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Prof: I have been speaking in the last lectures
about the ending of Part I of the Quixote,
and today we finally get to the end of the novel.
I remind you, again, that although you have
both parts bound as one book-- we all have it bound as one
book--this is the end of the novel Cervantes set out to
write, that he had no specific plan to
write a second part, which would not be published
anyway until a decade later, in 1615.
It is very easy to make the mistake that what we're coming
to now is a provisional ending, so avoid that mistake.
It is very easy to make, because of the book being bound
together, and also because of the very nature of the ending of
Part I that is so complicated.
It is also easy to fall in that mistake because you know that
Part II is coming as part of your course,
and that you are going to read it, but not the readers of the
1605 Quixote in 1605 did not have a second part that they
knew they were going to read, so I want to dispel the notion
that this is a provisional ending.
This is the ending of the novel as Cervantes conceived it.
There are critics who seem to see in the ending hints that
Cervantes planned a second part, but they are at best hints.
Because second parts were often written in the sixteenth
century, second parts of chivalric romances had many
parts.
The Celestina had many second parts,
the Lazarillo had second parts,
the Guzmán de Alfarache also had a second
part, so it is conceivable to see in
some of those hints the possibility that Cervantes
thought of writing a second part,
but it is not part of the plan of the 1605 Quixote,
which stands on its own, or was designed to stand on its
own as a book.
It is almost impossible to buy it today separately,
of course.
Now, ending the Quixote is a difficult thing to do
because it is no ordinary story with a clear beginning;
that is, the birth of the hero, for instance,
and a linear plot in which the protagonist pursues a goal that
he either attains or fails to attain;
hence, he is defeated or he dies.
It is not a love story like the subordinate stories that we have
just seen being resolved at the end in which the lovers get
married and presumably live happily ever after.
The Quixote, as we have seen from start,
from the prologue to be specific, is a meta-novel;
a novel about the writing of a novel among other things like;
it's a kind of meta-chivalric romance in that it is a parody
of a chivalric romance.
Meta-novel is a novel that includes a novel about the
writing of the novel.
This is quite common in avant-garde fiction in the
twentieth century, but it is the first time that
it happens in literature in the Quixote,
to have this dimension of criticism of the novel included
in the novel itself.
So the business of bringing it to a close is a complicated one
that involves closing several narrative strands,
plus the commentary or meta novel part about the composition
of the novel-- You can't just come to the end
and say, the hero failed,
died, got married.
No, no, no, you still have to deal with all of this commentary
on the writing of the novel, which is part of the novel.
How do you end that?
How do you close that?--I will anticipate that you have already
read that ending, because the only possible
ending to that narrative level is the prologue,
with all of its hesitations about how to write it,
which means, with all of the problems about
how to close the book; the last episode of that
meta-fictional level is the prologue,
because closing the book, which we literally do when we
finish, has many implications,
the most important of which is that it implies or includes a
statement, by just doing it,
about the structure, about the shape of the
book--Endings, as I've mentioned,
are very important, and I believe that I mentioned
the best book on the subject by Frank Kermode,
The Sense of an Ending.
It's a brief but very, very smart book that I
recommend, if you're in literature, that you pick up
some day and read.
So closing the book--after you've got to the end and you
close it-- has many implications
about--it's a statement about the structure of the book,
the very fact that it has an ending,
that you can close it.
These are the reasons why we do have several endings or closures
and why the prologue has to be the final or overarching one,
which necessarily suggests circularity and self enclosure--
if you come back to the beginning and make it the end--
and this circularity and this self enclosure,
we saw, is one of the characteristics of the novel,
of the Quixote, which is a fiction based on
fictions, and in where there are,
or there seem to be, no way out of the fiction,
because even the very author whose name is on the cover is
contained within that fiction.
Miguel de Cervantes is contained in the scrutiny of the
books; remember, his novel La
Galatea is mentioned; and then, Juan de Saavedra is
mentioned in the captive's tale; that's one of Cervantes' last
names; so it's also an allusion to
himself; Rinconete and
Cortadillo, the story that you read for
today, is a Cervantes story that is
contained, so even the author whose name
is stamped on the cover is within the fiction.
So I will discuss several episodes that constitute partial
endings, but reminding you that the ending is the prologue.
The first of those episodes has to do with the en-closure,
with the enclosure of Don Quixote--I'm playing with the
word enclosure-- by which I mean his caging.
Caging Don Quixote is a literal form of closure,
you close him in.
It takes him out of circulation for good, as the character that
he invented himself to be.
So I'm seeing, even in the act of enclosure of
the character, a form, a kind of ending,
a formal enclosure.
Now, Don Quixote is an outlaw, as we saw in the arrest order
read by the Holy Brotherhood trooper--
remember, the one who can't read very well--
who apprehends him after the fracas at the inn.
Being a criminal, others, particularly the
priest, have to argue Don Quixote's case to prevent the
Holy Brotherhood from taking him prisoner.
Remember, this crime is against the Crown,
because the galley slaves were under the purview of the Crown,
so he would have been taken by the Holy Brotherhood,
arrested and perhaps even executed.
Remember that Sancho says, at some point,
that he can hear the arrows of the Holy Brotherhood buzzing
around his ears, because of course,
Sancho being a commoner is more liable to be arrested by the
Holy Brotherhood, whereas Don Quixote,
being an hidalgo, perhaps thought that he was
above the law.
But in any case, the others, the priest,
particularly, have to argue that Don Quixote
be released into their custody because the priest argues very
persuasively, like a lawyer,
being insane Don Quixote would never be kept in jail;
he would never be convicted.
The insanity defense existed in Spanish law since the thirteenth
century; so an insane man would be
released.
Again, Don Quixote's insanity puts him above or beyond the
law.
It is his most significant characteristic as a literary
character, and being insane he accepts no law.
But why is he caged, and not simply arrested and
taken home in shackles, sitting on Rocinante?
Why is it that at the end Don Quixote's freedom has to be
denied in such a spectacular fashion?
And I mean spectacular, because this caging of Don
Quixote and being carried home in this case is a spectacle.
There are two plot strands that are winding up here.
First, Don Quixote's quest, and second, the priest and the
barber's own quest to return him home possibly to be cured.
This is what justifies the charade of the masks.
Pragmatically, the farce is staged because if
Don Quixote recognizes the barber and the priest,
he will catch on about the plan to return him home and he might
resist.
But there is more to it.
It is really only at the level of fiction that Don Quixote,
the character that he himself has created, can be captured.
Alonso Quixano, the hidalgo,
the modest hidalgo from that place in la Mancha,
can be arrested or apprehended, but not Don Quixote,
who is an invented literary character,
unless it is within the world of his fiction;
hence the make-believe.
And this is the scene of the caging on page 415 of the Jarvis
translation: "They made a kind of cage
with poles, great-wise, large enough to
contain Don Quixote at his ease [this is at the bottom of page
415]: and immediately Don Quixote and his companions,
with Don Louis's servants, and the officers of the Holy
Brotherhood, together with the innkeeper,
all by the contrivance and direction of the priest,
covered their faces, and disguised themselves,
some one way, some another,
so as to appear to Don Quixote to be quite other persons as
those he had seen in that castle.
This being done, with the greatest silence they
entered the room where Don Quixote lay fast asleep,
and not dreaming of any such accident;
and laying fast hold of him, they bound him hand and foot,
so that, when he awakened with a start,
he could not stir, nor do anything but look round
him, and wonder to see such strange
visages about him.
And presently he fell into the usual conceit that his
disordered imagination was perpetually presenting to him,
believing that all these shapes were goblins of that enchanted
castle, and that, without all doubt,
he must be enchanted, since he could not stir nor
defend himself: all precisely as the priest,
the projector of this stratagem, fancied it would fall
out.
Sancho alone, of all that were present,
was in his perfect senses, and his own figure;
and, though he wanted but little of being infected with
his master's disease, yet he was not at a loss to
know who all of these counterfeit goblins were;
but he does not open his lips until he saw what this surprisal
and imprisonment of his master meant [we're talking about
Sancho]."
The irony here, in this episode,
is that Don Quixote has communicated to the others the
freedom to act out whatever fantasies they have.
Isn't this contradictory?
He is caged.
Forgiven them, allowing them the freedom to
cage him in a way.
He has contaminated them with the imaginative freedom that he
practices.
This theme began with the story of Dorotea becoming Princess
Micomicona and her acting out a chivalric romance invented on
the spot by the priest and performed by her as the priest
invents this whole charade.
This whole charade, which is like a brief
theatrical piece or interlude taking place in the darkness of
the inn, is like the episode of a nightmare.
Don Quixote awakens to find himself bound and surrounded by
what seemed like goblins who put him in the cage.
But is this a dream, or is this reality?
He's dealing here--Cervantes--with a theme
that was very common in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries and that was made famous in a play called Life
is a Dream, by a playwright called
Calderón de la Barca-- you may have heard of it.
This is a play from the 1630s, but you can see that the theme
is here of--if it's real life or this is a dream.
He has gone from being asleep to finding himself surrounded by
these strange figures in the darkness of the inn,
so what could it be if not some sort of nightmare?
So he believes that he is enchanted.
In the cage, Don Quixote is like the
prisoner he is, in the sense that,
because prisoners were paraded through the streets as a lesson
to others.
Prisoners were routinely--I think,
even up through the nineteenth century--
paraded through the streets of town,
in carts or walking or being flogged and so forth as a lesson
to others.
Part of their punishment was their punishment being made
public, so it was no unusual for them
to be, probably, mostly,
riding donkeys and stuff they were paraded through towns,
but also in carts.
He is also like a circus freak show,
that's what this shows, and you will see one or two in
second part of the Quixote traveled around in
carts, and, in fact,
plays were staged in carts in town squares throughout Spain.
That is, the company came in the carts and the carts opened
up and became the stage; so the cart here is an
important and significant means of communication of taking Don
Quixote around as a prisoner and also as some sort of a freak
show, the continuation of the
theatrical episode of the charade to put him in the cage.
So this emphasizes that theatrical quality that I
mentioned.
An important part of the charade is the prophecy
contrived and delivered in dramatic highly affected tones
by the barber, which foretells of the future
of Don Quixote as knight, projecting a potential ending
to the story on that fictional level which satisfies Don
Quixote.
Like the priest, the barber is an author,
but also an actor besides.
I cannot do justice in my performance,
particularly in Jarvis' eighteenth century English and
with my Cuban accent, but this is the prophecy by the
barber: "O Knight of the Sorrowful
Figure!
let not the confinement you are under afflict you;
for it is expedient, it should be so,
for the more speedy accomplishment of the adventure
in which your great valour has engaged you;
which shall be finished when the furious Manchegan lion shall
be coupled with the white Tobosan dove,
after having submitted their stately necks to the soft
matrimonial yoke: from which unheard-of
conjunction shall spring into the light of the world brave
whelps, which shall emulate the tearing
claws of the valorous sire.
And this shall come to pass before the pursuer of the
fugitive nymph shall have made two rounds to visit the bright
constellations in his rapid and natural course.
And thou, O the most noble and obedient squire that ever had
sword in belt, beard on face,
and smell in nostrils, be not dismayed nor afflicted
to see the flower of knight-errantry carried thus
away from thine eyes!
for, ere long [before long], if it so please the fabricator
of the world, thou shalt see thyself so
exalted and sublimated that thou shalt not know thyself,
and shalt not be defrauded of the promises made thee by thy
noble lord.
And I assure you, in the name of Sage
Mentironiana [Mentironiana, from the word in Spanish
'mentira' for lie, this is the Sage]
that thy wages shall be punctually paid thee,
as thou will see it effect: follow,
therefore, the footsteps of the valorous and enchanted knight,
for it is expedient for you to go where you may both rest:
and because I am permitted to say no more,
God be with you: for I return I well know
whither."
So this is the prophecy invented on the spot and
delivered by the barber, who is, as we can see,
quite a ham himself, and also quite able to imitate
the speech of chivalric romances.
This is the peak of playacting in the Quixote.
By the way, you can see the prophecy that this is a
projected ending of the novel; that is Don Quixote and
Dulcinea will marry and have children, and so forth.
So, you see, this is the projected ending
within the fictions, or beyond even the fictions Don
Quixote has invented.
So this is yet another level, those levels that the novel
shows throughout created by characters.
This is the peak of playacting in the Quixote,
a culminating performance that among other things displays
Cervantes's talents as a playwright,
particularly a playwright of the interludes,
the entremeses, the funny skits that he wrote.
Juan Palomeque's inn, which has been used as a court
of law and as a debating meeting room where they debate what the
basin is and so forth, is now transformed into a
theater as Don Quixote is finally dismissed from it.
This, too, is one of the endings of the 1605
Quixote and the novel has several,
as I mentioned, and as we saw in the last class
when I discussed the restitutions made--
Excuse me, we have a visitor in the class,
an insect who is crawling in the middle of the room...
This is an added show free of charge by this bug.
Elena, maybe you can capture it.
Shall we kill it or not?
No.
What is it?
It came out of Toby's bag.
I'm sorry.
Well, if you can possibly pay attention to my lecture.
So please let us make a pause, an interlude,
while Toby, the valorous knight, delivers us from this
monster, who is very elusive, it seems.
So this, too, is one of the endings of the
1605 Quixote, and the novel has several,
as I mentioned, and as we saw in the last
class, and we discussed the various restitutions to those
who had suffered damages.
This ending is the most consistent;
the prophecy with the fictional world generated by Don Quixote
and now inhabited by all of the characters around him,
except for Sancho, who knows what is going on but
prudently chooses not to intervene.
So now, we go on the road, and we meet one of the most
memorable characters in Part I, the Canon of Toledo,
who is traveling with a retinue and meets this very strange
caravan carrying Don Quixote and stops to find out what this is
all about, and after he does,
the canon, Don Quixote, and the priest engage in a
discussion about commonplaces of literary theory about the
romances of chivalry, and about mostly Aristotle's
Poetics.
Now, the relevant background texts here are the
Filosofía antigua poética by Alonso
Lopéz Pinciano, known as "el
Pinciano," 1596-- in Spanish we write
"filosof ía"
today with an 'f,' that's just the old fashioned spelling--
and Lope de Vega's Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este
tiempo, 1609, which is,
of course, published after the Quixote,
but which deals with topics that are very relevant to this
episode.
Filosofía antigua poética is a book in
which el Pinciano expounds literary theory mostly derived
from Aristotle's Poetics.
Now, it is one of the great ironies of literary history that
Cervantes was wildly innovative in narrative fiction but
exceedingly conservative in the theater,
except when writing his brief comic of interludes.
I don't have to emphasize now how he was wildly innovative in
narrative fiction.
About the theater, this episode is a vicious
critique of Lope de Vega, his enemy Lope de Vega,
because Lope de Vega wrote plays that did not follow
Aristotle's Poetics, the rules of unity of action,
and of plays, and of time;
everything had to happen in one day, and one place,
and there was only one plot, and so forth.
Lope flaunted all of these rules and his plays were
historical plays that were dubiously accurate about the
history.
He just made it up, like Shakespeare.
He was a great innovator who wrote thousands of plays,
and who really couldn't care less about the rules.
He invented the Spanish National Theater by not
following the rules.
But there were those, like Cervantes himself who
criticized him for that; and he replied in 1609 in this
very hilarious poem called The New Art About How to Make
Plays at This Time-- the title is very polemical,
as you can see.
"Arte," art, is supposed to be eternal and
it says "new art," new art is an oxymoron,
art cannot be new or old; it's always the same,
supposedly, if you follow the Poetics;
to write comedies "at this time," now,
not in the past: now.
And so Lope was wildly innovative.
And he, as I've mentioned before, just took over the
Spanish theater, and Cervantes with his plodding
plays that followed the Poetics did not have much
success.
He did write have a few staged, and then he had the interludes
also staged, and a book of this appeared,
and I will speak about that when I speak about the
transition between the first and second part.
But it is an irony that Cervantes, who was so innovative
in the prose, was so conservative;
so he is using, of course, the canon and the
priest to criticize Lope de Vega for all of these irregularities
in his plays.
Peter Russell, who was a very reputable
English cervantista, Cervantes scholar,
writes, quote: "The discussion among the
three characters [about theory] has little bearing on the kind
of discoveries about fiction that Cervantes has been making
empirically in his book.
Hardly a word is said in it, for example,
about comic writing."
It is true.
I think that Russell is right, that Cervantes considered all
of the theoretical issues the canon puts forth,
but that in practice he did not adhere to any of them,
except that of verisimilitude, that the novel does not deviate
from the imitation of nature, that its characters never
engage in supernatural actions, and that there are no actions
that are beyond the credible; that is verisimilitude.
The most interesting part of the discussion is when the canon
and Don Quixote explore the possibilities of the romances of
chivalry which, in the end, the canon winds up
praising, because they afford the
possibility of introducing variety,
which is one Renaissance principle that Cervantes did
follow.
Besides, the canon himself confesses that he has written
the first hundred pages of a chivalric romance.
This is hilarious; he is the critic of chivalric
romances, and this is a typical cervantean twist.
We have seen that it was the priest who read out loud The
Novel of the Curious Impertinent, and here the
canon says: "'I myself,' replied the
canon, 'was once tempted to write a
book of knight-errantry, in which I purposed to observe
all of the restrictions I have mentioned;
and, to confess the truth, I had gone through above a
hundred sheets of it: and,
to try whether they answered my own opinion of it,
I communicated it to some learned and judicious persons,
who were very fond of this kind of reading,
and to other persons who were ignorant,
and regarded only the pleasure of reading extravagances;
and I met with a kind approbation from all of them:
nevertheless I would proceed no further,
as well in regard that I looked upon it as a thing foreign to my
profession, as because the number of the
unwise is greater than that of the prudent: and though it is
better to be praised by the few wise than mocked by a multitude
of fools, yet I am unwilling to expose
myself to the confused judgment of the giddy vulgar,
to whose lot of the reading of such books for the most part
falls.'" Don Quixote,
for his part as in reply, makes up a chivalric interlude
based on the story of the Knight of the Lake,
which is quite remarkable and with which in a sense he wins
the debate.
Both the canon and Don Quixote are authors, as is the barber,
and the priest, and so forth.
Now, there is a very elegant joke embedded in this
discussion.
The canon, I maintain, is the "idle reader,"
the "desocupado lector"
that Cervantes addressees in the prologue.
Remember, that he really says "desocupado
lector," idle reader.
The joke is that canons were supposed to have cushy jobs that
allowed them the time to read and devote themselves to other
leisurely activities.
"Vida de canónigo"
was, and still is, a way of saying cushy life.
Canons were in charge of reading canon law.
They were in churches, and they were supposed to read
canon law, and pass judgment.
Canon law is church law.
That is, when we talked about ***,
and the prisoner of sex, who would determine what is
*** and what is not, whom you can marry and whom you
cannot marry, and what is a sin,
and not a sin, and so forth.
Canon law is very, very important;
it's not to us anymore.
And the separation between crime and sin is beginning in
the seventeenth century and it's not quite accomplished until the
nineteenth century, if you know what I mean.
But canons had all of the time in the world to sit around and
read, and so they were supposed to be
well-fed, fat, and they had the time to
read romances of chivalry and pass judgment as this.
All of these figures of authority in Cervantes are
always slightly ridiculous.
They have some flaw or another, but here it's yet another
author, another internal author.
We have seen many in the Quixote: Don Quixote
himself, the priest, the barber we just
saw, Ginés de Pasamonte,
Cide Hamete Benengeli, the translator,
we have Grisóstomo, Cardenio, and so forth.
The Quixote is literature within literature.
Literature with its own internal rules discussed not
from the outside; this is what is important here,
the characters are discussing the nature of the work within
which they appear.
That is to say, that there is a seamless
continuity between theory and practice at the level of
discourse, but not at the level of ideology.
That is to say, the novel does not comply with
the theory propounded by the Canon of Toledo,
but flows from within its own practice.
Notice that the canon has not finished the novel that he
begun, and that he also confesses that
he's never finished reading the novels that he began reading;
he never gets to the end.
I think that Cervantes is pointing out here the difficulty
of finishing a novel, and finishing this novel in
particular, and that is more important than
all of the common places about Aristotelian theory that the
characters discuss.
A little background on Aristotelian theory,
although I think that the best thing to approach this passage
of the Canon of Toledo which, of course, has generated a lot
of criticism, because all you have to do is
give a scholar a set of rules that were being propounded and a
novel, and scholars think that art is
written following rules; it is delusion of scholars and
critics.
But none of this theory can contain the narrative,
the experiments in narrative that we have been observing in
the Quixote, all of those various levels of
fiction, all of these intertwined
stories, all of these very wild, and at the same disciplined
experiments about the nature of fiction that we find in the
Quixote.
All of that surpasses any theory that was expounded in the
Spanish Golden Age in the sixteenth century or in Europe
in the sixteenth century.
So we cannot be here blinded by the Filosofía antigua
poética, by Aristotle's Poetics,
by Plato and all of those discussions,
because the poetics of the Quixote are contained in its
own practice, and its own practice includes
the discussion of its own poetics.
But it does not take theory from outside and applies it to
the Quixote; that would be foolish.
What happens in the sixteenth century in literary theory,
in the sixteenth century, is the well-worn debate between
Plato and Aristotle.
Plato was the first spoilsport in the history of criticism,
because he thought that art was a negative influence in the
republic, and he wanted to banish the
poets because art appealed to the emotions and because art was
based on imitation; it couldn't be itself,
it was always an imitation of something.
Although, Neo-Platonism is important in other realms of
sixteenth century literature, that view of art and of poetry
was countered by Aristotle's critique of Plato in which he
departs from-- his point of departure,
his baseline, is that humans tend to imitate;
imitation is part of the human condition, and that therefore,
art is inherent in the human animal because he imitates.
That is, we are all "micomicones,"
if we remember that Princess Micomicona was about imitation,
was about mimesis, that we are all monkeys,
we imitate just like monkeys, and this is what Aristotle
really propounds, that imitation is a good thing,
and that imitation in art leads to a pleasurable,
intellectual process that he favors;
that is at the base of Aristotelian theory.
Now, Aristotle then in the Poetics gives a series of
rules that he bases on his own practice of reading the epic and
the theater that is applied, slavishly sometimes,
in the Renaissance with the Renaissance penchant for
reviving the classics.
That is basically what is at stake here.
It's parallel to what I mentioned in the last class
about the rules of government that are being drawn up then
from Machiavelli on and it's very much a part of the
Renaissance who try to draw up rules,
and the rules of behavior that were contained in Baltasare
Castiglione's The Courtier.
These are all parallel movements.
But in the case of the Quixote none of this theory
is ultimately relevant, it is contained within it,
it is discussed, but it does not drive the book,
it does not control the poetics,
Cervantes's poetics in the Quixote,
which surpasses all of that by quite a bit.
So I will not expound very much beyond that on the presence of
Aristotle's Poetics, there is a lot of criticism,
and one of those who has written eloquently about it is
E.C. Riley, whom you have met in my
Casebook, in the essay about life and
art, and so forth, in Don Quixote.
He wrote a book, he died not too long ago,
about the theory of the novel in Cervantes.
Cervantes Theory of the Novel,
which is a classic of Cervantes criticism,
but I think that ultimately what I have said here today
takes care of it.
Now, Cervantes, of course, expounded on
literature in other books, he has a long poem called
Viaje del Parnaso, A Voyage to Parnasus,
which is a book of literary criticism about the literature
of his time, and in the prologues to his
various books he expounds on criticism,
and so forth.
But the problem is, as with all writers of fiction,
that Cervantes has this theory appear always in dialogue,
in a dialogue among various characters.
You cannot really pinpoint him as to what Cervantes's
preference is in all of this, but I think that the point to
remember is that the canon is a slightly ridiculous figure,
that we cannot take him as a figure of authority who has
given us the poetics of the Quixote by any means,
that he himself has tried to write a romance of chivalry.
Now, another element that is present in this episode is the
critique or the criticisms of the romances of chivalry.
They were criticized severely in the sixteenth century by
figures as important as Erasmus of Rotterdam,
another one of these Renaissance figures that I have
mentioned before; Vives and others criticized the
romances of chivalry for their being potentially a bad
influence on society, in terms that Cervantes echoes
mockingly in the Quixote when he says that he's written
the book to do away with the romances of chivalry.
So there is in this episode, too, also an echo of those
debates about the romances of chivalry,
because, as I mentioned, they were quite popular at one
point, aided by the fact that they
could be, they were printed,
and distributed in relatively large numbers for the period.
So this is what is at stake in these episodes involving the
Canon of Toledo, which I think are also
preparing us for the ending of the book,
which, as I said, is the prologue.
It is one of the most sustained takes on the poetics of the
chivalric romances and on poetics and on literary theory
in the Quixote.
So the important thing to remember is verisimilitude;
Cervantes never deviates from verisimilitude;
that is, the characters never engaged in anything that is
supernatural or do something that is beyond what the
commonsense of a normal reader would allow.
So much for this episode which has, as I said,
elicited a lot of criticism as you can imagine;
and that I find very entertaining because I think
that the figure of the canon is really a very funny one.
You will see that religious figures appear in the
Quixote, well, the priest has been around the
whole first part.
Others will appear in Part II, one in particular,
who is depicted in very negative terms,
as you will see.
The canon is not, the canon is very learned,
very well read, and funny in his own
contradictions.
Notice, of course, that the whole debate takes
place over lunch, this picnic that they have
organized in this nice valley with food that they have
obtained from the inn, in this locus amoenus
where we will find a pastoral interlude,
which is another one of those stories that almost repeats
previous ones towards the end of the Quixote.
It is, again, a way of lending substance to
the book by these inner references.
The episode is like a new version of the Grisóstomo
and Marcela episode, but it also recalls parts of
the some of the intertwined love stories.
Leandra is a young beauty in her father's care who is desired
by many men; Eugenio, the goatherd,
and Anselmo, another goatherd,
are Leandra's principle suitors.
They appear to be perfect candidates to marry her,
as in the earlier story of Grisóstomo and Marcela.
They're both well off and so forth.
Then there appears Vicente de la Rosa who woos her with his
wiles and lies, because Leandra is no Marcela;
she allows herself to be seduced by Vicente de la Rosa,
who is a modern man, in that he has made himself,
almost literally, the way that he uses three sets
of clothes, he has three suits,
and he shuffles them in such a way that it appears that he has
many; and he is a miles
gloriosus--it's a term in Latin--a self glorifying
soldier, solider, miles gloriosus from
classical comedy.
This is a soldier who goes around boasting of all of his
great feats of arms and showing scars that he has from battles,
as Vicente de la Rosa does here.
He plays the guitar, and so forth,
and this is the way that he woos her.
They run off to the wild, the same kind of landscape that
we found in the Sierra Morena, where she is robbed,
but surprisingly not sexually ravaged,
which is a curious detail that I have not been able to ever
understand.
What does that reveal about Vicente de la Rosa?
It may be as bad that he was impotent and that all of these
Don Juan like adventures that he seems to be engaged in are
really a cover for that, but I find it amazing that she
has been left untouched, and that that satisfies her
father very much.
But the story is left is unfinished;
it hasn't concluded.
No one knows what is going to happen,
and I have wondered why, and I think that the reason is
that we are now coming to the end of the novel and what is
being narrated is kind of a present,
and a present cannot have a conclusion,
because current events are current,
and to give them a conclusion is an artificial way of
finishing them.
I think that's the only way to explain this unfinished story
that is just left unfinished.
We come to the end.
Finally, the priest, barber, Sancho and Don Quixote
arrive back in Don Quixote's village on a Sunday.
Is this significant?
It is the day of rest, of leisure, of feasts,
consonant perhaps with Don Quixote's arrival in a cage,
as if he were part of a fair.
But to me the most moving and interesting detail is that Don
Quixote does not know where he is.
If you go to page 458, at the very end:
"All of this discourse"--
at the top of page 458--"All of this discourse
passed between Sancho Panza and his wife Teresa Panza [you will
see that her name changes throughout the book;
this is another one of Cervantes's careless mistakes,
she goes Juana Gutierrez and so forth],
while the housekeeper and the niece received Don Quixote,
and having pulled off his clothes, laid him in his own
bed.
He looked at them with eyes askew, not knowing perfectly
where he was."
After all of these adventures, home is no longer familiar to
Don Quixote.
It is not, if it ever was, the abode of the canny,
but of the uncanny.
Instead of curing him, it seems to me,
bringing him home has made him madder than ever.
Perhaps the circularity of the event, coming back again has
made him dizzy to the point that he cannot recognize even his own
bed.
This is what I found very moving.
He's in his own bed and he can't even recognize it.
Now, he will, again, get out of it,
although we will meet him in it at the beginning of Part II,
but not quite soon.
In the fiction of Part II he will get out of it,
but a long decade later in real history.
I was going to wind up today by talking about Rinconete and
Cortadillo, which you were supposed to read
for today, and I'm going to do it very
briefly, but we will come back to The
Exemplary Novels, again, to discuss Rinconete
and Cortadillo perhaps a little more,
and also because we will be reading several of them.
Sixteen thirteen is the date of the Novelas ejemplares,
called here--this is the edition that you're using,
I assume-Exemplary Stories.
It's impossible to find a good title for it because
novellas at the time meant short novels or long short
stories, but today if you say exemplary
novels, you think of longer novels.
Short stories, the term didn't really emerge
until the late eighteenth century,
early nineteenth century with the appearance of newspapers and
all of that; so this is why there is no good
way of translating it, and when a Spanish speaker
reads it today he's mislead by the title, Novelas
ejemplares.
The point is, as Cervantes became well known
because the Quixote did so well,
and publishers became interested in publishing his
works for a change.
They had all ready fleeced him with the Quixote,
so they were ready to do so again with other books.
So he was able to publish his collection of stories that,
as I told you in an earlier class, does not have the
overarching fiction that the Decameron and other such
books have; all of the characters leave the
city because of the plague, get together somewhere and then
each one tells a story on a different day.
This is the Decameron's overarching fiction.
The Exemplary Novels doesn't have that,
it is a one-man show, twelve stories with a prologue
by Miguel de Cervantes.
Cervantes, as I have mentioned favored the long short story
like several ones we have encountered intertwined in
the Quixote and individually in The Novel of
the Curious Impertinent, and he had a few in reserve,
obviously, as we recall the papers that
someone left at the inn, Juan Palomeque's inn,
including at least a couple of stories by Cervantes.
These were stories that were circulating in manuscript.
Remember that I told you that stories still circulated in
manuscript in spite of the development of printing.
In the book, he collects stories with very
diverse themes and styles; it is like a series of
narrative experiments.
Some, like Rinconete, are akin the picaresque,
others to the Byzantine romance;
others are love stories, etcetera.
We are going to be reading several here.
They are superb.
I think that even Cervantes had not published the Quixote
he still would have become a major author by just this
collection of short stories.
You will see the Glass Graduate and all of the
others that we're going to read that are really excellent
stories.
Now, Rinconete and Cortadillo is obviously of a
picaresque thematic and ambiance,
and it takes place in the center of picaresque life,
Seville, but it does not follow the autobiographical form of the
picaresque and that Cervantes made fun of through Ginés
de Pasamonte-- Remember?
When he says, how can the book be over if my
life is not over?
He's making fun of that.
So you will see that he does use it in the Dialogue of the
Dogs at the end, but you will see in what
experimental fashion.
To me, the point is that that Rincón and Cortado,
known by the diminutive Rinconete and Cortadillo,
become pícaros because it is already a literary
character; so they become
pícaros the same way that Don Quixote becomes a
knight, and there are hints of this in
the first inn, when we learn that the
innkeeper of that first inn had been a pícaro and
he tells stories, and we get the sense that some
of these pícaros that the innkeeper assembled
within those emporia of picaresque life that he mentions
had chosen that life.
It was not that they were just simply poor boys who were out
looking for a way of living, but that they had chosen that
life, so they had--as they said in
the sixties in this country-- they had dropped out,
as it were, dropped out of society to become
pícaros.
And this is, I think, what is the case of
Rincón and Cortado, who, at the end,
decide not to be pícaros any more,
and that is the end of their adventures.
It is not that they go to the galleys or that they are nabbed
or they have to write a story because they are married to the
mistress of an archpriest and so forth--
I'm alluding to Lazarillo de Tormes.
I think the other very significant element here is
Monipodio's brotherhood, Monipodio is the chief criminal
here, who runs the whole brotherhood
in very well organized fashion.
He's, again, one of these figures of
authority who is slightly ridiculous,
and he's surrounded by a bevy of petty criminals,
prostitutes and pimps all of who have their own features,
physical features--remember, I talk about the physical
features in some of these characters--
and it is not a somber sordid life that is depicted as the
picaresque life.
On the contrary, it seems like a lot of fun.
Everybody is having fun, even the ***,
who comes complaining about her *** beating her up at the end,
she actually reveals that it was really an S&M
sadomasochistic, a little mutual *** game
that they were playing.
So there's nothing evil in all of these pícaros.
This is very much Cervantes.
As I've told you, even the worst characters have
some good and are never totally evil, and certainly none of
these are totally evil.
Repolido is her ***'s name, and it means that he is bald,
probably from some venereal disease.
I mean, Cervantes deals with the most sordid,
but in a way that does not read as a sordid story,
and I think also what is interesting here is that
Monipodio's brotherhood seems like the blueprint for society.
That it is the kernel of society where rules are being
created, and where there is a kind of
self enclosed atmosphere created by those rules,
as if this were the beginning of laws and the beginning of a
certain mode of speech, and so forth.
This is, I think, what is behind this
brotherhood; it's one of the Renaissance
topics about utopia, this is a counter utopia--I am
referring now to Thomas More, another one of those
Renaissance figures that I want you to remember--
but utopia, what it means is that it's a well ordered
society, in which everything has been
thought of, and advanced,
and there are rules, and this is what Monipodio's
brotherhood is like is a counter utopia that is organized with
the well wrought sort of polish of a work of fiction.
So we will return to this in our next class which will come
after Tuesday's exam.