From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
18.2 (1998): 148-50.
Copyright © 1998, The Cervantes Society of America
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Dudley, Edward. The Endless Text. Don Quijote and the Hermeneutics of Romance. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 316 pp.
This beautifully-written, erudite book is the
work of a distinguished comparatist who combines the best tools that philological
scholarship has to offer with sophisticated contemporary theories of reading.
In the process of doing so he provides a fresh, innovative interpretation
of part I of Don Quijote, underscoring Cervantes's well-known commitment
to “interpolative structure and to Romance” (229).
What follows is a veritable tour de force
which, in the study's first two sections —titled respectively “The
Endless Text” and “The Celtic Reserve”— focuses on the
use in Don Quixote of rhetorical devices that were found in
earlier manifestations of Western romance, from the earliest Celtic tales
and chivalric fiction to the medieval romance in the writings of Chrétien
de Troyes. And while the ostensible reason for such a book is to
demonstrate “how the traditional rhetoric of romance functions in the
Quixote to provide the text with its multiple and unending appeal”
(xx), the study's scope is, in fact, much broader, as it considers the novel's
complex response to the problem of truth and fiction and its “revision
to the problem of knowing in literature” which is said to be even more
radical than Descartes' revision in philosophy in so far as Cervantes
“allowed a more diversified role for the operations of the instinctive
and the irrational as modes of knowing” (38).
In tracing the history of chivalric fiction
in Western Europe, Dudley is less engaged in positing a question of influence
than working from the premise that “the work itself assumes a general
awareness on the part of readers of the textual anxieties of Renaissance
humanism and Reformation hermeneutics, specifically the problem of garbled
texts and the interpretative strategies used to
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| 18.2 (1998) | Review | 149 |
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extrapolate a variety of meanings (11). In this respect, Don Quixote as
a text would reveal how the hermeneutic possibilities available to the reader
are both “enriched and distorted” through various operations of
“textual change, suppression, corruption, and linguistic
metamorphoses” (24).
Those operations would involve the existence
of hidden or forgotten meanings as well as the appearance of “narrative
fault lines,” which are manifested in fissures in the textuality of
the discourse. An example is said to be the confrontation between the Hermes
figure Ginés de Pasamonte and the wild and love-mad Cardenio, whose
clash would suggest that “the text is taking an abrupt turn,” moving
from the realm of the picaresque to the problematic of love (19). At the
same time, the textual rupture in chapter 23 “ushers in entrelacement
as the organizing principle in its narrative development and leads to
Dorotea's triumph at the inn” (297).
Of course, through different methods of analysis,
other scholars have pointed to these kinds of narrative fault lines, most
recently Félix Martínez Bonati, who in an equally splendid
study (Don Quijote and the Poetics of the Novel) guides us through
the various movements in part I of Cervantes's text, exploring and describing
Cervantes's incursions into the multiple and varied regions of the imagination.
Dudley's merit, however, is to have located this sort of discussion within
a far-more reaching history of Western Romance.
Within such history, Chrétien de Troyes
is assigned a central role in a number of areas, including the creation of
certain narrative spaces through the domestication or Christianization of
pagan Celtic material —a process of transformation that was to receive
a new formulation in Don Quijote, a book whose narrative agenda clearly
underscores “the problem of hermeneutics” (102); the creation of
“an enclosed generic space for the feminine world of intuition and the
irrational” (89); and the weaving various narratives into a larger union,
a practice which, as Dudley correctly points out, was to be seen “as
the fatal defect of Romance in the Renaissance battles concerning
neo-Aristotelian aesthetics” (109).
The third and lengthiest section of Dudley's
book, titled “Don Quijote: The Reluctant Romance,” incorporates
detailed textual analysis to underscore what becomes a central motif in this
study, namely, how the activity of the writing process is part of the story
itself so that “the language of fiction turns out to be the fiction
of language” (114). In the end, “the writing as product” is
privileged over “what is being written about so that the language of
narrativity emerges as an autonomous entity empowered to range freely without
serious referential constraints”(115).
Some of Dudley's innovative readings of Cervantes's
text may be seen in the discussion of the three mill adventures (los molinos
de viento, I, 8; los batanes, I, 20; and el barco encantado,
II, 29), which are viewed as signposts or herms that mark the “border
crossings” for the hero or hero's identity as well as for the manner
in which the story is told (173; 192; 197-98). As such, they are said to
have special meaning as they become —like the inns and the various dream
episodes— parts or “segments of a signifying system” (202)
rather than mere discrete units of “self-contained aventuras”
(186-87).
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| 150 | NICHOLAS SPADACCINI | Cervantes |
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Dudley's magisterial analysis of part I of
Don Quijote is nowhere more apparent than in his reading of Dorotea
whose chiasmic character and aptitude for evasions and role playing are seen
as “the mannerist re-interpretation of the Celtic banshee or fairy woman
of the Otherworld sides” (230). Dudley underscores her
“dispersive and integrative functions within the overall narrative
strategies” (229) and most especially her role as a weaver of tales.
She is a consummate reader of texts who is ultimately able to resolve the
“enigma of the language of love” (271) and thus confront the slippery,
donjuanesque Don Fernando in the language of Romance whose force emanates
“from the language of women.” It is precisely such language —he
argues— which ultimately “undermines the restrictive categories
of men's affairs” (302). Here Dudley demonstrates convincingly, I believe,
that Dorotea is truly the female protagonist of Don Quijote, part
I, as she manages the “many tasks of interlinking the multistoried ontology
of the text” in addition to “providing a sufficiently mercurial
persona to confront the unraveled psychic needs of Don Quijote, Cardenio,
and Don Fernando” (252).
This is an important book, refreshingly free
of jargon; it is also a study that while eschewing controversy and staying
clear of the culture wars, manages to advance a powerful proposal: that in
Dorotea, the female protagonist of part I of Don Quijote, “Romance
and the language of women emerge as the dominant force in the creation of
the novel as a generic discourse” (297). For unexplained reasons, Dudley's
study deals only tangientially with part II of Cervantes's novel, which,
subsuming the mannerist composition of the Quijote of 1605 into a
baroque structure, traces the very origins of the modern novel.
Thus, while it may well be, as Dudley points
out, that Cervantes's fiction “like mannerist painting, holds up the
mirror, not to nature, but to art and to the ability of art to reflect
nature” (121), it might also be said, in keeping with the metaphor of
the mirror, that it is one which is constructed with the fragments of a shattered
glass, behaving like a kaleidoscope in a mobile and contradictory manner.
In this sense it would be interesting to follow Dudley's argumentations in
part II of Cervantes's Don Quijote which not only integrates part
I but also inverts its discursive trends. Thus, while the concept of an endless
text is perfectly applicable to part I, I am not so certain that the same
may be said for part II, whose ultimate proposal is to present novel as genre
in terms of a discourse constructed from the end. In fact, one might say
that if the story can be told, it is only because the hesitations of the
narrator disappear once the main character has, in the process of dying,
a definitive name: Alonso Quijano, el Bueno.
| Nicholas Spadaccini |
| University of Minnesota |
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| Fred Jehle jehle@ipfw.edu | Publications of the CSA | H–Cervantes |
| URL: http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/cervante/csa/articf98/spadacci.htm | ||