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Prof: I want you to ponder,
over the next few days, what is commemorated on October
7, the next October 7,
which will be next Wednesday.
You get bonus points for your midterm.
If you know it right off the top of your head already,
you can tell me, if not, think about it and you
may come up with it.
It's something very relevant to this course, and I can see that
my TAs, the graduate students are also puzzled by it.
You can go home and google it, and maybe it will come up,
but we'll talk about it on Tuesday, which will be the eve
of the anniversary of?
Okay.
We are going to talk today mostly,
but not exclusively, about The Novel of the
Curious Impertinent, as you can anticipate by the
various triangles on the board.
Cervantes was criticized in his time for the inclusion of this
novel in Part I of the Quixote.
He answered his critics through his characters,
who speak about that criticism, chiefly a character called
Sansón Carrasco-- whom you will meet when you
begin reading Part II very soon--
and he also talks about it in the prologue to Part II,
and Cervantes refrained from inserting any novels like this
in Part II.
So he took the criticism to heart.
As I said in my last lecture, Cervantes was trying to combine
the sequential kind of plot of the chivalric romance,
one adventure after another, with the collection of stories
in the style of Boccaccio.
Boccaccio, I have mentioned him, I think,
before, but if not, Boccaccio, Giovanni Boccaccio
1313-1375.
If you're a literature major you should know Boccaccio,
or you should know at least about Boccaccio.
His famous work is called the Decameron.
Now, not that the chivalric romances didn't have convoluted
plots, but the insertion of a novel like this was not one of
its features.
It is known that Cervantes contemplated the publication of
a collection of stories to be called Semanas del
jardín, Weeks at the Garden,
and he did publish, in 1613, the collection of
stories that you have, and from which you will read,
called The Exemplary Novels, Novelas Ejemplares.
This collection, as you will discover,
does not have an overarching fiction involving character
narrators leaving the city, fleeing the plague and
gathering to tell stories, as in the Decameron.
The overarching fiction in the Decameron is that all
of these young people leave the city because there is a plague,
they gather in a pleasant place, and they each tell a
story every day, and that is the overarching
fiction the Decameron.
The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes does not have such an
overarching fiction, it is just a collection of
stories by Miguel de Cervantes with a prologue and so forth.
Weeks in the Garden or Semanas del jardín
does sound as it would have had that kind of a plot,
meaning, overarching plot, meaning that characters would
get together in a garden and tell stories.
The point is that in the Quixote, Part I,
Cervantes is attempting to mesh these two forms of narrative as
I said.
The result may seem awkward, but it is mostly really very
innovative, and it leads to the creation of
the modern novel, with this very loose structure
of which this kind of insertion is possible.
Now, we saw how those commingling stories about
Fernando, Dorotea, Cardenio and Luscinda,
how those stories are correlated,
and my colleague from the Department of Comparative
Literature, David Quint,
calls it "interlacing"--
how these stories are interconnected--
in a fairly recent book on Cervantes.
And I proposed that they're structured,
they're all structured, all of these stories,
with its cuts, faults and gaps,
was like a representation of human memory,
human memory upon which fiction depends,
and on which the vary makeup of the creative self of the author
is based; memory.
As we will see today and in the next class,
the final resolution of the conflicts in those stories is a
narrative tour de force, a veritable boast of artistry
on the part of Cervantes.
But The Novel of the Curious Impertinent does stick out
as being very different, and apparently only tenuously
related to the main plot and to the other stories from which it
differs.
Why is the story inserted here in the Quixote?
You could say, is it padding,
is Cervantes padding his novel, or does it have something to do
with the intercalated stories that we have been discussing and
that are about to be resolved?
First, let us go over how Cervantes does justify the
inclusion of the novel at the most elementary level.
The innkeeper, Juan Palomeque,
reveals that he keeps a suitcase somebody left with some
papers, and that he owns a number of chivalric romances.
This is the second suitcase we find,
the first was Cardenio's, which the characters found
rotted in the middle of the Sierra Morena,
and it also contained writing, contained Cardenio's
manuscripts, and poems, and some shirts,
and most importantly for Sancho,
some money.
A discussion ensues involving the innkeeper,
his wife and daughter, and the priest about the value
of those books the chivalric romances.
This is a return to the scrutiny of the books episode
earlier, and the scrutiny of the books, in fact,
is mentioned by the characters.
The priest wants to burn the chivalric romances as he did
with Don Quixote's, but the innkeeper will have
none of it.
Juan Palomeque, as he says, he's not mad,
he's not insane, he knows that what those books
relate happened a long time ago, not in the present,
as Don Quixote does, he knows that it is not
applicable to the present.
In addition, he maintains the romances of
chivalry provide entertainment when,
at harvest time, the workers gather around at
the end of the day, and someone reads out loud from
one of them.
The tradition of reading out loud goes back to the Middle
Ages, and to convents, and monasteries,
and rituals of that kind and in such institutions.
He says that it provides solace and rest, and relaxation at the
end of work.
The innkeeper's wife and daughter, for their part,
are found of the love scenes and they talk,
particularly the daughter, about the love scenes that
moved her so much.
Juan Palomeque defends the veracity of the chivalric
romances, saying that these books are
published with the approval of the crown's councils,
they have the stamp of the crown council.
How could the crown allow books of lies to be published?--Of
course, he has a very primitive notion about printed books and
so forth.
He is corrected by others--the priest mostly--but to no avail,
he still sticks to his guns, but no books are burnt.
Juan Palomeque's books are not burnt.
There will be soon another scene with a character who is
the Cannon of Toledo-- you will learn what the Cannon
of Toledo or what a cannon is when we get to that part--
in which the romances of chivalry will,
again, be discussed but at a theoretical level,
by a very well educated and well read characters like the
priest, the Cannon of Toledo,
and Don Quixote, and so forth.
But here Cervantes seems to be emphasizing that the romances of
chivalry do have a function in society;
they furnish relaxation to the common people.
It is foolish to take Cervantes at his word when he says that he
has written the Quixote to demolish and banish romances
of chivalry.
There are people who still take him at face value on that,
but, in fact, the Quixote,
as with all parodies, is both a critique and an
homage to the romances of chivalry,
and it is, perhaps, the last of the romances of
chivalry.
So we must not take, I don't think,
Cervantes seriously when he says that he wrote the book
simply to do away with the romances of chivalry--
Remember, what I said before that by his time,
essentially, the fashion of publishing them,
anyway, had ended, but they continued to be read,
at least, if we take the Quixote as evidence of their
being read by the common people.
Now, then the innkeeper speaks about the papers in the suitcase
and mentions the story, The Novel of the Curious
Impertinent, which, he says, had been approvingly
read at the inn.
It had also been read out loud at the inn.
It is in manuscript form.
Much literature, including Cervantes's own
stories, still circulated in manuscript
even after the development of the printing press,
as printing was complicated and expensive.
So you must not assume that once printing became available
literature did not circulate in manuscript form any more.
It did, and some of Cervantes's work circulated in such fashion.
Some of the stories that were later included in The
Exemplary Novels, a book, had been circulating in
this form.
This is, then, another self-referential moment
in the Quixote.
It is, to me, clear, that it is Cervantes
himself who left that suitcase there with the manuscript,
and Cervantes is, again, winking at the reader;
this is me who left this suitcase here.
It is clear too that he has found a way to publish the story
by inserting here in the Quixote.
That doesn't mean that he's just padding the novel.
The long short story the novella or
nouvelle, in the manner of Boccaccio,
was a form with which Cervantes felt very comfortable,
as you will discover when you read The Exemplary
Stories, and as you have already
discovered in these intercalated stories,
that this sort of long-short story is a form that Cervantes
favored.
Now, let us not miss the irony, which is easy to miss--You have
to read carefully, remember?
Read for details--The irony that it is the priest who reads
out loud The Novel of the Curious Impertinent.
This perverse, twisted love story is told in
the voice of a representative of the Church.
This priest is a very complicated character,
as you are discovering; he invents chivalric romances,
and he is out in the fields chasing Don Quixote,
and it is--to me--very ironic, that you have the priest
reading this story.
Cervantes loves these ironic games.
It is the priest who at the end does a critique of the story and
asks permission to have it copied later.
Cervantes is engaging here in some self criticism,
but also in some self praise, having one of his characters
praise the story, with some reservation,
but the priest praises it.
This priest, as we have already learned,
is also a literary critic, as we discovered in the episode
of the scrutiny of the books.
Now, The Novel of the Curious Impertinent is the
most blatantly literary story contained in the Quixote,
the most artful and obviously derived from literary sources.
The action is set in Florence and in a vaguely defined past.
It is a time and place of fictions, not the present in
which the Quixote takes place.
It is drawn from known Italian sources,
and written in the style of Boccaccio--
whom you now know--and Bandello, Matteo Bandello--
This course is under the ages of the literature major,
that is Comparative Literature, so you are getting quite a bit
of Italian literature here, which is inevitable--Matteo
Bandello 1485-1561.
He was one of the great short story writers already of the
sixteenth century, much read throughout Europe,
and, in fact, one of his stories inspired
Romeo and Juliet.
Shakespeare, as you know,
was very fond of reading Italian literature.
In fact, The Novel of the Curious Impertinent is
actually drawn from Ariosto's Orlando furioso.
I have mentioned Ariosto several times,
but I will mention him again now.
His famous poem is Orlando furioso.
Ariosto is 1474-1533, and the Orlando furioso
was published in 1516, then 1521, and 1532.
It is a mock epic, as I've mentioned before,
is a mock epic poem that Cervantes much admired,
as we should know by now.
So we have here these three Italian authors that Cervantes
was indebted to.
Other more distant sources have been found, but Ariosto is the
obvious one.
One very distant source of the story of a king,
who wanted to put his wife to the test,
and had somebody seduce her and so forth,
the same story, but that is very remote,
and the most obvious source is a fragment from the Orlando
furioso.
I underscore, again, Cervantes's indebtedness
to Italian Renaissance literature,
as he was also to Italian Renaissance art,
as I mentioned in my last lecture.
Remember, if you have been reading the Casebook and
your introductions, that Cervantes spent a good
deal of time in Italy, which had been,
of course, the center of the Renaissance.
Now, The Novel of the Curious Impertinent has been
variously interpreted, but the most apt analysis,
the most-- How could I say?--current
analysis, the most accepted,
is the one by René Girard.
Now we have a French name.
Girard was a French professor who taught in the United States
nearly all of his life.
His most famous book was called in the original Mensonge
romantique et vérité
romanesque, known in English as Deceit,
Desire and the Novel.
The original, the first publication,
was 1961.
Girard's whole theory revolves around the concept of triangular
or mimetic desire.
This desire is both external, what it applies to a novel and
its sources, the previous books that it
imitates, and internal,
when it applies to the protagonist's love relations.
And, in fact, Girard will claim that all
novels contain, the kernel of all novels,
is this kind of mimetic triangular desire,
and his book contains analysis of famous novels in the European
tradition like Madam Bovary,
Le Rouge et le Noir, and so forth.
I much recommend his book.
Now, the story by Cervantes, The Novel of the Curious
Impertinent, is crucial to the development of
Girard' theory, and indeed it may have inspired
his theory, it is that important.
Girard writes, and this, I know,
is a little dense quotation translated from French into a
little awkward English.
I'll read it very slowly so that you can follow it.
He says: "The existence of The Novel of the Curious
Impertinent in the Quixote has always intrigued
critics.
The question arises whether the short story is compatible with
the novel, the unity of the masterpiece seems somewhat
compromised.
It is this unity which I revealed by our journey through
novelistic literature [his journey in the book through
novelistic literature, in which he shows that this
triangular desire exists in all of these novels].
Having begun with Cervantes, [he begins his book with
Cervantes] we return to Cervantes,
and ascertain that this novel is genius as grasped the extreme
forms of imitated desire.
No small distance separates the Cervantes of Don Quixote and the
Cervantes of Anselmo, since all of the novels we have
considered in this chapter as they show.
Yet, the distance is not insuperable since all of the
novelists are linked to each other.
The simultaneous presence of external and internal mediation
in the same work seems to us to confirm the unity of novelistic
literature, and in turn,
the unity of this literature confirms that of Don Quixote.
One is proof by the other, just as one proves that the
earth is round by going around it.
The creative force of Cervantes is so great that it has been
exerted effortlessly throughout the whole novelistic space.
All of the ideas of the western novel are present in germ in Don
Quixote."
I continue reading Girard: "And the idea of these
ideas, the idea whose central role is
constantly being confirmed, the basic idea from which one
can rediscover everything is triangular desire."
That's the end of the quote.
I'm sure this sounds very strange and obscure to you if
you haven't heard about it before,
but I tell you, once you understand it,
you may glean something useful about your love life.
I said that reading the Quixote would provide
lessons for living.
When I was a graduate student this book was the rage,
and everyone was interpreting his or her love relationships in
terms of triangular desire.
So, you don't have to make any confessions at the end of the
course but you might, if you want,
tell me if this has helped you in any way understand your life.
For Girard, desire is never spontaneous,
it's never a spontaneous one-to-one relationship but
mediated, one desires a man or woman
because he or she is desired by another.
It is that presumed desire by the mediator that makes her or
him attractive.
I say "presume" because then the mediator's
desire must yet have another mediator to exist as such,
and then there will be sort of an endless series of mediations,
but we're focusing on one triangle at a time.
Jealousy, in other words, is a requirement for desire,
for love.
You can now think of all of the novels you have read in which
jealousy plays such an important role.
Proust is full of jealous characters.
Hence imitation of the mediator, the one of whom one is
jealous, is of the essence,
because of the belief that she or he is loved by the object of
our desire-- if you follow that.
This is the mimetic part of desire, which may lead to desire
for the mediator in the guise of desire for the original object
of desire.
That is, you love so much the mediator that you wind up loving
the mediator, not loving the person that you
thought you began loving.
We'll see some of that in The Novel of the Curious
Impertinent. In the context of The Novel
of the Curious Impertinent it works like this.
We begin here and you have your handout for easy reference.
Anselmo cannot love really Camila until he gets Lotario to
love her.
This is the gist of this man's twisted desire,
and why he must put her to the test.
So Anselmo loves Camila, but once Lotario is inserted as
the mediator.
Then, eventually, when Lotario loves Camila,
he does so--a second triangle--because she has loved
Anselmo before.
So we have these two triangles.
Now, this story may well reveal a hidden substory of the kind we
have been finding, when characters tell stories,
and the story may very well be, and it has been proposed,
a homosexual love between the two friends,
using Camila as the mediator, the third triangle,
Anselmo really loves Lotario using Camila as the mediator.
Nicolás Wey-Gómez has written a persuasive
article, not only about that
relationship between the two, but also showing that Anselmo's
illnesses, both physical,
psychosomatic, are feminine in the medicine of
the time, to underscore the nature of the
relationship between these two.
So I hope that you are understanding all of this and I
hope it's not ruining your love life,
or your life in general, by realizing how complicated
love can be.
Now, this structure sheds light on the intertwined stories that
we have been discussing, and this is why I have these
other triangles here on the board and on your handout,
whereas where we have the Fernando,
Cardenio, Luscinda triangle, in which Fernando loves
Luscinda, really because she is
Cardenio's girl, or is going to be his girl.
Eventually, and I suggested this in another class,
there are intimations of a homoerotic relationship here
between Fernando and Cardenio.
Now, Fernando, when it comes to Dorotea,
Fernando loses interest in Dorotea once he has possessed
her, because there is no mediation,
but he marries her, once she appears at the inn
defended by Cardenio.
So once Cardenio appears as a potential mediator,
Fernando goes ahead and marries Dorotea.
Now, Don Quixote's mediations are the romances of chivalry and
its heroes, particularly,
Amadís de Gaula whom he imitates,
as he also imitates Orlando in the Orlando furioso.
The object of his love, Dulcinea, is a projection of
the loves of those famous lovers,
Oriana in the case of Amadís,
Angelica in the case of Orlando, which is why he desires
her, and in a way,
invents her from their own constructions of her.
And we will see her transformations as the novel
progresses, which are remarkable, especially in Part
II.
Now, The Novel of the Curious Impertinent holds up
a mirror, the mirror of literature to the
young people involved in love stories that are about to
culminate in marriage.
It provides a contrast to the comedy like ending of the
stories of Fernando, Dorotea, Cardenio and Luscinda.
The Novel of the Curious Impertinent is not so much
an admonition, though it is that too,
as a lesson about the complexities of love and how no
permanent stability can be achieved,
particularly, not by marriage.
It is also a wink at the reader, I think,
a wake up call.
I mean, can anyone--you will see one who does soon--but can
anyone really believe in the sincerity of the permanence of
Don Fernando's conversion?
Is it likely that Fernando will be a faithful husband?
What about Luscinda?
She was tempted once by money and status, and could be again.
Literature teaches through pleasure a very harsh lesson.
Ultimately, The Novel of the Curious Impertinent is
about, in my view, the death instinct
concealed within desire, co-evil, with it, with love.
It is what Freud called the death drive.
There is no stability where there is desire.
The perfection of a socio-*** situation of
Anselmo, Camila and Lotario is a mirage, and an invitation to
tragedy.
This is an even harsher lesson about the human condition.
What the priest says at the end is that he finds the story well
written, but he cannot believe--that the
author has not shown-- a real situation because a
husband would never do that.
That maybe young people in love before marriage would,
but not a husband.
What he's saying there is something that is a given in all
Golden Age Spanish literature, and the given is that
everything that happens before marriage is the stuff of comedy,
and everything that happens after marriage is the stuff of
tragedy.
This is not a lesson to be taken too seriously,
but it's something to be pondered, and I think that this
is what the priest notices.
He notices that this, to him, would not be possible
for a husband to do, to subject his wife to this
sort of test, but if it were among people not
married yet, it may be.
Of course, marriage is usually the ending of a comedy.
Comedies tend to end in marriage because marriage is a
return to stability; and in theater comedy is a
return to an order that has been upset, whereas tragedy does not
return to order.
So this is what the literary side of that would be,
whether it is applicable or not to life, it is for each one of
us to discover.
So now we move to the ending of all of these stories at the Juan
Palomeque's inn.
Fernando accepts Dorotea after everyone pleads with him and a
good deal surfaces about the concept of
hidalguía, from hidalgo;
hidalguía.
He pleads her case with as much verve as Marcela did in an
earlier episode and with a very thorough knowledge of Castilian
law.
She is lacking hidalguía--
Dorotea--nobility, but hidalguía is
passed on through the male line, not the female line,
as we've mentioned here before.
This is what she underscores in her own defense.
Cardenio has his Luscinda, who has the
hidalguía, but not the wealth Dorotea has.
So there is, as I mentioned in the earlier
class, sort of a crisscrossing here, a mirror image of the two
women.
That is, Dorotea has no nobility but has money,
and Luscinda has very little money but she has nobility,
and so forth.
Luscinda, by the way, in the midst of all of this,
had been kidnapped from a convent and brought to the inn
in what turns out to be a side story not told in detail.
These stories could be extended ad infinitum if you
pursued every one of them, but remember,
Luscinda had been kidnapped and she's brought back for this
ending.
Javier Herrero, whom I mentioned in the last
class, and I mention him here,
again, with respect and sometimes to disagree with good
old Javier, who is a very--was,
he's retired now-- a very competent critic and
also, I should say, very Catholic critic,
as you will understand from what I read here;
there's no sin in that.
Javier Herrero interprets in this way the battle of the wine
skins that leads to the resolution of the conflicts.
He also has a kind of symbolic, *** symbolic interpretation
of the whole thing, but it's good to hear it to
correct it a little bit, but to learn from it.
He says: "The meaning of the battle against the wine
skins is now clear [he has been expostulating].
Don Quixote is in a state of hallucination since he is really
possessed by an intense dream and acting with closed eyes.
Takes two superimposed wine skins which he saw in his room
when he went to bed to be the giant Pandafilando and to behead
him he cuts the head around, and pierces the body.
The wine floods the room and fills the inn with its smell.
Don Quixote has destroyed an erect *** [this is what good
old Javier writes] and has filled the inn with the
smell of wine.
Don Quixote has certainly cut down the power of *** [I'm
still quoting Herrero], this blood transformed into
wine must certainly be taken as a sacramental symbol,
a symbol of the mysterious power of the knight against the
amorous pestilence.
Metaphorically, the courage and courtesy of Don
Quixote have vanquished the arrogance, cruelty and *** of
Don Fernando.
It is true that Don Quixote is wrong,
that his adventures have created havoc,
and morally, his motivation is mixed,
but it is also undeniable that his courage,
truthful and chaste, his foolishness,
brings him blows and ridicule but his greatness makes him a
worthy instrument of Providence."
Herrero goes on: "We see clearly that the
spiritual movement has been completed by Don Fernando's
descent from *** and pride to a Christian humility and
fraternity by which he raises his victims to the level of his
affection, and now reunited in love,
a common embrace is possible.
The giant is dead and the true man, the Christian gentleman has
replaced him, but which powers have brought
about the conversion?
Has it been the beauty, the tears, the truths of
Dorotea?
The priest's persuasion?
They certainly all have a part in it,
but the text leaves no doubt that all these elements,
together with Don Quixote, have been the instruments of
Providence [with a capital P].
While men and women [he goes on]
had been acting through the impulse of their passions,
which brought them to the labyrinth of the Sierra Morena,
not a reference has been made by Cervantes to Heaven's will,
but as soon as Cardenio meets Dorotea and is told that Don
Fernando did not take Luscinda with him,
he expresses hope that Heaven has decreed their salvation.
From that moment on, their destinies began to escape
from the darkness and confusion of the labyrinth.
At the inn, the locus of social reunion and consequently of the
transition from wildness to civilization,
Luscinda, having been released by Don Fernando in the scene
just as described, exclaims [he's quoting
Luscinda] ‘observe how Heaven by
unusual and to us hidden ways has brought me into the presence
of my true husband, and well you know by a thousand
dear-bought experiences that death along can efface him out
of my memory.'
[Herrero goes on].
Immediately and in the long scene of reconciliation all the
participants claim that their meeting in the inn is not
accidental, but on the contrary the work of
Providence."
The question to be considered is if the conflicts would have
been solved without the intervention of Don Quixote--
which I will speak about in a minute,
I think that he was the agent, of course.
In any case, Herrero winds up his article,
which ultimately deals with the whole issue of marriage,
which is so important in the Quixote and so important in
the sixteenth century, and about whom the likes of
Erasmus and Vives wrote, as he quotes them,
and the Council of Trent, which is taking place--as you
know, from reading
Elliot--discussed--we will talk about again when we talk about
Part II-- about marriages and all of
that, because marriage is at the core of social stability and
social transitions in society; it is the way that society
renews itself, so it's crucial.
So this is what Herrero writes, and it's important because he's
bringing in first the Neo-Platonic notions of love
derived from the courtly love tradition--
that I think I've spoken about--against sort of certain
movement in Spanish society and in sixteenth-century society,
and philosophy in general, towards a more bourgeois sense
of marriage-- You remember,
I think I've spoken about the courtly love tradition,
the courtly love tradition, which is one of the great--
how could I say?
spiritual revolutions in the West,
is the idea that the woman had to be adored at a distance,
the love could not be consummated, usually,
the love was for a woman who was unattainable preferably
married, and the lover paid homage to
the woman, and so forth.
We still hear the echoes of the courtly love tradition in modern
poetry, in Neruda, and Octavio Paz,
and the great modern poets.
Don Quixote is a courtly lover in that sense,
an aged, out of fashion courtly lover, but that is what inspires
his love for Dulcinea.
Neo-Platonism, of course, was at the core of
this courtly love tradition.
So Herrero says the following, now that I think that I've
placed this in its ideological context:
"Against a sentimental and Neo-Platonic tradition,
which made of woman a goddess, Cervantes takes the side of the
conjugal love presented by Erasmus and Vives [Erasmus of
Rotterdam, I will speak more about him in
the following classes; he was a very important
sixteenth century humanist and so was Vives],
which allows man not only to enjoy the legitimate pleasure of
the *** union but to help each other to fight against the
inevitable weakness and imperfection of the human
condition.
By emphasizing the social civilizing aspects of marriage,
Cervantes was closer to the new doctrines of reform than to the
Renaissance ideals of love [he's thinking of Petrarch and
Garcilaso and the poets that I have mentioned before].
Indeed, with this attacks on the pastoral and by the story of
El curioso impertinente, [The Novel of the Curious
Impertinent] Cervantes is precisely marking
his distance from the great aristocratic tradition of the
Renaissance and joining the new, to a great extent bourgeois,
Christianity which descended to the south of Europe from the low
countries.
In opposition to Amadís, Palmerín,
Belianís [these are the chivalric heroes of the
chivalric romances], the new bourgeois lover is not
a knight, but a Christian gentleman.
Such love, as we have seen, has two elements.
It is Christian and the activity of Providence and the
priests show the role that God and his Church play in its
growth, but it's also gentlemanly,
both Cardenio and Don Fernando become through love,
not only Christians, but Christian gentlemen.
Courtly love brings the knight to madness, but Christian love
saves him.
Such a rescue is metaphorically expressed in our story by the
great classical myth of the labyrinth,
lost in the wilderness of the Sierra Morena their lives
twisted into the intricate maze of the labyrinth on the brink of
being devoured by the minotaur of *** and madness,
Cardenio, Luscinda, Dorotea and Fernando are
finally rescued by Don Quixote's courageous battle,
and by the civilizing force of an Erasmian church.
Divine Providence, in fact, has provided as
Ariadne, the saving threat."
That's the end of the quote, which I hope now you can
understand given the background that I gave you about.
All of this sounds fine, and it is instructive,
particularly the references to Erasmus and to Vives,
until we take into account the hilarious convolutions and the
mixture of madness, dreams and lies that bring
about the resolution of the conflicts.
The conflicts have been solved by Don Quixote's intervention,
but how can such a ridiculous figure be the instrument of
Providence, with a capital P?
They have been solved by Don Quixote's agency because they
are truly worldly conflicts, involving tensions of a world
in social flux, where the older values,
let's say the values of the Renaissance,
the values of courtly love, no longer hold sway.
Don Quixote embodies the mixture of values in transition,
so he can mediate in the various conflicts and solve
them.
He would not have been able to do so if he had been a real
knight, nor had he been an ordinary man of his time.
But to say this is not to do justice to the multilayer plots
unraveling in these episodes.
I am mostly struck by Cervantes's inventiveness,
by the wild yet disciplined imagination at play,
which cannot, I think, be reduced to this
providential scheme that Javier offers.
Don Fernando is at one level Pandafilando de la Fosca Vista,
a giant.
Remember, the rhyme, Fernando, Pandafilando.
The figure of Pandafilando, though invented ad hoc
by the priest, is presented as an effective
factor in the outcome of the conflicts,
as are Tinacrio the Wise and Princess Micomicona,
although not real and grotesque, not real in relation
to the fiction of the novel, this whole ensemble exists and
performs on a level not unlike that of the characters who
invented them, who invented this whole
ensemble.
The story of Pandafilando is like a dream version,
a recognizable distortion of Dorotea's real conflict--
if you remember when we went over it--
the story of Pandafilando is like a dream version,
as I repeat, of Dorotea's real conflict.
Remember, again, the hidden meaning of
Micomicona, over which I will go again,
in her name there is an allusion to mimicry,
to representation, to mimesis, to the very process
by which she was invented.
Does Micomicona not in a way represent representation itself?
I mean, she is the representation itself talking
place before our eyes.
Are all of these inventions of characters by other characters
similar to Cervantes's invention of his own characters in the
Quixote and this is what this whole thing is telling us?
This is what is truly dazzling about the resolution of all of
these conflicts, that they do unravel at every
level sort of simultaneously.
That is to say--and this is what you have on the back of
your triangles, and I have here on the
board--all of these levels, Don Quixote's dream,
which is Don Quixote, Pandafilando and Micomicona,
he cuts the head off of the giant,
he thinks, in the dream.
The meta-fictional creation by the priest, the story that the
priest invents, and that Micomicona then
performs, meaning Dorotea.
Don Quixote, Pandafilando,
Micomicona, Tinacrio, all these characters
in that novel that the priest and Dorotea invent,
and then, there is the fiction of the novel,
which is Don Quixote, Don Fernando,
Dorotea, and so forth.
All of those levels sort of collapse together and the
conflicts are resolved by Don Quixote slaying the giant;
that is, cutting and bursting poor Juan Palomeque's wine
skins, to his horror.
It is a stroke of genius, that the process of restitution
will be motivated by Don Quixote's nightmare which comes
to interrupt the reading of The Novel of the Curious
Impertinent, and the point,
incidentally near the end, which is when it's about to
unravel, when that novel is about to
unravel, another case of these
interruptions.
In the dream, Don Quixote completes the story
of Princess Micomicona; that is, Dorotea's predicament
translated into the language of chivalry,
like Don Quixote's psychotic delusion--
Remember, about Queen Madasima having had an affair with this
surgeon, which was his version of
Luscinda being deflowered by Don Fernando.
Now, this version of Dorotea's imbroglio true to the name she
assumes is a grotesque parody of her story.
I go back to what I have just said.
Remember, that "mico"
means monkey, Micomicona is "the twice
monkey" with an augmentative like that--
remember the augmentative in "segund&
oacute;n" that I mentioned
"segundo, segundón"
from "second," "segund&
oacute;n" is a big second.
"Grande, grandulón"
in Spanish, lummox, for a lummox,
and so forth.
"Mico-micón," there's an augmentative
involved there.
Micomicona--Remember, monkey see monkey do and all of
that?--She's a big blown up distorted copy of Dorotea,
this is what Micomicona is.
The ending of Dorotea's story in that register is what breaks
off the reading--as I mentioned--of The Novel of
the Curious Impertinent.
That story will be resumed and comes to its very tragic ending
while those of Cardenio, Luscinda, Dorotea and Don
Fernando will have a purely comic one,
happy endings, as I mentioned,
with marriages are typical of comedy.
This is yet another intersection of the two stories
here, with the accent on section, on crossing,
on cutting.
The ending of The Novel of the Curious Impertinent
reveals its artificial literary quality when the reading is
concluded and, as I've mentioned,
the priest remarks, as I said, that it doesn't
sound right for a husband to have done,
so that it's not good mimesis, and then there follow the court
like scene of reconciliations among the various couples and
restitutions made, including restitutions to the
barber who's basin was-- you haven't gotten there but
you will see that there are a series of restitutions to all of
the characters who have been injured or damaged or harmed in
some way.
The inn becomes like a court of law where these restitutions are
made.
Now, I want to quote Javier Herrero in a positive light now,
and he is right, in the sense that the values
are changing and there is sort of an emerging bourgeois sense:
"It is true [he says] that Neo-Platonism associated
with the tradition of courtly love was still the accepted
poetic and artistic vehicle for aristocratic sentiment.
But through the influence of Christian humanism and as an
expression of the strength of the new bourgeois,
the preoccupations with secular life and above all marriage
replaced the stylized conventions of chivalry and the
austere ideal of monasticism."
This may be true, particularly if we take into
account all of the economic and legal background that I have
given you about the relationship between these characters,
the fact that Fernando is a segundón and is
not going to inherit much of the state,
which makes him very anxious, the fact that Dorotea runs a
farm and has money and all of that;
it does give the impression that there is a kind of a
bourgeois sense of marriage and stability that is replacing the
old idea of the Neo-Platonic ideals contained in this
aristocratic versions of love in the poetic traditions.
The idea also seems to be that to cure the characters in the
real world of the fiction where they live they also have to be
cured in their dreams and inventions,
which is one of the overall plot strands now being resolved
in the Quixote, he's the only one missing here.
I mean, everyone is going to be sort of cured of his or her
dreams, hallucinations, and so forth,
but Don Quixote still has not.
But they have to be cured of those hallucinations,
as well as their situation has to be stabilized in social
terms.
The priest, the barber and the rest of the characters engage
Don Quixote as his level of madness,
in part because they are also mad in their own ways,
we have to realize this.
What are the priest and the barber doing traipsing all over
Spain after the knight?
Remember what I said before about the priest,
this is a very strange priest who is a reader of romances of
chivalry.
What has become of the priest's duties at church or the barber's
customers, we ask?
They too have left normal lives, as Sancho has,
he left his wife and children, to engage in an insane quest
after an insane man.
The point is that life, mental life,
is made up of levels that mirror and distort each other,
and that literature appears to emerge from this interplay.
The creative mind of the author is capable of reflecting or
expressing the multilayered essence of that mental life.
After the captive's tale--about which we'll be talking in the
next class, fascinating,
very entertaining captive's tail based on Cervantes's own
life-- the priest and the barber and
the others will send Don Quixote home.
They will cage him and send him home in a return that will still
engage them in further adventures.
The end of Part I is near, and we will get to it next
week.