From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
5.1 (1985): 3-17.
Copyright © 1985, The Cervantes Society of America
Beyond Metaphysics: Semiotics and Character in Don Quijote,
I
For Stephen Gilman
N Les mots et les choses
Michel Foucault suggests that Don Quijote is the first modern work
of Western literature because it reflects the new, post-Renaissance order
of the relationship between words and things. Foucault observes that this
relationship had traditionally been rooted in the concept of similitude,
and indeed Fray Luis de León, a competent professional linguist of
the sixteenth century, insists on the idea of a necessary, organic relationship
of similitude between the name and the object named.
Si el nombre . . . sustituye por lo nombrado . . . ,
mucho conviene que en el sonido, en la figura o verdaderamente en la origen
y significación de aquello de donde nace, se avecine y asemeje a cuyo
es . . . . Esta semejanza y conformidad se atiende en
tres cosas: en la figura, en el sonido, y señaladamente en la origen
de su derivación y
significación.1
In the Quijote, on the other hand,
“les ressemblances et les signes ont dénoué leur vieille
entente; les similitudes déçoivent, tournent à la vision
et au délire; les choses demeurent obstinément dans leur
identité ironique: elles ne sont plus ce qu'elles sont; les mots errent
à l'adventure, sans contenu, sans ressemblance pour les remplir; ils
ne marquent plus les choses.”2 Les
mots et les choses is in fact built on the notion that language is related
not so much to things as to mental
1 Fr.
Luis de León, De los nombres de Cristo, ed. F. de Onís
(Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1956), 1: 33-34.
2 Michel Foucault,
Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gillimard, 1966), p. 61.
3
|
| 4 |
CARROLL B. JOHNSON |
Cervantes |
|
processes. This view —the polar opposite of what we observed in Fr.
Luis de León— is present in embryonic form in the Examen de
ingenios of Juan Huarte de San Juan (1575 and 1594), developed more
explicitly in the Port-Royal grammar of 1660, and is perhaps most succinctly
articulated by Shelley in the Defence of Poetry (1821): “For
language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and has relation to
thoughts alone.”3 Language exists, and
meaning takes place in our heads. Because Don Quijote's head is not like
yours and mine, his encounters with things dramatize this principle with
great vigor and clarity, and this in turn is how he came to Foucault's
attention.
Whether or not one can accept all his conclusions,
Foucault's meditations on the Quijote encourage us to rethink and
reformulate the terms in which we are accustomed to consider some fundamental
aspects of the novel. If there is no longer any necessary, organic relationship
of signifier and signified, how are we to treat the series of mistaken identity
adventures that form the backbone of Part I? We are accustomed to think in
terms of objects with essences that are either known correctly or, as in
Don Quijote's case, mistaken. By considering the Quijote in general
in terms of signifiers, Foucault invites us to ponder the mistaken identity
adventures themselves not metaphysically, but semiotically. The question:
“What is this (windmill or giant)?” no longer has any relevance,
and is replaced by: “What does this mean?”
Changing the critical questions from essences
to meaning, from metaphysics to semiotics, has the advantage of positing
a necessary context and thereby giving us more things to study. A signifier
means whatever it means only in relation to somebody, as we have just seen.
Perhaps more importantly, a signifier means whatever it means only in relation
to some code. This in turn generates a corollary, namely that communication
is possible only when all the apprehenders of a given signifier refer it
to the same code. Consider the word burro, for example, in Italian
and then in Spanish. The individual's possession of a given code is not inborn,
but is acquired culturally. The acquisition of one's native language is the
most obvious example of this process, but there are others. Indeed, every
3 Percy
B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (1821), in B. R. McElderry, Jr. (ed.),
Shelley's Critical Prose (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1967),
p. 8. For a discussion of the historical development of the notion of language
as mental construct, see Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (New York:
Harcourt, 1968), pp. 1-23.
|
| 5 (1985) |
Semiotics and Character in Don Quijote,
I |
5 |
|
aspect of human understanding depends on our “knowing the code.”
What does it mean, for example, to drive a 1955 Chevrolet in Beverly Hills,
California, in 1965, and what does it mean to drive the same car in Paris'
16th arrondissement in the same year? In Paris the Chevy means
“a man of substance who puts on airs,” while in Beverly Hills it
means “somebody's maid.” These perceptions are the result of prior
internalization of much information concerning socio-economic structures
in two societies, specific knowledge of products, import duties and the like,
all subsumable under the rubric of “intertextuality.” This kind
of intertextuality was systematically exploited in fiction by Ian Fleming,
who surrounded Bond not with objects, but with brand-names as signifier
—his Rolex, his Aston-Martin, etc. To recapitulate, meaning does not
exist in a vacuum, nor does it inhere in the signifier. It is rather always
subject to the vagaries of time and space, and these are always articulated
into specific —although not necessarily explicit— codes, which
codes are internalized in the mental apparatus of the men who possess them.
In Don Quijote's first sally he is alone with
his thoughts as he comes into contact with the signifiers the world offers.
He is described riding along and looking around “por ver si descubría
algún castillo o alguna majada de pastores” where he might spend
the night. It is worth noticing that the word castillo refers to a
concrete literary genre, the chivalric, while the other possibility, the
majada, is associated with pastoral literature. In other words, Don
Quijote's vision of the world as reflected in this apparently trivial remark,
is organized and controlled by pre-existing literature. As Américo
Castro observed, he has eliminated such possibilities as venta or
aldea.4 He has in semiotic terms effected
an unconsciously willed substitution of one code —the literary—
for another —the prosaic—, or as Foucault describes it, he reads
reality in such a way as to make the libros de caballerías
true. He systematically refers each signifier to the code of chivalry: that
large building is the castle, the maidens taking their ease by the portal
are high-born ladies, his arrival is announced by music, the man in charge
is the castellan and so forth. Our enjoyment of this episode is derived from
the fact that we know Don Quijote is applying the wrong code in his
interpretation of the signifiers. Our knowledge is derived from our privileged
relationship with the narrator, who identifies himself with us and estranges
Don
4
Américo Castro, “La palabra escrita y el Quijote,”
(1947), in his Hacia Cervantes, 3rd ed. (Madrid: Taurus,
1967), p. 368.
|
| 6 |
CARROLL B. JOHNSON |
Cervantes |
|
Quijote from us. In this context he gives us the correct code —the
prosaic— to be applied to these signifiers: the large building is an
inn, the girls are prostitutes, the musician is a swineherd, the man in charge
is the innkeeper. We believe the narrator in part because we participate
in certain narrative assumptions and conventions, and in part because of
some specific things he tells us about Don Quijote. Our hero's first sally,
in short, is characterized by the presence of two codes —his chivalric
one and the narrator's prosaic one— applied to the same signifiers,
and our enjoyment is a function of our knowledge that Don Quijote is using
the wrong one.5 Because the narrator cannot,
and the other characters choose not to reveal this discrepancy to Don Quijote,
he remains oblivious to it and derives real satisfaction from exploits which
for him are heroic —the liberation of Andrés in I, 4, for
example— and for us are comical.
In I, 8, following the introduction of Sancho
Panza, the situation becomes more complex. Once again, there are two codes
present and our enjoyment depends on the disparity between them, but here
they are both present and in direct confrontation within the text. Don Quijote
has internalized the chivalric code, which in turn is based upon the reading
of books and acts of the imagination, including an imaginative projection
of the self into the past. Sancho's prosaic code, on the other hand, results
from his internalization of his experience of life in the country, the absence
of books, and living in the present. These two codes are applied to the same
signifier, or more properly the signifier is referred to two different codes
by two different apprehenders, and two different meanings are generated.
Don Quijote reads “giants,” Sancho “windmills.” We readers
know which code is the appropriate one not because of any particular affinity
with Sancho, but because the narrator has trained us. The extent of our
dependence on him will become apparent in subsequent episodes. In this one
Cervantes has demonstrated that meaning is a function of the particular code
to which each particular individual can refer a given signifier, and that
these codes can, indeed, must, vary from individual to individual.
This is the situation deciphered by Roland
Barthes in his discussion of Balzac's Sarrasine. In that work the
protagonist
5 J. J.
Allen calls attention in particular to the simultaneous existence of the
signifiers “sounding horn,” “castellano,”
“truchuela,” and “playing pipes” in two contexts:
the chivalric and the real. These “contexts” are readily assimilable
to our notion of codes. See Don Quixote, Hero or Fool? II (Gainesville:
University Presses of Florida, 1979), p. 53.
|
| 5 (1985) |
Semiotics and Character in Don Quijote,
I |
7 |
|
(Sarrasine) is in love with a castrato (la Zambinella) whom he believes
to be a woman, a soprano. At a party, a musician tells Sarrasine he need
fear no rival. “‘Vous ne risquez pas de rival,’ dit
le ténor: 1) parce que vous êtes aimé (entend Sarrasine),
2) parce que vous courtisez un castrat (entendent ses complices et
peut-être déjà le lecteur). Selon la première
écoute, il y a leurre; selon la seconde, dévoilement. La tresse
des deux écoutes forme un équivoque. L'équivoque est
bien issue, en effet, de deux voix, reçues à égalité;
il y a interférence de deux lignes de destination. Autrement dit,
la double entente (bien nommée), fondement du jeu de mots,
ne peut s'analyser en simples termes de signification (deux signifiés
pour un signifiant); il y faut la distinction de deux
destinataires.”6
Barthes appears to have discovered what students
of the Quijote, nurtured on the writings of Ortega and Castro, are
accustomed to call “perspectivism” and to regard as a hallmark
of Cervantes' conception of life and its artistic recreation: the inescapable
fact that each individual necessarily confronts life from a unique vantage
point, peculiar to himself. Nevertheless, restating the question in semiotic
terms constitutes an advance in Quijote studies. It allows us to chart
and to account for Don Quijote's and Sancho's varying reactions to the same
signifier with greater precision than heretofore possible. We know now how
it is that Don Quijote can read “giants” and Sancho
“windmills” in the same text. Also, and perhaps more importantly,
we are forced to the conclusion that Cervantes himself was thinking not in
terms of appearance and essence, but of signification and
perspective.7
I, 19 offers something different. Here the
narrator chooses not to supply the name of the code to which the signifier
should be referred,
6 Roland
Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970), pp. 150-51.
7 Indeed, Ortega
comes perilously close to elucidating Cervantes' text in semiotic terms himself.
“Caminando . . . con don Quijote y Sancho, venimos a la
comprensión de que las cosas tienen dos vertientes. Es una el 'sentido'
de las cosas, su significación, lo que son cuando se las interpreta.
Es ontra la ‘materialidad’ de las cosas, su positiva sustancia,
lo que las constituye antes y por encima de toda interpretación
. . . . Estos molinos tienen un sentido: como
‘sentido’ estos molinos son gigantes.” Meditaciones del
“Quijote,” Colección Austral” (Madrid: Espasa Calpe,
1964), p. 131. Following Ortega's teaching, Julián Marías
criticizes any attempt to define the task of philosophy as a progressive
stripping away of layers of “appearance” until some “naked
truth” is revealed. Rather, he affirms, reality “is something that
makes me make interpretations.” In S. R. Hopper and D. L. Miller (eds.),
Interpretation: The Poetry of Meaning (New York: Harcourt, 1967),
p. 48.
|
| 8 |
CARROLL B. JOHNSON |
Cervantes |
|
preferring instead to report what Don Quijote and Sancho see. “Vieron
que por el mesmo camino que iban venían hacia ellos gran multitud
de lumbres, que no parecían sino estrellas que se movían,”
and “de allí a muy poco descubrieron hasta veinte encamisados,
todos a caballo, con sus hachas encendidas en las manos, detrás de
las cuales venía una litera cubierta de luto, a la cual seguían
ostros seis de a caballo, enlutados hasta los pies de las mulas
. . . . Iban los encamisados murmurando entre sí, con
una voz muy baja y compasiva.” We are thrown into the same confusion
as Don Quijote and Sancho, who both react with fear and trembling. Suddenly
it is not so easy for us to be superior to Don Quijote, and we are forced
to experience his madness from a new and more sympathetic perspective. We
as readers of the twentieth century can and must participate in the author's
manipulation of us through the semiotic process —his willful refusal
to provide us with the right code— and another dimension of his creation
is thereby revealed to us. But what can we say of the reader of 1605, and
of Don Quijote and Sancho themselves, as objects of the same manipulation?
They are all presumed, by virtue of their membership in the society, to be
in possession of a socio-ideological code whose name might be something like
“our religion triumphant,” and one of whose statutes would be the
collective manifestation of faith in the form of religious processions. Yet
here, within the text, we have the spectacle of two Spanish Catholics, living
in the palmiest days of the Counter Reformation, who cannot recognize a religious
procession when one is passing in front of them, because they have been deprived
of the name of the code to which it should be referred as a signifier. The
reader of 1605 is, of course, similarly perplexed, for the same reason. Here
Cervantes is using the semiotic process in order to make a satirical point
of Erasmian inspiration about the value and significance of processions as
a manifestation of religious faith. Not only does Don Quijote fail to refer
the signifier before him to the appropriate code, he makes the most inappropriate
referral possible. For him the encamisados are demons from Hell, the
enemy it is the Christian knight's sworn duty to destroy: “que propiamente
semejábades cosa mala y del otro mundo; y así, yo no pude dejar
de cumplir con mi obligación acometiéndoos, y os acometiera
aunque verdaderamente supiera que érades los mismos satanases del
infierno, que por tales os juzgué y tuve siempre.”
The semiotic questions arising out of Don Quijote's
encounter with an anonymous barber on a rainy day in I, 21 are more complex,
|
| 5 (1985) |
Semiotics and Character in Don Quijote,
I |
9 |
|
although the episode begins with a deceptively familiar similarity to what
we have already observed, for example, in I, 8. When the signifier —a
shiny object on a man's head— comes into view, Don Quijote immediately
refers it to the chivalric code and identifies it as the magical yelmo
de Mambrino from the Italian epic tradition. We readers have long since
been trained by the narrator to reject the chivalric code, so none of us
is tempted to accompany Don Quijote, but we still lack the code that would
enable us to make sense of this signifier. At this point the narrator divulges
not only the appropriate code, but also the particular circumstances that
govern its applicability to this case: the barber, the basin, the new hat,
the rain, the basin used to keep the rain off the new hat. Sancho likewise
names the signifier bacía as soon as he touches it.
But all is not so simple. For one thing, the
barber himself had changed the meaning of the object in question from
“something to catch whiskers and lather,” to “headgear”
by inverting it and putting it on his head when the rain began to fall. So
the object itself begins to occupy a kind of limbo between two codes or,
its applicability as a signifier in more than one code begins to exist as
a reality before Don Quijote and Sancho ever come into contact with it. It
can still be referred to the prosaic code as “basin,” but it can
also be, has already been, referred to a different aspect of the same code
as “headgear” by the barber's action. From “headgear”to
“magical headgear” and the chivalric code is but a short step.
This ambiguity in the code itself constitutes the first difficulty we experience
in attempting to pass from the signifier to the signified.
Another difficulty springs from the fact that
this episode offers not only a signifier that hovers between two codes, but
multiple signifiers as well. As every reader recalls, after the barber flees
and abandons his equipment, Don Quijote claims the for-him yelmo,
while Sancho covets and then lays claim to the albarda from the barber's
mule. Now in order for him to actually gain possession of this object, it
must be inserted as a signifier into the code of chivalry, so that Don Quijote
can authorize him to take it. That is, if the operative code is the prosaic
one, the objects and the characters' actions mean the following: “A
Barber abandons his basin and his mule after being attacked by a madman.
The madman steals his basin, and his accomplice steals the packsaddle off
the mule.” Repositioned within the code of chivalry the same objects
and events acquire a different meaning: “Don Quijote defeats a knight
wearing the yelmo de Mambrino and drives him from the field. He claims
the yelmo as the
|
| 10 |
CARROLL B. JOHNSON |
Cervantes |
|
spoils of battle, and his squire claims the jaez off the vanquished
knight's horse as his share of the spoils.” The application of the prosaic
code yields the general meaning “insane and criminal,” while the
chivalric code creates the meaning “noble and legitimate.” In this
context, and only in this context, the theft of the albarda can be
justified, even though it is not strictly legal even according to the rules
of chivalry, by a mini-parody of the rules of casuistry. “You may take
the horse's trappings,” Don Quijote tells Sancho, “si es que tienes
dellos necesidad extrema.”
In semiotic terms, this episode marks an important
change from what we have hitherto observed. Instead of the antagonism between
the narrator's prosaic and Don Quijote's chivalric code (I, 2), or that between
Sancho's prosaic and Don Quijote's chivalric codes dramatized in the fiction
itself (I, 8), or the temporary absence of any code (I, 19), we have something
new. Sancho's desire for the albarda and the operations he finds necessary
in order to gain possession of it have had the effect of establishing the
chivalric code as the operative one both for himself and Don Quijote in this
episode. The object that came off the animal's back means jaez, and
the one that came off the man's head means yelmo. With this episode
is established the conditio sine qua non for communication to occur.
All the participants are referring all the signifiers to the same code.
When we move to I, 44, the barber who formerly
owned the objects in question appears unexpectedly at Juan Palomeque's inn,
bringing with him the prosaic code in which the disputed objects mean not
yelmo and jaez, but bacía and albarda.
The possibility for communication, established in I, 21, is here undone.
Two codes once again compete for the allegiance of those present. An apparently
irreconcilable dialectic is called into being, which Sancho, who has vacillated
between his own habitual prosaic and his master's chivalric codes, synthesizes
finally in a master stroke of linguistic invention
The barber: “Me quitaron una bacía
de azófar neuva . . . , que era señora
de un escudo.”
Don Quijote: “¡Porque vean Vuestras
Mercedes . . . el error en que está este buen escudero,
pues llama bacía lo que fue, es y será yelmo de Mambrino,
el cual se le quité yo en buena guerra, y me hice señor dél
en legítima y lícita posesión!”
Sancho: “. . . si no fuera
por este baciyelmo, no lo pasara entonces muy bien
. . . .”
|
| 5 (1985) |
Semiotics and Character in Don Quijote,
I |
11 |
|
Bacía and yelmo coalesce into baciyelmo, aporia
is overcome, synthesis is achieved, irroncilables are reconciled. But only
for a moment, for in the next chapter, Don Fernando submits the question
to the democratic process, whereby it is discovered that the prevailing code
is the chivalric one, within which the objects mean yelmo and
jaez. “Pero el que más se desesperaba era el barbero,
cuya bacía allí delante de sus ojos se le había vuelto
en yelmo de Mambrino, y cuya albarda pensaba sin duda alguna que se le iba
de volver en jaez rico de caballo” (I, 45). The clitic pronoun le
is of crucial importance in this sentence, for it indicates that what changes
is not the object, but the relation between the object and its beholder.
We are not dealing in this text with a problem of metaphysics but, as always,
with a problem of semiotics: What does this signifier mean, to whom, in relation
to what code?
The foregoing analysis is internally consistent,
reasonably cogent and, as we remarked earlier, it allows us to explore the
traditional quixotic themes of “truth” and “the nature of
reality” with unprecedented precision. In this last adventure, however,
we have crossed some kind of a fontier. To discover that meaning does not
inhere in a signifier but is rather a function of the particular code in
relation to which the signifier is considered, is well and good. But to submit
the choice of code to the whim of some good-time Charlies who seize the
opportunity for a few laughs, and to discover thereby that the code is not
imposed by necessity, but is rather arbitrary and capricious, surely this
is too much. D. Fernando's excursion into democracy has the effect of
trivializing this particular semiotic controversy and of calling the entire
semiotic enterprise into question. What this episode is about, in fact, is
the failure of semiotics as a method of analysis, of getting at the truth.
When semiotics fails, modern scholarship has
led us to deconstruction, based on the realization that there is in fact
no referentiality, no necessary relation between signifier and signified,
only what Derrida calls “l'affirmation d'un monde de signes sans faute,
sans vérité, sans origine, offert à une interprétation
active.”8 The fact that Derrida's formulation
can be used to sum up the results of the controversy in I, 45 —the last
word on the question— suggests that not only was Cervantes thinking
semiotically, as we discovered earlier, but that he had worked out the
possibilities of semiotics, the
8 Quoted
by J. Hillis Miller in “Deconstructing the Deconstructors,”
Diacritics, 5:2 (Summer 1975), 30.
|
| 12 |
CARROLL B. JOHNSON |
Cervantes |
|
entire question of referentiality and carried it to its logical conclusion:
There is nothing out there but “a world of signs, offered to active
interpretation.” We are led to conclude further that not only had he
discovered the paradox of the irreconcilable dialectic and mutual deconstruction
of its members, he consciously exploits his discovery by making it a theme
of his work. He offers a series of progressively more complex mistaken identity
adventures which culminates in the mock synthesis embodied in the word
baciyelmo. This is followed immediately by a crushing demonstration
of the impossibility of synthesis and the total arbitrariness of meaning
itself. Cervantes' text is not merely susceptible to analysis in semiotic
terms; it is about semiotics and the failure of semiotics.
Echoing Sigmund Freud, J. Hillis Miller observes
that, “the great works of literature are likely to be ahead of their
critics. They are there already.”9 Cervantes
is there already, along with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare. But we knew that
already. Cervantes' modernity has already been documented from a number of
perspectives by a number of writers, so that identifying him as the Jules
Verne of semiotics and deconstructionism, although fun to work out, confers
no particular luster. Our semiotic analysis has enabled us to establish his
theme as signs and meaning, rather than things and essence. We could have
documented that in the first episode, however, and just let it go at that.
But Cervantes organizes his text differently, treating the same theme over
and over again in progressively more complex contexts. This suggests either
that he is simply repetitive, or that he is playing a Baroque fugue with
variations on a theme, or that there is another theme lurking inside the
semiotic one.
In I, 2, Don Quijote “reads the text and
interprets the signs,” i.e., he interacts with phenomena around him,
and the narrator interacts with us. Don Quijote and the narrator of course
never meet. We perceive the existence of two codes, but Don Quijote does
not. In I, 8, Sancho is present, the existence of two codes is dramatized
within the fiction, and Don Quijote is forced to recognize the problem and
explain it away. The emphasis here is still on the relation between individual
—Don Quijote or Sancho— and signifier, but a new and very important
question is raised concerning intertextuality and the application of different
codes by different individuals. In human terms the question is: Why does
Don Quijote choose the chivalric code,
9 Miller,
art. cit., p. 31.
|
| 5 (1985) |
Semiotics and Character in Don Quijote,
I |
13 |
|
and why does Sancho choose the prosaic one? George Vaillant, M.D.,
argues that this choice is a function of the “coping style” —the
aggregate of particular unconscious defense mechanisms typically mobilized
in response to environmental stress— each individual has developed over
time and which comes to define his
personality.10 In literary terms, this is
the phenomenon we know as “character.” This in turns posits a
pre-history for both Don Quijote and Sancho, the fifty-odd years of each
man's life that passed before the narration begins, the events, perceptions
and reactions to environmental pressures internalized over that period. Don
Quijote's decision not to marry, for example, and his inability to form
relationships with women, are his reaction to the stress posed by the
developmental crises of adolescence and young manhood. More recently he has
reacted against massive new discomfort first by throwing himself into the
reading of romances of chivalry, by losing the ability to distinguish between
historical fact and chivalresque fantasy, and finally by retreating into
psychosis, taking on the identify of a knight errant and attempting to live
a romance of chivalry. His insertion of every signifier he encounters in
his travels into the code of chivalry is at once a function and an aspect
of his psychosis, which in turn is a function of a type of reaction
—flight— internalized early on in his life, to a recent massive
overdose of environmental pressure. This is what Vaillant would call his
coping style, or in literary terms, his character. Don Quijote is a wonderful
example of what Ortega meant when he said that man has no essence, only a
history. Returning to I, 8, we might conclude that in this episode Cervantes
show us that the choice of code —Don Quijote's vs. Sancho's— is
not arbitrary, but is rather the result of what each man has internalized
over the years, that is, his character. This in turn suggests the beginning
of a shift in emphasis away from the meaning of signifiers and in the direction
of the contrast between Don Quijote and Sancho, each of whom brings his
distinctive character to bear on the signifier in question. The episode uses
the fact of the different codes to call attention to differences in
character.
Character, as Ortega has taught us, is never
fixed and immutable, but evolves over time, precisely because it is the result
of the individual's existence in time. I, 19 shows us an intermediate point
in the evolution of our characters' characters. Together with the other
10 George
Vaillant, M.D., Adaptation to Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977),
pp. 75-90. Vaillant's study of men in mid-life is enormously useful in
understanding Don Quijote's character.
|
| 14 |
CARROLL B. JOHNSON |
Cervantes |
|
episodes that Casalduero has called “the adventures of the modern
world,” it forms part of a series that examines the relation of individual
to signifier within the context of the relation of individual to individual.
In the adventure of the armies/flocks (I, 18) Sancho displays a willingness
to be carried along by Don Quijote's invention (a tour de force of
ingenio) of the composition of the opposing armies and the casus
belli. In I, 19, as we have already seen, the two men are equally incapable
of identifying the code to which the signifier should be referred. In I,
20, the auditory signifier —rythmic thuds over falling water, accompanied
by the clanking of chains— defies interpretation and instead touches
off a whole spate of interactions between master and man. Sancho is terrified.
He deceives Don Quijote, hobbling Rocinante's feet together to prevent his
master's departure. He has a bowel movement sur place, which results
in some discussion between the two. He tells Don Quijote the story of Lope
Ruiz and the shepherdess Torralba, which becomes a dialogue involving various
literary themes, from the truth in fiction to aspects of narrative
technique.
The following morning the meaning of the mysterious
auditory signifier is easily established with no ambiguity. The sounds are
being made by the great hammers of a water-powered fulling mill, pounding
wool fibers into felt. A contrast here with the mills of I, 8 as signifier
is instructive. In the episode of the windmills the semiotic theme is still
uppermost, which is to say that there is a real disagreement as to what those
objects signify. Here there is no such disagreement. There is extensive
discussion, but its theme is not the ambiguity of the auditory signifier,
nor is it the newly discovered fulling mill as a signifier in itself. The
subject under discussion is rather the differing psychological reactions
on the previous night to the auditory signifier. These are a function of
the characters' characters. For Don Quijote that rhythmic pounding had meant
“opportunity to demonstrate my bravery,” or simply “opportunity
to be me.” Sancho had interpreted the same signifier to mean “motive
for terror.” In one sense, Cervantes is at his most semiotic in this
episode. The signifier is referred not to any metaphysical essence, but solely
and exclusively to its meaning for the individual who apprehends it. In another
sense, however, he is at his most personal, for the specific codes involved
are no longer “chivalric” vs. “prosaic,” but simply
“Don Quijote” vs. “Sancho Panza.”
Sancho begins the discussion by quoting from
Don Quijote's speech of the previous night. In the warm light of day, and
in the
|
| 5 (1985) |
Semiotics and Character in Don Quijote,
I |
15 |
|
presence of the inoffensive fulling mill, Don Quijote's heady rhetoric about
hazañas grandes and valerosos fechos appears ridiculous,
and Sancho lets him know it. Don Quijote cannot stand to be made fun of in
this way. He strikes Sancho with his lance and delivers a speech whose theme
is precisely the difference in character —including, for the first time,
social class— between the two of them. Peace is re-established and Don
Quijote remarks that in all of chivalric literature, no squire ever spoke
as often or as much, or with such a lack of respect, to his master as Sancho
speaks to him. In semiotic terms Don Quijote is explicitly contrasting the
reality of this concrete interpersonal situation with the chivalric code
as it exists in the books. Things have evolved, as Ortega suggests. We are
here light-years away from the parallel application of two differing codes
to the same signifier of I, 8. Here, the question of the signifier has paled
into insignificance, and what has appeared in its place is the question of
two characters' characters, their relation to each other, and the evolution
of that relation over time.
It is in this context that we should return
to the events of I, 21 and I, 44-45, the culmination of the semiotic theme
in the mock resolution of the dialectic of opposing codes into the
baciyelmo and its swift deconstruction and degeneration into semiotic
anarchy, in turn reflected physically in the ensuing brawl: “de modo
que toda la venta era llantos, voces, gritos, confusiones, temores, sobresaltos,
desgracias, cuchilladas, mojicones, palos, coces y efusión de
sangre.”
To begin, Sancho's failure in I, 21 to apply
his prosaic code to the signifier in question —the shiny object—
is a function of the most recent stage in the evolution of his relationship
with Don Quijote. His master has forbidden him to speak out of turn, and
he has no desire to find himself again on the receiving end of Don Quijote's
lance as he had in the preceding chapter. Similarly, his identification of
the mule's albarda as a warhorse's jaez is a function not of
his internalization of the code of chivalry, but of the relationship between
himself and Don Quijote in the light of his desire to possess the object.
We should pause here to observe that, while Sancho understands these
relationships and consciously exploits them, Don Quijote appears to be oblivious
to them. His only interest lies in demonstrating that the bacía
is a yelmo, and he repeatedly refuses to intervene in the
albarda-jaez controversy. Like Sancho, Don Quijote is concerned with
the affective, not the cognitive, relation between himself and the object,
but unlike Sancho, he needs no one else to legitimize his claim to it by
referring it to a particular code. He has
|
| 16 |
CARROLL B. JOHNSON |
Cervantes |
|
already done that for himself. Don Quijote is the focus in this episode of
what we might call the semiotic theme modified by affect, while Sancho is
concerned with the more complex matter of relations with signifiers modified
by affect in turn subordinated to the relations between individuals, a function
of affect by definition.
This, for me, is the kernel of Cervantes' thought
and the cornerstone of his artistic edifice. The metaphysical question of
discovering the “essence” of a reality (What is this?) Gives
place to a series of semiotic questions: What does this mean? To
whom? In relation to what code? This in turn raises the question of why one
individual chooses —must choose— one code and someone else chooses
another one, and leads to the discovery of character. Character for Cervantes,
as for Ortega, is defined as a particular way of coping with life's demands
evolved and reinforced over time, and which comes to define an individual's
personality. It is in this sense that we can speak of someone acting “in
character” or otherwise. The respective characters of Don Quijote and
Sancho come into contact in I, 8 and evolve together, in consequence of each
other, through the two parts of the novel. The episode of the
baciyelmo is crucial because it dramatizes and chronicles the
subordination of the semiotic theme to that of interpersonal relations. The
failure of semiotics is signalled by Sancho's unsuccessful attempt to resolve
the bacía-yelmo controversy by his invention of the synthetic
word baciyelmo, and the subsequent demolition of the very possibility
of synthesis. The choice of code, that is, the relation established between
person and object, which determines the meaning of the signifiers, is
demonstrated to be entirely a function of the human relationships between
the characters. This is worked out in this episode with explicit references
to codes (chivalric and prosaic) and signifiers, (bacía, yelmo,
albarda, jaez), and finally reduced to laughter. In Part II there is
no laughter, and by the novel's close the work's most important signifier,
Dulcinea del Toboso, has been altered and finally abandoned as a result of
the evolution of the interpersonal relationship between Don Quijote and
Sancho.
It is as though Cervantes worked through the
logic of semiotics to the phase of the unresolvable dialectic, confronted
Derrida's world of arbitrary signs and moved beyond it to the dialectic of
interpersonal relations as the context in which meaning again becomes possible
and the process of life can be recreated artistically. Although he lacked
the benefit of the insights of Foucault and Derrida, Américo Castro
|
| 5 (1985) |
Semiotics and Character in Don Quijote,
I |
17 |
|
intuited this thirty-five years ago when he wrote: “Obsérvese
cómo lo interesante no es si el yelmo es bacía, o la bacía
yelmo, el interés del escritor y el nuestro se concentran en la presencia
y funcionamiento de la interpretación . . . perceptible
en los varios juicios de quienes formulan dichas
interpretaciones.”11
| UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA,
LOS ANGELES |
11 “La
palabra escrita y el Quijote,” ed. cit., pp. 362-63. See also
J. J. Allen's fundamental distinction between event and
experience. “Don Quixote and the Origins of the Novel,”
in M. D. McGaha (ed.), Cervantes and the Renaissance (Easton PA: Juan
de la Cuesta, 1980), pp. 138-39.
|
Prepared with
the help of Myrna Douglas |
|