From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
2.1 (1982): 43-67.
Copyright © 1982, The Cervantes Society of America
Romance and Realism in the Interpolated Stories of the
Quixote
HE STORIES
INTERPOLATED in the Quixote are placed variously in three
of Cervantes' characteristic literary settings —pastoral, Moorish, and
contemporary Spanish; but, like the Novelas ejemplares, their plots
and devices are derived from the genre of the Renaissance novella
which Cervantes claimed to have been the first to introduce into
Spain.1 The inclusion of these tales in the
Quixote, as many commentators have remarked, creates something of
a paradox: a collection of stories generically related to romance is inserted
into a novel whose repeatedly proclaimed objective is precisely to debunk
romance. Thus the problem which still preoccupies Cervantine criticism of
establishing Cervantes' attitude to literary idealism (or, in effect, romance)
presents itself within the Quixote more acutely than it does even
in the Novelas ejemplares or the
Persiles.2 By studying the interpolated
stories collectively and in sequence, I believe it is possible to shed further
1 For
a comprehensive study of the genre see Robert J. Clements and Joseph Gibaldi,
Anatomy of the Novella: The European Tale Collection from Boccaccio and
Chaucer to Cervantes (New York: New York University Press, 1977).
2 The debate
has, by and large, been confined to the Novelas ejemplares but, recently,
E. C. Riley has discussed the issues and extended the discussion to the
interpolated tales in the Quixote. See his “Cervantes: A Question
of Genre,” in Medieval and Renaissance Studies on Spain and Portugal
in Honour of P. E. Russell, ed. F. W. Hodcroft et al. (Oxford: The Society
for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1981), pp. 69-85.
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light on the relations between romance and realism in Cervantes' work, and
to contribute to the debate on whether Cervantes moves from romance to realism
or, indeed, vice versa.
In Part II, Chapter 44 of Don Quixote,
Cervantes shows himself to be aware of the incompatibility between the
interpolated tales and the main narrative. At first sight his remarks seem
to bear on the neo-Aristotelian problem of reconciling unity and variety
in a long narrative, but on closer examination they reveal a concern with
more fundamental incompatibilities. He announces that the inclusion of stories
like El curioso impertinente and El capitán cautivo
in Part I was designed to relieve the tedium of writing about “un solo
sujeto” in the main narrative, which he found to be “un trabajo
incomportable cuyo fruto no redundaba en el de su autor” (II, 44,
848).3 The interpolated stories were introduced
primarily as a respite for Cervantes himself but also as an opportunity for
him to display his imaginative gifts more openly to his reader. There is
nonetheless a suspicion that the reader might find the interpolations themselves
rather tedious and skip them altogether, “sin advertir la gala y artificio
que en sí contienen, el cual se mostrara bien al descubierto cuando
por sí solas, sin arrimarse a las locuras de don Quijote ni a las
sandeces de Sancho, salieran a luz” (II, 44, 848-49). The problem of
interpolation turns not so much on the theoretical ideal of structural unity
as on the more practical question of aesthetic pleasure: the intercalated
stories must compete effectively with the anti-romance comedy of the
frame-narrative for the attention of the reader.
There is no evidence here that Cervantes wished
to parody these romance-type tales. On the contrary, he favours them highly
as vehicles which will enable him to impress his readers with the virtuosity
of his imagination. But, curiously, he expresses a doubt as to whether the
creative freedom and convenience they afford the author are not in fact opposed
to the actual interests of his readers. It transpires that the basic difficulty
with interpolation is that the main narrative exerts a kind of influence
or contextual pressure on the individual tales which threatens to diminish
their intrinsic aesthetic value and rob the author of the praise he feels
he deserves for his inventiveness and wit. The act of interpolation represents
a peculiar
3 All
my references to the Quixote are from the edition by Martín
de Riquer (Barcelona, Juventud, 1968). and have been incorporated into the
text.
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challenge to Cervantes' literary skills, for unlike their counterparts in
the Novelas ejemplares, these stories must rival the proven comic
delights of the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Therefore, in
Part II Cervantes says he has tried to work the interpolations more effectively
into the main narrative: “no quiso ingerir novelas sueltas ni pegadizas,
sino algunos episodios que lo pareciesen, nacidos de los mesmos sucesos
que la verdad ofrece” (II, 44, 849). It is, however, quite clear from
this quotation that, as my emphasis shows, the “episodes” of Part
II are not more obviously integrated into the structure of the whole, if
anything they appear to be as loose and detachable as those in Part
I. The real difference is that they are in some unspecified way subject to
the same “truth” as informs the history of Don Quixote. It is part
of my purpose in this article to determine what sort of truth this might
be.
The stories I will discuss are those which
are not, like El curioso impertinente, explicitly presented as fictional,
but which nevertheless possess a plot distinctive enough to stand independently
of the main narrative, while remaining within the ambit of Don Quixote's
experience. Although my discussion will attempt to embrace both the internal
generic features of these tales and the characteristics of their insertion
into the main body of the novel, more emphasis will be placed on this latter
aspect. In this way, I hope to bring into focus Cervantes' creative response
to the acknowledged difficulties of interpolation, and to show that he makes
a virtue of necessity and exploits these very problems in order to tap whatever
new resources of aesthetic pleasure might be discovered in the grafting of
two such discordant modes of narration.
Before proceeding to examine the stories in
context, it is as well to outline their generic elements. All of them run
to a narrative formula with a limited set of permutations: there is actual
or potential love between a man and a woman which encounters an obstacle
that is either overcome, whereupon marriage is celebrated, or else remains
insuperable, in which cast death, madness or the woman's entry into a convent
ensues. Variations occur both in the nature of the relations between the
principals and in the type of obstacle before them. Then variations, again,
are limited. Feelings are mutual but embarrassed by external factors, or
unrequited by one partner, or forcibly exploited by the man. The obstacle
to union consists in one or a combination of the following: jealousy, competition
from another actual or potential lover, objections by the woman's father,
or differences in religion or
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social class. Finally, the manner of overcoming the obstacle or not is by
far the most common way of varying the formula, but even here there are
recognizably conventional elements such as transvestism or other disguises,
deception, or some form of chase, flight, elopement or abduction. Since the
primary elements are few, the aesthetic interest of the genre lies in the
“gala y artificio” with which the author rings the changes on the
basic formula. It is this type of aesthetic interest, associated with romance,
that Cervantes is seeking to reconcile with or at least accommodate within
the larger framework of his anti-romance satire.
The interpolated stories of Part I
Marcela's story is introduced by Pedro, a companion
of the goatherds to whom Don Quixote has just delivered his speech on the
Golden Age with its exposition of his chivalric aims, one of which is to
restore to helpless virgins the right to walk the countryside safe from the
lechery of men (I, 11, 105-06). Pedro relates the case of the shepherdess
Marcela and her dead lover Grisóstomo at the behest of Don Quixote.
Marcela had left home and chosen to roam abroad while inexplicably rejecting
the solicitations of many rich and fine young men including Grisóstomo.
Thus the somewhat utopian Golden Age ideal of free-wandering damsels uttered
recently by the mad knight seems to have transpired literally in the very
next episode.4
Further details link Marcela's story with Don
Quixote's idealized chivalric world. Don Quixote that night meditates on
Dulcinea “a imitación de los amantes de Marcela” whereas
the commonsensical Sancho “se acomodó entre Rocinante y su jumento,
y durmió, no como enamorado desfavorecido sino como hombre molido
a coces” (I, 11, 115). The vulgar squire contracts out not only of Don
Quixote's amorous world but of the love-lorn shepherd's too. The next day
Don Quixote meets Vivaldo, who is on his way to Grisóstomo's funeral.
They converse about the profession of knight errantry and about Dulcinea
in whom, Don Quixote claims, “se vienen a hacer verdaderos todos los
imposibles y quiméricos atributos de belleza que los poetas dan a
sus damas” (I, 13. 121), Their dialogue is interrupted by the arrival
of Grisóstomo's funeral procession. The dead shepherd's
4
See Javier Herrero, “Arcadia's Infierno: Cervantes' Attack on
Pastoral,” BHS, 55 (1978), 289-99, where the link between the
knight's Golden Age speech and the Marcela story is considered to be additional
evidence of Cervantes' critique of pastoral.
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poetic valediction to Marcela is read out. It is a florid, almost bombastic
piece, employing conventional conceits (“Tú, que en tantas sinrazones
muestras / la razón que me fuerza a que la haga / a la cansada vida
que aborrezco”) and even at one climactic point indulging in one of
those “chimerical and impossible” hyperboles that Don Quixote had
claimed poets rhetorically attribute to their ladies (“el cielo claro
de tus bellos ojos”). The despair of the poem culminates in a rhetorical
invitation to death which, since Grisóstomo actually died, seems to
lend the piece a paradoxical, documentary authenticity. However, the shepherd
who recites Grisóstomo's poem claims that its insistence on Marcela's
lack of feeling conflicts with her actual reputation for diffidence and goodness.
Grisóstomo's friend Ambrosio explains this contradiction (“como
aquél que sabía bien los más escondidos pensamientos
de su amigo”) by saying that the valedictory poem was written when
Grisóstomo had voluntarily exiled himself from Marcela's company so
that her absence would alleviate his torment, but that “como al enamorado
ausente no hay cosa que no le fatigue ni temor que no le dé alcance,
así le fatigaban a Grisóstomo los celos imaginados y las sospechas
temidas como si fueran verdaderas” (I, 14, 129). According to Ambrosio,
then, the poem is in fact the product of Grisóstomo's paranoid fantasy
rather than a truthful description of Marcela's character.
At this point, Marcela herself appears and
provokes a rather contradictory outburst of accusations of cruelty from Ambrosio.
She then replies with a long speech in which she accuses Grisóstomo
and her other suitors of a kind of suicidal presumption: “Y si los deseos
se sustentan con esperanzas, no habiendo yo dado alguna a Grisóstomo
ni a otro alguno, en fin, de ninguno dellos, bien se puede decir que antes
te mató su porfía que mi crueldad” (I, 14, 131). Rejecting
all blame, she turns away and leaves the assembled mourners. Don Quixote
then reaches for his sword to leap to the rather unnecessary defence of this
capable damsel whom he will persist in viewing as a “doncella
menesterosa” according to chivalric convention. Merely by asserting
her will, Marcela dismisses the whole incident as an unnecessary chimera
engendered gratuitously and irrationally by the stubborn Grisóstomo.
She resists her forcible insertion by Grisóstomo as the unyielding
mistress of courtly love into the conventional frame of a love-story, or
by Don Quixote into the equally conventional chivalric category of distressed
damsel, even if it is only to continue in her semi-quixotic, Arcadian pastime
of tending herds of
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goats and holding innocent conversation with maidens from the surrounding
villages.
Despite the decisiveness of Marcela's departure
and the obvious finality of Grisóstomo's death there is a curious
inconclusiveness about the story, a sense of undischarged energy, as if nothing
had effectively occurred. It cannot be entirely explained by the futility
of Grisóstomo's death because he has after all brought that fate upon
himself. It is more a feeling of unkept promise: all the requisite properties
of a drama of unrequited love have been assembled and at the anticipated
climax the leading lady walks off because she has not consented to play such
a rôle in the first place. The story seems constructed expressly to
dissatisfy the reader; it initially arouses all the normal expectations
of a tale of unrequited love but then at the point of dénouement it
is folded back upon itself to reveal the arbitrariness of the assumptions
that sustained it. As a result, the conventions of a Renaissance love-story
are suddenly converted into a fantasy akin to the chivalric laws that govern
Don Quixote's behaviour.
The peripeteia is produced by two
interrelated factors —Marcela's decision, and the angle from which the
story is presented. Her decision causes an effective reversal because we
have been led up to the dénouement without being shown a glimpse of
either the living Grisóstomo or Marcela. We are forced to be recipients
of a story recounted from the particular perspective of Pedro who is in turn
a passive recipient of a version of those events from another source. The
whole movement of the story is from second-hand reporting to the actuality
of Marcela's surprising decision. For reasons, no doubt, of narrative economy
Cervantes has concentrated on the dénouement and eschewed direct
presentation of its beginnings and development. Thus the constraints imposed
by the interpolation of the story into the main narrative would seem to have
been turned to good account by virtue of the structural heightening of the
impact of Marcela's speech.
Since Marcela's speech is highlighted as the
pivot of the entire tale, it effectively dispels all the conventional reactions
to the news of Grisóstomo's amorous despair. But for precisely this
reason it whets the appetite for a fuller explanation of Marcela's character.
Why does she shun men? Why does she persist in roaming the countryside dressed
as a shepherdess? These enquiries are cut short by her departure, and the
very impossibility of their being answered
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only adds to the strangeness and peculiar resonance of the story. Marcela
so upstages Grisóstomo that the centre-piece of the tale —the
suicide and funeral— stands exposed as unnecessary and pathological.
The tale's centre of gravity has shifted to the nature of Marcela's character,
yet the reader's impulsion towards her is arrested by her abrupt disappearance.
The effect is to force the reader's interest beyond the actual ending so
as to make the story both closed and open-ended at the same time.
The episode rests on a further paradox. Cervantes
makes arbitrary pastoral conventions collide against a purposive will.
Nevertheless, the consequences of the collision suggest a corresponding
arbitrariness in Marcela's behaviour; she has rejected her courtly/pastoral
suitors in the name of free will, which she then proceeds to indulge in another
form of pastoral activity. Is she therefore as deluded in her way as
Grisóstomo? The story reflects the contrariness of human motives,
the way people project images on to each other without grasping the other's
true self. Marcela rightly refuses to be type-cast but she nonetheless fails
to emerge either as a more plausible character herself, or one wholly absolved
from the taint of pastoral artifice. In the other interpolated tales one
can observe similar tensions between the implicit complexity of individual
lives and the restrictions of conventional plot-design.
The next four stories —the two interlocking
ones of Cardenio-Luscinda and Fernando-Dorotea, the Captive's tale, and that
of Don Luis and Doña Clara— are also presented in such a way
as to heighten the impact of their dénouements by introducing them
all after their main action is over. The incidents are reported by the characters
and, as with Marcela's story, the reader is allowed directly to witness only
the nature of their resolutions. This focus is sharpened even further by
the grouping of these four tales, each following the other in accelerating
succession, under the one roof of the inn where Don Quixote is staying.
The organization of such a convergence of
dénouements relies on an accumulation of coincidences which Cervantes
does nothing to hide and not a little to underline. The first spectacular
coincidence is that of the arrival of Fernando and Luscinda at the inn where
they are each recognized by their respective paramours. Cervantes insists
on the extraordinary character of this meeting:
También don Fernando conoció luego a Cardenio, y todos tres,
Luscinda, Cardenio y Dorotea, quedaron mudos y suspensos, casi
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sin saber lo que les había acontecido.
Callaban todos y mirábanse todos: Dorotea
a don Fernando, don Fernando a Cardenio, Cardenio a Luscinda y Luscinda a
Cardenio (I, 36, 374).
The very deliberate stylistic threading of
all these names into a close chain exaggerates the exceptional nature of
the occurence. The characters themselves lose no time in remarking on it.
Luscinda says: “Notad cómo el cielo, por desusados y a
nosotros encubiertos caminos, me ha puesto a mi verdadero esposo
delante” (p. 374; my emphases). Luscinda attributes this marvellously
coincidental reunion to the unfathomable designs of el cielo. References
to the mysterious and miraculous workings of el cielo rapidly proliferate
as the two interrelated stories approach their common climax.
In her eloquent entreaty of Don Fernando, Dorotea
reminds him of how he had promised to marry her with el cielo as witness:
“. . . y testigo el cielo, a quien tú llamaste
por testigo de lo que me prometías” (I, 36, 376). Now Don Fernando
is implored by all present to free Luscinda and take Dorotea for his wife.
He relents and accepts the ways of el cielo: “Si el piadoso
cielo gusta y quiere que ya tengas algún
descanso . . .” (p . 377). However, when don Fernando
sees Luscinda fall into the arms of Cardenio he is shaken
(“admirándose de tan no visto suceso”) and characteristically
reaches for his sword. Dorotea tries to restrain him by throwing herself
at his feet, embracing his knees, kissing them, holding them tightly, and
weeping copiously: “¿Qué es lo que piensas hacer, único
refugio mío, en este tan impensado trance? . . . Mira si
te estará bien, o te será posible deshacer lo que el cielo
ha hecho . . .” (p. 377).
These entreaties are taken up by the assembled
company who warn Don Fernando that although these events may appear fortuitous
they are in fact the will of el cielo: “Que considerase que,
no acaso, como parecía, sino con particular providencia del
cielo, se habían todos juntado en lugar donde menos ninguno
pensaba” (p. 378; my emphases). The priest urges Fernando to respect
the bond between Luscinda and Cardenio, “permitiendo que . . .
los dos gozasen el bien que el cielo ya les había concedido”
(p. 378).
Don Fernando suddenly succumbs to this concerted
pressure and accepts the dictates of el cielo, declaring Dorotea to
be the lady of his heart. More surprisingly, he explains his refractory behavior
by reference yet again to the unknowable hand of el cielo:
“. . . y si hasta
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aquí no he dado muestras de lo que digo (i.e. that Dorotea is his
true love) quizá ha sido por orden del cielo, para que viendo
yo en vos la fe con que me amáis, os sepa estimar en lo que
merecéis” (p. 379). There seems to be a hint of casuistry here
which could suggest an element of cynicism in Don Fernando. Nevertheless
he expresses the hope that Luscinda and Cardenio may live together for many
years: “que yo rogaré al cielo que me los deje vivir con
mi Dorotea.” There follows a scene of general weeping.
This insistence on el cielo is interesting
as regards the relations between romance and realism. The double tale can
be considered wholly orthodox, no less morally, in its exaltation of the
power of faith and the action of Providence, than aesthetically, in its attempts
to elicit admiratio for a “tan no visto suceso” from its
readers. However, Cervantes' narrative treatment of the two stories allows
for a less solemn interpretation of their significance. In the first place,
their overall aesthetic effect cannot be wholly abstracted from the circumstances
of their interpolation. The separate and unconnected appearances of Cardenio
and Dorotea, their respective involvement in the adventures of Don Quixote,
the eventual surprise, both to themselves and to the reader, of their entwined
destinies, all point to Cervantes' deliberate transformation of the compositional
problems of interpolation into fundamental structural devices in the articulation
of these stories. The predominant tendency of these devices is to exaggerate
the marvellous implausibility of the double dénouement whose exceptional
remoteness from everyday life Cervantes repeatedly emphasizes: “tan
no visto suceso,” “impensado trance,” “tan trabados y
desesperados negocios.” But then to justify such amazing coincidences
and convolutions of plot Cervantes invariably resorts to the term el
cielo. This is surprising because such a very non-committal expression
is neither specifically Christian nor Classical, the reference never being
explicitly to God, Fate or Fortune. It is as if the flagrant departures from
verisimilitude which Cervantes had created by the nature of his interpolation
could not seriously be justified by invoking divine Providence. Instead he
employs the vague term el cielo as an anodyne alibi, a vestigial
ideological camouflage for the necessary manipulations of a narrator of
romance.5
5 In The
Secular Scripture (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press,
1976), pp. 46-47, Northrop Frye observes that “nineteenth century writers
of romance, or of fiction which is close to romance in its
[p. 52] technique, sometimes speak in their prefaces
and elsewhere of the greater ‘liberty’ that they feel entitled
to take. By liberty they mean a greater designing power, especially in their
plot structures . . . . In displaced or realistic fiction
the author tries to avoid coincidence. That is, he tries to conceal his design,
pretending that things are happening out of inherent probability.”
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For confirmation of such a hypothesis one can
quote the last part of the long closing sentence of Chapter 36:
“. . . y que así, acompañados de silencio
y de lágrimas, habían llegado a aquella venta, que para él
era haber llegado al cielo, donde se rematan y tienen fin todas las
desventuras de la tierra” (p. 380). The cielo which has featured
so prominently in the improbable resolution of this double tale, and which
is the happy place where all earthly misfortunes end, is located by Don Fernando
in the very inn which houses Don Quixote who, for his part, firmly believes
it to be an enchanted castle.
At the beginning of the next chapter all the
characters persist in their state of wonderment and happiness, with Don Fernando
still giving thanks “al cielo por . . . haberle sacado
de aquel intricado laberinto” (p. 381). The priest congratulates everyone:
Todo lo ponía en su punto el cura, como
discreto, y a cada uno daba el parabién del bien alcanzado; pero
quien más jubilaba y se contentaba era la ventera, por la promesa
que Cardenio y el cura le habían hecho de pagalle todos los daños
e intereses que por cuenta de don Quijote le hubiesen venido (p. 381; my
emphasis).
Ironically, the happiness of the characters congregated in that putative
heaven is topped only by the jubilation of the innkeeper's wife, after having
extracted a promise of compensation for the damage caused by the mad knight
when he took her inn to be a haunted castle. As the double tale eventually
flows back into the main narrative it mingles with the ironic world Don Quixote
moves in, and Cervantes makes sure that the comic potential of such a confluence
is not entirely lost on the reader.
In the very same Chapter 37, the next story,
the Captive's, is introduced with the arrival of two strangers dressed in
Moorish fashion. The veiled woman is eventually asked to uncover her face,
revealing her great beauty:
. . . y así, se lo quitó, y descubrió un rostro
tan hermoso, que Dorotea la tuvo por más hermosa que a Luscinda, y
Luscinda por más hermosa que a Dorotea, y todos los circunstantes
conocieron
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que si alguno se podría igualar al de las dos, era el de la mora,
y aun hubo algunos que le aventajaron en alguna cosa (I, 38, 387).
Apart from this slightly malicious treatment
of the rival merits of the three beauties, Cervantes introduces the Captive's
tale straightforwardly after Don Quixote's remarkably sane Arms and Letters
speech. The Captive narrates the story without any hint of irony. However,
as with the other tales, the movement is from reported action in the past
to the actuality of the present. It is when the deferred dénouement
is about to be resolved at the inn that traces of irony show up once more.
Just as the Captive finishes his story a coach
draws up outside the inn and the judge arrives with his beautiful daughter
Doña Clara. This time Cervantes makes much heavier weather of the
girl's beauty: “Traía de la mano a una doncella . . .
tan bizarra, tan hermosa y tan gallarda, que a todos puso en admiración
su vista; de suerte que, a no haber visto a Dorotea y a Luscinda y Zoraida,
que en la venta estaban, creyeran que otra tal hermosura como la desta doncella
difícilmente pudiera hallarse” (I, 42, 434). Now it is Don Quixote
himself who, after inviting the judge to enter and “espaciarse en este
castillo,” extravagantly praises the new beauty: “Entre vuestra
merced, digo, en este paraíso; que aquí hallará
estrellas y soles que acompañen el cielo que vuestra merced
trae consigo: aquí hallará las armas en su punto y la hermosura
en su estremo” (p. 434; my emphases). The roadside inn which Don Quixote
believes to be a castle, and which Don Fernando recently likened to heaven,
is once again rhetorically transformed, this time into a paradise, a firmament
spangled with the stars and suns of ineffable female beauty. The judge is
left bemused and speechless, incapable of much else than to admire the
constellation that already embellishes the inn: “. . . y
sin hollar ningunas palabras con que respondelle, se tornó a admirar
de nuevo cuando vio delante de sí a Luscinda, Dorotea y a Zoraida”
(p. 435).
But even stranger things lie in store for the
judge. By yet a further marvellous coincidence he is none other than the
long-lost brother of the Captive. When they are finally revealed as such
to each other, amidst scenes of general weeping, the narrator hurriedly sums
up the results:
Las palabras que entrambos hermanos se dijeron,
los sentimientos que mostraron, apenas creo que puedan pensarse, cuando más
escribirse. Allí en breves razones, se dieron cuenta de sus
sucesos; allí mostraron puesta en su punto la buena amistad
de dos
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hermanos, allí abrazó el oidor a Zoraida;
allí la ofreció su hacienda; allí hizo
que la abrazase su hija; allí la cristiana hermosa y la mora
hermosísima renovaron las lágrimas de todos.
Allí don Quijote estaba atento, sin
hablar palabra, considerando estos tan estraños sucesos,
atribuyéndolos todos a quimeras de la andante caballería.
(I, 42, 438-39; my emphases).
So extraordinary are these events that even the mad Don Quixote is inclined
to think that they are fantasies engendered by the enchanters of romance.
The hammering repetition of allí —a very similar but clearly
comic reiteration of allí occurs only a few pages later (p.
448) when Don Quixote is protesting at having his hand caught in a loop by
Maritornes— creates a stylistic link between the extraordinary
anagnorisis and the world of chivalric romance.
Nor is this yet the end of the affair. After
they are all bedded down for the night with Don Quixote standing guard
(“don Quijote se situó fuera de la venta a hacer la centinela
del castillo,” p. 439), a beautiful voice is heard singing outside.
It belongs to a young muleteer who turns out to be Don Luis, the shy but
devoted lover of the judge's daughter. Doña Clara proceeds to tell
the others the background to this strange appearance of the disguised boy.
Once again the dénouement is deferred as the action is intercut by
several absurd adventures, namely Don Quixote's being strung up by the hand
outside the inn, and a series of coincidental arrivals in quick succession:
the arrival of Don Luis's father's servants in search of the boy (p. 448),
the arrival of the barber to reclaim his basin (p. 456), and the arrival
of three cuadrilleros (p. 460); the narrative energy thus accumulated
is finally released in the farcical “caos, máquina y laberinto
de cosas” (p. 462) which recalls for Don Quixote the camp of Agramante
in Orlando Furioso.
The Don Luis-Doña Clara story, however,
cannot be said to have a resolution, properly speaking. Don Fernando's authority
is sufficient to reassure the servants who have come for the lad, and three
of them are sent back to inform the father. Although little doubt is left
in one's mind that everything will end well, the outcome itself is not revealed
to the reader. By forgoing a definitive ending while leaving the reader somehow
sure of a felicitous resolution, Cervantes throws into relief, by default
as it were, the force of conventional expectations within that type of tale:
the children of well-born parents need fear no formal obstacles to the fulfilment
of their love.
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The Don Luis-Doña Clara story is so
slight that it could not have stood on its own; it exists as a corollary
to the other stories, a thumbnail sketch of the elementary features of that
type of plot. Inserted into that accelerating sequence of arrivals at the
inn, its non-resolution placed inconspicuously between the climactic farce
of the general dust-up reminiscent of the camp of Agramante and the
cuadrilleros' equally chaotic attempt to arrest Don Quixote for his
deliverance of the galley-slaves, this little representative story is swallowed
up in the ironic anti-romance vortex of the main narrative of Part I. Contrary
to Raymond Immerwahr's opinion that with the insertion of these stories into
the novel “a highly imaginative literary world becomes a credible actuality;
romance and reality are
synthesized,”6 I would argue that their
contact with the world of Don Quixote continually threatens to expose the
implausibility of their romance devices.
Moreover, this precariously held balance between
the observance of convention and surrender to irony is accompanied, as in
the Marcela story, by a tantalizing incompleteness of characterization. As
both Madariaga and Francisco Márquez Villanueva have
observed,7 Dorotea is, in fact, the most fully
drawn character in the double tale —her sensibility is portrayed with
delightful subtlety by Cervantes. But I would nevertheless argue that her
character is prevented by the nature of the action and its dénouement
from developing beyond the conventional and rhetorical patterns of romance
into the full-fledged independence of a modern character. In spite of her
bold pursuit of Don Fernando to vindicate her rights, she finally achieves
her aim not through any direct efforts of her own but thanks only to an amazing
coincidence occasioned, as we have seen, by el cielo. Her destiny,
furthermore, is dependent upon the inclinations of Don Fernando. This, of
course, is fair enough so it goes, but Don Fernando's change of heart is
so sudden a volte face that it could only be reconciled with plausible
psychological reality if we attribute a kind of resigned cynicism to him.
Don Fernando's pivotal decision, explained in the orthodox way as an abrupt
enlightenment by el cielo, and by a
6
“Structural Symmetry in the Episodic Narratives of Don Quijote,
Part One,” CL, 10 (1958). 121-33 (p. 129).
7 Salvador de
Madariaga, Guía del lector del “Quijote”, 3rd ed.
(Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1947), pp. 85-104; Francisco Márquez
Villanueva, Personajes y temas del “Quijote” (Madrid: Taurus,
1975), pp. 15-75.
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conventional reference to the quality of his blood (“en fin como alimentado
con ilustre sangre,” p. 378), ultimately stunts the development of Dorotea,
who is too suddenly subsumed in a mechanical and melodramatic
dénouement.
Again, as Márquez Villanueva and Leo
Spitzer have remarked,8 in the Captive's story
which follows hard on the heels of the above, the motivation of one of the
two principal characters, Zoraida, is teasingly inconsistent, if not
contradictory. On the surface, her motive for wanting to escape with the
Captive is irreproachable —her devotion to the Blessed Virgin has inspired
in her a wish to convert to Christianity. But her actual behaviour towards
her gentle and loving Moorish father, shows her to be deceitful, scheming
and hardhearted. In typical Cervantine fashion the overt theme —in this
instance, the exaltation of the Christian life above the Moslem— is
ironically undermined by the evidence of the narrative. The girl could be
viewed as a cold fanatic with possible ulterior motives who is prepared to
be joined to the hapless Captive in a marriage which seems devoid of much
mutual love or passion. The highly orthodox Tridentine theme of conversion
therefore dissolves into a perplexing ambiguity which is revolutionary not
only in ideological import but also in aesthetic implication, since it suggests
an unresolved and troubled destiny for the couple beyond the mechanical
conclusiveness of the happy ending required of romance and provided by what
Márquez Villanueva calls the “anagnorisis archiconvencional del
hermano oidor” (p. 122).
In all the stories we have discussed so far,
there are tensions between the embryonic autonomy and complexity of characters,
and highly stylized plots which resolve themselves into spectacularly
melodramatic endings that are in turn qualified by ironic details and paradoxical
implications. I would argue that the aesthetic instability of these romance-type
stories is the result of conscious artistic purpose by Cervantes, who is
beginning in Part I to turn the technical problems of interpolation into
raw material for imaginative exploitation. In the first place, the narrative
presentation and setting show unmistakable signs of premeditation. There
is the concentration through deferred dénouements of the reader's
attention on the resolutions of the stories in every case, together with
an emphatic
8
Márquez Villanueva, pp. 126-34 and p. 129, n. 58; Leo Spitzer,
“Perspectivismo lingüístico en El Quijote,”
Lingüística e historia literaria (Madrid: Gredos, 1955),
pp. 161-225 (pp. 210-13).
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reliance upon excessively melodramatic effects and coincidences, disguised
by the thinnest of veils as the providential workings of el cielo,
but whose implications call into question the conventional optimism of the
endings. Secondly, the very entwining of the destinies of Dorotea and Fernando
with those of Luscinda and Cardenio, their dovetailing into the Captive's
tale, leading immediately into the trite and significantly unfinished story
of Don Luis and Doña Clara, all of which reach their rapidly successive
climaxes under the one roof, which also happens to house Don Quixote, the
robbed barber and the cuadrilleros, seems calculated to produce a
cumulative narrative momentum converging on the farcical rumpus reminiscent
of the camp of Agramante. Both individually and in their collective organization
the stories all abut on irony or farce when they come into contact with the
main narrative. It is not surprising, in this respect, that all these tales
are explicitly related by Don Quixote himself or by another character to
the fantasies and implausibilities of the romances of chivalry. I would conclude,
then, that in Part I Cervantes chose to incorporate these tales into the
main narrative in such a way as to indicate as far as possible their lack
of plausibility without actually invalidating through direct parody their
capacity to evoke orthodox admiratio. These interpolated tales are
an exercise in having the best of both worlds: they celebrate the traditional
wonders of love and adventure without altogether excluding the knowingness
of irony.
The interpolated tale which comes closest to
overt parody is, as both Immerwahr (p. 134) and Javier Herrero (p. 294) also
point out, that of the shepherdess Leandra. Coming at the end of Part I,
it contains echoes of all the other preceding tales. Leandra is the daughter
of a rich peasant (like Dorotea), she has no mother (like Marcela), and she
spurns the love of Anselmo and Eugenio (again like Marcela). These two (like
Grisóstomo and Cardenio) suffer an access of amorous madness which
drives them to dress up as goatherds. Leandra (like Dorotea with Fernando)
falls in love with a soldier, Vicente, and (like Zoraida with the Captive)
elopes with him in the hope of going to foreign lands. The elopement comes
to possess more of the practical characteristics of an abduction (as in the
case of Luscinda) when Leandra is found abandoned and robbed on a mountainside
(in a shift but, like Luscinda, quite intact). Her fate is similar to Luscinda's:
she enters a nunnery, but her reclusion does not prevent the local swains
from getting themselves up as goatherds to roam about the countryside (like
those others in the Marcela story) weeping for her love.
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It would appear that for this final tale in
Part I Cervantes has assembled most of the conventional elements which exist
in different permutations in the other tales and fashioned them into a composite
story which verges on open parody and which is again likened to the romances
of chivalry. In the first instance, Leandra's story is placed immediately
after the lengthy discussion between Don Quixote and the Canon of Toledo
on the poetic truth of the romances. It is introduced by a surprisingly
cultivated goatherd, Eugenio, who offers to tell them the Leandra story in
order to illustrate the unlikely paradox that goatherds are in fact educated
people: “para que creáis esta verdad y la toquéis con
la mano” (I, 50, 504). To this Don Quixote replies: “Por ver que
tiene este caso un no sé qué de sombra de aventura de
caballería, yo, por mi parte, os oiré,
hermano . . .” (p . 504). Eugenio finishes his tale,
lamenting Leandra's entry into a convent, whereupon Don Quixote offers to
release her from it, much as Don Fernando forcibly sprang Luscinda from her
nunnery in the earlier story.
The goatherd is puzzled both by Don Quixote's
words and by his outlandish appearance. When apprised by the barber of the
latter's identity and mission he replies: “Eso me semeja . . .
a lo que se lee en los libros de caballeros andantes, que hacían todo
eso que de este hombre vuestra merced dice; puesto que para mí tengo,
o que vuestra merced se burla, o que este gentilhombre debe de tener vacíos
los aposentos de la cabeza” (I, 52, 511). Naturally enraged by this
imputation, Don Quixote strikes him with a loaf of bread, thereby provoking
yet another ridiculous brawl. As in the case of the interlocking tales discussed
above, we have the idealized world of romance rising high above the everyday
only to tip over and collapse into farce when it comes into contact with
Don Quixote.
The interpolated stories of Part II
Turning now to the interpolated love-stories
in Part II, all four of them have a deferred dénouement but, unlike
those in Part I, they are not —except for the Tosilos story which is
part and parcel of the goings-on at the ducal palace— ironically undermined
in the manner of their grafting on to the main narrative. In this respect
they appear to be more “natural,” less obviously artificial or
separate from the world of Don Quixote, in accordance with Cervantes' own
declared purpose in Chapter 44 of Part II. But if ironic disparities between
the interpolated love-stories and the verisimilar mainstream narrative are
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virtually non-existent in Part II, the ironic tensions between complexities
of theme and character, and literary convention, still remain, albeit more
discreetly indicated by Cervantes.
In the Basilio story Cervantes again employs
the technique of the delayed ending, with the background to the story being
related by a character as a prelude to the enaction of the dénouement.
There are few if any ironic reverberations other than the obvious one in
this story. But certain difficulties can be discerned on closer inspection.
When Don Quixote is first told of Quiteria's imminent marriage to Camacho
and her father's rejection of Basilio as a suitable husband, he supports
the rights of fathers to marry off their daughters in a lucid and well-reasoned
speech which contrasts with Sancho's emotional support for Basilio (p. 673).
However, after Basilio's trick, when Camacho and his men set upon the usurping
lover in their rage, Don Quixote takes up his arms and orders them to stop.
The knight argues, again very lucidly, that in love as in war all manner
of subterfuge is legitimate in order to achieve one's end (pp. 692-93). One
might conclude that the moral of the story is that true love should triumph,
in spite of Don Quixote's earlier opinions to the contrary. But Don Quixote
next advises Basilio, once again in a well-reasoned speech which earns Sancho's
spontaneous admiration, that he should strive to become wealthy in order
to keep his girl. In this way he rather detracts from Basilio's position
as the champion of true love and restores much of the right to the defeated
Camacho. This advice, moreover, rather qualifies the “happy ever
after” romance ending by suggesting, again as in the Captive's story,
that troubles may lie ahead for the lovers should the husband not prove to
be sufficiently adept at getting rich.
As a result of this last speech of Don Quixote's
the story fails to cut much ice at the level of the theme. Cervantes
paradoxically uses Don Quixote in one of his “sane” spells to
neutralize the conflict between true love and material interest which the
suicide trick had appeared to resolve in favor of the former. This irresolution
of the theme is compounded by indecisiveness in characterization. Quiteria
is totally passive, submitting to her father's wishes without reported opposition
and later showing little enthusiasm for her designated rôle as a heroine
of true love. More extraordinary still is Camacho's reaction to the preposterous
and dishonouring hoax. His understandable anger is quickly doused by the
mad knight's comminations, of all things, and beyond that, he displays
unbelievable forbearance when
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he decides to proceed with the junketings. Every thematic or psychological
difficulty is smoothed over, throwing the suicide trick into sharp relief
as the single salient feature of the story. It is very much as if the whole
tale had been composed merely to highlight Basilio's ruse, a
peripeteia which seems a cynical sop to a readership avid for spectacular
forms of admiratio. As one might expect, true love triumphs, but thanks
only to the combination of two rather unlikely factors —Basilio's mechanical
trick and Don Quixote's braggadocio. Thus the triumph of love, since it is
made possible only by such outrageously improbable devices, appears to be
dangerously precarious, an exceptional concession to the sentimentality of
romance in a world which would otherwise sweep away its self-assumed
privileges.
That the story makes little sense in traditional
generic terms, much less in realistic terms, is very well illustrated by
Thomas Mann who protests at the immorality of the deceitful Basilio's winning
of Quiteria: “Is this really fair? The suicide scene is painted with
complete seriousness and tragic emphasis. The emotions of horror roused not
only in the other actors but in the reader as well are quite unequivocal.
Yet in the end the whole thing dissolves in laughter and betrays itself as
a farce and travesty.”9 Mann further
notes that it is in the Greek or Byzantine romances that such highly artificial
devices for producing admiratio are to be found. He points out that
specifically in Achilles Tatius' History of Leucippe and Cleitophon
of the second century A.D., there is a scene which almost exactly foreshadows
Basilio's trick. Stanislav Zimic has followed up Mann's reference and argues
that whereas in Tatius the device is used to astonish the reader, with Cervantes
it acquires a deeper significance, “elevándose a la preocupante
meditación sobre el múltiple aspecto de la
realidad.”10 Thus, Zimic accounts for
Mann's puzzlement over this scene by referring to Spitzer's Perspectivism.
I incline towards another explanation. Zimic
observes that Cervantes must have known full well that in Basilio's mock
death, it is the reader who is “el más burlado” (p. 881).
Indeed, I think the story is conceived as a literary joke on the reader.
In my view Cervantes is indulging in a sly subversion of the conventions
of the novella by
9
“Voyage with Don Quixote,” in Cervantes: A Collection of Critical
Essays. Ed. Lowry Nelson Jr. (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall,
1969), pp. 49 72 (p, 59).
10 “‘El
engaño a los ojos’ en las bodas de Camacho del
Quijote,” Hispania, 55 (1972), 881-86 (p. 885).
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choosing from a Greek romance a spectacularly artificial device for creating
admiratio, and placing it in the “real” world of Don Quixote
as the centre-piece of the story. He therefore goes as far as possible in
the direction of open parody, exaggerating and virtually exposing the
arbitrariness of the mechanisms which govern the romance-type love-stories
of his time, without, however, permitting the reader to accept it conveniently
as explicit parody. A superb tension between artificiality and verisimilitude
is thereby generated.
If Basilio's story represents an extreme of
authorial manipulation, with its subordination of theme, character and moral
coherence to an absurdly mechanical peripeteia, the Tosilos story
shows more directly Cervantes' concern with the relations between plausible
characterization and generic conventions. Much of its interest lies in the
way in which the plot of the conventional love-story is so masterfully crossed
with such devices of chivalric literature as enchantment and trial by
combat.
The story initially emerges as a surprise,
when the ridiculous duenna Doña Rodríguez requests Don Quixote
to help her resolve a genuine problem. Her daughter has been dishonoured
by a rich peasant's son but the Duke refuses to do anything about it because
the peasant often lends him money. Doña Rodríguez asks for
Quixote to challenge the peasant's son to a duel in order to uphold the honour
of her daughter. Cervantes has cleverly combined the two genres by getting
his characters to attempt to resolve a typical problem of the romantic
novella by means of a classic technique from the chivalric canon.
The Duke, seeing the comical possibilities of the situation, decides to extract
more fun from Don Quixote and the duenna, and orders his lackey Tosilos to
disguise himself as the rich peasant's son. However, the Duke's plans break
down when Tosilos suddenly falls in love with the duenna's daughter as he
is on the point of charging Don Quixote on the field of battle. The improbability
of Tosilos' access of love for the maiden is here unmistakably exaggerated
by Cervantes with his burlesque account of the activities of Eros (“el
niño ceguezuelo”) who, it is said, was loath to waste the opportunity
of conquering a lackey's heart and therefore pierced it with an arrow: “y
púdolo hacer bien al seguro, porque el Amor el invisible, y entra
y sale por do quiere, sin que nadie le pida cuenta de sus hechos” (p.
945).
Cervantes again uses a metaphysical agent (overtly
Classical here because of the clear parodic intent rather than the ambiguity
of el
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cielo) to extricate the characters' genuine feelings from the Duke's
machinations. These are exposed when Tosilos raises his visor and the imposture
is detected by Doña Rodríguez. By a further comical twist,
the full revelation of the Duke's schemes is neatly avoided when Don Quixote
perversely uses his favourite notion of enchantment to explain away the puzzling
substitution of Tosilos for the real culprit. The Duke decides to lock up
Tosilos for a fortnight to see if the “enchantment” wears off.
But again, his plans are thwarted when the duenna's daughter decides she
will in any case marry Tosilos and live happily ever after. Having apparently
resolved the story as happily as it deserves to be in romance, Don Quixote
goes off to Barcelona. However, there follows an epilogue much later when
Tosilos appears unexpectedly during Don Quixote and Sancho's journey back
(I, 66, 1022). The lackey announces that the episode actually ended with
his receiving a hundred lashes from the Duke, the duenna's return to Castile,
and her daughter's entry into a convent.
Although the story is concluded in partial
accordance with the rules of the genre, the manner of its conception and
elaboration has prised it out of the moulds of convention. From the start
the reader has been made aware of the delusion involved in the duenna's
enlistment of the mad knight's services and of the latter's inability to
alter the basic obstacles to a happy outcome —the fact of the Duke's
power and his self-interested refusal to right the injustice. Don Quixote
and the duenna are exposed for what they are —ridiculous upholders,
in the best traditions of chivalry or courtly love, of absolute principles
which are destined to founder on the bedrock of social realities. The story
ends with the recognition of harsh social facts which render literary conventions
futile and untrue; in ironic contrast to Basilio's story, no concessions
are made to sentimentality or to optimistic illusions. Nevertheless, the
ironic double ending of the story, while never flinching from the unpleasant
reality of the Duke's power, obliquely illustrates its limitations; absolute
social power does not necessarily entail total manipulation of individuals
either. There is here an implicit recognition of the ways in which an inner
world of feeling and amorous ideals, represented by the hapless Tosilos and
his sweetheart, can assert itself unpredictably and endure for a while beyond
the compass of social power. The double ending once again illustrates how
the circumstances of interpolation have been converted by Cervantes into
a source of new and deeper meanings which a straightforward narration of
the conventional plot might have left undiscovered.
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The brief story of Claudia Gerónima
(II, 60) again pays lip-service to romance convention only to show up its
limitations. The dénouement is once more detached from the narration
of the background in order to heighten the surprise of the peripeteia.
Claudia Gerónima believes that her lover Don Vicente has gone off
with another woman, she follows him and shoots him. She then seeks out Roque
Guinart and asks him to protect her father and herself from Don Vicente's
family's revenge. Roque and the others go to the scene and discover the dying
Vicente who claims that Claudia has misconstrued his motives through her
blind jealousy and insists that he was never unfaithful. He even offers to
marry her before he dies. Claudia now bitterly laments her impetuousness,
and after her innocent lover's unnecessary death, enters a convent.
This story bears similarities with Marcela's
in that its resolution points to a negation of the conventional impetus which
produced it in the first place. Claudia acts on impulse in accordance with
the established patterns of a typical story of a lover's revenge, without
stopping to examine either her motives or her lover's, “sin ponerme
a dar quejas ni a oír disculpas” (p. 977). Had she just begun
to do so the tragedy would have been averted and the story could conceivably
have developed along unprecedented lines by delving into Claudia Gerónima's
inner life and examining the real motives for her overpowering jealousy.
It remains significant that it is precisely the way in which Cervantes has
constructed the story that self-consciously draws attention to its generic
constraints and implies the possibility of an alternative destiny for its
characters.
The last of the interpolated stories, Ana
Félix's (II, 63-65), distinguishes itself by being the only genuinely
open-ended one of the collection. Unlike the Clara story in Part I its
inconclusiveness is not a form of narrative shorthand or elliptical brevity
but is rooted instead in the very nature of its subject-matter. On the surface
it falls within the same genre as the others and uses traditional devices
for its development —transvestism, coincidences and elopement. But I
would argue that in spite of all these features, the story is unfinished
because it cannot be concluded within the terms of the literary tradition
from which it springs. In the first place the obstacle the lovers encounter
falls well outside conventional bounds. Had it been based on infidelity,
unrequited affection, social or religious incompatibility, all these would
have been comfortably overcome from within the resources of the genre. But
Ana Félix and Don Gregorio come from rich families, they are united
in a true and steadfast love, and
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even though Ana is of Morisco background it is categorically stated that
she is a firm and convinced Christian. What stands between them is an inescapable
historical reality —Philip III's edict expelling all Moriscos from Spain
in 1609.11 The conflict is between private
rights and the anonymous world of public affairs, between personal convictions
and racial or cultural identity.
The motif of inversion runs strong throughout.
Ana is discovered accidentally, disguised as a man in Turkish clothes, and
is about to be executed when her beauty earns her the indulgence of her captors
who agree to listen to her story. She tells of how she was forced into exile
with her family in spite of her sincere Christian faith and was followed
to Oran by Don Gregorio, disguised as a girl. She left him there, in constant
danger of being discovered and seduced by the pederastic Turks, in order
to return to Spain to dig up some money buried near her home town. The
transpositions and inversions are cultural, racial, geographical and even
sexual. The lovers are driven to deny their true identities in their desire
to stay together and surmount the massive historical barrier erected between
them by the institutional authority of the State. Not only are their respective
positions highly precarious, the only hope of their reverting to their stable
and real identities —a destiny which is indispensable to the deepest
requirements of romance— is if they can somehow swim against the swiftly
rising tide of history.
Cervantes has written the story in such a way
as to elicit great sympathy for Ana and so raise conventional hopes of a
happy ending. However, when Don Gregorio returns from Oran the whole story
is abandoned without any indication as to how it will be resolved. But how,
we may ask, could Cervantes have ended it? There are three possibilities,
each beset by insuperable difficulties.
In the first place, if the lovers had married
without permission Cervantes would have been putting private passion above
public duty and the story would have become dangerously subversive given
the historical context. Secondly, if they had definitely been forbidden to
marry, the reader would have been disappointed and the story, as it is presented,
would have become a tragedy clearly caused by Philip III's edict. Again,
this would have been fraught with danger because the
11 For
a full discussion of Philip III's policy towards the Moriscos and Cervantes'
reaction to it see Márquez Villanueva, pp. 229-335.
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reader's dismay could have been construed as implying criticism of the royal
policy of expatriating Moriscos.
The only likely solution would have been a
compromise, by which the lovers could have been granted permission to marry
legally. This would have entailed making an exception of Ana Félix
among her fellow Moriscos, and that would obviously have required adducing
reasons to explain such a singular dispensation. Since Ana is already a convinced
Christian and a loyal lover there would seem to be no other decisive qualities
she would need to deserve a royal pardon, unless of course her own affirmations
as to the strength of her faith or the truth of her love were to be put to
the test in order to ascertain infallibly whether her true intentions correspond
to her professed feelings. Such infallible tests of real motivation are obviously
impossible outside romance fiction (viz. the Arch of Loyal Lovers
in the Amadís) so that the basic problem posed by the story
is how the individual can avoid being trapped within impersonal categories
which have no regard for his private wishes or genuine beliefs. Cervantes
has brought the Renaissance novella dangerously up to date, pushing
it to the uttermost limits of its conventional possibilities, where to proceed
beyond stereotypes of race, religion, culture and social station would have
inevitably opened the Pandora's Box of individual intentions, passions, and
irreconcilable divisions of identity.
Cervantes must have chosen to provoke these
speculations because he precluded the only solution open to him in this type
of tale, and one he had already used, albeit with a hint of irony, in the
Captive's Tale in Part I, namely that of conversion. Here that solution is
ruled out from the start by Ana Félix's pre-existent Christian faith.
The remedy for the lovers' plight lies well beyond anybody's control. As
a result, the transvestism central to the action ceases to be a well-worn
narrative expedient of the genre and crystallizes with unexpected poetic
force into a poignantly contemporary symbol of that intimate violence inflicted
upon the individual by the impersonal and alienating forces of an absolute
State.
In Ana Félix's story Cervantes seems
deliberately to emasculate the genre of the Italianate novella by
constructing his tale in such a way as to expose its inability to treat certain
intractable human problems. The only way forward to a happy ending would
have involved forcing the lovers to surmount the historical obstacle through
a deus ex machina device typical of romance. Here Cervantes refrains
from doing so and leaves the story significantly open-ended.
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In striking contrast to the twinned Dorotea and Cardenio stories, or to Basilio's
story, there is no recourse either to el cielo or to a cunning device
to deliver the lovers from their historical fate. It is as if Cervantes were
implying that even in the nominally free world of imaginative fiction not
every problem should be susceptible of solution.
If we consider the interpolated stories of
Parts I and II as a series, it is striking to observe how, from the utopian
pastoral setting of the Marcela story or the vaguely contemporary locations
of the other stories in Part I, Cervantes moves in Part II towards stories
set in a more historically-specific reality like that of Claudia Gerónima,
which is linked with the historical brigand Roque Guinart, or of Ana Félix,
which is set in the context of the expulsion of the Moriscos. This difference
in setting reflects a more fundamental and significant difference between
the stories of Parts I and II. In spite of the contextual ironies, all the
1605 stories are articulated in accordance with mechanisms derived from the
Italianate novella; its conventions form the ground of the characters'
real experience, at least within the visible bounds of the stories themselves.
But in Part II, all four stories demonstrate how these very conventions and
procedures are delusions produced by the fantasy of characters like Doña
Rodríguez or Claudia Gerónima, suspiciously improbable in the
case of Basilio, or ineffectual as in the Ana Félix story. Although
these 1615 tales are still derived from the genre of the Italianate
novella, their functioning exposes their inadequacy as narrative vehicles
capable of expressing or dealing with certain conflicts inherent in individual
experience. Cervantes' intermittent ironic sniping at the genre in Part I
has developed into a sophisticated subversion of its foundations in Part
II, where the stories are so arranged as to reveal a progressive sapping
of generic resources culminating in the unresolved, open-ended tale of Ana
Félix. The stories of Part I are susceptible of being read on two
levels: either in a manner blessedly innocent of irony, for the traditional
pleasure of admiratio they provide, or with a certain ironic awareness
of their literary artifice. In Part II this ambiguity is brought much further
into the open and promoted to the thematic level as an opposition between
the characters' illusions or aspirations and the recalcitrance of their actual
circumstances.
When considered collectively, the stories
interpolated into the Quixote, by their ironic dissonances and structural
peculiarities, progressively point to an area of reality, namely the inward
life of the
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| 2 (1982) |
Romance and Realism in the Quixote |
67 |
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characters, their motives, passions and states of mind, which remains beyond
the reach of traditional romance procedures. The stories of Claudia
Gerónima and Ana Félix, especially, seem to herald the need
for a narrative medium which would articulate individualized experience or
even the interior lives of characters —Claudia Gerónima's obsessive
jealousy for example, or Ana Félix's fears and frustrations—
that is, forms of experience which would otherwise remain stilled or constricted
by the limited permutations of the Italianate novella.
It is, then, the sharp contrast between the
world of romance and the actual experience of the characters that makes the
stories of Part II share with the history of Don Quixote's adventures the
“truth” that reality often exceeds the fixed patterns of romance.
But whatever “realism” can be attributed to the interpolated stories
is negative, in the sense that it arises only to the extent that Cervantes
manipulates the conventions he is using so as to reveal their formulaic basis.
This is not to suggest that Cervantes set out to undermine the
novella. It is rather that the problems of interpolation, combined
with Cervantes' love of paradox and irony, lead from the playful ironies
of Part I to the quite deliberate subversion of Part II.
Cervantes' attitude to romance is complex.
There would appear to be no systematic, chronological evolution towards either
realism or romance. Like most writers of his time, Cervantes starts from
within a particular genre —in this case the Renaissance
novella— but in his desire to delight his readers while at the
same time reflecting plausible experience, he is prepared to follow his creative
instincts or yield to the pressures of context, even to the point of straining
genre beyond established practice. In the interpolated stories of the
Quixote Cervantes remains within the bounds of romance even though
he twists and bends the rules until finally he stretches them actually to
the breaking point.
| BIRKBECK COLLEGE |
| UNIVERSITY OF LONDON |