1720 Richard Michel de Lalande’s ballet Don Quichotte is performed at the court in Versailles. In 1723 Jean-Philippe Rameau presents his opéra comique L’Endriague. Joseph Bodin de Boismortier’s ballet comique Don


Quichotte chez la Duchesse (1743), based on a libretto by choreographer and director of the Parisian Opéra Comique Charles Simon Favart, is somewhat better known (because it appeared on CD). Sancho Panza appeals to the French as well; again it is the well-known episode of his governorship of the island of Barataria that is repeatedly put to music: in 1727 by Jean Claude Gillier in Sancho Panza gouverneur, in 1762 in the opéra bouffe Sancho Panza dans son île by the famous chess player-composer François André Danican, better known as Philidor, and also by Pierre Nougaret in Sancho gouverneur of 1763. In Germany it is especially Georg Philipp Telemann that further adds to Don Quixote’s already immense popularity by producing some cheerful scores. He composed Sancio oder die siegende Grossmut as early as 1727, and followed up with Don Quichotte der Löwenritter in 1735. A quarter of a century later his most famous work Don Quichotte auf der Hochzeit des Comacho (1761) appears. It is alternately referred to as a serenata or a comical opera and these days is available on CD. Telemann himself revised the original Singspiel-libretto Basilio und Quiteria by his friend and collaborator Daniel Schiebeler. He also composed an orchestral suite consisting of the most interesting parts of his scenic divertimento. In the eighteenth century the contribution of Belgian composers to the “matter of Don Quixote” is limited to the opera Basile ou A trompeur trompeur et demi by the composer André-Modeste Grétry (Liège 1741 - Montmorency [near Paris] 1813). This one-act play, with text by Michel Jean Sedaine, was first performed in the Comédie Italienne in Paris on 17 October 1792, year I of the new French revolutionary calendar. The opera was only moderately successful and was removed from the bill after a few performances. Today it is almost completely forgotten. Autographical fragments have been preserved in two places in Belgium. The department of musicology in the Brussels Royal Library holds a total of ten double handwritten sheets with four numbered subdivisions. The Musée Grétry in Liège holds the complete overture and ten more sheets containing some passages. The libretto is an extremely free adaptation of that traditionally exquisite episode from the novel’s second part, the wedding of the rich Camacho. In this episode the rejected poor pretender Basilio manages to regain his beloved by using a ruse.


The two Belgian composers mentioned earlier, that is to say: Alphonse D’Eve in the seventeenth and André-Modeste Grétry in the eighteenth century, then, firmly nestle themselves within the best European musical tradition involving the figure of Don Quixote with their ‘t Gouvernement van Sancho Pança in’t Eylandt Barataria and Basile ou A trompeur trompeur et demi: colorful, festive episodes, a comical or light-hearted interpretation of the heroes, musical genres, dance, farce and opéra comique. The Nineteenth Century: Don Quixote as Romantic Hero Romanticism renews the ways in which Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are interpreted. Behind his purely amusing characteristics and underneath the visible aspects of his crazy adventures a complicated character is hidden. The Romantic reading constructs Don Quixote as a hero with a double meaning who shows the depths of his true self only through the filter of irony. The seemingly comic, wandering knight is in fact a tragically tormented hero, an always already defeated champion of impossible personal and universal humane, noble and social ideals; he is now considered the utopian lonely savior of an indifferent, mocking and even hostile society. Furthermore, Don Quixote is often constructed as the incarnation of the typically Spanish spirit. The influence of this new interpretation of Cervantes’ profoundly humane epic story does not immediately manifest itself in musical compositions at the beginning of the nineteenth century. On the contrary, initially it seems as if the composers want to play Don Quixote’s possibilities for anecdotal drollery for all they are worth. Consider for example titles such as Le petit Don Quichotte (1807) and La famille de Don Quichotte (Brazier, 1811). In line with the eighteenth-century tradition of the ballet suite, the divertimento musicale and the opéra comique, lighter genres such as the vaudeville and light opera take on the hero during the nineteenth century. Jacques Offenbach’s farcical parody Don Quichotte (1875) is a striking example. The light-hearted operetta Mademoiselle Don Quichotte by the famous Parisian organist Paul Pierné is, at the beginning of the


twentieth century, a late result of this early and exclusively comical vein of interpretation. While traditional episodes such as that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza at the Wedding of Camacho remain popular favorites (as in Saverio Mercadante’s Le Nozze di Camacho, 1825), they are also gradually subjected to a different, and more Romantic interpretation. In this regard the opera Die Hochzeit des Camacho by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy is an interesting example. Mendelssohn wrote this piece in 1824-25, when he was barely sixteen years old. It was first performed in 1827, with little success. The two act opera tells the famous story of the final triumph of Basilio, initially rejected as Quiteria’s lover, and therefore unhappy, over Camacho, his rival. The strong emphasis on the underlying social satire is remarkable; the true contrast between the two pretenders is economic. While Basilio has been rejected by Quiteria’s family because he is poor, Camacho has been chosen because he is rich. Don Quixote interferes, and in the battle between love and wealth champions the true lovers. The festive ballet at the beginning of the second act intensifies the contrast between rich and poor in a symbolic duel between the power of money and that of love. The text reads: “Liebe ist allmächtig. Liebe siegt in jedem Streit.” In the final chorus Don Quixote sings: “Die Liebe ist ein Krieg… Der Himmel ist gerecht und gnädig: er kämpfte mit und für den Armen. So sind Basilio und Quiteria vereint!” The heroic defender of the truly humane values closes the piece: “Lebet wohl, nun ist mein Werk vollbracht,” thus citing Christ’s final words on the cross. In the nineteenth century the (predominantly French) tradition of dance and ballet surrounding the figure of Don Quixote continues in full force. An example in case is Les Noces de Gamache by Louis Jacques Milon with music by E.C. Lefebvre, presented in the Opéra de Paris in 1801. As far as ballet music goes Russia gradually takes charge. Several French dancers and choreographers work at the imperial theatres in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg during the second half of the century. The most remarkable and most popular creation in this regard is certainly Don Quixote by the French-Russian ballet master, choreographer and dance star Marius Petipa; the piece’s original score was composed by the Austrian Ludwig Minkus, who was the official ballet composer and conductor at the Russian Imperial


Theatre. This piece once again tells the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza at Camacho’s wedding in a splendid mix of typically Spanish rhythms, refined French dance techniques and compelling Russian melodies. It was first performed at the Bolshoi in Moscow on 14 December 1869. The piece was enormously successful and quickly travelled to Saint-Petersburg and thence to Paris, where it also received applause. It continues to be performed all over the world. Recently, it featured with both the Royal Ballet of Wallonia and the Ballet of Flanders (in a choreography by the Russian political refugee Rudolf Nureyev). In the Don Quixote commemorative year 2005 young dancers at the ballet schools and academies in Belgium thus exercised their classic dance steps to the music of Minkus’ Don Quixote. We have to wait until the end of the nineteenth century before Don Quixote appears as the actual protagonist in a musical composition. During the whole of the seventeenth, eighteenth and the better part of the nineteenth centuries he was considered merely an occasion for drollery, a coincidental, anecdotic or funny presence, a second-class person in the background, or simply an interesting literary pretext in libretto’s and scores in which others play the actual principal part(s). His own heroic character, his tragicomic actions and adventures, his utopian quest for ideal love and his fight for real human values – in other words everything that made him such an intriguing figure for the Romantics – find their way only very late onto the musical stage. One of the very first composers who takes part in this new musical take on the matter is the Russian conductor and pianist Anton Rubinstein in his Don Quixote (1870). This piece is a fantasia for symphonic orchestra in which the epic hero’s dreams of being a knight, some of his strange adventures, his love for Dulcinea, and finally his death are set to music. The piece appealed to Rubinstein’s pupil Peter Tchaikovsky to such an extent that the latter successfully transcribed it for piano quatre-mains only one year later. In 1897 two composers in the Wagnerian tradition independently from each other produced a Don Quixote: the Austrian Wilhelm Kienzl and the German Richard Strauss. In line with Wagner’s Tannhäuser Kienzl’s is a three act opera in which both grave and amusing adventures of the hero are sung together in a mix of vague medieval mysticism, late Romantic lyric and modernist esotericism. The opera’s climax comes


with Don Quixote’s dramatic death. The elaborate subtitle of Richard Strauss’ Don Quixote: Fantastische Variationen über ein Thema ritterlichen Charakters accounts for both the design and the form of his symphonic poem, which he preferred to refer to as a Tondichtung – a “musical poem”. Strauss chose ten episodes from the novel which he freely transposed into the classic musical form of the theme with variations, preceded by a long introduction and concluded by a finale. Epic adventures such as Don Quixote’s fight with the windmills, with a flock of sheep, with pilgrims or with monks, or the journey on the flying horse alternate with dramatic parts, such as Don Quixote’s final encounter with the Knight of the Mirrors or his death throes. Or they alternate with markedly lyrical passages such as the hero’s endearment with Dulcinea or his conversations with Sancho Panza. Richard Strauss uses the Wagnerian technique of the leitmotiv and, as in a double concerto, two string instruments represent the two protagonists: a cello stands for Don Quixote and a viola for Sancho Panza. Although this “knight’s life” tends to be somewhat on the heavy side, and although in all its abundance it may not be readily accessible to all, it still remains the musical highlight of the Romantic orchestral interpretation of the figure of Don Quixote. Within the domain of the music theatre the (late) Romantic score par excellence is the opera Don Quichotte, a comédie héroïque in five parts, by the French composer Jules Massenet. With this piece Massenet managed to briefly revive the flagging Romantic tradition in 1910. Henri Cain’s libretto is based on the theatrical adaptation by Jacques Le Lorrain, Le chevalier de la longue figure (1904). Apart from the presence of the protagonists Don Quixote, Sancho Panza and Dulcinea, and of the windmill episode, this piece is only very loosely connected to Cervantes’ novel. Dulcinea is given a very important part. Don Quixote himself strongly resembles a Christian savior of humankind or an enlightened Apostle whose benevolence remains unrewarded and ultimately leads to death. This interpretation is completely in line with the symbolism and the humanitarian socialism prevalent at the beginning of the twentieth century. Massenet emphasizes the hero’s tragic-heroic side in a series of moving arias as when Don Quixote’s does battle with the windmills, or at his death scene. This way this otherwise rather sluggish and sometimes even boring opera does manage to reach some highlights. After its initial


premieres in Monte Carlo and Paris on 19 February 1910, Massenet’s opera was performed in the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels by the Opéra Princier de Son Altesse le Prince de Monaco on 14 and 17 May 1910. The world-famous bass baritone Feodor Chaliapin, who had created Moussorgsky’s Boris Goudonov two years earlier, took the principal part. He also played the part of Don Quixote in the 1933 film version of Cervantes’ novel made by Georg Wilhelm Pabst. Two details are worth mentioning here: the French-language version of this movie was done by the Belgian Fernand Crommelynck and was first shown in the movie theatre Métropole in Brussels on 16 March 1933. Jules Massenet’s opera, with its late Romantic tragic-heroic reception of the Don Quixote character, continues to feature in the classical musical repertory. Some of the opera’s relatively recent reprises and recordings star the Belgian baritone José Van Dam as Don Quixote and Teresa Berganza as Dulcinea. Only at the beginning of the nineteenth century do Spanish composers start to show an interest in their very own classic literary hero. The first scores rather predictably belong to the light comic genre. The pioneer appears to have been Manuel García who first put on his opera Don Chisciotte, probably in New York, in 1826-1828. This nowadays nearly forgotten but in his own time famous Seville tenor, composer and guitar-player used some passages from Cervantes’ novel’s first part for an opera buffa in two acts fully in line with the eighteenth-century tradition: confusing love plots with swift and numerous changes of characters and scenes, facetious arias and a happy end thanks to Don Quixote’s intervention. The manuscript, supposedly lost, has recently been recovered, and for Don Quixote’s four-hundredth birthday in 2005 it was reworked by Juan de Udaeta. In Spain there is an explosion of zarzuelas, sainetes, comedias líricas, light operas, arias and dance music surrounding the figure and the adventurous of Don Quixote from the eighteen sixties onwards. Some randomly chosen examples may serve as illustration: Francisco Asenjo Barbieri (a few numbers in Ventura de la Vega’s tragedy Don Quijote en Sierra Morena, 1861); Ruperto Chapi (the orchestral scherzo El combate de Don Quijote con las ovejas, 1863); Antonio Reparaz (Las Bodas de Camacho, 1866, and La venta encantada, text by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, 1871): Luís Arnedo (En un lugar de la Mancha, 1887); Miguel Santonja (La nieta de Don Quijote, 1896),


etcetera. The list is long. In the commemorative year 2005 Ruperto Chapi’s zarzuela La venta de Don Quijote (1902), after a libretto by Carlos Fernandez Shaw, was given a billing again for the Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid. In 1871 Spanish America too starts taking part in Don Quixote’s musical journeys for the first time: Miguel Planas puts on his Don Quijote en la venta encantada in the Teatro Principal de México. It may seem strange but the nineteenth century, with its romanticidealistic and later on more dramatic-realistic interpretation of Cervantes’ hero, has left hardly any musical traces in Belgium. Concrete information or documents regarding originally Belgian musical compositions or regarding performances of operas, zarzuelas, ballets or songs by foreign composers in the country’s opera houses and musical theatres are extremely scarce. Still, occasionally sometimes something does turn up. For example the anonymous song “ten behoeve der noodlijdenden” (for the sake of the needy): De lotgevallen van don Quichot, Ridder de La Mancha (The Adventures of Don Quixote, Knight of La Mancha), composed for the Carnival parade in Wetteren, a small town in the vicinity of Ghent in the province of East Flanders, in February of the year 1856. Once in a while other works by Miguel Cervantes turn up in musical versions, though. For instance, an adaptation of La Gitanilla, one of the Novelas ejemplares, ran in the Royal Dutch Theatre in Antwerp from October to December 1890. Preciose of het Spaansch Heidinnetje is a lyric theatrical adaptation, in Dutch, in four acts and five scenes by G. Hogguer of the German Preziosa (1820-1821) with text by Pius Alexander Wolff and music by Carl Maria von Weber (1820-1821). Numance (1895) is an opera in four acts by the Belgian composer Jean-Baptiste van den Eeden (Ghent 1842 - Mons 1917), based on Cervantes’ play Numancia. This piece, with text by the French librettist Michel Carré Jr., was first performed in Antwerp in 1898. Unfortunately its score, and all concomitant documents, are presently unavailable.


The Twentieth Century: Any Way, Any Key The twentieth-century musical repertory, in Spain as well as elsewhere, is uncommonly rich in scores which are, in some way or other, connected to Miguel de Cervantes’ masterpiece. On the one hand, composers continue to rely on some tried and tested traditional genres from previous centuries, such as ballet and dance suites, (tragi)comic or epic-dramatic operas, airy zarzuelas or parodic light operas. On the other hand, modernizing musical interpretations occur as well. Belgian composers also took part in this enriching creative process. A small sample of names and works will have to suffice to illustrate the abundance and variety of these compositions. Whereas the Spanish were both late and slow in taking part in the process of musical interpretation of their national hero, they nonetheless play a major role in introducing new elements and avenues of interpretation at the beginning of the twentieth century. Jesús Guridi’s 1915 Una aventura de Don Quijote remains indebted to Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss. At the beginning of the nineteen twenties, though, both Oscar Esplá with Don Quijote velando las armas (1924) and Manuel de Falla with El retablo de Maese Pedro finally bring some highly original musical adaptations of some of the more famous episodes from the Quixote. For his comic one act chamber opera Manuel de Falla wrote a libretto with close reference to the original text of the story about Master Pedro’s puppet theatre (chapters XXV-XXVI in Part II of the Quixote). This brief opera was created in 1923, first in Seville in a “concertante” version (March 21) and shortly thereafter (June 25) in its definitive, completely scenic puppet show version in the Parisian salons of the Princesse de Polignac, in the presence of among others Picasso and Stravinsky. Although the theatrical tradition, with its staging of an episode in which Don Quixote himself appears, certainly stems from the previous centuries, De Falla’s profound loyalty to the original text, his personal tragic-comic interpretation of the figure of the hero, and most of all his musical language are radically new. In 1950 the Flemish author Gerard Walschap made a Dutch translation of Falla’s libretto for a series of performances of De Poppenkast van Meester Petrus by the famous Malines Puppet theatre. The Theater De Maan, successor to the Malines theatre, still preserves the puppets used then:


Charlemagne, Gaiferos, Melisendra, Roeland, Marsilio, the amorous Moor, the executioner, soldiers… The roles of Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, Master Petrus and the narrator were played by living actors. The very same company performed the musical piece in both a Dutch and a French version. Following Esplá and Falla almost all twentieth-century Spanish composers of note devoted a piece, however modest, to the Quixote theme. In the nineteen thirties and forties the brothers Halffter are most important: Ernesto writes Don Quijote de la Mancha and (Serenata a) Dulcinea (1944), Rodolfo produces Tres Epitafios (19471953) for Don Quixote, Dulcinea and Sancho Panza respectively. Their nephew, Cristóbal Halffter, will also repeatedly return to the theme in his pioneering oeuvre, for example in his La del alba sería (1996) for choir and orchestra and especially in 2000 in his worldfamous opera cantata Don Quijote. In Andrés Amorós’ libretto not only the superhero and his creator Cervantes make an appearance, but other Spanish authors, such as Jorge Manrique, Saint John of the Cross, Pedro Salinas, and Antonio Machado are present as well. In fact, the work revolves around the existential tension between freedom and bondage, art and life, fantasy and reality, originality and mass culture, life and death. The book, each book, provides the ideal space for imagination and freedom. With regard to the post-war years an endless list of composers should be mentioned, but some striking examples will have to suffice: Salvador Bacarisse and his Soneto a Dulcinea de El Toboso for soprano and piano (1947), Robert Gerhard (numerous works for orchestra, theatre, dance), Gerardo Gombau (his work has the same title as Esplá’s, Don Quijote velando armas, 1945), Joaquín Rodrigo (Ausencias de Dulcinea, 1947-48) and Jesús García Leoz (with the opera Barataria, 1953). In the nineteen eighties Antonio Ruiz-Pipó wrote El testamento de don Quijote for baritone, tenor and orchestra while Antón García Abril composed the original score for the British movie Monsignor Quixote after Graham Greene’s novel (1985) of the same name. More recent examples worth mentioning are Miguel Franco with Tres madrigales del Quijote (1999) for mixed choir a cappella, José Luis Turina with his pioneering “ópera cibernética” D.Q. Don Quijote en Barcelona (performed by La Fura dels Baus in Barcelona in 2000), Miguel Angel Aparicio (Pasajes del Quijote,


2004, for choir and orchestra) and Alfonso Ortega (Romance a Alonso Quijano for soprano, flute, cello and piano, 2004). In the commemorative year 2005 Don Quixote’s home country saw the creation of many more musical productions based on Cervantes’ masterpiece. Outside of Spain the Quixote theme underwent a radical renewal during the twentieth century, and gave rise to quite remarkable compositions. The first thrust issued mainly, though not exclusively, from France. Jacques Ibert and Maurice Ravel played major parts in this process. While Ibert wrote his Sarabande pour Dulcinée as early as 1921, the most important years in this musical success story are 1932-33. In preparation for the English-French co-production of his full-length movie Don Quichotte (1933) the German movie maker Georg Pabst had organized a kind of secret contest among a few composers. The assignment consisted of composing a series of songs specifically adapted to the vocal characteristics and heroic character of the protagonist, who would be interpreted by the great Russian bassbaritone Feodor Chaliapin, whom we have previously mentioned as the Don Quixote in Massenet’s opera of the same name. The composers Marcel Delannoy, Darius Milhaud, Manuel de Falla, Maurice Ravel and Jacques Ibert were all approached. Some, like De Falla, did not respond. Ravel’s contribution was late. Eventually Ibert’s Quatre chansons de Don Quichotte were preferred to Ravel’s series of three songs from Don Quichotte à Dulcinée. For his series of songs Jacques Ibert selected a sonnet by Ronsard (Chanson du départ. Ce château neuf, ce nouvel édifice…) and three poems by Alexandre Arnoux (Chanson à Dulcinée, Chanson du Duc and Chanson de la mort). This last song is especially moving and beautifully voices the dying hero’s entire life’s tragedy (“l’étrange sort du pauvre Don Quichotte”). Until his dying day he continues to dream about a utopian and future hereafter on a far island “où tout est pur et sans mensonges”. The literary status of Cervantes’ hero is also definitively settled: “Si tous les livres m’ont tué / il suffit d’un pour que je vive…” For his three songs in honor of Dulcinea Maurice Ravel used texts by the diplomat, and globetrotter of French literature, Paul Morand. The first two songs (Chanson romanesque and Chanson épique) are in line with the character’s Romantic religious interpretation. The Chanson à boire on the other hand is conceptually


closer to the apocryphal Quixote of Avellaneda than to that of Cervantes. The song bears close resemblance to the book’s comic reading as was common in the eighteenth-century opéra comique or in the vaudevilles and zarzuelas of the second half of the nineteenth century. Each of the three songs is based on a specifically Spanish dance rhythm. Although the genre of the musical “song”, which was chiefly developed by Ibert and Ravel for the Quixote competition, will be imitated many times in the twentieth century, it also evolves from an academic classical song into a popular cabaret song. I previously mentioned the Soneto a Dulcinea de El Toboso by Salvador Bacarisse (1947) and Tres madrigales del Quijote by Miguel Franco (1999) with texts from the original Quixote. Other verses by other poets are put to music as well, for example the Letanía a Nuestro Señor Don Quijote by Rubén Darío, used by both Rayner Brown and Carlos Echeverría Alonso (both in 1995). Joan Manuel Serrat perfectly illustrates the transition in the musical use of literary texts from the classical “song” to the more popular and personal “chanson”. For example, Serrat sings the poem Vencidos by León Felipe: the story of the defeated hero is successively “invented” and “composed” by the poet Felipe and the composer Serrat as a parable of their own lives. The real chansonniers then rapidly take to the stage both in Spain and elsewhere: Julio Iglesias with Quijote (1982) (“Soy de aquellos que sueñan con la libertad…”), Pierre Perret and Claude Nougaro, both with Don Quichotte et Sancho (Pança), in 1995 and 1997 respectively. Rock bands have taken on our hero as well, for example the Madrid band Mago de Öz with La leyenda de la Mancha. In South-America, finally, Don Quixote joins the pacifistic movements (for example in Don Quijote de barba y gabán by the Argentinian band Alma y Vida). The broad public’s knowledge of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha is traditionally limited to a small number of funny adventures from children’s books or youth encyclopedias. More recently, some comic book figures have been inspired upon Don Quixote as well. Still, in Belgium Don Quixote is certainly best known via L’Homme de la Mancha, Jacques Brel’s French adaptation of the originally American musical Man of La Mancha. Mitch Leigh wrote the music to a libretto by Dale Wasserman with song lyrics by Joe Darion. The work was first performed in the ANTA Washington


Square Theatre in New York on 22 November 1965. It featured on Broadway uninterruptedly for six years, won numerous awards, and travelled all over the world, being performed in more than fifty countries. It was adapted or translated into more than thirty languages. In our country its circulation is exclusively due to Jacques Brel. He is it that made a French version of the originally English text and who completely rewrote the songs’ lyrics. Brel himself played the main part of the double-character of Miguel de Cervantes and Don Quixote from the musical’s first run in the Brussels Théâtre de la Monnaie on 4 October 1968 until 17 May 1969 when, worn out by illness and effort, he was forced to withdraw. In the mean time, after about thirty performances in Brussels, the musical had moved to the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, where about another hundred and fifty performances followed. The musical became a real classic, and continues to be a success both in Belgium and abroad. Brel’s original French version was, for example, performed a few years ago by the Opéra Royal de Wallonie with José Van Dam in the protagonist’s role; the Dutch translation was staged by the Royal Ballet of Flanders. In the commemorative Don Quixote year of 2005 a number of theatre, music and ballet companies put the musical back on stage. Still, Brel is not the only Belgian to have made Don Quixote walk the staves during the twentieth century. The Brussels composer, violinist and conductor Théo Dejoncker (1894-1964) wrote an original orchestral piece for wind instruments, strings, percussion and piano, Don Quichotte rêve / Don Quichotte droomt in the nineteen thirties (1934?). Midway through the century Antwerp’s August Verbesselt (1919) composed a quartet for flute, clarinet, bassoon and violin for the open air performances by the Koninklijke Nederlandse Schouwburg (K.N.S.) of Pieter Lagendijk’s farce Don Quichotte op de Bruiloft van Kamacho (Don Quixote at Camacho’s Wedding) in an adaptation by Hugo Weymans. In the summer of 1992 the Instituut voor het Archeologisch Patrimonium van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap (Flemish Archeological Institute) organised an open air spectacle in the archaeological park of the old abbey of Ename, near Oudenaarde, in East Flanders. Under the title Don Quichot: een rit naar het verleden (Don Quixote: A Ride into the Past) it evoked the history of the site in the Spanish era under the tutelage of Cervantes’ hero. For


this popular festival the original music for small choir, wind instruments and percussion was composed by Johan De Smet. Finally, 2005 saw the creation of Cuadro cervantino by Lucien Goethals. This Flemish composer (Ghent, 1931-2006) grew up and studied in Argentina until he was fifteen years old, and thus was mainly raised in Spanish. It is not surprising, then, that in his long musical career he has set a lot of Spanish poetry to music, using texts by amongst others Rubén Darío, Lope de Vega, Frederico García Lorca en Ricardo Güiraldes. A considerable part of his oeuvre carries Spanish titles as well. He considers himself a fierce reader of the adventures of the wandering knight and he has been contemplating composing an opera about Don Quixote: On average not a week goes by without me taking up the novel, reading a fragment and meditating about it. My deepest wish is to compose an opera about the subject. Until now fate has prevented this from happening, numerous elements outside of my control have played a part herein. A few years ago the poet Stefaan van den Bremt has written me a libretto in Spanish after the original text by Cervantes. Hoping a commission will appear I have meanwhile used the fourth tableau from the libretto to compose a chamber music version for five singers and grand ensemble. This has become Cuadro cervantino. The tableau is about the meeting of Don Quixote and his illustrious aide Sancho Panza with the Duke and Duchess Altisidora, who have already read the first part of our heroes’ adventures and want to have some fun. The Knight with the Sad Countenance and his companion are invited to the castle of the duke… (Source: Program of the first performance of the Cuadro cervantino, Vlaamse Opera, 2005.)

The Cuadro cervantino by Lucien Goethals for the time being is the last original ride of Don Quixote on Belgian staves. Translated from the Dutch by An Goris


Bibliography Alvar, Carlos (Ed.). 2005. Gran Enciclopedia Cervantina (3 vols). Madrid: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, Castalia. Lolo, Begoña (Ed.). 2007. Cervantes y el Quijote en la música. Estudios sobre la recepción de un mito. Madrid: Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, Centro de Estudios Cervantinos. Discography Asenjo Barbieri, Francisco; Gombau, Gerardo; Rodrigo, Joaquín et al. Don Quixote in Spanish Music. Naxos. CD 8.570.260. Brel, Jacques. L'Homme de la Mancha. Barclay. CD BA 900 839.5862. Falla, Manuel de. El Retablo de Maese Pedro. Naxos. CD 8.553.499. Massenet, Jules. Don Quichotte. EMI Classics. CD 754.767 2 Mendelssohn, Felix. Die Hochzeit des Camacho. Channel Classics. CD CCS 5593 Minkus, Ludwig. Don Quixote. Naxos. CD 8.557.065-66 Ravel, Maurice. Don Quichotte à Dulcinée. / Ibert, Jacques. Quatre Chansons de Don Quichotte. Virgin Classics. CD 7243 56.1850 29. Strauss, Richard. Don Quixote. EBS. CD 6072. Telemann, Georg Philipp. Don Quichotte auf der Hochzeit des Camacho. CPO. CD 999.210-2.

Don Quixote in the Netherlands: Translations and Adaptations of Cervantes’ Novel HENDRIK VAN GORP Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

In this article six (nearly) complete Dutch translations of Cervantes’ Don Quixote are studied against the background of their historical contexts. These translations, spanning a period of 350 years, in a remarkable way reflect different visions of the narrative protagonists in European literary history. Whereas in the first translations/adaptations the character of Don Quixote is, to a large extent, a ridiculous fool or idiot with whom the reader can amuse himself, he becomes some sort of freedom fighter or romantic hero in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century translations. We have to wait until the twentieth century though, and the two most recent translations, for the character of Don Quixote to recover the full complexity and ambiguity of the Spanish original, i.e. of “wise craziness and crazy wisdom” as it was so pithily phrased in the introduction to the first translation of 1657.

In chapter 3 of the second part of El ingenioso cavallero Don Quixote de la Mancha (Madrid, 1615) the success of the first part of Cervantes’ novel (Madrid, 1605, editio princeps) is referred to in a dialogue between the licentiate Sanson Carrasco and the protagonist himself. The latter is surprised to hear that his adventures have been described in a book and wants more information about it by asking “Is it true, then, that there is a book about me and that it was some Moorish sage who composed it?” Sanson’s answer is beyond all doubt: “By way of showing you how true it is, I may tell you that it is my belief that there are in existence today more than twelve thousand copies of that history. If you do not believe me, you have but to make inquiries in Portugal, Barcelona, and Valencia, where editions have been brought out, and there is even a report to the effect that one edition was printed at Antwerp. In short, I feel certain that there will

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soon not be a nation that does not know it or a language into which it has not been translated” (1949: 526). The passage about Antwerp in this answer may be not factually correct at all, but it does indicate the presence of the Netherlands in the literary discussions of the time. This is hardly surprising, as Spain and the Netherlands, and more specifically Flanders, had a lot of “contacts” in the beginning of the seventeenth century. Spanish editions of the two Parts of the Quixote were printed very early in Brussels in 1607 (by Roger Velpius), 1611 (by Roger Velpius and Huberto Antonio), 1616 (Second Part by Huberto Antonio), 1617 (First and Second Part by Velpius and Antonio). These were important editions in the history of Cervantes’ novel, since the earliest translations into English, French and Italian are based on them. Also later on in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the importance of “Flemish” and Dutch editions is remarkable. Among other things, they include the first illustrated editions, in translation (1657, Dordrecht, by Jacob Savry) as well as in Spanish (1662, Brussels, by Jean Mommaert, and 1670, 1672/73, 1697, 1719 and 1770 by Verdussen in Antwerp) (see De Paepe 2006). Especially in the Southern Netherlands, with its folklore tradition of Breughel and Teniers, many artists tried to portray in book illustrations and in tapestries the burlesque figures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, who played an important role in the iconography of Don Quixote. However, as far as translated versions of Cervantes’ novel are concerned, Flanders and Holland remained behind (see Arents, 1962: VII-VIII). The first translations of Don Quixote into English, French, German and Italian are to be situated between 1612 (Thomas Shelton), 1614 (César Oudin), 1621 (Pahsch Basteln von der Sohle, partially) and 1622 (Lorenzo Franciosini Fiorentini) respectively. For the first Dutch translation we have to wait until 1657. And even after that the translating activity is not enormous: one (strongly reduced) version in 1746 by Jacob Campo Weyerman, two nineteenth-century translations by Pieter van Woensel (1802) and C.L. Schuller tot Peursum (1855) and finally two translations in the twentieth century, by J.W.F. Weremeus Buning and C.F.A. van Dam (1941) and Barber van de Pol (1997). It is worth noting that in that whole period of four centuries not one single complete translation of the Quixote by a Flemish translator can be registered! In the following pages I want to comment

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on this translation activity by describing and characterizing the abovementioned translations against the background of the respective literary and cultural environments. As we have just pointed out, the first Dutch translation of Don Quixote dates only from 1657. Before, some other works by Cervantes had been translated, among them a few short stories from the Novelas ejemplares (1613). Jacob Cats e.g. made an adaptation of “La Gitanilla” under the title “Seltsaem Trou-geval tvsschen een Spaens Edelman, ende een Heydinne” (Dordrecht 1637), but he thought that it was the work of a certain Doctor Potzzo (mediated translation via an Italian one). Six years later Mattheus Ganzneb Tengnagel made a stage adaptation of the same “novella”, in all probability via a French translation, and called it “Leven van Konstance: Waer af volgt het Toneelspel, De Spaensche Heidin”. In that same year 1643 Felix van Sambix published his translations of (French versions of), again, “La Gitanilla” (Het Schoone Heydinnetje), “El celoso extremeño” (Den Ialoerssen Carrizale) and “La illustre fregona” (De Doorlvchtige Dienstmaegt). In 1650 the same author translated four other novelas, without even mentioning Cervantes’ name, i.e. “La señora Cornelia” (Mevrouw Cornelia), “La fuerza de la Sangre” (De kracht van het bloed), “El amante liberal” (De edelmoedige minnaar) and “Las dos doncellas” (De twee jonkvrouwen). Further Dutch versions of the novelas ejemplares followed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But not Cervantes’ masterpiece, Don Quixote de la Mancha. We have to wait until 1653 to see some passages from Don Quixote published in Dutch by Hendryk J. Takama in his Vyf Nieuwicheen. Uyt die van d’Heer Michiel Servantes van Saveedra. Uyt het Frans verduytst (Amsterdam, Gerrit van Goedesberg). As the full Dutch title shows, the author had Cervantes’ exemplary novels in mind, of which he translated “Rinconete y Cortadillo,” “La fuerza de la sangre” and “La señora Cornelia”. The Quixote passages concern, among others, chapters 33 to 35 of Part I, i.e. the embedded “novella” of the “Curioso impertinente”. This last tale harmonized very well with the other stories. To sum up: until the fifties of the seventeenth century Cervantes was only known in the Netherlands as the author of (dramatizations of) the Novelas ejemplares. This changed in 1657 when the first complete translation of his Don Quixote appeared.


The first Dutch translator of Don Quixote was Lambert van (den) Bos (1620-1698), who originated, as so many intellectuals of the Northern Provinces at that time, from the Southern Netherlands. After having practised the profession of an apothecary in Amsterdam, he moved to Dordrecht where he became the “conrector” of the “illustrious school” (former Latin School). Although he had already written and translated a lot of works during his stay in Amsterdam, it was the Dordrecht period that was crucial for his literary activities. He turned out to be a very erudite and versatile author who translated from Latin and Greek as well as from English, Italian and Spanish. His Den Verstandigen Vroomen Ridder, Don Quichot de la Mancha. Geschreven door Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Dordrecht, J. Savry, 1657), is translated, as the subtitle mentions, from the Spanish language into Dutch (“En nu uyt de Spaensche in onse Nederlantsche tale overgeset”), but given his knowledge of English and Italian he may have used also the existing English and Italian translations (cf. supra). However, it is a remarkable piece of work in which he could show his literary talents as well as his fascination with courtly life and heroes (see van Vliet & de Niet, 1995: 15). As far as the macrostructure of the novel is concerned, Van Bos’ translation is rather integral. Apart from the omission of the original dedications and poems at the beginning, and some chapter rearrangements (responsibility of the printer/editor?) he made an effort to translate the whole novel, although the original is not averse to verbosity. Yet he left out here and there a few passages concerning exotic concepts or habits, as was usual in a time characterized by belles infidèles (see Davids 1918: 79). Van Bos’ translation, thus, stands out more for its empathy than for its accuracy or adequacy. Yet, it is, in the context of its time, a valuable and for scholars still readable translation, which has been appreciated by most critics (see Lechner 1995: 44 and Roose 1948). It is, at the same time, a remarkable translation as far as its success and its illustrations are concerned. It was reprinted until 1732 no less than seven times, together with two title prints (see Arents 1962: XII-XIII). And the illustrations by Jacobus Savry, also originating from Flanders, have been found back in many French editions published later on in Brussels. That same Savry summarized in a masterly way in his dedication to Pieter de Sondt Cervantes’ novel as “wijse sotheydt, en sotte wijsheyt” (wise craziness and crazy


wisdom), thus stressing the Erasmian combination of stupidity and wisdom in the figure of the protagonist, especially when one compares his adventures to his discourses. It anticipates already the later, nineteenth-century romantic vision of Cervantes’ hero (e.g. Schuller tot Peursum’s translation of 1855), influenced by the German translation of Ludwig Tieck and the comments by other pre-romantics (see Lechner 1995: 43). But forewords, often written with commercial intentions, don’t always give an accurate reflection of the texts they pretend to characterize. So Lambert van den Bos’ translation entered literary history at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century as an entertaining story about the burlesque-heroic adventures of an anti-hero which the readers were acquainted with from the aforementioned book illustrations and the many comic stage adaptations of individual episodes (such as the famous fight against the windmills). One of the best-known of these comedies is Pieter Langendijk’s Don Quichot op de bruiloft van Kamacho (1712), based on chapters 19-21 from the second part of the novel. The burlesque character of Don Quixote warned its Dutch readers, as the original had done in Spain, against the “disease” of reading heroic novels that prevented them from distinguishing between fiction and reality, as Justus van Effen commented upon the novel in Le Misanthrope (December 26, 1712). What about the further translations of Don Quixote in the Netherlands? A year before the sixth edition of Lambert van den Bos’ Verstandigen, Vroomen Ridder, a Dutch translation (Utrecht 1706) of Avellaneda’s apocryphal adventures of Don Quixote had been published to entertain the reader (“om derzelver geestigheid voor de eerste maal in ‘t nederduits gebracht”). Reprints in 1718 (Amsterdam) and 1725 (Deventer), together with a seventh (and last) edition (1732) of Van den Bos prove that the hidalgo of La Mancha had become rather successful in the Netherlands. Possibly it was the prospect of (commercial) success that motivated the new translation (“version” or “adaptation” might be a more appropriate term) of Cervantes’ novel, in 1746 by Jacob Campo Weyerman. Being in prison at that time, Weyerman was asked by the Hague editor Pieter de Hondt to translate a French abridged version of Don Quixote into Dutch. It was published under the relevant title De Voornaamste Gevallen van den Wonderlyken Don Quichot… Beschreeven Op Een’ Vryen En


Vrolyken Trant (The most important adventures of the strange Don Quixote …described in a free and pleasant way). With the commercial note: “Alles volgens het Oirspronklyk Spaansch.” The text provides a random anthology of adventures accompanied by 31 copperplates that were made from famous paintings by Coypel (“door Den Beroemden Picart den Romein, En andere voornaame Meesters, in XXXI. Kunstplaaten, na de Uitmuntende Schilderyen van Coypel, in ‘t Koper Gebragt”). The poetical subscripts and the prose comments by Weyerman, thus, don’t give the impression of a (hi)story at all, but rather of a superficial and satirical picture book of episodes, pointing at contemporary situations and habits at the cost of Cervantes’ novel as a whole (see Altena 1997: 22). Nevertheless, some passages of the Spanish novel by Cervantes were translated literally, which indicates that for his version he not only had those copperplates in front of him, but also the original novel by Cervantes and/or a French translation. Anyhow, in the genealogy of Dutch translations of Don Quixote Weyerman’s version remains a would-be humoristic intermezzo, characterized by trivial observations and satirical comments, whereas the copperplates (most of them inspired by the “more courtly” second part) are typical examples of French Rococo tastes (see Horst 1995: 21). Important for this edition is, however, the biography of Cervantes with which it is enriched (“met… het Leeven van M. de Cervantes Saavedra verrykt”). It shows Weyerman’s admiration for Cervantes, whose realism, wisdom and irony he praises. Whereas the general drift of Weyerman’s version bears witness to his own satirical works, the following abridged and illustrated translation/adaptation by the physician Pieter van Woensel (17471808), i.e. De ridder Don Quichot van Mancha, beschreeven door Miguel de Cervantes de Saavedra (‘s-Gravenhage, 1802, 18192) goes back to Lambert van den Bos’ translation of Don Quixote and probably also a French version by Florian (because of the many Gallicisms in this translation). But, as is explained in the title of the work, it is cut up according to contemporary taste (“Versneeden naar den Hedendaagsche smaak”). “Versneeden” has to be understood here not only in a figurative way, but also literally, in this sense that Van Woensel has reduced the original novel to some 75% of the original text volume. In his justification (“Aanhangzel van den Nederduitschen uitgever”, pp. VII-VIII) of the translation he refers to this intervention


saying that if Cervantes had lived in the beginning of the nineteenth century he himself would have abridged his story to make it readable for the contemporary readers: “…ik reeken een weezenlijken dienst aan CERVANTES gedaan te hebben, door hem leesbaar te maken, in onze taal, (‘t geen hij, oordeel’ ik wel, niet extra was) voor mijne landgenooten…” (p. VIII) (…I think to have rendered a real service to CERVANTES by making him readable, in our own language, (which, in my judgement, he really was not before), for my fellowcountrymen…). This is an implicit reference to the integral translation by Van den Bos, whose latest edition dated already from 70 years earlier, and which had become unreadable for late eighteenth-century readers. It is to his credit, anyhow, that Van Woensel informed the reader of the most important omissions in the text. In some of his former critical works he had already referred to Cervantes and called the Quixote his vademecum (see Broecheler 1995: 53). He showed a great respect for Cervantes and perhaps felt some personal affinities with him, maybe on account of his many travel experiences or because his own “enlightened” and tolerant, although very critical opinions about religion and politics corresponded to Cervantes’ “Erasmian” view of life. From the very beginning of his translation, i.e. in the prefaces, but also in his many notes throughout the text, he draws the attention of the reader to the real subject matter of Don Quixote, calling it a storehouse of mirth and mind (“een pakhuis van vrolijkheid en verstand”). To sum up: Van Woensel’s translation is, according to its (abridged) form an adaptation following the trend of his time (“naar de mode van zijn tijd”, Preface, p. VII); in its content it doesn’t stress, as his predecessors did, the ridiculous character of Don Quixote, but rather his author’s search for truth in a character that gives rise not only to amusement but also to contemplation and compassion (see Nijs 1997: 26), as one might expect in a context of Enlightenment and sentimentalism. The next Dutch translation of Don Quixote appears in 1855 under the title De Vernuftige Jonkheer Don Quichote (4 volumes, Haarlem, A.C. Kruseman). Its author, Mr C.L. Schuller tot Peursum (18131860), was a member of an upper-class military family who had studied law and philology at university, and who engaged himself in politics and the editing of periodicals. His acquaintance with Cervantes dates from rather early in his career, as he lectured on Don


Quixote in 1842 in the Utrecht book club (“Voorlezing over den Don Quijote”). In this lecture he regrets that former translations of the Spanish novel had been tasteless and refers, amongst others, to Van den Bos, Weyerman and Langendijk, whose stage adaptation of Don Quichot op de bruiloft van Kamacho he calls a burlesque farce. His judgment on his predecessors is rather damning, but it gives an interesting image of the reception history: Met te ruwe hand plukten zij de vrucht van den Spaanschen boom af en het aanminnige waas was van dezelve verdwenen: kneuzing en smakeloosheid waren de gevolgen geworden van eene lompe knelling in de grove vingers. De hoffelijke Castiliaansche uitdrukking werd door onze vertalers in eene zoo boersch mogelijk Hollandsche overgebragt: wat edel is, werd gemeen, wat aardig, plomp, wat geestig, grappig. Het gehele tafereel, met zoo fijn geschakeerde couleuren geschilderd, werd in eentoonige en opzigtige verw gecopieerd, en als een beeld van den geest der Hollandsche vertalers, strekken bespottelijke caricatuurplaten tot een waardig cieraad hunner onwaardige, door weinigen gewraakte overzettingen. (1842: 7-8) With too heavy a hand they plucked the fruit from the Spanish tree and thereby removed its delicious aura: their coarse fingers left it bruised and without flavor. Our translators rendered the courteous Castilian expressions in as rustic a Dutch as possible: what is noble became vile, pretty, plump, witty, laughable. The whole scene, so delicately painted, was copied in flat and garish tones, and as if to highlight the mindset of the Dutch translators, ridiculous illustrations smacking of caricatures accompany their vapid, yet rarely criticized, translations.

No wonder that Schuller tot Peursum had problems with the antagonists of Don Quixote, who seem to amuse themselves at his expense. In his eyes Cervantes was a romantic author par excellence (1842: 49), whose Don Quixote is a romantic type of hero (Knight of the Sad Countenance) who regrets the passing away of medieval knighthood with its values of courage, gallantry and helpfulness. This idealizing view of Don Quixote, without seeing at the same time the irony and ambiguity of his author, is found also in Schuller’s conscientious translation which resembles the spirit of the Dutch


romantic age. According to S.A. Vosters it is the first well-founded Dutch translation. Van de Pol considers it as very reliable but too literal: it hasn’t become real Dutch (“een wonderlijke vertaling, heel betrouwbaar maar zo letterlijk dat ze in een onaffe fase is blijven steken; er is geen Nederlands van gemaakt,” 1994: 146). Its influence on the imagology of the character of Don Quixote in the Netherlands cannot be overestimated, as it was reprinted and adapted many times in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century (see Arents 1962: 17-23). It is significant that the greatest romantic author of Dutch literature, Multatuli (Douwes Dekker), recognized himself as a new Don Quixote, longing for fight and interpreting an uninterrupted series of painful defeats as the true victory (Altena 1997: 16). We have to wait until World War II for the next translation of Cervantes’ novel to appear. J.W.F. Weremeus Buning and C.F.A. van Dam, a poet and a hispanist respectively, published in 1941 a translation of Don Quixote that was to remain the standard text in Dutch for the second half of the previous century. Its full title reads: De Geestrijke Ridder Don Quichot van de Mancha, vertaald, ingeleid en toegelicht door… (Amsterdam, Querido). As the title suggests, this is a philological translation. This philological scruple shows itself in the Translators’ Note, in which the translators, or rather, Van Dam, prudently refer to the earlier translations by Van den Bos (“not fully complete, in places very free and not always adequate, but anyway a serious attempt”) and Schuller tot Peursum (“complete, conscientious and deserving, but with lots of adaptations”), in order to argue that a new, scholarly translation was urgently needed. The nearly fifty pages of annotations speak for themselves in this respect. Partly because of these annotations, another academically and professionally trained translator and creative author, Barber van de Pol, found it necessary to make a new translation to bring everything in line with the present state of the art. Her effort was crowned with success. What had remained an uneasy combination of creative writing and philological study in the earlier translation, now became a well-founded but at the same time very readable novel for Dutch readers of the twenty-first century: De vernuftige Edelman Don Quichot van La Mancha (Amsterdam, Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep 1997). Instead of adding her annotations to the translation itself, Van de Pol published them in a series of intriguing essays on her work in progress under the


title Cervantes & co. In plaats van voetnoten (Amsterdam, Querido 2000). Scholars interested in translation problems, especially in those concerning such a complex work as Cervantes’ Don Quixote, will find here all they need. With these two twentieth-century Dutch translations of Cervantes’ novel the character of Don Quixote and the novel as a whole have again recovered for the Dutch reader the complexity and ambiguity of the Spanish original. Don Quixote is no longer the ridiculous fool or idiot at whose expense the reader or spectator can amuse himself, as is the case in the versions/adaptations by Weyerman and Langendijk, nor is he the freedom fighter or romantic hero we encounter in the translations by Van Woensel and Schuller tot Peursum. In a certain sense Weremeus Buning & Van Dam, and especially Barber van de Pol have succeeded in bringing out the true proportions of Cervantes’ novel and his protagonist: those of “wise craziness and crazy wisdom” as Jacobus Savry so pithily phrased it in his introduction to the first integral Dutch translation by Lambert van den Bos. Does this end the discussion of the translation history of Cervantes’ Don Quixote? Probably not, for, as one knows from history, masterpieces are always in need of new translations in order to please or meet the expectations of a new reading public, as translations cannot fully replace the original. Or to say it with Don Quixote himself in the second part (II, 62) of his adventures: “It appears to me that translating from one language into another […] is like gazing at a Flemish tapestry with the wrong side out: even though the figures are visible, they are full of threads that obscure the view and are not bright and smooth as when seen from the other side.” (1949: 923).

Works Cited Altena, Peter. 1997. “Lotgevallen van Don Quichot in Nederland,” in Bzzlletin 245: 16-23. Arents, Prosper. 1962. Cervantes in het Nederlands. Bibliografie. Gent: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Taal- en Letterkunde. Broecheler, Meike. 1995. “‘Mijne bedoeling is altoos geweest iedereen goed en niemand kwaad te doen.’ De Don Quichot-


vertaling van Pieter van Woensel,” in Mededelingen van de Stichting Jacob Campo Weyerman 18: 50-56. Cervantes, Miguel de. 1949. The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de La Mancha. Tr. Samuel Putnam. New York: The Modern Library. Davids, William. 1918. Verslag van een onderzoek betreffende de betrekkingen tusschen de Nederlandsche en de Spaansche letterkunde in de 16de-18de eeuw. ’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff. Horst, Daniel. 1995. “De prenten in de Don Quichot-bewerking van Jacob Campo Weyerman,” in Mededelingen van de Stichting Jacob Campo Weyerman, 18: 20-34. Kerkhof, Maxim P.A.M. 1995. “Cervantes in de Nederlanden tot 1746,” in Mededelingen van de Stichting Jacob Campo Weyerman, 18: 3-10. Lechner, Jan. 1995. “Vertaler, bewerker, bederver. Jacob Campo Weyerman en Don Quijote,” in Mededelingen van de Stichting Jacob Campo Weyerman, 18: 42-50. Nijs, Pieter de. 1997. “Illustratieve Omzwervingen,” in Bzzlletin 245: 24-35. Paepe, Christian de. 2006. “Don Quichot in Vlaanderland,” in Vlaanderen: tweemaandelijks tijdschrift voor kunst en cultuur 60: 230-235. Pol, Barber van de. 1994. “De erfenis van een vertaler,” in Raster 66: 142-156. ––––. 2000. Cervantes & co. In plaats van voetnoten. Essays. Amsterdam: Querido. Roose, Roland. 1948. “Don Quichotte dans la littérature néerlandaise aux XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècles,” in Les lettres romanes 2: 45-59, 133-149. Schuller tot Peursum, Christiaan Lodewijk. 1842. Voorlezing over den Don Quijote, gehouden in het Leesmuseum te Utrecht, den 10den februari 1842. Utrecht: Kemink. Vliet, Rietje van & Niet, Marco de. 1995. “Van ridders en andere Dordtse helden. De Don Quichot-vertaling van Lambert van den Bos,” in Mededelingen van de Stichting Jacob Campo Weyerman 18: 10-20. Vosters, Simon A. 1955. Spanje in de Nederlandse literatuur. Amsterdam: H.J. Paris.

Don Quixote Travelling Through the Young Belgium LIEVEN D’HULST Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Campus Kortrijk

Les voyages et aventures de M. Alfred Nicolas au royaume de Belgique by the now forgotten Belgian author Joseph Grandgagnage may be understood as a crucible of all the tensions that characterize Belgian literature at the beginnings of the 1830s. It is one of the first and richest testimonies of the complex dynamics inherent in the construction of a new national narrative. The article studies a number of “Cervantine” procedures exemplified by this work, such as parody, satire and pastiche: they express the search for a compromise between the a priori rejection of contemporary French models of the novel, especially as represented by the then recent vogue of the “littérature facile”, and the selective appropriation of some of its narrative features. At the same time, this search reveals the scarcity of proper alternatives available within the Belgian literary system of that time.

Introduction Before tackling the concrete case I have in mind, I would like to raise, and already tentatively answer, three general questions that elucidate my approach: (1) Why do I study “Don Quixote” in a Belgian context? My interest in this topic was brought about by current research into the formation of a Belgian literary and cultural identity in the first phase of development of the nation state.1 During the first half of the nineteenth century many Belgian writers were hopelessly trying to get

1

See among others D’hulst 2000, 2003 and 2005. The present text is to a large extent based upon D’hulst 2002.

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out from under the dominance of French models. Like Cervantes, they entered upon a lost struggle with themselves. (2) What do I study in this case: a character, a literary figure, an actantial structure (protagonist and adjuvant), a narrative matrix (actantial structure, action and space) or a type of novel? It seems clear to me that, starting from the why-question, we have to turn our attention to two closely linked levels. First, with a view to the development of a literary repertoire, we have to focus on the discursive level of the matrix. Second, having the positioning of Belgian literature at the back of our minds, we have to focus on the allegorical level of the character. (3) To which repertoire is this research related? As far as narrative prose in book form, published in Belgium between 1830 and 1880, is concerned, the result is rather poor when it comes to actual titles. Of course, next to novels there are also other texts, primarily in periodicals. However, these are difficult to find with the available bibliographical tools such as the Bibliographie Nationale (de Belgique). In what follows, therefore, I will confine myself to one text written by Joseph Grandgagnage.2 Alfred Nicolas and Gaspard Voyages et aventures de M. Alfred Nicolas au royaume de Belgique (1835) is one of several remarkable Belgian texts from the early thirties of the nineteenth century. Texts dating from that period typically form a melting pot of tensions characterizing the young literary Belgium. In the opening words, the author, who calls himself “Justin***”, quotes a verse from the Apocalyps: “Ego quos amo arguo et castigo.” He translates this verse as follows: “Tapons un peu nos amis, à tort et à travers.” But who is to do the hitting: the Belgians? and if so, which Belgians: the Flemings or the Walloons? Who is to receive the blows: the Belgians or the French? How is whoever has to be hit going to be hit: by means of parody or satire? Why are they to 2

François-Charles-Joseph Grandgagnage (1797-1877), who was a magistrate in Liège, published historical and geographical works. As far as I know, very little research has been done on his work. A short description of his life can be found in Stecher 1878.

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be hit: because of their wrong use of styles and genres, because of their immoral behavior, or because of a literary disapproval of Belgium or the Walloon provinces in Belgium? What is the desired effect; in the Walloon provinces in Belgium, in Belgium, or even in France? What was the actual effect? In what follows I will try and provide at least the beginnings of an answer to some of these questions. The story begins in medias res. The protagonist, Alfred Nicolas, is lecturing Gaspard, his copyist and secretary (who later assumes the role of author), on a “conte à la mode”, that stages, amongst other things, two corpses, and contains some incestuous scenes. This lecture gives rise to a critical discussion about the then-present state of literature in France. The two friends set off and scour the Walloon provinces of Belgium for confirmation of their proposition that such literature deeply influences the readers’ perception of reality. Nicolas and Gaspard meet numerous odd characters that have been exposed to “la littérature romantique”: M. Nicolas apprit de l’exorciste que la pauvre fille avait été saisie de cette triste maladie après avoir lu Lélia, excellent ouvrage, ouvrage tout brûlant de morale, qu’une femme cachée sous le manteau d’un homme n’aurait pas mieux écrit sous la dictée d’une fille. (1835: I, 234) Mr Nicolas learned from the exorcist that the poor girl had been afflicted with that sad disease after having read Lélia, an excellent work, full of burning moral issues, that a woman disguised as a man could not have better written if a girl were dictating.

These meetings provide the basis for all sorts of new plotlines, with numerous intertextual references to well-known or notorious contemporary French stories. Moreover, the narrator’s text is interwoven with other genres: theatre, poetry, and essays on history, architecture, and prosody, and much more. When they have arrived in Tilff, close to Liège, somewhere in the middle of 1834, Nicolas decides to publish a “riche assortiment de contes, de romans et de drames” (1835: I, 271) (rich assortment of


stories, novels and dramas), based on his colorful meetings. The list is as follows: 1° la Journée des têtes, conte rouge, adultérin et incestueux; 2° le Louisisme, ou les ribris de Louise, conte spiritualiste; 3° le Lupanar, conte drolatique; 4° Euphémie ou la Nymphomane, drame léliaque et utérin; 5° Mainfroid, ou neuf et vieux, aventure gallo-gothe et bibliophilique; 6° le Cimetière, contecadavre; 7° le Capitaine La-Rose, marinade. (1835: I, 271) 1° the Day of the heads, a sizzling tale, adulterous and incestuous; 2° Louisism, or the jinks of Louise, a spiritualist tale; 3° the House of Ill Repute, a comical tale; 4° Euphemia or the Nymphomaniac, a uterine drama after the manner of Lélia; 5° Coldhand, or the old and the new, a Gallo-Gothic and bibliophilous adventure; 6° the Cemetery, a horror story; 7° Captain La-Rose, a sea story.

The book ends with an auctorial message (“Conclusion de l’auteur”), in which Justin incites his readers to take up a crusade against contemporary French literature (“la littérature facile”). But what is the status of the text itself? As the genre of the Voyages et aventures is not specifically named, the author in his “Conclusion” seems to react rather against the classic structures of narrative prose. As such, he seems to join in a heated debate on the function of literature that at the time was raging in France. This debate coincided with a crisis following upon the animated years in which the historical novel triumphed. During this crisis two different attitudes were closely linked. First, the July Revolution of the 1830s had destroyed the hope for a republican regime. Some authors had positioned themselves on the extreme left, and against the values of the emerging middle class. Second, there was the despondency of those authors that found it hard to accept the popularization of the novel in the form of the serial novel. They were dissatisfied with the new status of the novelist, which was determined by economic structures, and which generated intense media interest. Reactions on the literary level took different shapes. First, there was the remarkable attention given to the anti-novel and to authors such as Cervantes, Sterne and Diderot, who had served as models for


this genre in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, respectively. In the eighteen-thirties, the “restoration” of this genre was embodied by Charles Nodier, who defined the model of the “livre excentrique” as follows in 1835: J’entends ici par un livre excentrique un livre qui est fait hors de toutes les règles communes de la composition et du style, et dont il est impossible ou très difficile de deviner le but, quand il est arrivé par hasard que l’auteur eût un but en l’écrivant. (Quoted from Sangsue 1987: 41) By an eccentric book I mean a book that flaunts all commonly accepted rules of composition and style, and of which it is impossible or very difficult to guess the purpose, if by chance the author had a purpose to begin with.

For a decade, several narrative subgenres, such as the conte, the travel account, and in some cases the novel itself, adopted some features of this model,3 and they often did so expansively.4 Moreover, they did so in such a way that these genres partly came to be seen as the most important manifestations of what is scornfully called the “école romantique”. That goes especially for the omniscient narrator, who in the case of the Voyage et aventures concludes his story as follows: […] quand je vis les maîtres eux-mêmes, les plus beaux talents de la nouvelle école, se fourvoyer dans les routes qu’ils avaient tracées, écrire à la course et se cogner partout […], oh! alors je me dis: Voilà qui est trop fort. – Et je fis Nicolas. (1835: II, 273274) […] when I saw the masters themselves, the most gifted talents of the new school, lose themselves along the tracks they had cut 3

“[…] l’excentricité marque la littérature des années 1830-1840 et il n’est pas d’écrivain qui n’ait été ‘contaminé’ dans l’un ou l’autre des textes composés entre ces deux dates.” (Sangsue 1987: 28) (excentricity marks the literature of the period 18301840 and no writer of that period has escaped being contaminated in one or the other sense).

4 For example, F.P. Bowman has identified about five hundred contes for one single year (1832).


themselves, writing in a hurry and bumbling along […], oh! then I said to myself: that’s a bit much. – And I wrote Nicolas.

Grandgagnage’s work can thus be read as an answer to Nodier and the prose of some of his contemporaries (such as the authors of “JeuneFrance”, Jules Janin and Théophile Gautier, Xavier de Maistre, the young Balzac of the Contes drolatiques, etc.). In other words, Grandgagnage’s work can be considered as an appeal for the restoration of the neo-Planonist values of the early Romanticism: C’est aux littérateurs, peut-être même aux poètes, qu’est réservée la noble mission de remédier au mal, de conserver une étincelle de ce feu sacré qui animait l’ancien âge, de réchauffer les âmes, de réveiller les idées généreuses, de ressusciter ce pur enthousiasme qui mène aux grandes actions, et d’empêcher la créature intelligente de s’anéantir entièrement dans les froides réalités de la vie positive. (1835: I, 187) It is to the men of letters, perhaps even to the poets, that falls the noble task of remedying evil, of keeping alive a spark of that sacred fire that burned in the past, of warming the souls, of reviving generous ideas, and of rekindling that pure enthusiasm that leads to glorious deeds, and of preventing intelligent life from being entirely extinguished by the cold realities of everyday life.

However, in an apparent paradox, Grandgagnage’s work itself draws upon several structural elements of the anti-novel, such as the splitting up of secondary plots into narrative units or episodes according to the characters’ movements in space, or the split between the reading and writing experiences of the protagonist and his adventures. The antinovel thus functions as a clearly recognizable intertext. In this respect, the contemporary critic Théodore Weustenraad pointed out the presence of Cervantes’ Quixote in Grandgagnage’s text: M. Nicolas, comme le héros de Cervantès, est bon homme au fond. Il est même doué d’un jugement sain et d’un esprit cultivé. Mais la lecture des romans de la nouvelle école a gâté, chez lui, ces précieuses qualités, comme la lecture des romans de


chevalerie avait fait tourner la tête au brave don Quichotte. (1835: I, 356) Mr Nicolas, like Cervantes’ hero, is a good man at heart. His judgment is sound, and his mind is cultivated. But reading the novels of the new school has spoiled these precious qualities in him, just as reading novels of chivalry drove poor Don Quixote out of his mind.

In other words, thanks to the narrator’s numerous sophisticated interventions, often in the form of metalepses that draw attention to the underlying model, the embedded stories and the dramatic scenes function as parodying quotations: Tandis que la diligence court à grand bruit à travers les ombres, je ferai bien, cher lecteur, d’entrer en explication avec toi. Il en est plus que temps; car nous voici arrivés au chapitre VII […]. (1835: I, 135) While the stagecoach noisily advances through the darkness, the moment has come, my dear reader, to give you an explanation. It is high time; because we are to embark on chapter VII […].

At the same time these interventions underline the seriousness of the narrator’s own discourse: “M. Alfred Nicolas suspendit en cet endroit sa lecture pour reprendre haleine et s’essuyer le front. Il aurait encore mieux fait de se le cacher à deux mains.” (1835: I, 11) (Mr Alfred Nicolas here interrupted his reading in order to take a breath and to wipe his brow. He would better have hidden it with both hands.) The narrator’s discourse is thus explicitly foregrounded. This effect is strengthened by the direct dialogue with the reader5 and by the narrator’s clearly metafictional role, constantly stressing the break with the fictional world.

5

“Bonsoir aussi, cher lecteur, car grâce à mes longs récits, tu dois avoir bien sommeil.” (85) (Good evening you too, dear reader, because due to my long stories, you must be quite sleepy.)


M. Dubonnier chargea un commissionnaire de sa valise et d’un gros sac d’argent. Mais je veux en finir avec le gros Dubonnier, dont le langage monotonement agricole commence à me déplaire. Il est d’ailleurs incertain si nous le retrouverons dans la suite; car nous allons voyager beaucoup et M. Dubonnier va se fixer au contraire. […] Chacun sait que M. du Bonnier [sic] l’emporta d’emblée aux dernières élections, et qu’il fut élu sénateur. Il prononce assez souvent au sénat des tirades dans le goût de celle que j’ai fidèlement rapportée. (1835: I, 160-161) Mr Dubonnier handed his suitcase and a big bag of money to the doorman. But I want to have done with this rude Dubonnier, whose monotonously vulgar language begins to annoy me. Besides, it is uncertain if we will see him again in the following pages; because we are going to travel a lot and Mr Dubonnier, on the contrary, is going to settle down. […] Everyone knows that Mr du Bonnier [sic] carried the day in the last elections, and that he was elected senator. Quite often he launches into tirades in the senate in a vein similar to those that I have faithfully reported to you.

At the same time, this metafictional role functions as a kind of excuse for the inability to express romantic ideas in a story. The proliferation of speeches on archaeology, architecture, history, economics, etymology, prosody, politics, religion, and the like, serves to hide the narrative emptiness beneath the endless “digressions”. So one can wonder as to the strategy this parody is based on. Of course, the point is to make the prevailing model of the “littérature facile” the butt of literary mockery by converting it into a homeopathic instrument: De l’homéopathie ô merveilleux effet! Le mal fait par Drouineau se guérit par Musset […]. C’est enfin ce que nous appelons la médecine homéopathique; médecine admirable, infaillible, qui, à la maladie que vous avez naturellement ajoutant artificiellement la même maladie, et puis les mettant toutes les deux aux prises comme deux champions en champ clos, les fait se détruire, se perforer, se dévorer l’une l’autre […]. (1835: I, 87)


Look at what marvellous effect homeopathy has! The disease caused by Drouineau is cured by Musset […]. This after all is what we call homeopathy; an admirable and infallible kind of medicine that, by artfully adding to the disease you already have a dose of the same, gets them both to slug it out like two champions in a ring, makes them annihilate one another, rip themselves apart,, devour each other […].

In fact, this undertaking is nothing but a duplicate of the “parodie sérieuse” with which the “littérature facile” identifies itself, as is clear from the introduction to L’Âne mort et la femme guillotinée (1834), a story written by Jules Janin, which is, by the way, referred to by Grandgagnage: Je lui ai juré sur mon âme et conscience que, malgré ce titre bizarre, il ne s’agissait rien moins que d’une parodie; que le métier de loustic littéraire ne convenait nullement à mon caractère et à ma position; que j’avais fait un livre sans vouloir nuire à personne; que si mon livre était par malheur une parodie, c’était une parodie sérieuse, une parodie malgré moi, comme en font aujourd’hui tant de grands auteurs qui ne s’en doutent pas plus que moi-même je ne m’en suis douté. (1834: V) I have sworn to him on my soul and my conscience that, in spite of this strange title, it was nothing less than a parody; that the profession of literary chap did not suit my character and my position; that I had written a book without wanting to harm anyone; that if my book was, as bad luck would have it, a parody, it was a serious one, a parody in spite of myself, as is the case with so many great authors these days, wondering just as much as I have done.

It rather seems that in Grandgagnage’s writings parody has to veil to a certain extent the internal contradictions within contemporary Belgian literature. After all, there is no concrete alternative available: there is no author, genre, or literary movement that can go beyond parody and suggest new models. To put it differently: Voyages et aventures can be read as a search for an appropriate vantage point. For want of valid literary examples, Justin nestles in a paratopic place from which he


can harass with a certain liberty both the French and the Belgian propositions, the latter having no actual reference point. […] la Belgique est une vraie étoffe de littérature à la mode avec toutes ses bigarrures, ses institutions si jeunes et ses hommes si vieux, ses libertés républicaines et ses prêtres souverains, ses châteaux, ses ruines, ses couvents morts et ses couvents en vie, et tous ses vieux usages palpitants de trivialité. C’est dit, c’est juré. Je vais m’installer à Bruxelles comme au centre du système; et de là je projette tout autour mes rayons de reconnaissance. (1835: I, 109-110) […] with all its odd patterns, its brand-new institutions and its age-old people, its republican freedoms and its sovereign priests, its castles, its ruins, its convents dead and alive, and all its old customs panting with triviality, Belgium is very much in fashion to be spun literary cloth of. My decision stands firm. I am going to live in Brussels, in the heart of the system; and from there I will explore all around me.

What is Grandgagnage’s purpose? Does he hope to create models for a new kind of Belgian prose? This is not very likely, as Grandgagnage avows the kind of parodying relativism which Michèle Hannoosh describes as follows: “la parodie ne prétend pas pour elle-même à une autorité supérieure à celle de sa cible” (quoted in Sangsue 1994: 58) (parody in itself does not lay claim to any greater authority than its original). Even though the clues Grandgagnage passes can help the readers to recognize the double structure of the parody, they express uncertainty all the same. Mon style, c’est la noix de coco; ma pensée, c’est le lait bienfaisant. Or, donc, ami lecteur, jeunes filles, femmes agréables, vous qui me lirez peut-être avec une âme amie et un regard sévère, veuillez, je vous en prie, détacher mon écorce, la jeter sur le sol, et la broyer sous vos pudiques semelles. Allez au fond de ma pensée puiser et recueillir les sages leçons que je vous donne: lisez et méditez mon livre. Ma main brutale, arrachant le manteau du vice, le traîne nu à vos pieds, mais ne vient pas, perfide et séduisante, vous offrir dans une corbeille de roses des serpents venimeux. (1835: II, 240)


My style is the shell of the coconut; my thought is its nourishing milk. And yet, my reader friend, young girls, charming women, you who will perhaps read me with a kindred spirit and a severe look, I beg you to remove my shell, to throw it on the ground, and crush it under your bashful soles. Look for my deepest thoughts and learn there the wise lessons I teach: read my book and think on it. My brash hand, tearing away the veil, hurls vice naked at your feet, but will never falsely tempt you with a basket of roses full of poisonous snakes.

Moreover, in Grandgagnage’s writings parody often becomes selfparody, in which the cliché of the cheery Walloon is confirmed. Qu’est-ce que Nicolas? Un livre en grotesque, une caricature à la mode wallonne, un grossier mascaron, un plaisant embâté, un épais Pasquin, un lourd Marforio du nord, une bête de somme, une bête foncière, un sot immobilier, tout ce que vous voudrez… Déchirez, mordez et criez; tant mieux, cent fois tant mieux; j’ai donc touché la plaie. (t. II: 275) What is Nicolas? A grotesque, a caricature Walloon style, a crude impostor, a pleasant snide, a thickheaded Pasquin, a heavy Marforio of the North, in short, a beast, a beast of burden, a dumb idiot, anything you want… Tear, bite, shout: so much the better, a hundred times better; it proves that I have hit a raw nerve.

Even though Grandgagnage makes a plea for the restoration of the Walloon language as a literary language, he also often undermines the seriousness of this plea. Oui, mes pays; apprenez, si vous ne le savez pas, que notre wallon est singulièrement riche en expressions de ces bons vieux auteurs. Car notre wallon, voyez-vous, idiome resté pur et naïf, n’est que l’ancienne langue appelée gauloise, laquelle, en dégénérant, se corrompant et s’abâtardissant, est devenue la langue française de Racine et de Boileau, comme M. de SainteBeuve l’a très démonstrativement établi dans un savant ouvrage qui a paru et disparu naguère. (t. II: 285)


Yes, my countries: learn, if you do not know this, that our Walloon language is singularly rich in expressions of these good old writers. Because our Walloon, you see, is an idiom that has remained pure and simple, it is nothing less than the ancient language spoken by the Gauls, which, degenerated, corrupted and debased, has turned into the French of Racine and Boileau, as M. de Sainte-Beuve has convincingly demonstrated in a learned work that has appeared, and disappeared, not so long ago.

Grandgagnage is the victim of a perverted logic: “Les peuples stigmatisés, dominés, sont portés à faire de nécessité vertu et à se défendre contre l’intériorisation de la domination en se tournant euxmêmes en derision.” (Bourdieu, in Bourdieu & Dubois 1999: 16) (Stigmatized, dominated people are prone to make of necessity a virtue, and to defend themselves against internalizing their oppression by deriding themselves.) Epilogue During those first difficult years of both political and cultural uncertainty in Belgium, parody and satire were the expression of different attitudes towards the demand for an own identity, especially in the field of prose. Justin was caught in a web of expectations. On the one hand he had to support the polemics against France and on the other hand he had to make a contribution to the own national repertoire, as had been asked by, amongst others, the “Association pour l’encouragement et le développement de la littérature en Belgique”. Grandgagnage was a member of this association, which was founded in Liège in 1835. Unfortunately, the nascent Belgian literature was incapable of fulfilling these expectations. While the native literature lacked internal impulses and, especially, appropriate institutions, the numerous and very successful pirate editions of contemporary French works undermined the effect of the polemics pursued. Grandgagnage’s attempts express an inability to increase the autonomy of literature and to liberate it from its peripheral position. This frustration would last


for at least two generations. It is not until 1870 that we see new attempts to achieve autonomy from France and from the other social discourses. But here too, mimesis took its toll. In a way, the “JeunesBelgique” reaction of 1880 was a copy of the “Jeunes-France” reaction of the early 1830s against the contemporary literary center in France. It is this idea of mimesis, with its implications for the way in which literature deals with other discourses, that gives significance to the character of Don Quixote.

Works Cited Bourdieu, Pierre & Dubois, Jacques. 1999. “Entretien: Champ littéraire et rapports de domination,” in Textyles 15: 12-16. Bowman, Frank Paul. 1975. “La nouvelle en 1832: la société, la misère, la mort et les mots,” in Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises 27: 198-208. D’hulst, Lieven. 2000. “Les études rythmiques d’André Van Hasselt: une tentative d’émancipation de la poésie belge au XIXe siècle,” in Vives Lettres 10: 11-35. ––––. 2002. “Parodie et satire dans Voyages et aventures de M. Alfred Nicolas au Royaume de Belgique (1835) de Justin***,” in Francofonia. Studi e ricerche sulle letterature di lingua francese 43: 77-98 ––––. 2003. “Les Wallonnades (1845) de Joseph Grandgagnage ou du laboratoire de la poésie belge,” in Jean-Pierre Bertrand & Lise Gauvin (dir.), Littératures mineures en langue majeure: Québec/Wallonie-Bruxelles. Bruxelles: P.I.E.-Peter Lang; Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 205-216. ––––. 2005. “La poésie en ‘Belgique’ durant la période hollandaise,” Textyles 28: 63-71. Grandgagnage, Joseph. 1835. Voyages et aventures de M. Alfred Nicolas au royaume de Belgique (2 vols). Bruxelles: Leroux. Janin, Jules. 1834. L’Âne mort et la femme guillotinée. Bruxelles: Louis Hauman et Cie. Sangsue, Daniel. 1987. Le récit excentrique. Paris: Librairie José Corti.


––––. 1994. La parodie. Paris: Hachette. Stecher, Jules. 1878. “Notice sur François-Joseph-Grandgagnage,” in Annuaire de l’Académie royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique. Bruxelles: F. Hayez. 163-239. Weustenraad, Théodore. 1835. “Recension de Voyages et aventures de M. Alfred Nicolas au Royaume de Belgique,” Revue belge 1: 356.

Did Don Quixote and Cervantes Read the Same Books? JAN HERMAN Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

The universe in which Don Quixote wanders is like a library. In this article, I will not go into the – by now familiar – intertextual character of Don Quixote, marking him as an exponent of Modernity; rather, I will study the imaginary books that spring into life in the brain of the knight himself. First of all, there is the “book of fame,” which, according to the protagonist, is related by an invisible omniscient companion who writes down the adventures of the hero at the moment at which they take place. Secondly, in the so-called “book of fate” are registered in advance all the experiences of Don Quixote. Don Quixote is convinced that he has to put this book into action. The thesis advanced in this article is that the Modernity of the Quixote lies in the way in which both these imaginary books are treated.

1. No one will contradict me when I posit that in the narrative economy of the Quixote the written word occupies a central place. (1) Consider first of all, on the extradiegetic level, the book Don Quixote itself, the very existence of which is at least partly due to an Arabic manuscript found by the author – or “the second author” as he tends to call himself – in Toledo’s Jewish quarter. The author, i.e. the manuscript’s “first author”, is Cide Hamete Benengeli. From chapter nine on the book is largely based on this foreign manuscript. (2) Furthermore a considerable number of books, most likewise in manuscript form, appear in the diegesis itself. During their journey through the Sierra Morena in Part I Don Quixote and Sancho Panza find Cardenio’s “memorandum book,” full of poems. (3) Left behind in the Sierra Morena Don Quixote engraves some verses in the bark of the trees surrounding him. The traces of these poetic fantasies are later recorded. In the mean time Don Quixote has

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sent Sancho to Toboso with a letter for Dulcinea, written in Cardenio’s little book. It is up to Sancho to have this neatly copied somewhere. (4) When Don Quixote is taken back to his village by the priest and the barber, the company ends up in the pub where earlier Sancho was tossed in the air. The innkeeper shows them a suitcase left behind by a traveler. The case contains three hand-written romances of chivalry, and the novella “The Curious Impertinent”, while later on a novella by Cervantes himself is discovered in the lining of the suitcase. (5) In Part II of his eponymous book Don Quixote is confronted with his own story. Some characters have read the first part of the Quixote. Some of them have even read the apocryphal second part by Avellaneda. For Don Quixote the crucial point will then be to show that he is the one and only “real” Quixote and that Cide Hamete Benengeli is his only true biographer. (To this end he will have one of his partners sign a certificate of authenticity.) In short, the entire Quixote appears to be a huge scriptorium in which writers of all sorts and conditions are working. From this scriptorium the Quixote as a text itself will emerge in several different versions of itself. All of this is known quite well. 2. Here, however, I want to talk about a special kind of writing and a special kind of book with regard to the Quixote. I want to address the imaginary books in the Quixote. As point of departure I present to you the following passage. One night, when Don Quixote has lost some teeth in an adventure, Sancho is called upon to invent a new name for his master. Inspired by the sorry sight of Don Quixote’s mashed face in torchlight, Sancho suggests “the knight of the mournful countenance.” Don Quixote reacts with: “It is not that,” said Don Quixote, “it is simply that the sage who is to write the history of my exploits must have thought that it would be a good thing for me to take another appellation as all knights of the past have done.” (143, my italics, as in all further quotations from the Quixote following)

This passage gives rise to some remarks:

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(a) Don Quixote is convinced that, in accordance with tradition, as a wandering knight he is accompanied by an invisible witness who notes down everything that happens to him. Don Quixote is not alone in believing this. When at the beginning of chapter nine the subject matter on which the extra-diegetic narrator has ostensibly been relying has become exhausted, the latter declares, right before telling us how he found the sequel to the Quixote in Toledo, the following: It appeared impossible and contrary to all good precedent that so worthy a knight should not have had some scribe to take upon himself the task of writing an account of these unheard-ofexploits; for that was something that had happened to none of the knights-errant who, as the saying has it, had gone forth in quest of adventures, seeing that each one of them had one or two chroniclers, as if ready at hand, who not only had set down heir deeds, but had depicted their most trivial thoughts and amiable weaknesses, however well concealed they might be. (1949: 70)

(b) The name giving scene alluded to earlier allows for a second consideration. Don Quixote’s invisible biographer not only registers what is happening to him, he also dictates what is still to happen: he arranges Don Quixote’s fate. This is obvious from the following passage: “And so, I tell you (Don Quixote says), it must have been that sage of whom I was speaking who put it into your mind and on your tongue to dub me the Knight of the Mournful Countenance; This title I adopt as my own from now on; and in order that it may better fit me, I propose, as soon as opportunity offers, to have painted on my shield a very sad-looking face.” (1949: 143)

I am now going to suggest that Don Quixote’s adventures are surrounded by two types of imaginary books. Downstream there is first of all what the good knight himself calls “the book of fame”: “This, O Sancho,” he said, turning to his squire, “is the day when you shall see the boon that fate has in store for me; this, I repeat, is the day when, as well as on any other, shall be displayed the valor of my good right arm. On this day I shall

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perform deeds that will be written down in the book of fame for all centuries to come.” (1949: 131)

Upstream, however, what I would call “the book of fate” is being written. Don Quixote regularly alludes to his destiny and to the fact that his story is in fact already written. He is merely acting out a previously written book. Just as the “book of fame” assumes many different shapes (which I will not further dwell upon here), so does the “book of fate”: (a) First of all there is the mysterious “sage” who whispers Don Quixote’s name into Sancho’s ear: the Knight of the Mournful Countenance. (b) Then, the book of fate takes on a mythological form: “the God of battles has permitted this punishment to be inflicted upon me” (1949: 120) Don Quixote declares after one of his defeats. His defeat was a punishment; he was destined to fail. (c) The fact that Don Quixote’s every move is pre-ordained is manifested in passages such as the following one: “since fate has willed that I must listen, proceed with it.” (1949: 149) (d) Furthermore, there is Don Quixote’s invisible enemy, an evil wizard who follows him, but who has only a restricted influence on Don Quixote’s actions: “So it does,” said Don Quixote, “He is a wise enchanter, a great enemy of mine, who has a grudge against me because he knows by his arts and learning that in the course of time I am to fight in single combat with a knight whom he favors, and that I am to be the victor and he can do nothing to prevent it. For this reason he seeks to cause me all the trouble that he can, but I am warning him that it will be hard to gainsay or shun that which Heaven has ordained.” (1949: 60)

In Don Quixote’s imaginary world it is the wizard or enchanter that makes things appear different from what they are. He it is that makes the windmills resemble giants, who replaces reality by illusion. This is Don Quixote’s logic. Even more important is that Don Quixote’s fate has been preordained in heaven. Don Quixote is the executor of an already existing book, which is either simultaneously written by an


omniscient invisible companion or which coincides with a “Holy Scripture”. For the “author” of this imaginary Book of Fate we can thus draw upon diverse entities, starting with a potentially evil wizard, over the mythological Fortuna or the God of Battles, to God himself. The two imaginary books – the Book of Fate and the Book of Fame – between which Don Quixote pivots diametrically oppose each other. The Book of Fame tells the story of how the hero Don Quixote becomes a book; the Book of Fate tells the story of how the heavenly book becomes human. The word becomes flesh. Book of Fame and Book of Fate oppose each other in the figure of Don Quixote as mimesis and anti-mimesis, literature and theology. I have now arrived at the core of my argument. 3. To follow the theological trail in the Quixote is an impassioning activity. Just a few pages after the name giving scene mentioned earlier Don Quixote suggests that his journey actually complies with a messianic mission: “Sancho, my friend,” he said, “you may know that I was born, by Heaven’s will, in this our age of iron, to revive what is known as the Golden Age.” (1949: 146) Not even ten pages on into the story Don Quixote makes the exact same statement: “Sancho, my friend, you may know that I was born by Heaven’s will, in this our age of iron, to revive what is known as the Golden Age” (1949: 154) The mechanism that regulates Don Quixote’s activities is, I gather, the principle of conformity. Don Quixote not only conforms to his fate as determined by the Heavenly book, he likewise assumes a basic principle of conformity in his reading of reality. Consider the following example. When his master has badly beaten up an adversary, Sancho fears the Inquisition, la Santa Hermandad: “Taistoi, dit Don Quichotte; où as-tu jamais vu ou lu qu’aucun chevalier errant ait été traduit en justice pour homicides qu’il eût commis.” (1949: 87) (“Be quiet,” said Don Quixote. “And where have you ever seen, or read of, a knight being brought to justice no matter how many homicides he might have committed?,” 1949: 76). The romance of chivalry, a generic variation on the “already-written” book, functions as a touchstone for reality here. Don Quixote derives his sense of probability from the book, in this case the romance of chivalry: it is improbable that the Inquisition will get involved in this matter as in

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romances of chivalry there is no mention of the Santa Hermandad bothering wandering knights. For the same reason Don Quixote does not deem it necessary to pay for his stay and consumption at the tavern: “[…] I cannot contravene the rule of knights-errant, none of whom, I am sure – at least, up to now, I have read nothing to the contrary – ever paid for his lodging or anything else when he stopped at an inn.” (1949: 126) Regarding this principle of conformity the second part of the Quixote differs significantly from the first. We see a Don Quixote who does not want to conform to the “already-written” book, which is now the apocryphal second part of his life by the Aragon Avellaneda. Don Quixote even explicitly opposes the fate Avallaneda wants to force upon him. Instead of going to Saragossa, which would be in keeping with Avellaneda’s book, Don Quixote decides to go to Barcelona as the final destination of his quest. I would conjecture that the issue of “probability” underlies one of the most important argumentative dimensions in the Quixote. The figure of Don Quixote, as argumentative structure, poses mimesis against anti-mimesis, man-become-book against book-become-man, theology against literature, “theological probability” against “poetic probability”. In the Book of Fate nothing is impossible; everything is arranged by what I would refer to - using a term coined by Philippe Sellier – as “theological probability”. As God is omniscient and almighty, everything is possible for the author of the Book of Fate. Don Quixote conforms his behavior and his perception of reality to this “already-written” book and this theological conception of probability. If the Quixote, as is often claimed, is composed of fragments – and indeed, can we think of a more fragmented book? then the unity of the book must at least partially lie in Don Quixote’s attempts to integrate the fragmented and chaotic aspects of his life with the ideal of the already-written book. This integration fails. 4. The issues just touched upon also confront us with the problem of irony as related to the Quixote: is this a book to laugh about? Let us distinguish between those that laugh and those that do not – a distinction that also corresponds with the various historical phases of the reception of Cervantes’ masterpiece.


(a) A reading of the Quixote by those that laugh could be the following: Don Quixote confronts the modern reader with the difficulty of having reality conform to an already-written book. Cervantine irony directly refers to Holy Scripture, in which Jesus’ life story is written by the evangelists in accordance with predictions made in the Old Testament: “In order that what is written by the prophets would be fulfilled, Jesus said these words, Jesus performed these acts…” Similar statements abound in the Gospels. As Book of Fate I believe the Quixote can be read as a parodic “mise-en-scène” of the “canon”. As a literary category “Canon” is a relatively unusable category for this kind of literature since the canon contains only a single book, the one true book, the Bible. I use the concept then in its absolute and original meaning of indisputable bearer of truth. (b) Those who do not laugh will give a different reading. Don Quixote is the figure who gives meaning, who attempts to fit the chaotic, fragmented and absurd aspects of reality into the alreadywritten and by theological probability regulated ideal book. Don Quixote raises the mundane to a loftier level. He transforms reality, the age of iron, back to its ideal form, the Golden Age. The already written book is reality as it could and should be: the ideal, with respect to which reality is nothing but a diversion and to which the latter should return. Achieving this goal is less important than the attempt, the seeking, the quest. In this hypothesis, the reader quickly forgets how to laugh. Suddenly the world of the Quixote is replete with a deep, almost metaphysical earnest. 5. The idea of “the quest” brings me to the question I first posed in the title of my article: did Don Quixote and Cervantes read the same books? A possible answer to this question can be found in the famous book burning scene, after Don Quixote’s first escapade, in chapter six of Part I. A lot of romances of chivalry are mentioned here, and most are confined to the fire. Everybody remembers the hesitations of the book burners: some of the works, such as the Amadis, are held responsible for Don Quixote’s folly and are to be burned outright, but at the same time they compel admiration from their censors. Many books are spared eventually: the Amadis and Tirant-lo-Blanc are not thrown into the fire. Derivatives, however, such as the Esplandian, fils d’Amadis, encounter a different fate. The selective nature of the book

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burning is, however, another problem. What I find much more striking is the absence of one book in particular that the modern reader would have expected to have been part of Don Quixote’s library: Robert de Boron’s Merlin. The wizard Merlin only appears in Part II of the Quixote, where he will become the symbol of deceit. The entire second part of the Quixote is occupied with comedy and the creation of illusion, as innumerable characters fool Don Quixote by staging all sorts of figures which fit the latter’s imaginary world. In this second part, as well as in the French sequels by Fileau de Saint-Martin and Robert Challe – in which Don Quixote does not die at the end of the second part but only at the end of two more parts – Merlin plays a principal part as dramatic figure. While this is a very interesting fact in itself, I am currently more interested in Merlin’s complete absence from Part I of the Quixote. Robert de Boron’s Merlin is a thirteenth-century romance of chivalry. We know only the very beginning of the original romance in verse. The prose version, likewise from the hand of Robert de Boron, we have in full. Merlin recounts the story of “le Royaume de Logres,” from the rule of king Vortigern until the time of Uter and Pendragon. In this book Merlin is a child of the devil. According to the Gospel of Nicodemus, after Jesus Christ descended into hell to liberate from original sin the souls dwelling there, the devil unleashed his wrath and strove to bring evil back into the world. To this end he took possession of that which is absolutely pure, a virgin, and planted a child in her womb: Merlin. The following passage of this thirteenth-century work outlines what Merlin has to do with our problem. Child prodigy Merlin, eight years old, is speaking to king Vortigern: Apprenez sans l’ombre d’un doute que je suis le fils d’un diable qui abusa de ma mère, et cette sorte de diable qui m’engendra s’appelle incube; ils vivent dans l’air, mais Dieu m’a accordé le don d’avoir, comme eux, la connaissance et la mémoire du passé et c’est pourquoi je sais la conduite de votre mère. Et Notre-Seigneur qui m’a gratifié de ce privilège en raison des sentiments de ma mère, de son saint et sincère repentir, de la pénitence que le saint homme que voici lui a imposé, de sa foi dans les commandements de la sainte Eglise, m’a fait aussi la grâce de connaître en partie l’avenir. (1994: 50)


(Know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I am the son of a devil that took advantage of my mother, and that this kind of devil that engendered me is called an incubus; they live in the air, but God granted me the gift to have, as they do, knowledge and recall of the past, and that is why I am the medium of your mother. And Our Lord, who has granted me this privilege because of my mother’s feelings, her sacred and sincere repentance, the penitence imposed upon her by the holy man here present, and her belief in the teachings of the Holy Church, has also granted me the grace of partially knowing the future.)

As a child of the devil Merlin knows the past; as a child of the absolutely pure he has the ability to foresee the future. Merlin will still, as is well-known, be at the basis of Arthur’s birth, his upbringing, the foundation of the round table, etc. None of this happens without a struggle. Merlin is the one orchestrating all of this as well as the one dictating the story as we know it to Blaise, his mother’s confessor and his own guardian: “Reçois mon enseignement sur la foi et la croyance de dieu et je te dirai ce que personne, sauf Dieu et moi, ne pourrait te révéler. Fais-en un livre” (1994: 52) (Hear what I teach you about the faith and the belief in God and I will tell you what no one, except for God and myself, can tell you. Make it into a book.) Indeed, Merlin visits Blaise at regular intervals and dictates the story to him. But what is this story about, then? Is it more than just a retrospective recounting of what has just happened? We get the answer in the following fragment: Un long temps se passa et Merlin régna sur l’esprit de Pandragon et d’Uter. Quand il sut qu’ils avaient l’intention de consigner par écrit ses paroles, il en fit part à Blaise. – Ecriront-ils, demanda celui-ci, le même livre que moi ? – Point du tout, ils ne noteront que ce qu’ils connaîtront après le fait accompli. Merlin retourna à la cour et on le mit au courant de cette décision, comme s’il n’en savait rien! Il se mit alors à tenir des propos obscurs qui constituent son Livre des Prophéties qu’on ne pouvait comprendre qu’après leur réalisation. (1994: 105)

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A long time went by, and Merlin reigned over the spirit of Pandragon and Uter. When he knew that they had the intention to write down his words, he revealed it to Blaise. – Will they write, the latter asked, the same book as I? – Not in the least, they will note down what they get to know after the facts. Merlin went back to the court and he was informed about this decision, as if he knew nothing about the matter. He then started to speak in obscure terms, which resulted in his Book of Prophecies, which could only be understood after they had come to pass.

Thus Merlin, as a visible witness of the events, is also the story’s writer, or at least he is the one dictating not only what has already passed, but also what is still to pass. As a character in the story Merlin simultaneously writes the Book of Fame and the Book of Faith of le Royaume de Logres. As it is succinctly put elsewhere: “Il retourna auprès de Blaise et lui rapporta ces faits et ce qui devait en résulter” (1994: 160). (He returned to Blaise and reported to him these things and also what was to follow from them) It seems unlikely that Cervantes read this book, even though it was part of the immense cycle of Grail books. Did Cervantes know of this Merlin, so different from the wizard that appears in the second part of the Quixote? In any case, when Cervantes starts mentioning Merlin in the second part it is as impersonation: somebody else dresses up as Merlin to mock Don Quixote. Merlin appears merely as a costume. Merlin is thus conspicuous by his absence from the first Quixote. On the axis of the imaginary Book of Fate on which we just have placed numerous entities, something particularly interesting is taking place, then. Don Quixote seems to be unsure of where the book of his destiny is being written: in heaven or on earth. Sometimes he acts as a kind of Messiah, in accordance with heaven’s commands. At other times it is a wizard that determines, knows, predicts and records all of Don Quixote’s actions. This mysterious wizard can only be Merlin. Merlin acts as God’s rival, an omniscient narrator, not outside but inside the very book. In this regard the Quixote fits in with the medieval romance of chivalry, which presents itself as complementary to and, later on, as rivaling evangelical writings. Merlin is a


spectacular metaphor of the implosion of “auctoritas” in writing itself. With this implosion modern narrativity begins as it were. For me the Quixote is an anti-canonical book, as it embodies the discussion between theology and literature on several fronts and in several ways. As anti-canonical book the Quixote opens up “writing” for literature; as such it only mirrors Robert de Boron’s achievements in Merlin four centuries previously: the implosion of the omniscient “auctor” into the work itself. Theological writing or Scripture thus becomes literature. The Quixote is unrivalled in its recounting of the story of the implosion of auctoriality. And that is my final point. Listen to the following age-old fragment by the prophet Ezekiel: Et toi, fils de l’homme, écoute ce que je vais te dire: “ne sois pas rebelle comme la maison de rébellion; ouvre la bouche et mange ce que je vais te donner.” Je regardai et voici qu’une main se tendait vers moi et dans cette main il y avait un rouleau de livre. Il se déroula devant moi et le rouleau était écrit au recto et au verso et contenait des lamentations, des plaintes et des gémissements. (Ezechiel, 2, 8-10) (But thou, son of man, hear what I say unto thee: Be not thou rebellious like that rebellious house: open thy mouth, and eat that I give thee. And when I looked, behold, an hand was sent unto me; and, lo, a roll of a book was therein; And he spread it before me; and it was written within and without: and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe. – Ezekiel 2, 8-10) Et il me dit: “Fils de l’homme, mange ce que tu trouves là, mange ce rouleau et va parler à la maison d’Israël.” (Ezechiel, 3, 1-3) (Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, eat that thou findest; eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel. – Ezekiel 3, 1)

This is theological writing of Scripture. The book that was written in heaven is eaten by the prophet and subsequently committed to writing again. The adverse of this anti-mimetic, theological writing is

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literature’s mimetic writing, which finds its origins within itself and is thus autogenetic. The actual Don Quixote is not written outside of itself; it generates itself as it were. In an ingenious way the Quixote relates how the text has been able to come into being. [We obviously cannot believe in Don Quixote’s own imaginary genesis in the Book of Fate which exists only for Don Quixote and which is instantly written by a wizard.] There is, however, another “scriptoral” axis which we can easily follow. At the genesis of the book Don Quixote himself stands. On this axis there are first and foremost the written traces which Don Quixote himself leaves behind in the bark of the trees. Then there are the other characters, Sancho, the priest, the barber, Don Fernando, Cardenio, etc., who constantly pass on Don Quixote’s story to each other. At the beginning of Part I, when Don Quixote is brought to his village in a cage, Don Fernando, who is leaving, asks the priest to keep him updated on further developments. This way the legend of Don Quixote could come into being in La Mancha and several different authors could tell his story. One of these is Cide Hamete Benengeli. His manuscript is found by the “second author”. It is the latter’s recount which we eventually read. The book is thus inherently possible, it can exist, and through its fiction it guarantees its own conditions of existing. Over against the always-already-written book, against theological probability, against the Heavenly book, there stands the book that is written within the story itself, and that accounts for its own engendering. This book’s author is part of the story. This author is not at the basis of the creation but is, as it were, part of it. Literature then becomes autonomous discourse. It is a broken discourse as well; everybody will have noticed that a crack appears in the Quixote’s autogenesis in the form of the found manuscript: where this eventually comes from and how the legend of Quixote has given rise to an Arabic version, remains a mystery. Cervantes’ Quixote takes up a monumental place in the history of the European novel. On the axis which takes us from the Heavenly book written by God Himself to the found manuscript the origin of which no one is able to trace, we find the Quixote somewhere in the middle where theological and poetical writing hold each other in a


baroque mise en abyme. This battle pivots around “la folie”. Folies d’Espagne. Translated from the Dutch by An Goris

Works Cited Bible, The, Authorized King James Version. 1997. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Robert Carroll and Stephen Pricket. Oxford - New York: Oxford University Press. Boron, Robert de. 1994. Merlin. Ed. Alexandre Micha. Paris: GarnierFlammarion. Cervantes, Miguel de. 1949. Don Quichotte. Ed. Jean Cassou. Paris: Gallimard. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. ––––. 1949. The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de La Mancha. Tr. Samuel Putnam. New York: The Modern Library.

Of Humorous Heroes and Non-Existent Knights: Don Quixote in Twentieth-Century Italian Literature BART VAN DEN BOSSCHE Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

In many respects, Don Quixote can be considered as a true “literary myth”, whose literary and cultural reception is intertwined, in particular from the nineteenth century on, with many of the crucial obsessions and preoccupations of modern culture. Some eloquent (and to a certain extent also emblematic or epochal) illustrations of how Don Quixote has become an authentic mythical hero of modernity can be found in the works of Luigi Pirandello and Italo Calvino. Whereas Pirandello tends to consider Don Quixote as the first truly “humoristic” hero of European literature, Calvino’s reworkings of the poems of chivalry (especially of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso), in parrticular in The Nonexistant Knight or The Castle of Crossed Destinies, cast at times highly quixotesque shadows, either through some aspects of characters and plot, or (and in particular) through their metafictional dimension.

Dealing with Don Quixote As difficult as it may prove to offer a satisfactory definition of what a “literary myth” is,1 it is most probable that Don Quixote would meet beyond any doubt the requirements of any such definition. In the course of its symbolic existence, Cervantes’ novel has been the object

1

In general terms, a “literary myth” may be defined as a story, recorded in literary texts (who are not necessarily the “only” or the “true” source of the story), and enjoying a more or less ramified Wirkungsgeschichte, versions of which may fulfill in certain cultural contexts and under certain conditions functions similar to those fulfilled by traditional myths; see a.o. Sellier (1984), Brunel (1994) and Siganos (2005; part. pp. 93-96, “Mythe littérarisé et mythe littéraire”).

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of various re-workings, in literature as well as in other artistic fields, and numerous characters and episodes of the work have become an inalienable part of western literary and cultural tradition. In the course of Don Quixote’s textual wanderings through western culture, his adventures have acquired the kind of narrative and hermeneutic malleability distinctive of literary texts transformed at some stage of their cultural reception into myths. Moreover, the adventures of the hidalgo and his servant have become more and more intertwined, especially from the second half of the nineteenth century on, with a number of crucial preoccupations and obsessions of modern culture. Therefore Don Quixote can be considered a truly mythical hero of the modern condition.2 As Don Quixote is a hero who aspires to live by the book, both the errant knight’s adventures and Cervantes’ novel present striking metaliterary aspects. Therefore, Don Quixote is highly suitable for becoming a “literary myth” in a more specific, metaliterary sense too, as the nature of his vicissitudes may inspire reflections on the relations between literature and the modern condition, and on the way in which concepts of truth and fiction, individuality and sociality may, can – and actually do – function in modern literature. In twentieth-century Italian literature, Don Quixote’s presence has been as striking and prominent as in other western literatures. My exclusive focus here on Luigi Pirandello and Italo Calvino is not meant to suggest that they are the Italian authors most intensely engaged in a reworking of the Quixote – especially in the case of Calvino, as will become clear, this would be a rather bold statement. Both oeuvres actually do present highly specific intertextual dialogues though with the knight of the sad countenance, dialogues which stand by themselves as remarkable (and remarkably different) examples of twentieth-century readings of Cervantes’ novel. They also demonstrate how Pirandello’s and Calvino’s readings strongly intertwine with the configuration and development of both writers’ poetics. At the same time, despite – or precisely because of – this specificity, both Pirandello’s and Calvino’s readings of the Quixote may also be read as illustrations of two fundamental ways in which

2

See Canavaggio (2005) and Watt (1996: 48-89; 218-227).

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Don Quixote has haunted twentieth-century Italian literature and culture. Luigi Pirandello’s Humorous Heroes In Pirandello’s essay L’umorismo,3 rightly characterized by Umberto Eco as “a drama or play by Pirandello which has erroneously taken the form of an essay” (1990: 165), Don Quixote is attributed an important role.4 Given Pirandello’s definition of humor and humorous art, this comes not really as a surprise. According to Pirandello, humorous art is defined by a special activity of reflection that observes, analyzes and elaborates all fantasies and images emerging from the artist’s conscience in such a way that every image, every sensation, every emotion is accompanied by its opposite. In humorous art the avvertimento del contrario, constitutive of the comical, is further elaborated in a sentimento del contrario: the comical blends with the tragical, laughter is tempered by sadness, mockery gives way to pity. According to these criteria, Don Quixote is a truly humorous work of art: even if at first the hilarious exploits of the hidalgo trigger an irrepressible impulse to laughter, this initial avvertimento del contrario is invariably followed by the bitter aftertaste of the sentimento del contrario, tantamount to the sharp awareness that the glorious ethos of chivalry is on the wane. However, there are two reasons why the position of the Quixote within the argumentative and discursive framework of Pirandello’s essay on humor is not all that self-evident. The first reason regards the literary and historical position attributed to the Quixote¸ the second reason has to do with the specific way the so-called “special activity of the reflection” (speciale attività della riflessione), crucial to Pirandello’s notion of humor, is articulated in the Quixote.

3

The first edition of the essay was published in 1908 (republished in Pirandello 2006: 775-948); a second revised edition of the text appeared in 1920 (2006: 1567-1576).

4

On Cervantes and Pirandello, see a.o. Cro (1986), González Martín (1979), Hernández González (1997), Krysinski (1988), Scheel (1982), Zangrilli (1996). For Pirandello’s reflections on Don Quixote and their importance for the genesis of his concept of umorismo, see Casella (2002, part. pp. 94-101 and pp. 266-268).


In the first sections of his essay, Pirandello rejects any form of historical, geographical or cultural reduction of humor. Humor and humorous art cannot be claimed as the prerogative of Northern European cultures, nor are they to be considered as typically modern phenomena; on the contrary, humorous art is of all time and in all places, provided that humor, wherever it shows up, always has a certain exceptional quality about it.5 In the central, more literaryhistorically oriented sections of his essay, in which Pirandello singles out some concrete examples of humorous art, the argument is gradually narrowed down to the reworking of epic of chivalry in the Renaissance (Pulci-Boiardo-Ariosto-Cervantes, so to speak), and in this context the Quixote is labeled the first true masterpiece of genuinely humorous art. Despite Pirandello’s denial of any privileged connection between humor and modernity, the fact that it is precisely Cervantes who represents the transition from irony to humor is connected with more typically “modern” and even “post-romantic” senses of being and Kunstwollen. Eventually, there seems to be some kind of deeper, almost epochal, connection between Don Quixote and specific prerequisites and mechanisms of humorous art. In Pirandello’s essay, the knight of the sad countenance ends up playing the part of a mythical hero of modernity – in the first place of Pirandello’s very own understanding of modernity, that is, a modernity inextricably linked with the widespread spiritual crisis of the fin de siècle as the young Pirandello had already described it at the age of twenty-six in his short essay Arte e coscienza d’oggi.6 Possibly the important position of Don Quixote as the first “modern” humorous work has to do with the peculiar kind of sentimento del contrario triggered by Cervantes’ novel, for the socalled “special activity of reflection”, crucial to Pirandello’s concept of humorous art, is located completely outside the novel itself (2006: 913). In most cases of humorous art described by Pirandello, the 5

Pirandello’s emphasis on the exceptional nature of humor is completely in line with his categorical refusal of any rhetorical or typological classification of artistic phenomena (see his criticism of Hippolyte Taine’s approach of art (Pirandello 2006: 793-794) and the rejection of rhetorical categories (2006: 815-817)).

6

“Arte e coscienza d’oggi,” first published in La Nazione letteraria, September 1893; now in Pirandello 2006: 185-203.


interventions of the artist’s reflection are located within the work itself, and can easily be detected by the reader in the course of his reading activity, whereas the sentimento del contrario stirred by Cervantes’ novel can only be fully assessed if one considers the hidalgo as a humorous alter ego of Cervantes himself; if one knows and fully realizes how Cervantes has subjected himself, and the way the ethos of chivalry has dominated his own life and times, to the special activity of reflection essential to humorous art. Is Pirandello’s reading of the Quixote indebted to a biographically inspired and eventually “romantic” interpretation of Don Quixote as a tragic hero? Was Pirandello utterly wrong when he claimed, in an article published in 1905 and later integrated in his essay on L’umorismo, that this reading of the Quixote was entirely new?7 Was Leonardo Sciascia right to label Pirandello’s interpretation of the novel as rather commonplace?8 Not quite, it seems, for Pirandello’s reading of the Quixote is far from biographical. What is at stake in Pirandello’s interpretation of Cervantes has to do with a fundamental area of tension between life, form and art (vita, forma, arte), as well as with the idea that umorismo is a fruitful way of exploring and artistically elaborating these tensions. The idea that life is in one way or another controlled by, restricted to, or entrapped in all kinds of socially, psychologically or culturally organized and regulated forms is a standing point in Pirandello’s poetics (as well as in the so-called pirandellismo, a kind of commonsensical synthesis of the main aspects of Pirandello’s ideas particularly influential in Italian criticism in the wake of Adriano Tilgher’s essays).9 For Pirandello, humor is precisely the ability to

7

“Pare impossibile: nessuno finora ha saputo interpretarla veramente, questa ragione, ed io ho quasi paura che tocchi a me, dopo tanto tempo, di scoprire un’altra America nel mondo della letteratura internazionale” (Pirandello 1905). (It seems impossible: so far no one has been able to fully understand this reason, and I almost fear that after all this time, it will be up to me to discover another America in the World of international literature.)

8

Cf. Sciascia, “Don Chischiotte,” in Alfabeto pirandelliano [1989] (1991: 476-477). See also “Con Cervantes,” in Pirandello e la Sicilia [1961] (1991: 1135-1139). 9

See Sciascia’s important remarks on this topic in Pirandello e il pirandellismo [1953] (1991: 999-1039).


grasp the conflicts between life and all kinds of forms in all their acute and tragic consequences, and humorous art is driven by and confers artistic expression to this intuition. Other forms of art, and in particular “rhetorical” art, favor form over life, at the risk of achieving the very same mummifying and fossilizing effects other coercive forms of social life generate. Within the context of L’umorismo, it is the relationship between Cervantes and Don Quixote, between author and main character – a relation of distant observation and unmasking, but also of empathy and compassion – that is indicative of humorous art’s ability to unravel the conflicts between form and life and to reveal the illusive truths of a life molded upon fixed social and psychological patterns. In this way, Don Quixote turns into a mythical hero of Pirandello’s poetics and of what in his view represents the post-romantic condition, as is illustrated by the (at first sight rather bizarre) connection between the literary-historical position of Cervantes’ humor and Pirandello’s own attitude towards romantic irony. Far from being purely literary-historical disquisitions, Pirandello’s remarks on the difference between Ariosto’s irony and Cervantes’ humor are interwoven with the distinction between the philosophical irony of the German romantics and Pirandello’s own definition of humor: irony – Ariosto’s as well as Schlegel’s – is defined as “the conscience of the unreality of one’s own creation” (“la coscienza dell’irrealtà della propria creazione,” 2006: 787), whereas humor – that of Cervantes and Don Quixote, or that of Pirandello and his characters – consists in the fact that characters, through the fully emphasized dialectics between vita and forma, behave as genuinely autonomous and self-reflexive beings, as spokesmen of the sentimento del contrario. If one is to look for traces of this interpretation of Don Quixote in Pirandello’s work, it is highly likely that one starts with Six Characters in Search of an Author.10 But it may be at least as logical to apply Pirandello’s reading of the Quixote to the way many of his characters reflect upon themselves, on their lives and identities, and, ultimately, on their very own ontological status. Pirandello’s world swarms with characters that step out of the contours of their own 10 And the link has been established soon after the worldwide success of Six Characters; see “Cervantes y Pirandello” [1924] in Castro (1967: 477-485).


identity and observe themselves living (vedersi vivere, 2006: 938). Contemplating their lives, their bodies, their thoughts from a distance, they fall under the spell of the sentimento del contrario, and react with astonishment, dumbness, horror or hilarious laughter. They are “liminal” characters, situated on the edge of life, or even beyond life (that is, beyond life as molded in social forms), they are mad (that is, others make a fool of them).11 The list of such characters in Pirandello’s work is long, almost endless… The protagonist in the novel The Late Mattia Pascal (Il fu Mattia Pascal) – to whose memory Pirandello dedicated the first edition of L’umorismo –, on his way back home after an improvised trip to Monte Carlo, reads his own obituary notice (the corpse of a drowned man has erroneously been identified as Mattia Pascal’s), and promptly assumes a new identity. Gradually, he realizes that such a newly created identity is an artificial and lifeless construction. As returning to his old identity appears to be impossible, he accepts to live the life of the “late Mattia Pascal”, a living dead enjoying the rare privilege of being formally (legally, that is) deceased but whose actual existence is certified by the emotional reactions of his entourage. In the play Henry IV (Enrico IV), a man playing the part of the medieval emperor Henry IV in a historical parade falls from his horse, and thinks he actually is the historical Henry IV. Years after the incident, he is cured from his madness, but eventually favors the distant, lucid viewpoint of the madness over the banality, hypocrisy and blindness of ‘normal’ social life. Vitangelo Moscarda, the narrator in the novel One, No One and Hundred Thousand (Uno, nessuno e centomila), wakes up with a shock from the drowsiness of his clearly outlined identity, and because of his attempts to undermine this identity the others consider him more and more as a madman. At the end of the novel, Moscarda chooses voluntary exile in an asylum he founded by donating his own fortune. He does not even consider the idea of going back to society: he bluntly refuses to look into the mirror – and to accept his body as a socially visible and generally recognizable form; he refuses his name, for a name seals off the life of an individual being, fixes it in a mould, and therefore belongs only on a gravestone. Moscarda prefers to 11 In L’umorismo, Pirandello uses the terms morire and impazzire to indicate the effects of a sudden epiphany of the “true” nature of life (2006: 940).


experience life as a flusso continuo, allowing him to be completely born and reborn in every moment, free to merge with a tree, a cloud, the wind, a book.12 Many a Pirandellian character seems to opt – sometimes under the pressure of circumstances, but often in a lucid and deliberate way – for some kind of quixotic madness: a life, an identity, a viewpoint that is by and large against the grain, and that avails him only the scorn and pity of his fellow citizens, who eventually consider him a madman. Yet at the same time Pirandello’s characters are distant, twentieth-century cousins of Don Quixote, for not only do they willingly and lucidly suspend their “normal” social identity, but they also ascertain the bankruptcy of any kind of well-defined social identity, and opt for a stato di sospensione in which the variety and indeterminacy of life are no longer curtailed. Pirandello’s reading of the Quixote can therefore hardly be reduced to the plain contrast between a body of ideal representations and the banality, conventionality and hypocrisy of social reality. Pirandello’s work has more of an anatomical theatre in which the opposition between the ideal and the real itself is time and again subjected to the merciless vivisection of the sentimento del contrario. Italo Calvino’s Non-Existent Knights Even a hasty reading of Italo Calvino’s oeuvre cannot but come across frequent and outspoken signs of the author’s great interest in poems of chivalry, an interest that regards first and foremost Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (Orlando Enraged). Traces of this fascination with Ariosto have been analyzed by various scholars13: many of Calvino’s works of fiction have explicit intertextual relations with the Orlando furioso; Calvino published a rewriting of the Orlando furioso (1970), and commented, sometimes at length, on his fascination with Ariosto in various essays and interviews.14 The most striking examples of 12

Cf. “Uno, nessuno e centomila” [1926] (Pirandello 1973: 901).

13

See a.o. Battistini (2001), Villa (2004) and Waage Petersen (1991).

14

Calvino’s main essays on Ariosto are “Piccola antologia di ottave” (1975) and “Ariosto: la struttura dell’Orlando furioso” (1974). Both texts can be found in Saggi


Calvino’s rewriting of poems of chivalry are the novel The NonExistent Knight (Il cavaliere inesistente), published in 1959 and republished shortly afterwards as the final part of the trilogy Our Ancestors (I nostri antenati), and The Castle of Crossed Destinies (Il castello dei destini incrociati), a volume first published in 1973, and consisting of two long texts in which different characters tell their respective stories by means of a set of tarot cards. In both works the Orlando furioso is overtly present. But the Ariostesque world in which Calvino dwells with such outspoken passion and delight is haunted from time to time by the phantom of Don Quixote. Even if neither The Non-Existent Knight nor The Castle of Crossed Destinies contain explicit references to the knight of the sad countenance, in both there are indirect, twisted, distorted or repressed traces of Don Quixote’s presence. Both works of fiction are, to speak with Hans Blumenberg (1979), instances of an Arbeit am Mythos: an Arbeit that, on a superficial level, concerns mainly the overt exploration of Ariosto’s fantasy world, but that eventually also has to do with the hidden and menacing world of Don Quixote. Right from the first page, The Non-Existent Knight introduces the reader to a imaginary world that is clearly Ariosto’s. Just like the Orlando furioso, Calvino’s novel begins outside the city walls of Paris, where the army of Charlemagne has just built its encampment. But the reader witnesses a chivalry in decay: the once glorious knights now wander weak-kneed and undisciplined through the camp, and their commander is a decrepit old man rather than a legendary emperor. Only the mysterious Agilulfo follows by the book all rules of military duty. Agilulfo is a kind of Don Quixote devoted to the consequent and literal application of the ethos of chivalry that his peers apply in very different and most of all very faulty ways. According to the narrator of the story, Suor Teodora, Agilulfo’s entire existence is limited to the accomplishment of his tasks, the execution of his function, the fulfillment of his duty. Life – real life – has vanished from his existence – literally, that is, for he is now nothing more than a suit of armor, without any bodily presence. He is the prisoner of his armor, yet at the same time only exists by virtue of that 1945-1985 (1995: 759-768; 769-774). Another short text, “Ariosto geometrico” (1974) was not republished in the edition of the Saggi.


armor, and of the countless tasks, rituals and actions attached to it. Just like Don Quixote, Agilulfo has a squire who in many respects is his opposite. Whereas Agilulfo is characterized as someone who thinks he exists, but in reality does not, Gurdulù is said to be “a person who exists and doesn’t realize he exists” (1977b: 26). Gurdulù represents a form of pure existence, unaware of its own being, and therefore constantly fused and confused with all things and creatures he is surrounded by. Between Agilulfo’s situation and that of Don Quixote there may be several striking parallels, yet there are also significant differences. Both Don Quixote and Agilulfo clash with their environment because of their straightforward and literal application of the codes of chivalry, but this conflict has very different ontological implications. The (often physical) collisions between Don Quixote and his entourage represent a conflict between two radically different worlds and worldviews, whereas Agilulfo’s adventures are undoubtedly situated in the same imaginary world as that of his fellows or antagonists. So, at first sight, Calvino’s novel lacks any quixotic conflict between fiction and reality; in the case of The Non-Existent Knight, the tension between fantasy and reality is situated more (one is tempted to say: almost entirely) on the level of the relationship with the reader. In his essays from the fifties and the early sixties, Calvino defines the core of his relationship with literature, both as a writer and as a reader, as the search for a positive ethical-historical significance (the so-called “medulla”, midollo del leone).15 What Calvino is looking for are stories conveying in a convincing way a morally inspired stance vis-àvis historical reality. For Calvino, among the narrative genres particularly suited for this kind of literature range traditional narrative genres such as fairy-tales and fables, genuinely epical genres such as classical adventure stories or the poems of chivalry from the Renaissance: because of the language, the imagery, the emphasis on plot and events, the brisk narrative rhythm and the absence of psychological analysis, all these genres can function as interesting sources of inspiration for contemporary prose fiction voicing in a 15

Cf. in the first place Il midollo del leone [1955] (1995: 9-27), Natura e storia nel romanzo [1958] (1995: 28-51) and Il mare dell’oggettività [1959] (1995: 52-60); all these essays were collected by Calvino in the volume Una pietra sopra (1980).


clear-cut and efficient way certain basic attitudes towards historical reality. From this point of view, Agilulfo may refer to a certain attitude towards the world: a way of being exclusively defined in functional terms, oblivious of the thickness of being-in-the-world and, as will become clear in the wake of the story, unable to correct his own self. In the same way, other characters and their vicissitudes (the female characters of Bradamante and Sofronia, the knights Rambaldo and Torrismondo, as well as the mysterious Gurdulù) can be considered to stand for particular forms of self-awareness, and for specific attitudes towards reality. This kind of reading naturally tends toward allegoresis. The narrative voice already offers various clues in this direction, especially in its comment on the acts of Agilulfo and Gurdulù. Calvino himself, too, has outlined the contours of an allegorical reading of The NonExistent Knight and of the other novels in Our Ancestors (The Cloven Viscount and The Baron in the Trees). The existential questions conveyed by the character of Agilulfo (and, directly attached to him, by the other characters, in the first place by Gurdulù), is what turns the knight without armor in one of our ancestors and grants him a wellearned place in the family tree of modern man.16 In The Non-Existent Knight, however, this kind of allegoresis is not as straightforward as it seems, and this is mainly due to the almost quixotic meta-discursive slant of the novel. In the course of her account, Suor Teodora, the narrative voice, not only comments on the plot and the narrative act (the way in which the account starts and develops, the obstacles during the act of writing), but the unfolding of the events is progressively linked to – and even represented as a direct consequence of – the way the writing itself is unfolding. The story crawls with ever greater fatigue from the narrator’s pen. The thin line of firmly linked letters unfolds amidst harsh difficulties, and offers 16

See Calvino’s interpretation of the difference between Agilulfo and Gurdulù as an opposition between “non-existence gifted with will and conscience” (“inesistenza munita di volontà e coscienza”) and “existence deprived of conscience, that is general identification with the objective modus” (“esistenza priva di coscienza, ossia identificazione generale col modo oggettivo”); the other characters represent particular forms of conflict (as well as possibile solutions for it) between “existing” (“l’esserci”) and “non existing” (“il non esserci”) (Nota 1960 in I nostri antenati, in Calvino 1991: 1216-127).


only a homogeneous and imperfect version of the facts (cf. 1959: 1136-1138). At times, the whole story even threatens to get caught up in the scribbles and doodles of Suor Teodora’s handwriting. More and more the narrator seems to take into account the possibility that her story, precisely because of the arduous process of writing, is full of holes, and may be subject to quite diverging interpretations. Both story-telling and allegoresis appear to depend upon contingent and almost arbitrary factors, and the reader needs to seriously consider the possibility that the story of Suor Teodora exists of no more than a chain of skillfully combined letters, just as Agilulfo is no more than a skillfully assembled suit of armor, held together by the mere force of his will and sense of duty. And just as Agilulfo eventually seems to vanish almost completely – he disappears, leaving the disiecta membra of his armor on the field of honor – the only true reality of the story can eventually be mediated through and may even coincide with that of the narrative act itself. Or maybe this is not entirely true: the threat of a fully quixotic ending – with a pen and a character who, precisely as in the Quixote, tend to merge completely – is eventually averted, or at least postponed. In a kind of final qui pro quo, Suor Teodora, the narrator of the story, turns out to be none other than Bradamante, the female warrior Rambaldo is in love with. And if her pen in the course of the narration creaked with ever greater haste on the surface of the paper, at the expense of doubts and concerns regarding the unfolding of the story, this may be due to Suor Teodora’s hurry to speed up events and reach the point where Rambaldo would find her at last, she would be able to abandon her pen and to set out in life with her beloved knight. Similar preoccupations with the narrative act and its epistemological and ontological implications, and with even more pronounced outcomes, can be spotted in The Castle of Crossed Destinies. In this case, too, these preoccupations are linked to some intriguing echoes of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Suffice it to consider the first page of the book: an anonymous narrator arrives in a castle after a long and harsh journey through an immense wood. He enters the premises, joins the other guests at a huge table, and immediately starts doubting about what he witnesses. In what sort of building is he: a castle or a tavern? Or maybe a castle that has been turned into a tavern? Or maybe a tavern that has taken on the allure of a real castle?


Here is a very eloquent case of mémoire ludique¸ a playful literary memory17 – but one that in the course of Calvino’s book will turn into a kind of mémoire mélancholique that would very well suit the knight of the sad countenance. This initial moment of doubt about the nature of the space into which the narrator finds himself foreshadows future developments in the course of the story. The Castle of Crossed Destinies consists of stories the different characters, all mysteriously struck with mutism, tell each other by means of a set of tarot cards. All these stories are worded by the narrator, but his comments on the tarot cards displayed by the other characters seethe with inferences that, although sometimes very convincing, remain debatable. Moreover, the stories are part of a web of signs whose meaning depends on the position of every sign within the larger chain. In part two of the book (The Tavern of Crossed Destinies), the narrator’s uncertainties result in a more outspoken and even radical doubt: does he read the tarot cards correctly? Is he making the right deductions? What about flaws in the memory of what we want to tell each other? Furthermore, the other characters continuously move, shift and switch the tarot cards, and some of them really are at pains to tell their story in the midst of the row of ever shifting and moving cards.18 The doubt about the way the stories develop, and the way they may, could or should be read expands in the course of the novel to the general question about order and chaos in the universe, and about meaning or madness of the constructions elaborated by the human brain to understand the world. Two of the stories refer to episodes from the Orlando furioso, two others concern literary myths (Faust, Parsifal), and three other stories derive from Shakespeare (King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet).19 17

See Samoyault (2001: 50-66).

18

“For the cards conceal more things than they tell, and as soon as a card says more, other hands immediately try to pull it in their direction, to fit it into a different story. One perhaps begins to tell a tale on his own, with cards that seem to belong solely to him, and all of a sudden the conclusion comes in a rush, overlapping that of other stories in the same catastrophic pictures” (1977a: 71). 19

These are respectively Two Tales of Seeking and Loosing (1977a: 89-96) and Three Tales of Madness and Destruction (1977a: 113-121).


In the chapter The Tale of Roland Crazed with Love, madness is seen as a condition characterized by a “surplus” of stories, whereas reason is characterized by selecting a single story line to the detriment of the other possible stories and their ways of structuring the tellable.20 A narrative thread is tantamount to a distinction between order and chaos. Choosing a single point of view – be it a seemingly strange, odd or mad point of view – already suffices to establish some kind of order and to keep the chaos of swarming possibilities at bay. At least, this seems to be Orlando’s conclusion, as he ends his story with the tarot card of The Hanged Man (L’Appeso), who observes the world from his upside down position.21 Further on in the volume Faust defends a similar position, when he compares the structure of the world to that of a set of tarot cards: a limited number of elements puts billions of possible combinations at our disposal, but only rarely does the formless and meaningless dust-cloud of possibilities give way to meaningful sequences of signs.22 The second Ariostesque story, The Tale of Astolpho on the Moon, eliminates the idea of a deeper, more profound and more meaningful counter-world (represented in this case by the moon) in sharp contrast with the jumble of life in the sublunary world, a counter-world that offers the instruments capable of creating an order here below. It is a poet who patiently explains to Astolfo that this so-called counterworld is in fact completely void: it can best be compared to an empty horizon from which all stories start and to which they eventually return.23 Elsewhere in the book this is more or less the position 20

“Roland descended into the chaotic heart of things, the center of the square of the cards and of the world, the point of intersection of all possible orders” (1977a: 33). 21 “What does he say? He says: ‘Leave me like this. I have come full circle and I understand. The world must be read backward. All is clear’” (1977a: 34). 22

“[…] there is not an all, given all at once: there is a finite number of elements whose combinations are multiplied to billions of billions, and only a few of these find a form and a meaning and make their presence felt amid a meaningless, shapeless dust cloud; like the seventy-eight cards of the tarot deck in whose juxtapositions sequences of stories appear and are then immediately undone” (1977a: 97). 23 “[The poet] will tell us whether it is true that the Moon contains the universal rhyme-list of words and things, if it is the world full of sense, the opposite of the senseless Earth. No, the Moon is a desert […]. From this arid sphere every discourse and every poem sets forth; and every journey through forests, battles, treasures,


defended by Parsifal, who compares the structure of the world with that of the tarot cards displayed on the table. Just as there is a blank space right at the center of the rectangle of neatly arranged cards in front of him, the whole universe, with all that exists and is created, hinges upon an empty space of nothingness.24 Above this whole castle of cards, above these images of order and madness, chaos and nothing, towers the narrator – the one and only true narrator, the only one who actually resorts to language in order to express what he sees and thinks. He weighs up the possible interpretations of the tarot cards displayed by the others, yet at the same time is puzzled by a strange anxiety about what is to be found outside all of these stories: the “unwritten world,” as Calvino called it in “The Written and the Unwritten World,” an essay written a few years before his death and originally published in English: the overwhelming and disturbing tangle of everything that is not expressed nor explained, of all untold tales that yearn and scream and push and shout just to attract attention. For the narrator, the story eventually seems nothing more than a talisman against the uncanny spell emanating from the unwritten world – whether this spell adopts the form of a sticky chaos of entangled meanings or of a hypnotizing and mysterious void. But – and at this point the Ariostesque lightness assumes a truly quixotic air – maybe the story, with its order, its straightforwardness, its neatly disposed sequences, is also a prison, a strait-jacket, or even an illusion, a tragic mistake. More than once one notices in The Castle of Crossed Destinies a certain preoccupation, even a claustrophobic fear that it is possible to get stuck in a story, to become the prisoner of what you relate, unable to get in touch with the unwritten world and eventually to discern in which story you actually are. In The Castle of Crossed Destinies the spirit of what Calvino has called the Ariosto geometrico – the Ariosto of the narrative play of banquets, bedchambers, brings us back here, to the center of an empty horizon” (1977a: 39). 24

“The kernel of the world is empty, the beginning of what moves in the universe is the space of nothingness, around absence is constructed what exists, at the bottom of the Grail is the Tao […]” (1977a: 97). The rectangular of the displayed tarot cards with the empty space at the center is visually represented at page 98 of the English translation.


continuously changing combinations of a limited number of elements – is unmistakably present. But through the reflections on order, disorder and madness, via the doubt gradually permeating the narrator’s discourse, the geometrical Ariosto receives a real quixotic slant. It has been suggested that Calvino’s afterword to The Castle of Crossed Destinies illustrates the author’s feelings of obsession and even hatred vis-à-vis the book.25 Was Calvino anxious about the possibility that his Ariostesque combinatoria would turn out to be a quixotic enchanted cage from which he would not be able (or not even be willing) to escape? In “The Written and the Unwritten World,” Italo Calvino declares that after forty years of writing he starts to feel that he knows at least something of the written world, whereas what goes on in the unwritten world continues to surprise, confuse, and frighten him.26 At this point the darker edges of Calvino’s so-called institutionalized, soft, woolly postmodernism (I allude to Carla Benedetti’s polemical study Pasolini contro Calvino, 1998) come to light. Calvino’s apparently agile rewritings – of the Orlando furioso, as well as of countless other literary works – cast lean, emaciated shadows in which we recognize more than once the familiar silhouette of the knight of the sad countenance. Don Quixote’s Italian Odyssey The differences between Pirandello’s and Calvino’s Don Quixote clearly outnumber their resemblances, and an attempt to define what both interpretations have in common would find it hard to avoid rather generic formulas, such as the arduous relationships between being and consciousness or between art and reality – broad issues, relevant to virtually all twentieth-century literature and art. It is important to stress, however, that both intertextual dialogues with Cervantes’ novel concern interpretations that, without being truly “representative” or 25

Cf. Scarpa (1999: 76); in his afterword, Calvino describes how the writing of the second part of the book advances with ever greater difficulty, stirring the writer’s increasing irritation towards the novel, and bringing him to the conclusion that with the publication of this book a charter in his oeuvre will be closed. 26

In New York Review of Books, May 12, 1983; Italian translation: “Mondo scritto e mondo non scritto” in Calvino 1995: 1865-1875.


“emblematic” for a historical period, a spiritual climate, a literary current and so forth, do highlight characteristics of an attitude towards Don Quixote that is relevant for a broader cultural context. Pirandello’s reading of the Quixote is to a large extent based upon the highlighting of some of the sharp contrasts and contradictions surrounding Cervantes’ novel as well as the vicissitudes of its protagonist. Don Quixote is awarded the title of first humorous hero in western literature because of the way he embodies the humorous sentimento del contrario. The madness of Don Quixote is the result of the highly estranging look with which his creator Cervantes was able to analyze his own life. Similar explorations of Don Quixote as a symbol of contrast and contradiction can be found in other Italian interpretations of Cervantes’ novel in the first decades of the twentieth century. Inspired by Miguel de Unamuno’s Vida de Don Quixote y Sancho, Giovanni Papini refrains from considering Don Quixote the wretched representative of an anachronistic and meaningless body of chivalric ideals, but sees him as a true knight gifted with a deep-rooted faith in his high ideals, who declares war on the prosaic, sceptical, mercantile spirit of his time.27 For Papini’s Don Quixote, just as for many a Pirandellian character, madness is a kind of voluntary exile, a conscious attitude of rejection of his own time. That is why Don Quixote accepts all adversities he encounters: they are the true evidence of the tension between idealism and pragmatism, between heroism and parody that makes up his destiny. For all who cherish an authentic and enthusiastic faith are always mad, will always be torn apart, and will always live in a distorted reality. A similar slant can be found in the novel Lemmonio Boreo, published in 1912 by Ardengo Soffici, Giovanni Papini’s famous literary brother-in-arms. The novel’s protagonist is a kind of “Don Quixote in Tuscany” (the title of a woodcut by Soffici used for the cover of the August 1906 issue of the review Leonardo; Giovanni Papini, editor of Leonardo, considered “donchisciottismo” as a major characteristic of the journal): Lemmonio Boreo contrasts his own faith 27 The essay was originally published as a preface to the Italian translation of Unamuno’s text (1913), but Papini already knew the original version of Unamuno’s book, published in 1905. Papini dedicated two more essays on Unamuno on the occasion of the author’s death in 1937.


in the creative vitality of authentic idealism to the idolatry of logic, laws and rules in modern society. The fact that the others see him as a madman is just the ultimate confirmation of the authenticity of his faith. In short, during the first decades of the Italian Novecento, Don Quixote ends up in deep water: the hidalgo epitomizes a destiny marked by sharp contrasts, a radical rejection of artistic and social conventions, and by a proud profession of madness, acknowledged as the ultimate expression of otherness. Of course, the scepticism of Pirandello’s humorous heroes contrasts sharply with Papini’s Nietzschean glorification of the absolute creative powers of the artist, but it is precisely via the common denominator of Don Quixote as symbol of a discordant destiny that the differences between both oeuvres become clear. The quixotic phantoms that haunt Calvino’s work are of a different kind, and have mainly to do with the relations between literature and reality, between imagination and perception, between storytelling and worldviews – or, to be more precise, they have to do with the relations between the reality-forging potential of stories and the story-like nature of our knowledge of reality. In The Non-Existent Knight, allegoresis seems to be able to guarantee a process of interpretation and communication between both perspectives: as the narrative evokes a genuinely imaginary world, the reader is invited to read it in terms of ethical and historical attitudes. The stories contained in The Castle of Crossed Destinies cast serious doubts on the possibilities of interrelating story-telling and any experience of the real. Is the order of a story, as attractive as it may be, of any relevance to the understanding of the world outside the story, or is it purely immanent and autonomous? And does not the notion itself of any form of matching the story to an “outside” collapse? In that case, one risks remaining trapped in a story, a web of stories, a library. In Calvino’s work, such doubts culminate in the fear of an emptiness situated right at the heart of the story: Agilulfo’s armor is filled with Nothing, and in The Castle of Crossed Destinies there is an empty space at the center of the system of intersecting stories.


Don Quixote casts his shadow – now and then combined with explicit references to Cervantes’ novel – on many a metaliterary text of the last decades of the twentieth century. Autobahn, a short story by Pier Vittorio Tondelli published in 1980, has been labeled a parody of Don Quixote (Bernasconi 2003), as the young narrator, who is about to head for Northern Europe, interlards the account of his trip right from the start with allusions to Don Quixote. He calls his car ronzino or ronzinante, and sees his trip to a mythical Northern Europe as a heroic journey, inspired by the desire for a more compelling reality. During his trip, various mysterious adversaries (he calls them magicians or witches) try to thwart him. In contrast to Don Quixote, though, the narrator of Autobahn right from the start blends the heroic slant of his story with playful irony, highlighting his awareness of being in the middle of a self-invented literary game of role-playing. Far from altering the authenticity of his desire for escape and his aspirations to a different lifestyle, this self-reflexive irony shows right from the start that the narrator is acutely aware of the fragile and eventually illusive nature of his escapade. And he will be forced to interrupt his escape to the North. This playful quixotic charade fits into a pattern, for on several occasions the narrator of Autobahn – who has artistic ambitions – clearly expresses his views on the self-reflexive and ironic recycling of literary and cultural memory as the aesthetic strategy most in keeping with his attitude towards the world he lives in. Once again, the silhouette of the knight errant of La Mancha is prominently present in a story that is essentially about story-telling as a way of retelling, rereading, rewriting countless other stories.

Works Cited Battistini, Andrea. 2001. “Geometrie del fantastico. L’Ariosto di Italo Calvino,” in Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate LIV (2): 147-170. Benedetti, Carla. 1998. Pasolini contro Calvino. Per una letteratura impura. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.


Bernasconi, Erik. 2003. “Autobahn parodia del Don Chisciotte?,” in Panta 20: 243-251. Blumenberg, Hans. 1979. Arbeit am Mythos. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Brunel, Pierre (Ed.). 1994. Dictionnaire des mythes littéraires. Paris: Editions du Rocher. Calvino, Italo. 1959. Il cavaliere inesistente. Torino: Einaudi. Republished in Calvino 1991: 953-1064. ––––. 1970. L’Orlando furioso raccontato da Italo Calvino. Torino, Einaudi. ––––. 1973. Il castello dei destini incrociati. Torino: Einaudi. Republished in Calvino 1992: 499-610. ––––. 1974. “Ariosto geometrico,” in Italianistica III (3): 657-658. ––––. 1977a. The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Tr. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch. ––––. 1977b. The Non-Existent Knight and The Cloven Viscount. Tr. Archibald Colquhoun. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch. ––––. 1983. “The Written and the Unwritten World,” in The New York Review of Books. 12 May 1983. 38-39. Italian version (“Mondo scritto e mondo non scritto”) in Calvino 1995: 1865-1875. ––––. 1991. Romanzi e racconti I. Ed. Mario Barenghi & Bruno Falcetto. Milano: Mondadori. ––––. 1992. Romanzi e racconti II. Ed. Mario Barenghi & Bruno Falcetto. Milano: Mondadori. ––––. 1995. Saggi 1945-1985. Milano: Mondadori. Canavaggio, Jean. 2005. Don Quichotte, du livre au mythe. Quatre siècles d’errance. Paris: Fayard. Casella, Paola. 2002. “L’umorismo” di Pirandello. Ragioni intra- e intertestuali. Firenze: Edizioni Cadmo. Castro, Américo. 1967. Hacia Cervantes. Madrid: Taurus. Cro, Stelio. 1986. “Pirandello lettore di Don Quixote,” in Teatro Contemporaneo 13: 1-20. Eco, Umberto. 1990. “Pirandello ridens,” in The Limits of Interpretation, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. González Martín, Vicente. 1979. La cultura italiana en Miguel de Unamuno. Salamanca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Salamanca.


Hernández González, Belén. 1997. “Pirandello e Ortega lettori del Quixote,” in E. Lauretta (Ed.), Pirandello e la sua opera. Palermo: Palumbo. 121-129. Krysinski, Wladimir. 1988. “La linea Cervantes-Pirandello, prolegomeni e termini di una modernità,” in Il paradigma inquieto. Pirandello e lo spazio comparativo della modernità. Napoli: E.S.I. 231-276. Papini, Giovanni. 1932 [1913]. “Michele de Unamuno,” in Ritratti Stranieri (1908-1921). Firenze: Vallecchi. 65-75. Pirandello, Luigi. 1905. “L’umorismo di Cervantes,” in Il Momento, 13 May 1905. Republished in Zappulla Muscarà 1983: 260-264. ––––. 1973. Tutti i romanzi. Ed. Giovanni Macchia. Milano: Mondadori. ––––. 2006. Saggi e interventi. Ed. Ferdinando Taviani. Milano: Mondadori. Samoyault, Tiphaine. 2001. Intertextualité. La mémoire de la littérature. Paris: Nathan. Scarpa, Domenico. 1999. Italo Calvino. Milano: Bruno Mondadori. Scheel, Hans Ludwig. 1982. “Don Quixote visto da Luigi Pirandello e Miguel de Unamuno,” in Pirandello saggista. Palermo: Palumbo. 351-363. Sciascia, Leonardo. 1991. Opere 1984-1989. Ed. Claude Ambroise. Milano: Bompiani. Sellier, Philippe. 1984. “Qu’est-ce qu’un mythe littéraire?,” in Littérature 55: 112-126. Siganos, André. 2005. “Définitions du mythe,” in D. Chauvin, A. Siganos & P. Walter (Eds), Questions de mythocritique. Dictionnaire. Paris: Imago. 84-100. Tondelli, Pier Vittorio. “Autobahn,” in Altri libertini, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1980. Republished in Tondelli. 2000. Opere. Romanzi, teatro, racconti. Ed. Fulvio Panzeri. Milano: Bompiani. 133-144. Unamuno, Miguel de. 1913. Commento al Don Chisciotte. Trad. e note di Gilberto Beccari. Lanciano: Carabba. Villa, Cristina. 2004. “Alla ricerca del midollo del leone e l’Ariosto geometrico di Calvino,” in Romance Studies XXII (2): 115-126. Waage Petersen, Lene. 1991. “Calvino lettore dell’Ariosto,” in Revue romane XXVI: 230-246.


Watt, Ian. 1996. Myths of Modern Individualism. Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zangrilli, Franco. 1996. Le sorprese dell’intertestualità. Cervantes e Pirandello. Torino: Società editrice internazionale. Zappulla Muscarà, Sarah. 1983. Pirandello in guanti gialli. Caltanissetta-Roma: Salvatore Sciascia Editore.

Cervantes in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy ULLA MUSARRA-SCHRØDER Katholieke Universiteit Leuven / Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen

City of Glass, part I of The New York Trilogy, includes an interpretation of Don Quixote, in which the traditional relations between narrative instances and narrative levels are turned inside out. According to this interpretation, voiced by a certain “Paul Auster”, the author inside the book, it is Don Quixote who has invented Cervantes’ novel. In City of Glass this reversal of the roles of author and character occurs in the relation between “Auster” and Daniel Quinn, the main character of the novel, but even the roles of Quinn and that of the "real" Paul Auster (the author outside the book), will, to some degree, be interchangeable. The Don Quixote interpretation has the function of a mise en abyme, that reflects techniques and motifs characteristic not only of City of Glass, but also of the entire Trilogy. Also parts II and III, Ghosts and The Locked Room, are tales full of mirror images: every character is a double, the “Doppelgänger” of someone else. In The Locked Room the relation between the two main characters, the first person narrator and his friend Fanshawe, is comparable to that between Sancho Panza and Don Quixote. In the entire trilogy, just as in Don Quixote, the frontiers between “reality” and “fiction”, “truth” and “fantasy”, are erased.

Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy (1987),1 like most of Auster’s other novels (Moon Palace, Oracle Night, Illusions), is full of mirrors, doubles, disguises, ghosts, vanishing, disappearing, and sometimes unexpectedly re-appearing characters. It is a book in which the frontiers between reality and fiction are continually undermined, and the traditional hierarchical relation between author and character subverted. Furthermore, the narration is interwoven with numerous 1

The single novels which constitute the trilogy were originally published by Sun and Moon Press, Los Angeles: City of Glass in 1985, Ghosts and The Locked Room in 1986. The complete trilogy was first published by Faber and Faber, London, in 1987. I refer to the reprint from 1999.

220 | ULLA MUSARRA-SCHRØDER

quotations and allusions to other books, texts, and authors. In this intertextual network, characteristic for Auster’s novels, the most prominent figures are Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe, but it also includes European writers such as Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Chateaubriand, Hölderlin, Marco Polo, Giordano Bruno, and certainly not least: Cervantes. The famous Spanish author’s text is among the most important intertexts of the trilogy. Part I, City of Glass, includes an important discussion of Don Quixote. This discussion suggests a typically postmodernist interpretation of Cervantes’ novel voiced by a certain “Paul Auster”, who, notwithstanding his name, is not identical with the author.2 This interpretation may be considered “postmodernist” insofar as the traditional relations between narrative instances and narrative levels are turned inside out: here it is the character Don Quixote who is the one that has “invented” Cervantes’ novel.3 The main character of City of Glass is Daniel Quinn, an author of mystery novels, who writes under the pseudonym of William Wilson (the name of the “Doppelgänger” in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story William Wilson); the detective in Quinn’s novels is Max Work, an adventurous and (as suggested by his name) dynamic character, with whom Quinn tends to identify himself. One night Quinn receives a phone call from a certain Virginia Stillman, who mistakes him for private detective “Paul Auster” (head of the “Auster Detective Agency”). After having told her that she has dialled a wrong number, Quinn hangs up. Virginia Stillman, however, insists in calling him again, and in the end Quinn, who has become interested in the case, decides to play along, feigning himself to be “Auster”. Virginia Stillman wants to hire private detective “Auster” to prevent her husband Peter Stillman junior from falling victim to the murderous 2 3

The name of this character will subsequently be put between quotation marks.

In the case of Don Quixote this hierarchical order could be summarized as follows: “I, Cervantes, publish a Spanish translation of an Arabic manuscript, written by a certain Hamete Benengeli”. A partial reversal of this order has been proposed by Italo Calvino in one of his literary essays: “Cervantes represents a sort of synchronic relation between the narrated facts and the creation of the Arabic manuscript, by which Don Quixote and Sancho realize that their adventures have been written down by Benengeli and not by Avellaneda in his apocryphal second part of Don Quixote” (Calvino 1995: 389).

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plans of his father, the insane Peter Stillman senior. The latter, a sort of mad scientist, had for nine years kept his little son Peter locked up in a small dark room for the sake of finding out whether the child, closed off from every human and social contact and without knowing any language, would by himself learn to speak the original language of innocence, the so called “adamic” language or the language of Eden, or would grow completely mute or unable to utter intelligible sounds?4 After nine years, Stillman senior realizes that his experiment has been a failure. Burning his papers, he happens to set fire to the apartment. The firemen get to the locked room just in time to rescue the boy; the father is judged insane and sent to an institution. Now that Stillman senior, after thirteen years of confinement, is to be discharged, he threatens to return and take revenge on his son. Quinn, who has assumed what should have been the task of “Auster”, shadows Stillman senior from his arrival at the Grand Central station and onwards. Day in day out he follows him on his labyrinthine and apparently aimless walks through Manhattan. Every day the old man chooses a new route which Quinn afterwards maps out in his red notebook. The result is a series of diagrams, which Quinn, unsuccessfully, tries to read as signs, figures of a code, or letters of a secret message. Quinn manages to have three, apparently casual, meetings and conversations with Stillman senior. The day after the third meeting, at which Quinn had presented himself as Peter Stillman junior, the old man has disappeared from his Broadway hotel. Quinn looks for him in the neighbourhood and in Riverside Park, but of Stillman senior there is no further trace. Quinn is at his wit’s end. He thinks he has no other choice than to look up the “real” private detective “Paul Auster”, in whose name he has acted up to now. He finds the address in the phone book: Manhattan, Riverside Drive. It appears to be a well-kept place, with clean glass, polished doorknobs, and an “air of bourgeois sobriety”, where “Auster” lives in an apartment on the eleventh floor. Quinn realizes that there has been a mistake: “Auster” is no private detective at all; he is a writer.

4

This experiment is a reminiscent of the destinies of Peter of Hanover, described by Daniel Defoe, of Victor, the “Wild boy of Aveyron”, and of the terrible story of Kaspar Hauser.


During their conversation “Auster” tells Quinn something about his writing, and amongst other things that he is working on an essay on Don Quixote, in which he offers an ironic, and highly inventive, interpretation of Cervantes’ novel: “I suppose you could call it speculative, since I’m not really out to prove anything. In fact, it’s all done tongue-in-cheek. An imaginative reading, I guess you could say” (1999: 97). The first question that occupies “Auster” is that of authorship: who “really” wrote the book, and how? Following philology and literary history there should be no doubt about this. The question only arises if we consider the book inside the book, where the author, in his own imagination, appears as both author and editor: “(...) I mean the book inside the book Cervantes wrote, the one he imagined he was writing” (ibid.). As Quinn doesn’t seem to follow this argumentation, “Auster” gives a more detailed explanation of his ideas: It’s quite simple. Cervantes, if you remember, goes to great lengths to convince the reader that he is not the author. The book, he says, was written in Arabic by Cid Hamete Benengeli. Cervantes describes how he discovered the manuscript by chance one day in the market at Toledo. He hires someone to translate it for him into Spanish, and thereafter he presents himself as no more than the editor of the translation. In fact, he cannot even vouch for the accuracy of the translation itself. (ibid.)

On the one hand there is a Cervantes outside the book, the one who has invented the whole story of Don Quixote, on the other there is a Cervantes inside the book, the one who feigns to have discovered and published a translated manuscript. There is a queer and somewhat distorted correspondence between the doubling of the figure of the author in Don Quixote and the relation between Auster, the writer outside the book, and “Auster”, character and writer inside the book. The first moves from the cover to the inside of the book; transforming himself into a character, a fictitious writer5 who, just like the author,

5

In an interview with Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory from 1989-1990 Auster explains the motif of this process: “I think it stemmed from a desire to implicate


plays a game with the character Daniel Quinn, whose initials D. Q. are also those of Don Quixote. The reader, in fact, tends to suspect “Auster”, who sits there smiling “with a certain pleasure”, for having mounted everything: “The man was obviously enjoying himself, but the precise nature of his pleasure eluded Quinn” (1999: 97). It seems that “Auster” lets Quinn play a role that he, “Auster”, had invented and that Auster (outside the book) will put into words. And what is the part of Virginia Stillman in all this? As the one who called and hired Quinn, she might stand more on the side of “Auster”, or the author, than on the side of the character Quinn. Perhaps it is not unimportant that the nurse she has hired for Peter is married to a policeman called Michael Saavedra, a name that clearly alludes to Cervantes (Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra). In fact it was Mr. Saavedra who suggested that Mrs. Stillman should call private detective “Auster”. “Auster” and Quinn continue their discussion, talking about the invention of the translated and edited manuscript. Here the frontiers between “truth” and “fiction” are totally obliterated, as “real” and “false” are presented as reversible values. Not only is Hamete Benengeli’s Don Quixote the only “real” and unadulterated Don Quixote; also the discovered manuscript is authentic. And why this pretension of “authenticity”? Because only “reality” and “truth” may be used in an attack on fantasy and free imagination. Which, according to “Auster”, is the opinion of Cervantes, a writer who, just like Don Quixote, was crazy about old novels, about fiction: “And yet he goes on to say,” Quinn added, “that Cid Hamete Benengeli’s is the only true version of Don Quixote’s story. All the other versions are frauds, written by impostors. He makes a great point of insisting that everything in the book really happened in the world.” “Exactly. Because the book after all is an attack on the dangers of the make-believe. He couldn’t very well offer a work of the

myself to the machinery of the book. I don’t mean my autobiographical self, I mean my author self, that mysterious other who lives inside me and puts my name on the covers of books. What I was hoping to do, in effect, was to take my name off the cover and put it inside the story. I wanted to open up the process, to break down walls, to expose the plumbing” (Auster 1996: 137).


imagination to do that, could he? He had to claim that is was real.” “Still, I’ve always suspected that Cervantes devoured those old romances. You can’t hate something so violently unless a part of you also loves it. In some sense, Don Quixote was just a stand-in for himself.” “I agree with you. What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?” “Precisely.” (1999: 98)

This argument leads to a new problem. If the manuscript is “true”, it must have been written by a witness, by someone who had taken part in or seen everything. But Cide Hamete Benengeli was no witness. The only eyewitness was Sancho Panza who, however, could neither read nor write: “In any case, since the book is supposed to be real, it follows that the story has to be written by an eyewitness to the events that take place in it. But Cid Hamete, the acknowledged author, never makes an appearance. Not once does he claim to be present at what happens. So, my question is this: who is Cid Hamete Benengeli?” “Yes, I see what you are getting at.” “The theory I present in the essay is that he is actually a combination of four different people. Sancho Panza is of course the witness. There’s no other candidate – since he is the only one who accompanies Don Quixote on all his adventures. But Sancho can neither read nor write. Therefore, he cannot be the author. On the other hand, we know that Sancho has a great gift for language. In spite of his inane malapropisms, he can talk circles around everyone else in the book. It seems perfectly possible to me that he dictated the story to someone else – namely to the barber and to the priest, Don Quixote’s good friends. They put the story into proper literary form – in Spanish – and turned the manuscript over to Simon Carasco, the bachelor from Salamanca, who proceeded to translate it into Arabic. Cervantes found the translation, had it rendered back into Spanish, and then published the book, The Adventures of Don Quixote.” (1999: 98-99)


So far, we are able to follow “Auster”. But when he proceeds to proclaim that Don Quixote is the one who had invented everything and therefore the actual author of the book, it becomes (not only for Quinn but also for us) quite difficult to continue to do so: “But there’s one last twist. Don Quixote, in my view, was not really mad. He only pretended to be. In fact, he orchestrated the whole thing himself. Remember: throughout the book Don Quixote is preoccupied by the question of posterity. Again and again he wonders how accurately his chronicler will record his adventures. This implies knowledge on his part; he knows beforehand that this chronicler exists. And who else is it but Sancho Panza, the faithful squire whom Don Quixote has chosen for exactly this purpose? In the same way, he chose the three others to play the roles he destined for them. It was Don Quixote who engineered the Benengeli quartet. And not only did he select the authors, it was probably he who translated the Arabic manuscript back into Spanish. We shouldn’t put it past him. For a man so skilled in the art of disguise, darkening his skin and donning the clothes of a Moor could not have been very difficult. I like to imagine that scene in the marketplace of Toledo. Cervantes hiring Don Quixote to decipher the story of Don Quixote himself. There’s great beauty to it.” (1999: 99-100)

The result of this interpretation is not only the reversal of the position of author and character, as mentioned above, but also the radical minimizing of the role of Cervantes and the maximizing of the contribution of Don Quixote. Also the importance of Sancho as the original chronicler is enhanced, whereas Cide Hamete is replaced by the so called “Benengeli quartet.” And why all this?, Quinn wonders: “But you still haven’t explained why a man like Don Quixote would disrupt his tranquil life to engage in such an elaborate hoax.” According to “Auster”, Don Quixote “was conducting an experiment. He wanted to test the gullibility of his fellow men. Would it be possible, he wondered, to stand up before the world and with the utmost conviction spew out lies and nonsense? To say that windmills are knights, that a barber’s basin was a helmet, that puppets were real people?” (1999: 100).


We may wonder if “Auster” has not carried out an analogous experiment with Quinn, getting him to believe that he (in the place of private detective “Auster”) had got the important task of shadowing Stillman senior and protecting the young Peter Stillman. During his investigations, Daniel Quinn, not unlike Don Quixote, does nothing but chase chimeras. He is, as Auster states in another context, a Don Quixote, whose consciousness has “gone haywire in a realm of the imaginary” (Auster 1992: 147). Quinn, furthermore, becomes completely obsessed with the case, identifying himself still more with Peter Stillman junior. Finally, after having confined himself to the locked room that once was Peter’s prison, he looses all sense of identity. But who will have the last word? Will it be “Auster,” or perhaps Quinn? At the end of City of Glass Quinn disappears. He vanishes as if from the face of the earth. In the locked room, little Peter’s prison, he has left no other trace than a “red notebook”, where he has annotated all his adventures and vicissitudes, a manuscript that will be copied out and edited by a mysterious “I”, an anonymous narrator who presents himself as a friend of “Auster.” The latter, who declares to have been upset by the whole business, wants to have nothing more to do with the story of Quinn. The roles have been reversed: Quinn is the author of a manuscript, of a story, where “Auster” (next to Stillman junior and Stillman senior) has the role of a character. Important in this context is also the circularity of the story: the end of it (“the red notebook”) will bring about the whole story, which, instead of by “Auster” (inside the book), will be transcribed by an anonymous narrator/editor and finally written by Paul Auster (outside the book), alias Cervantes.6 The Don Quixote interpretation has the function of a mise en abyme, of a mirror that reflects techniques and motifs characteristic not only of City of Glass, but also of the entire New York Trilogy. In City of Glass this function is underscored by various hints and allusions: the role of Michael Saavedra, the initials of the protagonist

6

Auster gives the following comment: “Paul Auster appears as a character in City of Glass, but in the end the reader learns that he is not the author. It’s someone else, an anonymous narrator who comes in on the last page and walks off with Quinn’s red notebook. So the Auster on the cover and the Auster in the story are not the same person” (1996: 137).


Daniel Quinn, the web of fantasies and illusions, which Quinn has created and where he is going, helplessly, to entangle himself. As Paul Auster declares in an interview with Joseph Mallia: “Quinn’s story in City of Glass alludes to Don Quixote, and the questions raised in the two books are very similar: what is the line between madness and creativity, what is the line between the real and the imaginary, is Quinn crazy to do what he does or not?” (1996: 110). As suggested by the title, City of Glass is a tale full of mirror images. Every character is a double, a mirror of someone else. This applies for instance to the relations between Auster and “Auster”, between Auster en Quinn, between Quinn en Max Work. Both Auster and “Auster” are writers; they are both married to a woman of Norwegian descent, Siri,7 and have a son with the name Daniel. The interpretation of Don Quixote has its origin not only in the fantasy of “Auster”, but was already invented by the younger Paul Auster. In an interview with Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory from 1989 Auster admits that “the crazy speech about Don Quixote, the maps of Stillman’s footsteps, the crackpot theories about America and the Tower of Babel – all that was cooked up when I was still in my early twenties” (1996: 129). Also Quinn is, in many regards, a mirror or a reflection of the author. At the beginning of his career Paul Auster, like Quinn, was mainly a writer of poetry; later he changed to prose genres, testing his talent first on the detective genre and writing under a pseudonym, which made him feel as though he was writing “with a mask” on his face (1996: 139). Auster too has filled up numerous “notebooks,” and one of his autobiographical publications has the title The Red Notebook (1996: 1-38). Auster sees Quinn as a sort of “other self”, as the person he might have been, if his personal and professional life had not taken another direction. In an interview with Joseph Mallia he says: “On the most personal level, I think of City of Glass as an homage to my wife. It’s a kind of fictitious subterranean autobiography, an attempt to imagine what my life would have been like if I hadn’t met her” (1996: 107-108) and in the interview with McCaffery en Gregory quoted above: “I tried to imagine what would have happened to me if I hadn’t met her, and what I came up with was

7

Siri Hustvedt (cf. Auster 1996: 20).


Quinn. Perhaps my life would have been something like his” (1996: 142). Like Quinn, Auster once was called by someone searching for a private detective. Thus the creation of City of Glass is, in a sense, due to “a wrong number”. In The Red Notebook Auster tells the following “story”: My first novel was inspired by a wrong number. I was alone in my apartment in Brooklyn one afternoon, sitting at my desk and trying to work when the telephone rang (...). I picked up the receiver, and the man on the other end asked if he was talking to the Pinkerton Agency. I told him no, he had dialed the wrong number, and hung up (...). The next afternoon, the telephone rang again. It turned out to be the same person asking the same question I had been asked the day before: ‘Is this the Pinkerton Agency?’ Again I said no, and again I hung up. This time, however, I started thinking about what would have happened if I had said yes. What if I had pretended to be a detective from the Pinkerton Agency? I wondered. What if I had actually taken on the case? (...). I waited for the telephone to ring again, but the third call never came. After that, wheels started turning in my head, and little by little an entire world of possibilities opened up to me. When I sat down to write City of Glass a year later, the wrong number had been transformed into the crucial event of the book, the mistake that sets the whole story in motion. (1996: 36-37)

The series of confusions will not finish here. What once happened to Quinn, will also happen to Auster. Ten years after the publication of City of Glass Auster will be mistaken for his character Quinn. At this occasion Auster discovers “that books are never finished, that it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves without an author” (1996: 37). He has in fact been called by someone with a Spanish accent who wants to talk to Mr. Quinn: “I was alone in my apartment in Brooklyn that afternoon, sitting at my desk and trying to work when the telephone rang (...). I picked up the receiver, and the man on the other end asked if he could speak to Mr. Quinn (...)” (1996: 37). Auster first thinks it’s a joke (“it might be one of my friends trying to pull my leg”), but the man on the other end appears to be in dead earnest: “He had to talk to Mr. Quinn (...). Just to make sure, I asked


him to spell out the name. The caller’s accent was quite thick, and I was hoping that he wanted to talk to Mr. Queen. But no such luck. ‘QU-I-N-N’, the man answered” (1996: 38). One might think that such an “uncanny” coincidence cannot happen but in fiction, in books such as Don Quixote or The New York Trilogy, but here we are, apparently, dealing with reality: “This really happened. Like everything else I have set down in this red notebook, it is a true story” (ibid.). Once again, however, we are reminded of the shifting frontiers between fiction and reality, of the possibility that books interfere with the world and act upon reality. Analogous to the relation between Auster and Quinn, there is, on another diegetic level, the relation between Quinn and his double, Max Work. While Quinn is writing his mystery novels, he identifies ever more closely with his hero and protagonist: “And little by little, Work had become a presence in Quinn’s life, his interior brother, his comrade in solitude” (6). Quinn and Work form a couple comparable to Quixote and Sancho: whereas Quinn is withdrawing from reality, Work becomes still more “real”: “If Quinn had allowed himself to vanish, to withdraw into the confines of a strange and hermetic life, Work continued to live in the world of others, and the more Quinn seemed to vanish, the more persistent Work’s presence in that world became” (1999: 9). An analogous identification will take place with Peter Stillman senior and, at the end of the story, with Peter Stillman junior, when Quinn confines himself to the dark and locked room that once was little Peter’s prison. In Ghosts, the most abstract and speculative part of the trilogy, the characters who, right from the beginning of the story, are mirroring one another, will finally lose every trace of consistency and blend completely into each other. The reader does not know which of the two characters, Mr. Blue or Mr. Black, has got the task from Mr. White to shadow the other. Is it Blue who traces Black as a shadow or as a ghost? or is it the other way round? Is it Blue who threatens Black or is it Black that represents a menace to Blue? Is it Blue who, sitting in his locked room, makes annotations about Black or is it the other way round? Is Black, after all, a character in Blue’s “notebook” or is Blue a character written and narrated by Black? The Locked Room is perhaps the most fascinating and compelling part of the trilogy. Between the two protagonists, the “I”, or narrator,


and his friend Fanshawe, there has been ever since their youth a relation comparable to that between Don Quixote en Sancho Panza: “Still, I continued to go along with him, a befuddled witness, sharing in the quest but not quite part of it, an adolescent Sancho astride my donkey, watching my friend do battle with himself” (1999: 215).8 At the same time they are also each other’s double: between the two friends there are continuous shifts and exchanges of roles. Fanshawe is a writer, but he has never published anything. He has in fact always had a deep aversion to everything he has ever written. After his sudden and mysterious disappearance, the “I” will be his critic and editor. Later the “I” gets the idea to write apocryphal Fanshawe-texts, to write books by himself, edit and publish them as if they were books written and left to him by the still missing Fanshawe. In this way he little by little transforms himself into Fanshawe. Also in his personal life the “I” manages to adopt several of Fanshawe’s roles. He marries Fanshawe’s wife, Sophia, and becomes his son’s “father”. As he finally undertakes to write a biography on Fanshawe (intending to shed some light on his dead friend’s mysterious and obscure life), he himself will eventually turn into the writer and Fanshawe is transformed into a character. The “I” consolidates his authorial omnipotence when he pretends to be the author not only of Fanshawe’s biography, but also of The Locked Room, the text we are reading, together with the other parts of the New York Trilogy: “The end, however, is clear to me. I have not forgotten it, and I feel lucky to have kept that much. The entire story comes down to what happened at the end, and without that end inside me now, I could not have started this book. The same holds for the two books that come before it, City of Glass en Ghosts. These

8

Also in other works of Auster we find allusion to the relation between Don Quixote Sancho Panza. This is in particular the case of Timbuktu (1999), a moving story about the dog Mr. Bones, which follows his master, the visionary poet and dreamer Willy Christmas on his wanderings through Maryland. Just as Sancho is Mr. Bones a faithful but also somewhat sceptical eyewitness of the adventures and visions of his master. He understands, like Sancho, everything that his master tells, but cannot (he is only a dog!) neither read nor write. Without his witness, however, the story of Christmas could not have been written. After the death of his master, Mr. Bone, like Sancho after the death of Don Quixote, falls into a state of darkness.


three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about.” (1999: 294)

Thus the “I” who at the end of City of Glass picks up Quinn’s red notebook, intending to edit and publish it, could coincide with the “I” of The Locked Room. One may however wonder if his pretensions are not comparable to Avellaneda’s claim of authorship in his apocryphal second part of Don Quixote.9 In the crucial passage quoted above, the “I” indicates that he has already invented the end of the story, but still has to write it down. In this last section of the story he recounts that Fanshawe suddenly has reappeared and locked himself in a dark room in a dilapidated house in Boston. With great reluctance the “I” takes a train to Boston to look him up, but Fanshawe does not let him in. He does not even get to see him; he hears only his voice, coming, almost like a whisper, from the other side of a bolted door. Before dying from the poison he had taken some hours earlier, Fanshawe has, with his words, almost drained the “I” of all his physical and mental strength, so that he feels himself as if going to faint: “I no longer knew what to say. Fanshawe had used me up, and as I heard him breathing on the other side of the door, I felt as if the life were being sucked out of me (...). I was so exhausted that for a moment I thought I was going to fall down. I clung to the doorknob for support, my head going black inside, struggling not to pass out. After that, I have no memory of what happened” (1999: 312313). We may presume that this scene coincides with the moment in which Fanshawe, the double of the “I” or narrator, on the other side of the bolted door, is actually dying. Under the stairs in the hall Fanshawe has left a red notebook, perhaps his version of his own story or that of the story of both friends. The relation between author/narrator and character, between the “I” and Fanshawe, seems to have been reversed, – as with the relation between Quinn and “Auster” (as annotated in Quinn’s red notebook) and that between Sancho Panza and Don Quixote (as interpreted by “Auster”).

9

The author of the apocryphal second part, who hides himself under the name of the “licenciado” Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda da Tordesilla, has been identified with various writers, contemporaries of Cervantes: Lope de Vega, Ruiz de Alarcon, Tirso de Molina.


The “I” is right when affirming that the three stories, which he pretends to have written, are finally the same story. Between the three parts of the trilogy, City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, there are numerous correspondences, analogies, reflections, both as to characters and action. Fanshawe, for instance, watching the family life of his former wife, repeats exactly what Quinn did when, from his shelter in the street, he observes all the comings and goings at the Stillman’s building: “I watched you. I watched you and Sophie and the baby. There was even a time when I camped outside your apartment building (...)” (1999: 309). In the same passage we are reminded also of the accidental meetings between Black and Blue: “I followed you everywhere you went. Once or twice, I even bumped into you on the street, looked you straight in the eye. But you never noticed” (ibid.). Furthermore, some characters migrate from City of Glass and Ghosts to The Locked Room. This is the case of Quinn, who now turns up as the private detective that Sophia has hired to trace her vanished husband. During the final scene of the novel Fanshawe in fact mentions that for years he had suspected to have been shadowed by Quinn, but that Quinn, after Fanshawe had “turned everything round” (just as Peter Stillman senior with Quinn and Black in his relation with Blue!) now (once more) has disappeared without leaving a trace: “He thought he was following me, but in fact I was following him (...). It was like playing a game. I led him along, leaving clues for him everywhere, making it impossible for him not to find me” (1999: 307). Also, the “I” and Quinn may be considered each other’s “Doppelgänger”. The “I” is in fact a sort of detective who shadows Fanshawe by means of documents, letters, annotations: “I was a detective, after all, and my job was to hunt for clues” (1999: 282). Even Peter Stillman junior will reappear. On a trip to Paris the “I”, who is on the track of facts concerning Fanshawe’s life story, meets a young man who reminds him of his disappeared friend. When he speaks to him calling him Fanshawe, the young man declares that his name is not Fanshawe but Peter Stillman. The “I” pursues Stillman through the streets, calling after him, again and again, with the name of Fanshawe. The outcome of the pursuit is a fight, a fight to the bitter end, where the “I”, who will come out worst, feels as if losing his identity (“Long before I reached him, long before I even knew I was going to reach him, I felt as if I was no longer inside myself (...). I


couldn’t feel myself anymore”), and where Stillman who, contrary to Peter Stillman in City of Glasss, is strong and sturdy, finally strikes his pursuer down: “Stillman tore me apart, and by the time he was finished, I was out cold. I can remember waking up on the sidewalk and being surprised that it was still night, but that’s the extent of it. Everything else is gone” (1999: 299). In this scene, which answers to the traditional motif of the struggle between “Doppelgänger”, the roles are distributed over a double constellation of antagonistic “twins”: Quinn – Stillman and “I” (mirror of Quinn) – Fanshawe. We will conclude with some observations concerning two remarkable topoi that connect the three novels: the “red notebook” and the “closed room”. The “red notebook” appears at the ends of both City of Glass and The Locked Room. It is a text in the text, a story in the story, which includes the whole text or the already finished story, creating a semblance of circularity. At the end of The Locked Room this illusion of circularity will however be broken. The “I” has gained possession of the red notebook and might possibly publish it (as he has published Fanshawe’s other manuscripts). But what is he instead going to do? He destroys it, tears it to pieces, page after page, – somehow in accordance with the text itself, which seems to contradict and to cancel itself: “Each sentence erased the sentence before it, each paragraph made the next paragraph impossible” (1999: 314). The tearing off of the last page of Fanshawe’s text coincides with the last phrase of the novel (and with the almost inevitable literary motif of the departure of the train): “One by one, I tore the pages from the notebook, crumpled them in my hand, and dropped them into a trash bin on the platform. I came to the last page just as the train was pulling off” (ibid.). All characters that make use of notebooks to write down their stories or their thoughts and meditations also shut themselves up, or have been shut up, in small dark rooms: Quinn, Blue and Black, Fanshawe. Among the important intertexts in this connection we may refer to the autobiographical texts of Auster himself,10 but also to 10

In Auster’s autobiographical work, A Portrait of an Invisible Man and The Book of Memory, both of them included in The Invention of Solitude, the theme of the locked room constitute a leitmotiv, the locked room as a prison but also as a condition of creativity. Auster refers in this context to the locked rooms in Vermeer en Van Gogh


writers such as Herman Melville and Nathaniël Hawthorne.11 Perhaps a reference to Borges would not be out of place too. Don Isidro Parodi, the detective in Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, manages, without leaving the closure of his small and dark convent cell, to resolve problems connected with the most obscure crimes and in that way also to compose his stories about these same crimes. According to Umberto Eco (1990: 155-156), in Abduction in Uqbar, the locked room is in fact the best place to resolve mysterious cases and, at the same time, to invent and to tell stories.

(rooms with open windows and rooms with hermetically sealed windows), in the story about Jonah and in Pinocchio of Collodi: “For it is only in the darkness of solitude that the work of memory begins” (Auster 1992: 164). 11

In City of Glass Quinn meditates on the last years of Herman Melville and has a short vision of the room of Bartleby: “His mind drifted off to the accounts he had read of Melville’s last years – the taciturn old man working in the New York customs house, with no readers, forgotten by everyone. Then, suddenly, with great clarity and precision, he saw Bartleby’s window and the blank brick wall before him” (1999: 5152). In Ghosts Blue and Black are talking about Hawthorne: “Take Hawthorne, says Black. A good friend of Thoreau’s, and probably the first real writer America ever had. After he graduated from college, he went back to his mother’s house in Salem, shut himself up in his room, and didn’t come out for twelve years. What did he do in there? He wrote stories. Is that all? He just wrote? Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there. Another ghost. Exactly” (1999: 175). Black mentions a story of Hawthorne about a certain Wakefield, who tells his wife that he has to go away for a business trip, “but instead of leaving the city, he goes around the corner, rents a room, and just waits to see what will happen” (1999: 176). He lives in that room for many years. At the end of the story he returns to the house of his wife, as if nothing had happened: “One rainy night in autumn, as he’s taking a walk through the empty streets, he happens to pass by his old house and peeks through the window (...). He walks up the steps of the house and knocks on the door” (ibid.). Fanshawe, in The Locked Room, is an allusion to the title of one of Hawthorne’s books: “In The Locked Room, by the way, the name Fanshawe is a direct reference to Hawthorne. Fanshawe was the title of Hawthorne’s first novel. He wrote it when he was very young, and not long after it was published, he turned against it in revulsion and tried to destroy every copy he could get his hands on. Fortunately, a few of them survived” (Auster in the interview with Joseph Mallia, in Auster 1996: 111). Just as Hawthorne, Auster’s character Fanshawe has an aversion towards his own texts. He does not want to publish his own manuscripts and when he hears that someone, his former friend, the “I” or narrator of the novel, has published some of his books, he buys so many copies as possible, – just in order to destruct them.


Works Cited Auster, Paul. 1992 [1982]. The Invention of Solitude. London: Faber and Faber Limited. ––––. 1999 [1987]. The New York Trilogy. London: Faber and Faber Limited. ––––. 1996 [1995]. The Red Notebook. London: Faber and Faber Limited. ––––. 2000 [1999]. Timbuktu. London: Faber and Faber Limited. Calvino, Italo. 1995. Saggi I. Ed. Mario Barenghi. Milano: Mondadori. Eco, Umberto. 1990. The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Don Quixote on the Mississippi: Twain’s Modernities1 THEO D’HAEN Katholieke Universiteit Leuven / Universiteit Leiden

In this article I consider Cervantes’ Don Quixote to be an intertext running all through Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Specifically, I consider Twain in these works, and particularly in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to be reflecting on the particular form Modernity took in nineteenth-century America, and to be doing so by way of an implicit dialogue with the Quixote, which itself is already a profound reflection on Modernity emerging at the time of its writing.

I will approach Twain’s work, and primarily Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the dual “European” perspective of an intertext present throughout Huck Finn, and also in Tom Sawyer, that is to say Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and from that of a more general theory allowing me to re-situate Twain with regard to American Studies, but also with regard to the study of literary history more in general. The particular theory I am here thinking of is that developed by Pascale Casanova in her 1999 La République mondiale des lettres, since translated into English as The World Republic of Letters. Is there anything novel to say about Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), a book that, as Jonathan Arac put it in his 1997 Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of

1

This article originally appeared as “Don Quixote on the Mississippi: Twain’s Modernities,” in Richard Gray and Waldemar Zacharasewiecz (Eds). Transatlantic Exchanges: The American South in Europe - Europe in the American South. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences. 2007. 349-61. The author and the editors of the present volume are grateful to the editors and publishers of the original collection for permission to reprint.

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Criticism in Our Time, is the most “hypercanonized” of “American” texts? Arac dates Huckleberry Finn’s elevation to its present exalted status from the period 1948 to 1964. He cites the decisive role of a number of influential critics, including Lionel Trilling, with his 1948 introduction to the first college text edition of Twain’s book, subsequently reprinted in The Liberal Imagination (1950), Walter Blair, with his Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn (1960), Henry Nash Smith, with Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (1962), and Leo Marx, who in The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964) hailed Huckleberry Finn as the first novel in which “the [pastoral] mode is wholly assimilated to the native idiom” (319). To this list we might add Richard Chase, with The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957) and Leslie Fiedler, with Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). All of these critics and literary historians in one way or another pick up on Hemingway’s famous dictum from Green Hills of Africa (1935) that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” But they all also chime in with the then reigning orthodoxies of the study of American literature as the embodiment of the spirit of the nation, as practised by the Myth and Symbol School, and of New Criticism, reinforced by Leavisite yearnings for an American “Great Tradition”. Small wonder then that Arac, to immediately sketch the contours of the debate he will be conducting in his book, starts off by quoting Norman Podhoretz who in a 1959 article claimed that “sooner or later, it seems, all discussions of “Huckleberry Finn” turn into discussions of America – and with good reason… Mark Twain was the quintessential American writer” (1997: 3). Now Arac himself has a great deal of problems with this designation of Twain, and particularly Huckleberry Finn, as quintessentially “American,” because he thinks that the book in question is only representative, in all senses of the word, of part of the American population, and notoriously mis-represents another part, primarily the African American one. Be that as it may, I do not intend to go into that discussion here. What I do want to note is that Arac, while contesting the particular role ascribed to Huckleberry Finn within traditional or “orthodox” American Studies, at the same time limits the discussion to the American context. Now it seems to me that such an approach unduly limits the scope of Twain’s novel.

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Specifically, I think it prevents us from seeing how Huckleberry Finn may function not only within the paradigm of a national literature, in this case American, or to be more precise the literature of the United States, but also within Casanova’s “world republic of letters”. To do so would be to situate Twain’s text within a continuum of texts circulating in Western literature, and therefore also in relation to European texts, not only American ones, and with respect to events and developments outside the United States. Obviously, this is quite a program, and here I can only hope to scratch the surface. Therefore, I will take a shortcut by looking at Huckleberry Finn in relation to one “intertext” manifestly present in the book, and that is Cervantes’ Don Quixote, or with its original title, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615 respectively. Of course, it is somewhat of a commonplace in Twain criticism to acknowledge the American author’s indebtedness to his famous Spanish predecessor, specifically with regard to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Already in 1922 Olin Harris Moore published an article on “Mark Twain and Don Quixote” in PMLA, and in a number of ways this has remained the staple reference for later critics and literary historians on the subject. Blair, for instance, commenting on the episode with the “A-rabs” who will eventually turn out to be Sunday school children at the beginning of Huckleberry Finn, cites Moore as having established that this episode is based on chapters 18 and 19 of Don Quixote Part II. He credits Moore as having noted that “the humor of the romance lies in the contrast between the matter of fact philosophy of Sancho Panza and the romantic spirit of Don Quixote” (1960: 119), and then having extrapolated this to the relationship obtaining between Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Moore also already noted how Tom Sawyer shares with Don Quixote a preference for books, and for acting out his reading in the “real life” of the fiction he himself is part of. Nash Smith, when touching upon the much-discussed ending of Huckleberry Finn, claims that for Tom Sawyer Jim here is “the hero of a historical romance,” and that Mark Twain, in portraying Tom this way, is “consciously imitating Don Quixote” (1962: 134). Montserrat Ginés is the most recent commentator to take up, and at the same time summarize, the relationship between Mark Twain’s

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oeuvre and Cervantes’ masterpiece in his The Southern Inheritors of Don Quixote (2000). Instead of immediately focusing upon specific works, Ginés establishes a more general relationship between Don Quixote and Southern writing: “certain Southern writers,” she posits, “have been particularly sensitive to the fundamental themes of Cervantes’ novel: the insoluble discord between the real and the ideal and the attempt, at once grotesque and dignified, to affirm one’s individuality in complete disregard of common sense and against all the demands of historical reality” (2000: 3). With Twain, Ginés comments, this translates into bringing “Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to life again in the shape of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, the most memorable partnership in American literature… they not only reproduce the characters from Cervantes’ novel but also establish a genuine dialogue between the ideal – as romance and thirst for heroism – and the ineluctable force of the real transposed into the common sense of the ordinary folk of the American frontier among whom the author moved in his youth” (2000: 7-8). In line with most readings of the Quixotic import into Twain’s fiction, Ginés concentrates on Tom Sawyer as the counterpart to Don Quixote in both The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Linking each of these heroes to his specific cultural environment, Ginés contends that their different fates reflect the different fortunes of these environments. Whereas old and tired Don Quixote is destined to fail, reflecting Spain’s slow decline as already initiated at the time of Cervantes’ writing, youthful Tom Sawyer’s success is emblematic of nineteenth-century American prosperity and optimism. As she puts it: “Tom’s prospects are those dreamed of but forever denied to Alonso Quijano… Tom Sawyer and Don Quixote both seek adventure as a way of escaping their inauspicious lives, they both go in quest of glory and aspire to the heights of romance, and they both wish to alter their given realities, but only Tom succeeds in realizing his dreams, when in the course of his adventures, fiction actually overlaps with life” (2000: 28). Most readers of Mark Twain would agree that this statement obviously applies to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer where Tom and Huck, under Tom’s guidance playing at pirates and robbers and all that, actually uncover a murder, and actually end up with a pirate’s treasure.


Ginés also links Tom Sawyer’s fortunes to those of young Samuel Longhorne Clemens himself as portrayed in Life on the Mississippi. When it comes to assessing Tom Sawyer’s role in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, though, I think there would be less of a consensus as to the validity of the statement just made. But then in that novel Tom Sawyer so to speak acts by proxy, that is to say in the guise of Huck Finn ventriloquizing Tom Sawyer’s ideas to Jim, and always still in the mold of Don Quixote. In the words of Ginés (2000: 31): “taken as a whole, Huck and Jim’s adventures and misadventures along the Mississippi are carried out very much in the manner of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza’s, with Huck playing Tom’s usual role (Don Quixote) and Jim playing Huck’s (Sancho).” In fact, Ginés labels the entire undertaking of Jim’s flight with the aid of Huck “quixotic”. The fundamental “quixoticism” of Huck himself, however, for Ginés lies in Huck’s “moral stance,” and when “he refuses to hand Jim over to his persecutors, when he turns a deaf ear, not only to the heavily prejudiced society he lives in, but also to his own biased conscience, he performs a most genuine quixotic act” (2000: 31-2). With one stroke, we have here arrived at one of the two elements that also in Arac’s analysis have ensured the hypercanonization of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in American literature: the famous “alright, then, I’ll go to hell” from chapter 31, when Huck finds that notwithstanding everything his civilization and his religion have imbued him with he cannot turn in Jim to his “rightful” owner. The other element Arac singles out is Twain’s use of “American vernacular,” particularly as used in the opening pages of chapter 19 of Huckleberry Finn. I will come back to this in a while. The point of my discussion so far, then, is that ever since Olin Moore in 1922 comparisons of Don Quixote, Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn have by and large focused on parallels of character, and on the obvious resemblances between a limited number of episodes. The main reason for this, I believe, is because, as I intimated before, Twain’s work has hitherto been read exclusively within an “American” context. In fact, many works, biographical as well as critical, dealing with Twain, do not even mention Cervantes or the Quixote. To just stay with the biographies, that is the case, for instance with such recent works as Andrew Hoffman’s Inventing Mark Twain (1997) and Fred Kaplan’s The Singular Mark Twain (2003). Yet even

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the scarce attempts to situate especially Huckleberry Finn in a larger context, and to do so at least partially by way of Don Quixote, have tended to remain on the same level of generalities. I am thinking here in particular of an article by Lauriat Lane Jr., published in the October 1955 issue of College English, and thus squarely within what Arac sees as the formative period of Huckleberry Finn’s rise to “hypercanonization,” an issue moreover largely devoted to discussing the pre-eminence of Twain’s novel, and thus greatly contributing to said hypercanonization. Lane Jr.’s article is entitled “Why Huckleberry Finn is a Great World Novel,” a kind of novel “whose importance in its own literature is so great, and whose impact on its readers is so profound and far-reaching, that it has achieved worldwide distinction.” But that is not all, the world novel “achieves its position not only through its importance but also because of its essential nature,” and it is from this perspective that Lane Jr. chooses to discuss Huckleberry Finn, that is to say from the perspective of “the special qualities Huckleberry Finn has in common with certain other world novels” (1955: 1). The first world novel, for Lane Jr. is the Quixote. “The most important thing which Don Quixote has bequeathed to the novels after it (apart of course from the all-important fact of there being such a thing as a novel at all),” Lane Jr. says, “is the theme which is central to Don Quixote and to almost every great novel since then, the theme of appearance versus reality… this theme is also central to Huckleberry Finn” (1955: 1-2). Other themes that make Huckleberry Finn qualify as a world novel are the “passage from youth to maturity,” effectively making it into a novel of education, and therefore in a lineage likewise comprising Candide, Tom Jones, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Furthermore, always according to Lane Jr., Huckleberry Finn shares with “most of the world’s great novels [the theme] of man’s obsession with great wealth,” as well as that it conveys a “total vision of the nation or people from which it takes its origin” (1955: 2). Further contributing to Huckleberry Finn’s world novel status is that it fulfils some of the functions of epic poetry, features an epic hero, highlights epic values, and partakes of the epic style. Finally, Huckleberry Finn also has the quality of allegory, putting it in a direct line of descent from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The particular form this allegory takes, according to Lane


Jr., is that of a journey towards knowledge. The specific “progress” Huck Finn makes, then is that at the end of his eponymous novel “he is about to undertake another journey, this time to the west, in search of further experience and further knowledge” (1955: 5). Especially with his appeal to the epic qualities of Huckleberry Finn and to how it conveys a “total vision of the nation or people from which it takes its origin,” and its insistence on the hero’s impending “journey to the west,” Lane Jr. to me seems to be defining Huckleberry Finn’s “world novel” qualities in terms of what others have termed its “quintessential” American-ness. Now it is my contention that the actual relationship between The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and even more so Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the Quixote is far more fundamental and specific than has hitherto been acknowledged, and that this has important consequences for a full appreciation of Twain’ work. I will take my cue from a recent book on the Quixote, by David Quint, and entitled Cervantes’ Novel of Modern Times: A New reading of Don Quijote (2003), and use that as filter through which to read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Quint essentially reads Part II of the Quixote in function of Part I, interpreting the sequel as a re-write of its predecessor, and a conscious reflection upon it. My suggestion, not original of course, is that this is also what happens with Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Huckleberry Finn shows parallel developments. For brevity’s sake, I will stay with three key elements Quint sees as structuring the relationship between Parts I and II of the Quixote, and which I see Twain as taking up in his two linked novels: parody, love, and money. First as to the use of parody with both Cervantes and Twain, relative, respectively, to medieval and modern chivalry. Quint argues that whereas the parodic dimension of the Quixote in Part I is a source of humor and suspense, in Part II it is a source of suffering. He instances this with reference to Sancho Panza in Part I undergoing physical punishment as a result of his master’s foolishness, but argues that such punishment never results from any meanness of spirit on the part of the perpetrators, but is simply a reflection of good cheer and of the spirit of buffoonery informing the entire Part I of the Quixote. In Part II, however, Sancho Panza is continuously under threat of having to inflict three thousand lashes upon himself in order to comply with

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the remedy the Duke and Duchess with whom Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are staying for a great part of the novel have determined to be necessary to dis-enchant Don Quixote’s beloved Dulcinea and turn her from an ugly and smelly farm girl into a lovely princess again. The Duke and Duchess are able to play this trick upon Don Quixote and Sancho Panza because they have read Part I of the Quixote, and hence they know both the gullibility of the Don and Sancho’s fear of pain. In other words, they are using their knowledge to impose real suffering, and they are doing so from a real meanness of spirit too. Tom Sawyer, in his eponymous novel, constantly plays tricks on people, but this never leads to real suffering – and even when it does, as one could legitimately argue with respect to the anguish his “playing dead” causes to his relatives, this is done unwittingly and unintentionally. In Huckleberry Finn, on the contrary, Tom’s insistence on freeing Jim “the proper way” at the end of the book puts Jim in danger of being sold “downriver” again while Tom all the while is fully cognizant that Jim actually already is a free man in the eyes of the law, thus causing unnecessary suffering in the interest of a boy’s prank. In Part I of the Quixote, Quint argues, love as portrayed in Don Quixote’s infatuation with Dulcinea runs along Petrarcan lines of courtly love, and is hence pure and unselfish. In fact, as Don Quixote never actually gets to see Dulcinea, it is a purely “ideal” love, untainted by any ulterior motives. In Part II, in contrast, the figure of the beautiful Princess Micomicona, who eventually turns out to be the rich farmer’s daughter Dorothea, introduces the “realities” of love. Dorothea has been seduced by a nobleman, who, not without some hesitations and trepidations, will also eventually marry her. With Dorothea, then, the physically “sordid” aspects of love, as well as the social implications of class relations, upward mobility, and fortune hunting make their appearance. Nor does this leave Don Quixote himself untouched, as Dorothea in her guise of the Princess Micomicona also appears a possible and desirable mate for our knight, who thus might gain a kingdom through marriage. In Tom Sawyer Tom is romantically and chivalrously in love with Becky Thatcher. In Huckleberry Finn love takes the guise of Aunt Polly restoring “reality” on the Phelps farm at the end of the book.


Don Quixote manages without money in Part I of his adventures, as is only fit for a true knight-errant in the traditions of old. In Part II, though, and partly as a result of reflecting on his own adventures as related in Part I, which in the mean time Don Quixote has read himself, the knight and his squire, when they set out upon new adventures, carry a bag of coin along, and it is Sancho Panza’s duty to properly pay whatever is due along the way. In fact, in Part II money emerges as a means with which to compensate for the knight’s foolishness as when in a fit of rage at what he sees as a gross insult to knight errantry he destroys the marionettes of the puppeteer Maese Pedro, and Sancho has to pay the damage. Money even partially comes to substitute for the immaterial bonds of loyalty obtaining between the knight and his squire when Don Quixote, exasperated by Sancho’s slowness in administering the lashes the Duke and Duchess prescribed and hence desperate as to the dis-enchantment of Dulcinea, ends up paying Sancho for his ordeal. In Tom Sawyer, money moves from being the “ideal” object of Tom’s boyish fantasies to being the real treasure the boys recover at the end of the book. Throughout Huckleberry Finn Huck’s part of that same treasure is a constant source of worry to him, as it leads to the return of his no-good father, driven by greed, into Huck’s life, but also as it robs Huck of the freedom he used to enjoy before wealth came his way. For Quint, the changes from Part I to Part II of the Quixote reflect the social and other changes affecting the Spain of Cervantes, and primarily the transition from military to court nobility, and from a feudal order based on honor and prowess to a proto-capitalist or mercantilist order founded on money and favor at court. As Quint himself puts it, “Don Quijote throughout tells and retells a master narrative of early-modern Europe: the movement from feudalism to the new order of capitalism that will become the realistic domain of the modern novel, the genre this book does so much to invent” (2003: x). I would argue that the change from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn reflects a comparable transition in nineteenth-century America. Specifically, I would see in this change a reflection of the transition from a belief in an America of youthful innocence restored after the Civil War, with the issue of slavery supposedly solved, Reconstruction under way, and the achievement of the ideals encoded in the American Constitution apparently within

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actual reach, to the realization of the closing of these opportunities with the end of Reconstruction, the institution of Jim Crow laws, and the Unites States rapidly turning into a fully capitalist society. Moreover, I would maintain that Twain in all this closely parallels Cervantes. What does al this finally lead to? In first instance, I think it proves that Twain was not the “untutored genius” he has often been held to be. In fact, he was a very “literary” writer, who at least in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and even more so in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn deliberately and skillfully used a variety of intertexts, prime among these Cervantes’ Don Quixote, to compose his own fictions. Moreover, he did not use these inter-texts in the sense of preying upon them or cannibalizing them simply for the sake of easy reference and a higher recognition factor with his audience. No, part of the meaning of his fictions, and particularly of Huckleberry Finn, arises out of the interrelationship with these inter-texts. In the case of Huckleberry Finn this interrelationship is moreover “overdetermined” because of a further interrelationship with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, parallel to the interrelationship obtaining between parts II and I of the Quixote. Second, it goes to suggest that Mark Twain, like all “great” writers, was acutely aware of his own position within his own “national” literature, but also of the position of that literature within the context of world literature, and hence his own place within Casanova’s world republic of letters. Specifically, I would propose that Twain used the apparent “naiveté” of his narrative stance as a deliberate strategy for novelty, thus opening up a “novel” space for himself within American literature, but also for American literature within world literature. Indeed, whereas before the publication of Huckleberry Finn Twain was well-known on the national scene, and thanks to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer also enjoyed some international reputation, the truth also is that until then he had been working mostly in well-worn genres, be they that of frontier humor, public lectures, or boys’ adventure stories. It is only with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that he changes the course of American literature, and gives that literature a fully distinctive voice on the world scene. I deliberately use the term “voice” here, because to a large extent, of course, it is indeed a matter of language, as has been stressed over and over again in Twain


criticism, and as Casanova herself also maintains. Again, though, the strategy here deployed by Twain, while novel in its specific context, was not wholly original in the sense of being without precedent. In fact, Twain’s move closely parallels the strategy first followed by the French writers of the Pléiade, when in the sixteenth century they emancipated French literature from the domination of Latin by opting for the vernacular, thereby practically “inventing” what we now know as “French” literature, but at the same time also setting in motion the complex struggle for literary recognition and hegemony that has characterized modernity, or at least its Euro-American variant, ever since. In fact, such emancipation, as Benedict Anderson has argued in Imagined Communities (1983), is itself a feature of and a contributing factor to what we now call modernity. The language, and the cultural system of authority closely linked to it, and from which Twain emancipated his heroes, his literary form, himself, and American literature, was, of course, not Latin but rather the standard English then in use. All of this certainly warrants Hemingway’s crediting Twain with having “initiated” American literature with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. However, and this is a point I want to stress, this was not an invention “ex nihilo,” as it is so often made out to be in traditional “Am. Lit.” In fact, I would see this very claim as itself a strategy used, perhaps by now unconsciously or at least unwittingly, by the upholders of American “exceptionalism” also in matters literary. In other words, it is yet another manifestation of the ingrained American desire to always “start afresh” or “make it new”; part of the same ideology that also enshrines the self-made man, particularly the selfmade businessman, as the embodiment of the “American dream.” In reality, what I see Twain doing is carefully clearing a space for himself, and for American literature, on the by the end of the nineteenth century already rather crowded scene of world literature, by using old strategies in a novel way, while at the same time firmly anchoring himself in that world literature by drawing upon the authority of what was arguably the most authoritative predecessor in his chosen genre, i.e. Cervantes’ Don Quixote. In other words, what I am trying to say is that for his own foundational text of his own American literature, which for him also constituted the only possibility for gaining access to world literature as a major writer in

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his own right, and not as a minor author in a major language not his own, Twain unhesitatingly drew upon, in the sense of actually building upon, the authority of the foundational text in the genre of the modern novel, and thereby also one of the foundational texts of modernity, or at least – as the term these days needs qualification – of Euro-American modernity. And just as Don Quixote needed to destroy what went before in order to allow modernity to come into being, and did so by parodying to death the literary form “organically,” that is to say socially and ideologically linked to the old feudal order, so too Twain, using a comparable strategy, had to do away with the literary forms linked to the pseudo-feudal order of the Old South. Hence the famous passage from the end of chapter 46 of Life on the Mississippi where he compares the effects wrought upon the nineteenth-century South by Don Quixote and Ivanhoe, respectively, concluding that “the first swept the world’s admiration for the medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence; and the other restored it… as far as our South is concerned, the good work done by Cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter, so effectually has Scott’s pernicious work undermined it” (1982: 502). To revive that dead letter, and to “sink” Sir Walter Scott is precisely what Twain aims to do with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Both Cervantes and Twain, while savagely criticizing what went before, and fully recognizing its inability to provide valid models for the changed times, at the same time could not but also lament the passing of the old forms, the old ways. Still, I would argue, they did not suffer from what Svetlana Boym, in a recent book with the same title, has diagnosed as “the future of nostalgia.” Rather, while fully acknowledging the inevitable, and in some undeniable ways also beneficial, coming of the new, Cervantes and Twain also already understood, and dreaded, what its corollaries would be, and particularly the inexorable turn toward everything economic, commercial, and “bourgeois” their respective societies were taking. That is also why I prefer to read both the Quixote and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn not as having unambiguously positive endings, with the Don’s retreat from his “madness” and his “good Christian death,” and Huck’s “lightin’ out for the Territory.” As we know, by 1615, the year of publication of the second part of Don Quixote, Spain’s retreat into the most orthodox Catholicism had firmly set the country on the


course of decline it would continue on over the next centuries. Likewise, in 1884, at the time of publication of Huckleberry Finn, the Territory as such no longer existed, and what in a fiction set in about 1835 had still seemed a life-enhancing way out of “sivilization,” at the end of the nineteenth century had proven to be a dead end. Both Don Quixote and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, then, while apparently ending on a (moderate) triumph for their heroes, in fact only engage in a holding operation, a “willing suspension of disbelief,” or “a momentary stay against confusion,” in the inevitable defeat of these very same heroes. This, of course, is also what renders Don Quixote and Huck Finn, regardless of the humor of the fictions in which they figure, into tragic heroes, and therefore also into icons of the contradictions, or even the regrets, of modernity, or perhaps even more appropriately of the various and successive guises modernity takes, each of which in its very own triumph at the same time mourns the “antiquity” it had to slay in order to give life to itself. Briefly put, then, and this is my conclusion, rather than as a unique and exceptional American phenomenon I prefer to see Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as taking its place in a long line of literary works that mark the turning points of Euro-American modernity.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Arac, Jonathan. 1997. Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Blair, Walter. 1960. Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Casanova, Pascale. 1999. La république mondiale des lettres. Paris: Seuil. English Translation: The World Republic of Letters, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

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Cervantes, Miguel de. 2004 [1605 and 1615]. Don Quijote de la Mancha. Edición del IV Centenario. Madrid: Real Academia Española. Chase, Richard. 1957. The American Novel and Its Tradition. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Fiedler, Leslie. 1970 [1960]. Love and Death in the American Novel. London: Paladin. Ginés, Montserrat. 2000. The Southern Inheritors of Don Quixote. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Hoffmann, Andrew. 1997. Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Kaplan, Fred. 2005 [2003]. The Singular Mark Twain. New York: Anchor Books. Lane Jr., Lauriat. 1955. “Why Huckleberry Finn is a Great World Novel,” in College English 17(1): 1-5. Marx, Leo. 1964. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Moore, Olin Harris. 1922. “Mark Twain and Don Quixote,” in PMLA 37(2): 324-46. Quint, David. 2003. Cervantes’ Novel of Modern Times: A New Reading of Don Quijote. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Smith, Henry Nash. 1962. Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Trilling, Lionel. 1970 [1950]. The Liberal Imagination. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Twain, Mark [Clemens, Samuel Langhorne]. 1982 [1884]. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain, Mississippi Writings, Library of America, New York: Viking. Twain, Mark [Clemens, Samuel Langhorne]. 1982 [1883]. Life on the Mississippi in Mark Twain, Mississippi Writings, Library of America, New York: Viking.

Getting Lost in La Mancha: The Unma(s)king of Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote BRIGITTE ADRIAENSEN Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen

This article examines how the documentary Lost in La Mancha (Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe) reflects on the production process of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a movie inspired by Cervantes’ Quixote that Terry Gilliam never actually finished. First, it is suggested that the documentary in question represents Gilliam’s movie in a very “Cervantine” fashion: in the way the documentary blurs authority, and plays with different authors, voices and perspectives, it metafictionally holds up for exhibit, and at the same time questions, the mechanisms of film-making similar to what Cervantes did with the genre of the novel itself. Second, this approach to the documentary might itself be questioned if we take into account that the documentary’s directors unwaveringly insist that they strove for an authentic, truthful and respectable rendering of the shooting of Gilliam’s film. This view on the documentary might then further be linked to Cervantes in a very different way, in the sense that it would be considered as a baroque ‘desengaño’ in which the exuberant fantasies of Terry Gilliam are parodied. In that sense, we could interpret Lost in La Mancha not only as the unmaking of Gilliam’s film, but also as the unmasking of Gilliam as a writer of chivalresque movies rather than of a truly quixotic story.

Watching the documentary Lost in La Mancha (2001) makes one feel peculiarly “lost”.1 The co-directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe lead us through eight weeks of the pre-production process and the shooting of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a movie about which Terry Gilliam had been pondering for many years and that consisted in an

1

I would like to thank Tom Sintobin, Maarten Steenmeijer and Dagmar Vandebosch for their critical comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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adaptation of Cervantes’ novel to the screen. Far from announcing from the beginning that Terry Gilliam’s quixotic fantasies on Don Quixote will fall apart, and will never take form as a real movie, the documentary maintains the illusion that eventually things will turn out well, thus inviting the spectator to share Gilliam’s optimism. At first sight, it would seem possible to interpret this documentary as a traditional “making of”, i.e. a short documentary that is aired on television close to the screening of a heavily promoted movie. In fact, this was also the initial proposal of Fulton and Pepe. Instead, we progressively assist at the accumulation of disasters that finally rendered the shooting and the production of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote impossible, and we become aware that Fulton and Pepe were not shooting the making but rather the “un-making” or deconstruction of Gilliam’s movie. Let There Be Chaos! After having failed to find funding in Hollywood, where the project was considered too experimental, Gilliam eventually succeeded in obtaining 40 million dollars from European investors. Still, as he admits himself in the documentary, even this sum – unusually high by European standards – would not have sufficed to make his dream come true in exactly the way he would have liked to. In fact, one year before actual production started, Gilliam saw his budget reduced to 32,1 million dollars, when one of the main sponsors withdrew. Fulton and Pepe’s story starts eight weeks before the start of the production of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, in august 2000. From the very beginning, the team is hounded by bad luck. Not only are funds insufficient; already in this pre-production phase the movie’s actors seem to be extremely difficult to locate, and none more so than Vanessa Paradis. As a result, none of the actors thoroughly rehearses his or her part. Yet, Gilliam does not lose faith. He does not concur with the pessimism of some of his producers and other members of the crew, but asserts rather gleefully that the movie has “got a lot of potential for chaos”. The brief visit of Jean Rochefort – the actor who is to play Don Quixote – five weeks before production starts gives them all a fresh shot of enthusiasm. Rochefort is very well

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prepared, is a good equestrian, and has been practising his English for seven months. However, when they finally want to start filming some indoor scenes, four weeks before production time, the echo in the studio is so devastating that even Gilliam gets a first nervous breakdown. One week before production starts, the eighty-year-old Rochefort is having problems with his prostate and has to stay a few days extra in Paris instead of coming to shoot the movie in Madrid. When they finally start the production process in the arid desert of La Mancha, with Rochefort, more problems arise: the stand-ins, because of their total lack of rehearsal, hardly know what they are supposed to do, and moreover F16 NATO planes overflying the set at low altitude cause a deafening noise. The second day of production is even worse: a flash flood inundates the expensive equipment and chaos firmly reigns. The following four days of production only confirm disaster: the dry and brown landscape suddenly turns green because of the rain, and the sky is continuously overcast. Both changes render previous shots in a sunny environment useless. Rochefort’s prostate gets worse and he has to fly back to Paris. On top of all this, the insurance company refuses to cover the time wasted by Rochefort’s illness. As it is unclear when Rochefort will have recovered, the actors gradually drift away, and start working elsewhere. Finally, assistant director Phil Patterson resigns, and Gilliam has no other option than to assume that his movie will not materialize. The agony of this process is stressed by the strong sense of dramatic irony in the documentary. For example, Gilliam repeatedly claims that “[i]f it’s easy, I don’t do it; if it’s almost impossible to do, I have a go” and he is called “captain chaos” by the other members of the crew. The irony reaches a climax at the end of the movie, after 89 minutes of progressive depression: we see a scene that we saw before, featuring three Spanish actors – representing giants – with nude torsos, filmed from a frog perspective so as to render them really scary. This was one of the few images actually shot by Gilliam, and the one that he liked best. In fact, he liked it so much that he suggested that it might be used as a trailer for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. This same scene pops up again at the end of the movie, and is accompanied by the rather cynical message “Coming soon”. We are several years later now, and though Gilliam has brought out The Grimm Brothers and Tideland, both in 2005, and has repeatedly


insisted that he is still trying to get back the copyright to The Man Who Killed Don Quixote from his insurance company after the budgetary deficit, there is no sign of the movie yet.2

Gilliam’s Man of La Mancha Don Quixote seemed a perfect theme for Gilliam. Knights, quests, madness, and justice are staples of his films (e.g. The Holy Grail, with the Monty Python team). Significantly, those quests are performed by isolated and naive protagonists in a hostile, overly rational and modernized environment. In The Fisher King, Parry – similar to Don Quixote – disregards accepted twentieth-century dress codes with his medieval outfit, and keeps seeing huge red knights on giant horses. Jack, his “rational” friend, even ends up joining him in his quests. Blurring time-perspectives is a recurrent feature as well with Gilliam. In Twelve Monkeys, the protagonist James comes from another era, and is regularly sent back to the present in an analeptic movement. In The Fisher King the protagonist behaves in the present as if he comes from the past. In Brazil we see the main character fighting the highly industrialized society he lives in dressed up as a flying knight with sword. Gilliam’s decision, then, to introduce a new character in his adaptation of the Quixote is in line with his predilection for anachronisms. In Lost in La Mancha we get to know that Johnny Depp was to have played the part of Toby Grosini, an advertisement executive who travels back to the early seventeenth century, the period in which the Quixote was originally situated. Significantly, the relationship between Don Quixote and Toby Grosini seems to rely on a misunderstanding, as Don Quixote takes Toby for Sancho Panza. Although we do not get to know in detail to what kind of hilarious situations this initial confusion would have led, it is clear that Gilliam aims at the intensification of the paradox of appearance and reality that is so strongly present in the original Quixote as well.

2

Recently (July 2008) Gilliam declared once more that he would retake the shooting of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Let us wait and see…


Simultaneously, the situational irony caused by the blurring of identities recalls The Life of Brian, another movie in which Gilliam collaborated with his Monty Python team, and in which the distinction between Brian and Jesus Christ himself is blurred. Still, Don Quixote does not always take Toby for Sancho. At a certain moment Toby has to flee with his beloved, the princess Altisidora (interpreted by Depp’s partner in real life, Vanessa Paradis, and in Cervantes’ story a girl that pretends to be in love with Don Quixote), because his furious master attacks him without recognizing him. Moreover, Gilliam goes even further in the scene with the galley slaves where Toby plays the part of Ginés de Pasamonte (I, 22). In short, Toby seems to be a kind of cross between Sancho Panza, Ginés de Pasamonte and a modern executive, telescoping different time periods and switching identities. In the same way, Gilliam exploits the fading distinction between Quixote’s madness and Toby’s/Sancho Panza’s sense for reality already present in Cervantes’ Quixote. The famous chapter in which Sancho tries to convince his master of finding himself in front of Dulcinea, when in fact he is standing in front of three peasant girls sitting on their donkeys (II, 10), was not shot during the production process. We do, however, see another animated scene of the storyboard in which Altisidora and Toby (Johnny Depp) peacefully cross the Castilian landscape together, and surprisingly it is Sancho Panza/Toby who all of a sudden is alarmed when he sees some frightening giants persecuting him. This scene is all the more confusing as the giants in the Quixote are associated with windmills, while they are completely autonomous and dissociated from their counterpart in reality in Gilliam’s story. Terry Gilliam versus Orson Welles In many screen-adaptations of the Quixote Cervantes’ complex poetics regarding lies and truth, or verisimilitude and history, lose their strength because the director tries to represent the original work in a truthful, mimetic, even mechanical way. Gilliam, on the contrary, aims for a fresh and modernized Don Quixote, translating Cervantes’ imaginings into a more modern context. In a certain way, such innovative rewritings of the Quixote seem doomed: is it a coincidence


that Orson Welles never did finish his movie on the Quixote either? From the Don Quixote (1991) as directed by Jesús Franco on the basis of Welles’ original camera work, it is clear that Welles also intended to make a movie where the anachronism of Don Quixote, a seventeenth-century man that wanted to live like a thirteenth-century knight, was emphasized by introducing many aspects of twentiethcentury Spain. Only, the techniques of both directors are very different. As François de la Bretèque points out in “Lost in La Mancha, d’Orson Welles à Terry Gilliam: se perdre dans la Manche pour retrouver le cinema” (2005), Welles, unlike Gilliam, did not introduce an analeptic movement (sending back a contemporary character to the past), but used exactly the opposite strategy (2005: 36). In Welles’ movie, Sancho Panza is catapulted into the future: after having lost his master, he goes searching for him everywhere and ends up in a city where he is confronted with a very strange box that produces noises and images... and which is nothing but a television, on which moreover Orson Welles is featured as receiving homage from the mayor of Jerez and being encouraged to finish his splendid movie on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in Spain. This shows not only that anachronisms have their function in Welles’ movie, but that metafictional elements are present as well. Sancho Panza is always in search of Don Quixote, and on several occasions he meets Orson Welles with his camera team. At a given moment, Sancho is completely bankrupt, and in order to earn some money he ends up playing his own part in Welles’ film. The principle of mise en abyme that so often occurs in the Quixote itself – when Sancho Panza and Don Quixote hear from Sansón Carrasco about the book in which their adventures are recounted (II, 3), or when they meet Alvaro Tarfe (II, 72), a character from the apocryphal second part of the Quixote – is recovered by Welles when he converts his characters into actors in his own movie. A comparison of Gilliam’s and Welles’ unfinished movies makes clear that both directors tried to record a different image of Spain. Gilliam insisted on shooting his movie in Castile. He had never been to Spain before. So instead of shooting some scenes in other countries with similar landscapes (as Welles did in Mexico), Gilliam insisted on filming the landscape in which Cervantes originally situated his antihero. In this sense, the tendency towards fantasy that is so typical of


Gilliam finds its counterpart in his obsession to adhere to the original setting of the novel for his movie. When the desert-like landscape is no longer as arid and dry as usual, because of unexpected rainfall, Gilliam refuses to go on shooting. In Cervantes’ Spain it never rains, and the director does not want the image of the real Spain (where at times it might rain) in his movie. In the same vein, the F16s flying over the set do not tally with the rural, primitive landscape of the novel. In Gilliam’s version, Spain becomes a stereotype, with a fixed identity, and not in any sense affected by modernization.3 Even though Welles also portrays Spain in its most traditional aspects, he does so in a different way. His images were shot in the fifties, and he clearly wanted to give a faithful image of the Spain he knew. Various times in the movie he professes his love and passion for the folkloristic Spain. He shot various scenes on the (today still existing) feasts of Christians and Moors, in which the inhabitants of some villages in Spain (mostly in Alicante) represent the battles of the Reconquista. Both sides assume traditional dress, and they alternatively conquer the city, the ceremony being closed when the Christians finally take the city and chase their enemies. Ingeniously, Welles uses these images to represent the scene in which Don Quixote originally fails to make the distinction between the puppets of Maese Pedro and reality (II, 26). The bullfights are integrated in Welles’ movie as well: Sancho gets almost smashed when the bulls are liberated to run through the streets of the city. At the same time, in certain passages of Welles’ movie folklore subtly gives way to the more political dimensions of Franco’s Spain in the fifties: when Sancho Panza hears about Orson Welles’ homage on television, it is announced that the Generalísimo recently visited one of his barracks and was received with ample military honors. Gilliam also shows a tendency toward folklore, but in a sense different from Welles’. Possibly as a critique of those Hollywood 3

Although the landscape and the setting seem to be chosen with some stereotypical Spanish identity in mind (it reminds especially the landscape promoted by the writers of the generation of ’98), the actors chosen by Gilliam suggest the opposite: none of them is Spanish, except the three giants. Vanessa Paradis and Jean Rochefort are French, Johnny Depp is American. The lingua franca on the set is English, but Rochefort’s strong accent shows again that linguistic purism is also unfamiliar to Gilliam.


sponsors who refused to invest in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, Gilliam seems to defend more primitive film techniques, and more traditional spectacles, such as the theatre. For example, in Lost in La Mancha he uses unsophisticated hand cameras, shooting with a shaking pulse. His use of puppets could be interpreted as a plea for alternative and low budget ways of making movies. The opening scenes of the documentary do not stage a surrealist scene of devils and demons, as Donnell claims (2006: 105), but represent Gilliam filming an open-air play performed by Els Comediants, a Catalan theatre company (de la Bretèque 2005: 38).4 Gilliam is not only fascinated by this play, he also wanted to introduce many puppets in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, as when Don Quixote and his guards, who all turn out to be huge puppets, surround Toby and Altisidora. As Welles also filmed some scenes with the impressive puppets that during the fallas in Valencia are carried all through the city, the incorporation of puppets in Gilliam’s movie can also be taken as an implicit reference to Welles’ Don Quixote. In light of all this, it seems rather contradictory that Gilliam followed a strategy similar to that of his previous movies, and once again called upon expensive actors such as Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis. How can we reconcile his plea for a more primitive theatre with the casting of such celebrities? Even if, as is explained in Lost in La Mancha, these actors participated for an extraordinarily low fee, the contradiction remains. But perhaps we should see this differently: if Cervantes originally parodied the novels of chivalry, Gilliam’s aim was perhaps to parody commercial Hollywood films, choosing famous actors but casting them in a very different movie. This parody gains strength through the character of Toby, the advertisement executive: Johnny Depp himself suggests that his character should shout “cut” when he is attacked by Don Quixote and his guards. It is not really surprising that this suggestion does not come from Gilliam himself: even if he seems quite enthusiastic about Depp’s idea, this kind of 4

According to Bretèque, the presence of Els Comediants in Gilliam’s movie is significant in the sense that “[l]a présence de la troupe catalane dans un univers en principe castillan mérite d’être relevée” (2005: 38). Although Gilliam seems to promote an image of mythical Spain in his movie, I don’t think the political perspective (Castile/central Spain vs. the “autonomous communities”) is a relevant aspect in this case.


metafictional interruptions in his fantastic story does not seem to have been meant to occupy a prominent place in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Even if Gilliam was very keen on auto-referentiality in his earlier work – The Monty Python’s Flying Circus animated intermezzos are the most representative example – nowadays he seems to prefer a genuinely fantastic story, that should paradoxically respect at the same time verisimilitude: the landscape has to be mythical Castile, Don Quixote’s armor has to be exactly how Cervantes described it, the F16s that deafen the actors cannot be integrated in the form of an absurd intermezzo in a story on a seventeenth-century knight. Thus if we could say the film parodies commercial advertisement and film business, it does so in a very implicit way. On the other hand, the Hollywood issue is much more present in Lost in La Mancha than in Gilliam’s movie, and as such the documentary could be seen as more “Cervantine” than The Man Who Killed Don Quixote itself, the more so as in Cervantes’ novel the question of money is very topical too. Remember for example the comments of the “second author” on the amount of money he paid for the acquisition of the manuscripts written by Cide Hamete Benengeli and for the services of his Moorish translator (I, 9), or the incident in the inn when Don Quixote refuses to pay for his night’s stay, as he never read anything about knights paying fees in his novels of chivalry (I, 17). In other words, the importance of money in a capitalist society, so much stressed by Cervantes, recurs in Fulton and Pepe’s documentary on Gilliam’s cinematographic enterprise. Lost in La Mancha: A Cervantine Glance at The Man Who Killed Don Quixote This brings me to the interesting question whether Lost in La Mancha actually is not closer to Cervantes’ novel than The Man Who Killed Don Quixote would have been. Whereas we lack the material to judge the final product Gilliam wanted to deliver, we can see very clearly how many Cervantine strategies Fulton and Pepe use. This is the main claim also of Donnell’s article. Following a very postmodern interpretation of the Quixote, stressing such discursive strategies as polyphony, polyperspectivism, and the confusion of high and low


culture in Cervantes’ work, Donnell argues that “Co-directors Fulton and Pepe’s postmodern activity – the self-conscious, metatheatrical act of documentary filmmaking – is very much in keeping with the blurring of discourse and genre in Don Quijote, which itself is a selfreflexive, metaliterary text” (2006: 92). Donnell develops the idea that Lost in La Mancha blurs the distinction between high and low culture in a similar way as Don Quixote does. Cervantes combines humorous and recognizable parody of popular novels of chivalry with ingenious and innovating narrative techniques. Lost in La Mancha combines highbrow documentary on the making of a movie of a cult director with marketability. Although in my view it is questionable whether the distinction between high and low culture can be maintained for a late twentieth-century cinematographic product, it is a fact that the co-directors and the producer of Lost in La Mancha decided at some moment that they should not make a documentary for television, but rather aim at a 90minute product that could stand independently from Gilliam’s movie, the future of which became more and more unsure. In order to make Lost in La Mancha a commercial success, they effectively adopted a somewhat misleading strategy, in the sense that until the very end they keep up the illusion that Gilliam’s enterprise would in fact be brought to a happy end. Thus, they tried to bring a good story, in which Terry Gilliam’s disappointing experience is somehow recast into Shakespearian tragedy, or perhaps rather tragicomedy. Although the spectator is often clued that the film will abort, still he prefers to believe all will turn out well, and the documentary feeds this illicit hope. Fulton and Pepe offer a panoptic view of the various problems that arise, alternatively interviewing Gilliam himself, his closest collaborators, and filming the production process from an observer’s point of view. Throughout the documentary we get very different perspectives on Gilliam’s movie to-be, but one of the main ideas is the comparison, suggested by various members of the crew and by Gilliam himself, of the director with Don Quixote. His optimistic sense of feasibility, his aim to realize the impossible, his fight against the windmills of a “low” budget: all is sadly lost at the end of the movie. Nevertheless, as Donnell suggests, Gilliam’s madness differs from Don Quixote’s in that it is not as complete as Don Quixote’s:


For Gilliam, any potential insanity is part of his garb, disguising creative genius, not dementia. Like Cervantes, he is more mischievous storyteller than madman. Thus, his self-comparison to Quixote is self-promotion on Gilliam’s part […]. But for Fulton and Pepe, the construction of Gilliam as an insanely quixotic filmmaker becomes a discursive strategy, bridging what would otherwise result in enormous leaps between subject positions, perspectives, and diegetic levels. (2006: 102)

This brings me to the very core of Lost in La Mancha’s problems: on the one hand, it is clear that the co-directors use narrative techniques in order to capture the audience. They exploit the panic, the anguish and the tensions among the crew and Gilliam himself during production in order to maintain the suspense about the realization of the movie. On the other hand, in the interviews on the bonus DVD they maintain that they did not feel comfortable shooting the whole story and were hesitant about making a commercial success out of Gilliam’s troubles. Although they clearly made a story out of the documentary, they also insist very much on bringing a truthful, respectful and authentic portrait of Gilliam’s work. The director himself admits he likes the documentary precisely because he is pictured as a responsible filmmaker, not as a fool who loses all control. In an interview with David Sterritt and Mikita Brottman, Gilliam also insists on the authenticity of the project: “The reason people get so excited or moved by it is that it’s maybe the first time you’re seeing something truthful about filmmaking. It isn’t all about how wonderful everything is and how happy we all are. For better or for worse, it’s a true tale” (2004: 209). One of the points on which Fulton and Pepe also insist very much is that theirs is the first documentary that was shot during the production process only. Other documentaries by Fulton and Pepe, such as The Hamster Factor (1995), on Twelve Monkeys, one of Gilliam’s most successful movies, had the support of the final movie and did not have to stand on its own. Moreover, as Lucy Darwin, the producer of Lost in La Mancha affirms, most “makings of” produce much material after the movie itself is finished, such as interviews etc. In Lost in La Mancha’s case, everything is “authentic”, shot “on the spot”, without manipulation.


Even the way in which the whole documentary is filmed, with a hand camera, and without expensive settings, leads Donnell to associate Fulton and Pepe with the Dogma 95 school (2006: 95). However, instead of considering all this as proof of “authenticity” we might also consider it as a discursive strategy used by the codirectors: though Lost in La Mancha was shot during the (pre)production of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, it is evident that the assembly process also determines how the material is composed, selected, and even manipulated. In the extra DVD, Fulton and Pepe state that they sent different versions of their movie to Gilliam, and that the latter advised them on cutting one scene or another, not by way of censure but rather in order to maintain the funny overtone of the product. Evidently, this implies that this is again a story, a fiction, rather than a truthful document. Cervantes’ play between veracity, verisimilitude and fiction thus becomes extremely patent, even if neither the co-directors nor the protagonist of the story seem to be ready to fully acknowledge this. In this, Donnell feels, Fulton and Pepe have been very much influenced by George Stoney, a film maker who tried to mitigate the moral rigidity of cinéma vérité (or direct cinema), and who tried to nuance the notion of unmediated truth in documentaries: In practice, [Fulton and Pepe] – like Stoney – are unwilling to sacrifice the poetic devices of good storytelling to an overdetermined preoccupation with the veracity of minute details. In this sense, the directorial pair belongs to a less moralistic, more openly artistic school of cinéma vérité filmmakers. (2006: 95)

But does this observation concern only minute detail? In what sense did the camera work itself promote some subjective perspective on the events? A good example is the flash flood episode: to what extent is the immensity of the natural calamity reinforced by the angle from which the camera records it? If it is certain that we can see some equipment floating on the enormous amount of water that all of a sudden fell out of the sky, the decision to put the camera very close to the ground simultaneously amplifies the disaster. Watching this scene, the analogy with Don Quixote’s mad look at things is inevitable: it


seems as if Fulton and Pepe themselves start participating in the distortion of reality, and in the end the spectators at least cannot be blamed for starting to suspect that some images may not be as authentic as they are claimed to be. This precedence of fiction over reality seems to be a constant element in Lost in La Mancha. Earlier, I mentioned that the trailer scene with the giants recurs various times. When I once showed this fragment to my students, they asked me if it really should be associated with the famous windmill scene from the novel, as we could not see any windmills on the screen... At variance with most other filmic adaptations of the novel, where windmills and giants are shown alternatively, Fulton and Pepe (and also Gilliam)5 seem to give priority to fantasy and madness, as we only are given Don Quixote’s perspective. While with Orson Welles we see only windmills, in Lost in La Mancha we see nothing but giants. When the same scene recurs at the end of the documentary, Lost in La Mancha returns ironically to its generic status as the making of a movie, announcing that The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is “coming soon”. Even if Gilliam asserts in the interviews included on the bonus DVD that the windmills this time won the battle from the giants – as the project did not materialize –it is clear that Lost in La Mancha – and perhaps The Man Who Killed Don Quixote –can be interpreted as suggesting the opposite, preferring the image of the giants to that of the windmills. Doubt and indeterminacy are crucial elements of the Cervantine heritage in Lost in La Mancha. The title The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was chosen by Gilliam long before bad luck started striking the project. But what does it refer to? Did Gilliam see himself as a new Avellaneda who wanted to resuscitate Don Quixote and eventually make him die once and forever? Or was it an allusion to Toby, who would come from the future to put an end to Don Quixote’s dreams? Possibly, but Lost in La Mancha allows us to reinterpret the title in various ways. To begin with, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote could refer to a kind of artistic suicide, as Gilliam alludes to the similarities between himself and Don Quixote on several occasions. It could, however, also be read as an allusion to one of the 5

It is not really clear whether The Man Who Killed Don Quixote would integrate the giants in a context with windmills or not.


heaviest discussions during the production process, when the first assistant director Phil Patterson almost resigns because Gilliam forces Jean Rochefort to go on with the horse riding while his health obviously asks for rest. As a consequence of this abuse of Rochefort’s health, the main actor has to fly back to Paris and the movie definitely can not be turned: in this sense Gilliam can be said to have killed his own Don Quixote. In other words, the documentary allows for a redirection of the meaning of the title, and perspectives on the movie only get multiplied. Another question concerns the documentary’s title itself: who exactly is Lost in La Mancha? Gilliam? The crew? Don Quixote? The co-directors themselves? Getting Lost among La Mancha’s Voices The omnipresence of doubt is a feature of Cervantes’ book that has often been stressed in contemporary interpretations of the novel. This has everything to do with the play between verisimilitude, veracity and fiction as well as with the dubious authorial authority in the Quixote. Polyperspectivism is another aspect commented on by Donnell (2006: 98) when he claims that Lost in La Mancha is a Cervantine documentary. Lost in La Mancha has many narrators, and the hierarchy between them is not very clear. Gilliam himself sometimes acts as first-person narrator, but he assumes many roles: he is also a spectator, a character, an actor, a storyboard artist, or a director.6 Moreover, the co-directors of the documentary themselves, the “real authors”, are invisible and remain almost completely silent: only on very few occasions do they intervene in the sound track. The main narrator’s voice, significantly, is neither that of Fulton nor of Pepe. It is that of Jeff Bridges, the star of The Fisher King. Is 6

I do not agree with Donnell (2006: 100) when he says that Gilliam does not figure as a director of his own movie in the documentary. We can see various scenes where he does give indications to actors (for example to those interpreting the giants) or when he reprimands certain members of the crew because they did not inform him about the impossibility to rehearse some parts in advance. It is true, nonetheless, that the scene where Gilliam takes the most typical role of a director takes place when he has to convince the sponsors that the movie is going perfectly. At that moment, we see Gilliam playing the role of a director, which implies another splitting up of diegetic levels.


this yet another marketing trick, as Donnell suggests (2006: 101)? Perhaps, but it also recalls another strategy from the Quixote, where we can find Don Quixote and Sancho questioning their own role and representation in the apocryphal and the real Quixote. This kind of mise en abyme is very current in Cervantes’ work, and leads to the blurring of the distinction between fiction and reality, as the status of the characters themselves is not clear anymore: are they readers or characters? In this sense, the reader’s own status is questioned as well, and he might start asking whether, if the characters read the same book as he, he is not a character as well? In The Fisher King Jeff Bridges, in the guise of “Jack,” is frustrated because he is only a voice in a radio program. Jack’s highest ambition is to work as an actor and so gain recognition as a human being with something more than a voice. Yet, ironically, the co-directors of Lost in La Mancha really choose Bridges/Jack only for his voice: we never see him – in the documentary, he is nothing but a voice. We can interpret this as a rather cynical game of the co-directors, who condemn Jack to his frustrating part. From a non-intentional point of view, we can also analyze it as a questioning of our own role when we watch Lost in La Mancha. If we can only hear Bridges’ voice, then perhaps we are comparable to the audience of Jack’s radio program? We are then listening to a story – the documentary called Lost in La Mancha – without access to the making of this same story. In other words, our own status may be questioned: is there a higher diegetic level in the fiction where we, as Bridges’ devoted audience, are playing a part as fictional characters in the frame story, as was the case with Jack’s audience in The Fisher King? Are there any spectators watching us? What matters is that Lost in La Mancha promotes a consistent indeterminacy about who is running this show; even if the credits inform us that it is Fulton and Pepe, an innocent spectator – such as myself – might suspect at first instance that the director was Gilliam himself. As Donnell puts it, there is a “lack of agency” (2006: 100), a lack – it should be noted – that is only apparent, forming a part of the general narrative strategy that profoundly determines Lost in La Mancha. Another element that stimulates indeterminacy is the incorporation of frame stories. Just as the Quixote works with various manuscripts, written, translated and found by different characters, Lost in La


Mancha proliferates intertwined stories. As Donnell points out, “the tale of Gilliam’s failed production is the main story, yet fragments of the story he wanted to tell (Killed) also are included” (2006: 99). On top of these, other stories are integrated too: the animations of the storyboards from Killed, the readings of the script, the “Terry Gilliam’s Picture Show” animated by Chiam Bianco, images from Orson Welles’ Don Quixote, and so on. However, even if Donnell is right in asserting that all these intertwining stories and perspectives create indeterminacy while at the same time echoing Cervantes’ narrative techniques, they do so in the first place because they expose the mechanisms of film production itself. Just as the Quixote is a novel on the making of a novel, as is clear from the prologue of Part I, Lost in La Mancha is a documentary on the creative process of cinema itself. Or at least, it is so up to a certain point: because if it is clear that the hidden mechanisms of directing a movie, of the secrets of fiction and fantasy in Gilliam’s cinematography are laid bare, it is also clear that we not have to do with an auto-referential work on the making of documentaries. Although the problematic distinction between verisimilitude and fantasy becomes clear in the opposition between the co-director’s claim for authenticity and the distortion of perspectives, this does not become an issue at any moment in the documentary. Therefore, Donnell’s assertion that “metafictional storytelling appears frequently in Lost” (2006: 99) is only partly true. In fact, the mise en abyme concerning the production of the documentary itself goes largely untreated and uncommented. The main reason is without any doubt the marketing factor. Still, this also explains why Lost in La Mancha is a quixotic storytelling only in a limited sense: the lucidity of Cervantes’ prologue to the first part, where the veracity of literature and fiction is thoroughly questioned through the friends’ advice to invent famous citations and proverbs, is remarkably absent in Lost in La Mancha. For the same reason, the documentary cannot be dissociated from the cinéma vérité school. Consequently, Donnell’s claim that “the main story (the unmaking of) and the story-within-a-story (scenes from Killed) are embedded within Fulton and Pepe’s self-reflexive tale about narrative projects and filmmaking in general” (2006: 99) is only valid to a certain extent.


Conclusion As a final consideration, it should be noted that in his analysis Donnell started from a postmodern interpretation of the Quixote. Following the argument of Cascardi in “Don Quixote and the invention of the novel” (2002), Donnell argues that polyphony and doubt are main features of Cervantes’ novel. As I hope to have shown, such a reading of Lost in La Mancha is valid up to a certain point: it is undeniable that the play with different authors, voices and perspectives in the documentary provokes a metafictional reflex by which the mechanisms of filmmaking are exhibited and questioned. The intertwining of stories is another element that recalls the structure of the Quixote, to the point even where it becomes unclear who exactly is the author of which part of the documentary. Although the directors try to respect the difference between Lost in La Mancha and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, the limits and distinctions between both movies become vague, and in the same way the question of authority is unstable. The two works depend on each other for their existence, and their symbiosis can be situated as well on the level of directors as of the level of interpretation: we cannot say anything about The Man Who Killed Don Quixote without Lost in La Mancha, because the latter mediates our interpretation. Could Gilliam’s film still stand on its own after Fulton and Pepe’s work? Did the two directors not take on the role of another Avellaneda, planning an apocryphal version of Gilliam’s project? Did not the co-directors bury Gilliam’s movie once and forever by unmaking it in their documentary? Surely, Fulton and Pepe would not agree with my point of view. Although it is more exciting to read The Man Who Killed Don Quixote as a product of Lost in La Mancha, blurring chronology and traditional intertextuality, the co-directors themselves insist on the authentic, truthful and respectable image of the shooting they wanted to transmit through their documentary. Indeed, this view is slightly nuanced by Fulton himself, who in one of the interviews on the bonus disc mentions that his and Pepe’s work was approved of by Gilliam because it was “as objective as it can be for documentary film makers, who are never objective”. The main thrust of their interpretation relies, though, on their attempt to represent things as truthfully as they could. In such a case, of course, the documentary is not Cervantine in the


sense Cascardi and Donnell understand it. We could still claim, though, that it adheres to quixotic aims if we read Cervantes’ book as a strategy of baroque desengaño with the exuberant fantasies of the novels of chivalry. Following this more traditional – but not necessarily more convincing – line of interpretation, Cervantes had a very well defined concept of what was “truthful”. His novel, then, was a plea not so much for a poly-interpretable world in which madness and reason, truth and fiction were impossible to distinguish, but rather for a literature that perhaps would not defend truth and veracity – as that is history’s task, according to Aristotle –, but at least verisimilitude, instead of the lies and fantasies of the novels of chivalry. Even if we accept that Fulton and Pepe conceived of their documentary as a truthful apology for Gilliam’s project, we can still interpret Lost in La Mancha as the involuntary unmasking of Gilliam’s fantastic and fantasist intent to make – paradoxically enough – an adaptation of the Quixote that was closer to its parodied object than to the parody itself. Lost in La Mancha may then be seen as a documentary that unmasks Gilliam as a quixotic producer of movies of chivalry rather than as a director who plays with the notion of veracity, truth and appearance in the same ironic way as Cervantes did. An unmasking that, however truthful it may pretend to be, is nothing more than another story, another fiction, another perspective on a first narration. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote may one day be revived and tell its own story, one never knows…

Works Cited de la Bretèque, François. 2005. “Lost in La Mancha, d’Orson Welles à Terry Gilliam: se perdre dans la Manche pour retrouver le cinéma,” in Les Cahiers de la Cinémathèque 77: 33-41. Cascardi, Anthony. 2002. “Don Quixote and the Invention of the Novel,” in A. Cascardi, (Ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes. New York: Cambridge University Press: 58-79. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. 1995. Don Quijote de la Mancha (2 vols). Ed. John Jay Allen. Madrid: Cátedra.


Donnell, Sidney. 2006. “Quixotic Storytelling, Lost in La Mancha, and the Unmaking of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” in Romance Quarterly 53(2): 92-112. Fulton, Keith & Pepe, Louis 1998 [1995]. The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of the Twelve Monkeys. Dir. Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe. Extra on DVD Twelve Monkeys. ––––. 2003 [2001]. Lost in La Mancha. Dir. Keith Fulton & Louis Pepe. DVD. Docurama/New Video Group. ––––. 2003. Lost in La Mancha. Bonus Disc. Dir. Keith Fulton & Louis Pepe. DVD. Docurama/New Video Group. Gilliam, Terry. 2006 [1969-1974]. Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Terry Gilliam’s Personal Best Selected. DVD. Python (Monty) Pictures. ––––. 2001 [1975]. Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Dir. Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones. DVD. Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment. ––––. 2003 [1985]. Brazil. Dir. Terry Gilliam. DVD. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. ––––. 1998 [1991]. The Fisher King. Dir. Terry Gilliam. DVD. Colombia Tristar Home Video. ––––. 1998 [1995]. Twelve Monkeys. Dir. Terry Gilliam. DVD. Universal Home Video. Sterritt, David & Brottmann, Mikita. 2004. “Lost in La Mancha: The Making, Unmaking and Remaking of Terry Gilliam. [Interview with Terry Gilliam],” in D. Sterritt & L. Rhodes (Eds). Terry Gilliam. Interviews. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi: 208-219. Welles, Orson. & Franco, Jesús. 2002 [1992]. Don Quijote de Orson Welles. Dir. Orson Welles and Jesús Franco. DVD. El Silencio Producciones.

Notes on Contributors

BRIGITTE ADRIAENSEN is a Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American literature at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She has published widely on Spanish and Latin American literature, on postcolonial theory in Latin America, and on the theory of irony. Among her recent publications are La poética de la ironía en la obra tardía de Juan Goytisolo (Verbum, 2007) and “La sátira en Carrera y Fracassi de Daniel Guebel: ¿cómo representar la mediocridad sin dejarse contagiar por ella?” (Cahiers du CRICCAL, 38: 2 (2008), 77-82). PATRICK COLLARD is Emeritus Professor of Hispanic culture and literature at Ghent University. His research deals with the relations between historiography and literary fiction in contemporary literature, as well as with the theme of food in literature. He has published numerous articles on Ramón Sender, Francisco Ayala, Alejo Carpentier, Alvaro Mutis, Antonio Benítez Rojo, René Vázquez Díaz, Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, Pablo Neruda, Germán Espinosa and Leonardo Padura Fuentes. He is a member of the Belgian Royal Academy for Overseas Sciences, of the advisory board of the Duques de Soria Foundation, and of the Institute of Hispanic Studies at the University of Antwerp. CHRISTIAN DE PAEPE is Emeritus Professor of Hispanic literature at K.U. Leuven/Leuven University. His interests lie in the field of modern Spanish poetry (the Generation of ’27, and particularly F. García Lorca: textual genesis, manuscript catalogue, critical editions, rhetoric and poetics), Latin-American poetry (psalms by Ernesto Cardenal and sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges), as well as Hispano-Flemish literature. He has edited a.o. Federico García Lorca. Poema del cante jondo (Espasa-Calpe, 1986) and the Catálogo general de los fondos documentales de la Fundación Federico García


Lorca (Ministerio de Cultura, Dirección de Archivos estatales, 19922008, 8 vols). In collaboration with Elsa Dehennin, he is presently working on the research project Principios modernos y práctica creadora en la poesía española contemporánea. Poemas y ensayos (in press). THEO D’HAEN is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at K.U. Leuven/Leuven University. Earlier, he was Professor of English Literature at Leiden and Utrecht. He was Visiting Professor at the Sorbonne (2004) and Harvard (2007-2008). He has published widely on European-language literatures, particularly with regard to (post)modernism, (post)colonialism, and popular literatures. Recent publications include Contemporary American Crime Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan 2001, with Hans Bertens), Europa buitengaats: koloniale en postkoloniale literaturen in Europese talen, 2 vols. (Bert Bakker 2002), Romantic Configurations (Rodopi 2003, with various co-editors), How Far is America From Here? (Rodopi 2005, various co-editors), Cultural Identity and Postmodern Writing (Rodopi 2006, with Pieter Vermeulen), and Amerikaanse literatuur: een geschiedenis (ACCO 2008, with Hans Bertens). D’haen is Editor-in-Chief of The European Review (Cambridge University Press), and advisory editor to numerous scholarly journals and book series. During 2008-2012 he serves as President of FILLM (Fédération Internationale de Langues et Littératures Modernes). REINDERT DHONDT studied Romance Languages and Literature and Modern History at K.U. Leuven/Leuven University and Paris-IV-Sorbonne (Erasmus). He is currently writing his Ph.D. thesis on the neo-baroque and melancholia in the later work of Carlos Fuentes, and works as a research assistant in Hispanic literature at K.U. Leuven/Leuven University. His recent publications include “De/recentring of the Literary Universe: The Baroque Ellipse and the Geography of the Novel,” in Karen-Margrethe Simonsen & Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (Eds), World Literature, World Culture, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2008, 261-271, and “Saying Everything and Affected Self-Disclosure in the Works of Reinaldo Arenas and Hervé Guibert,” in Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal & Carel Smith (Eds), The

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Rhetoric of Sincerity, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, 263279. LIEVEN D’HULST is Professor of French and Francophone literature and of Translation Studies at K.U.Leuven/Leuven University (and campus Kortrijk). His current research topics are Francophone Belgian and Caribbean literatures (see a.o. Les études littéraires francophones, état des lieux, Lille: P.U. Lille, 2003 and Caribbean Interfaces, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), literary translation (a.o. a critical edition of Le “Faust” de Goethe traduit par Gérard de Nerval, Paris: Fayard, 2002), and migrant culture in Northern France between 1850 and 1914. He is the review editor of Target. International Journal of Translation Studies, co-director of a series “Traductologie” at “Artois Presses Université”, and member of the Executive Council of the International Comparative Literature Association. JAN HERMAN is Professor of French Literature at K.U. Leuven/Leuven University. His research deals with the poetics of narrative prose between 1600 and 1800. With his colleagues Mladen Kozul and Nathalie Kremer, he is the author of Le Roman véritable. Stratégies préfacielles au XVIIIe siècle (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2008/08). His book Genèse et Généalogie dans le roman du XVIIIe siècle (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, SVEC, 2009/12) is currently in press. NADIA LIE is Professor of Hispanic Literatures at K.U. Leuven/Leuven University. She published profusely on literary criticism and intellectual discourse in Cuba (e.g. Transición y transacción, Hispamérica/Leuven University Press, 1996) and coedited several books in the field of comparative literature and cultural studies (e.g. Constellation Caliban, Rodopi, 1997, and Zorro & Co, Vantilt, 2002, both with Theo D’haen; Caribbean Interfaces, Rodopi, 2007, with Lieven D’hulst a.o.). Currently interested in stereotypical constructions of Hispanic identities in fiction and film. ULLA MUSARRA-SCHRØDER has been an Associate Professor in General and Comparative Literature at the University of Nijmegen


and a Visiting Professor at K.U.Leuven/Leuven University. Her main fields of research are narratology, semiotics, modernism, and postmodernism. She has published numerous articles on European and Italian literature (Hamsun, Proust, Nabokov, Calvino, Eco, Magris) and is the author of Le roman-mémoires moderne (1981), Narcissus en zijn spiegelbeeld (1983) (published as Narciso e lo specchio in 1989), Il labirinto e la rete. Percorsi moderni e postmoderni nell'opera di Italo Calvino (1996). MARÍA STOOPEN earned her Ph.D. in Spanish Literature at UNAM in Mexico City. She is Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts, in the Colegio de Letras Hispánicas and the postgraduate formation of UNAM. She is also a member of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores. Her most recent publication is Los autores, el texto, los lectores en el ‘Quijote’ (2002, 2005) and her Cervantes transgresor is in press. Her research focuses primarily on the question of the subject in Latin American stories rewriting, adapting or echoing the Quixote. She has also made some incursions into Mexican cuisine, to which she has dedicated various books. DAGMAR VANDEBOSCH is Associate Professor at K.U.Leuven/Leuven University. She has published on early twentiethcentury and contemporary Spanish literature, with a special interest in the genre of the essay and the construction and representation of national identities. Recent publications include: Y no con el lenguaje preciso de la ciencia: la ensayística de Gregorio Marañón en la entreguerra española (Geneva: Droz, 2008) and “‘Rappelle ton âme endormie’: mémoire et construction identitaire dans Séfarade d’Antonio Muñoz Molina” in Carola Hähnel-Mesnard, Marie LiénardYétérian and Cristina Marinas (Eds), Culture et mémoire. Représentations contemporaines de la mémoire dans les espaces mémoriels, les arts du visuel, la littérature et le theater, Palaiseau: Éditions de l’École Polytechnique, 2008, 373-381. KRISTINE VANDEN BERGHE is Associate Professor of Hispanic Language and Literatures at the Universities of Liège and Namur. She has published numerous articles about Latin American

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literature and culture of the twentieth century and she is the author of Intelectuales y anticomunismo. La revista Cadernos Brasileiros (1959-1970) (Leuven U.P., 1997) and Narrativa de la rebelión zapatista. Los relatos del Subcomandante Marcos (IberoamericanaVervuert, 2005). With Maarten van Delden she has edited the volume El laberinto de la solidaridad. Cultura y política en México (19102000) (Rodopi, 2002). BART VAN DEN BOSSCHE is Professor of Italian literature at K.U. Leuven/Leuven University. His main interests are in modern and contemporary Italian literature, in particular in the relationship between myth and literature. In 2001 he published a monograph on Cesare Pavese, and in 2007 he published the volume Trasformazioni ed elaborazioni: il mito nella letteratura italiana del Novecento (Leuven-Firenze, Leuven University Press-Franco Cesati). He has published on various topics and authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is editor-in-chief of “Civiltà Italiana”, a series of A.I.P.I. (Associazione Internazionale Professori d’Italiano). HENDRIK VAN GORP is Emeritus Professor of General and Comparative Literature at K.U. Leuven/Leuven University and K.U. Brussels/Brussels University. His main research fields are narratology (especially the picaresque and the gothic), genre theory, translation studies, and literary terminology. Major publications include Het optreden van de verteller in de roman. Een historisch-kritische studie van de Duitse verhaal- en romantheorie (The Narrator in the Novel. A Critical Study of German Narratology, 1970), Lexicon van literaire termen: Stromingen en Genres - Theoretische Begrippen - Retorische Procédés en Stijlfiguren (Lexicon of Literary Terms: Periods, Genres, Concepts, Rhetorics and Stylistics. 8th ed. 2007 [1980], French version: Dictionnaire des termes littéraires, Paris: Champion, 2001), and De romantische griezelroman (The Romantic Gothic Novel, 1998).

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