From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
6.1 (1986): 81-90.
Copyright © 1986, The Cervantes Society of America
Cervantes and the Imagination
N Don
Quixote Cervantes takes a notoriously strong official stand against the
popular forms of fiction of his day. His attack includes not only the romances
of chivalry, but also the pastoral romances and the
picaresque.1 The criticisms appear conventional
enough, often borrowing from the language of the neo-Aristotelian theorists
whose work clearly influenced him. The Canon of Toledo, for example, in a
well-known presentation of the official anti-chivalric position, says:
“Hanse de casar las fábulas mentirosas con el entendimiento de
los que las leyeren, escribiéndose de suerte que, facilitando los
imposibles, allanando las grandezas, suspendiendo los
1 The
attacks against the pastoral and picaresque are less concentrated and overt
than those made against the chivalric. As in the Coloquio de los perros,
Cervantes attacks the pastoral in Don Quixote by presenting an implied
contrast with the true nature of country life, and by revealing the devastations
that result when characters leave home to pursue as a way of life the literary
pastoral. The attacks against the picaresque are similarly oblique, calling
principally into question the problem of form, narrative ending, and world
vision implied in the making of a rogue's autobiography. The denunciations
of the chivalric, on the other hand, are both consistent and overt, beginning
with the prologue in Part I (“todo él es una invectiva contra
los libros de caballerías . . . [que] . . . no
mira a más que a deshacer la autoridad y cabida que en el mundo y
en el vulgo tienen los libros de caballerías”; “llevad la
mira puesta a derribar la máquina mal fundada destos caballerescos
libros, aborrecidos de tantos y alabados de muchos más”), and
ending on the last page of Part II (“no ha sido otro mi deseo que poner
en aborrecimiento de los hombres las fingidas y disparatadas historias de
los libros de caballerías”).
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ánimos, admiren, suspendan, alborocen y entretengan de modo, que anden
a un mismo paso la admiración y la alegría juntas” (I,
47). His formulation, however, centers on giving dominance to intelligence
over imagination. The Canon, along with many theorists of the day, tended
to demean the imagination, associating it with the “lower faculties”
(at another point he refers to the “confuso juicio del desvanecido vulgo,
a quien por la mayor parte toca leer semejantes libros” [I,
48]).2
Cervantes' announced rejection of the romances
of chivalry is difficult to reconcile with his own boast, late in life, that
he is a “raro inventor,” “aquel que en la invención
excede,”3 as well as with his obvious
full acquaintance with that popular prose genre. But contradictions are notorious
in Cervantes. After nearly four hundred years, critics still have not arrived
at a consensus regarding even the question of whether Cervantes meant it
or nor when he bore down
2 The
faculty of imagination, in medieval and neo-Aristotelian Renaissance philosophy,
was directly associated with the senses, and hence was seen as a property
of being mankind shared with the animals. Aquinas says, in Question 84, Article
7: “Now sense, imagination, and the other powers belonging to the sensitive
part make use of the corporeal organ.” Intellect, on the other hand,
belongs especially to human beings, and draws from the image-making faculty
the apprehension of intentions not perceived through the senses. However,
a competing view, new in the Renaissance, began to link imagination with
love, and both with the creative powers, especially with regard to poetry,
as John Dagenois points out in “El amor y el proceso creador en Lope
de Vega,” Anuario de letras 21(1983), 223-36.
3 The famous
quotes come from the long mock-epic poem, published in 1614, the Viaje
del Parnaso, Chapters I and IV, respectively. The Coloquio de los
perros, whose talking dogs struggle with the principle of order against
an overabundance of material streaming out of recalled experience, also exhibits
the expansive imaginative faculty of Cervantes. His sympathy with characters
given to excesses of imagination and invention is also evident in the portrayal
of so many rogues and actors whose survival depends on their success at creating
and sustaining, against the official view, a version of reality based on
their own experiences in the world. Famous examples are Rinconete and Cortadillo,
Pedro de Urdemalas, Chirinos and Chanfalla in “El retablo de las
maravillas,” the student in “La cueva de Salamanca,” Doña
Lorenza in “El viejo celoso,” Master Peter and Basilio in Don
Quixote Part II, and even Persiles and Sigismunda. For a detailed discussion
of the rogue, and also of the role of neo-Aristotelian poetics in Cervantes'
work, see Alban Forcione's Cervantes, Aristotle and the
“Persiles” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).
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so heavily on the works of chivalry.4 And
hidden within that question is the deeper one of how Cervantes understood
the relationship between imagination and intellect; between the fantasmagoria
of events and desires presented to the self through the senses and the official
organization of that data into acceptable forms and units of
comprehension.5
The principal complaint against the romances
of chivalry, as voiced by such “learned” figures as the priest,
the barber, and the Canon of Toledo in Part I, is that they abuse the
intelligence of their readers. But Cervantes shows something a little more
subtle in his novelistic rendering of the problem. Despite the Canon's insistence
that it is his intelligence that finally refuses the books of chivalry (“De
mí sé decir que cuando los leo, en tanto que no pongo la
imaginación en pensar que son todos mentira y liviandad me dan algún
contento . . . . y aun tienen tanto atrevimiento, que se atreven
a turbar los ingenios de los discretos y bien nacidos hidalgos
. . .” [I, 49]), it is precisely Cervantes' fiction-ravaged
characters, from Don Quixote to Grisóstomo to Cardenio to Marcela,
who are most richly endowed with intellect. Over and over again throughout
the book characters ask themselves of Don Quixote: how can a man as intelligent
as he be so mad when it comes to the books of chivalry? Clearly intellect
and imagination belong to different realms: what appeals to one faculty of
the soul has nothing essential to do with what goes on in
another.6
4 Though
since the Romantic period most critics have tended to look far beyond Cervantes'
anti-chivalric statements for signs of his true intentions, serious concern
with those statements has made a recent comeback, most thoroughly developed
in Anthony Close's The Romantic Approach to “Don Quixote”
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
5 The question
is one that began to receive considerable attention in the Renaissance, when
philosophers first began to associate the faculty of imagination with poetry,
and with an excess of hot and dry humors. Alfonso de Carvallo, for example,
in his Cisne de Apolo, distinguishes clearly between imagination and
intellect in the creation of poetry, deviating from the medieval idea that
imagination was a source of danger requiring a censor. For more on the role
of the imagination in poetic activity, see John Dagenais' “El amor y
el proceso creador,” op. cit.
6 That the faculties
were separate, if interrelated, was clear to the theorists who discussed
the psychology of the soul. Huarte de San Juan, so influential in Cervantes,
sees the difference among people in the development of the various faculties
(imaginative, memorial, and intellectual) as indicators of differences in
talent, taking as ideal the even balance of all three. The point here is
that one can easily use more than one faculty, and not experience those faculties
as in harmony with one another. [P. 84] See
Examen de ingenios in Biblioteca de autores españoles
65 (Madrid: Atlas, 1953). Just as I was preparing this manuscript for press
I came across C. Christopher Soufas, Jr.'s “Thinking in La vida es
sueño,” PMLA 100 (1985), 287-99, which takes up in
some detail Renaissance notions regarding imagination and the intellect.
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Don Quixote's defense of the books, enunciated
most clearly in his debate with the Canon in chapter 49 of Part I, but expressed
on and off throughout the work, consists of celebrating their appeal to the
senses, but also their capacity to uplift and ennoble. He tells the Canon:
“De mí sé decir que después que soy caballero andante
soy valiente, comedido, liberal, bien criado, generoso, cortés, atrevido,
blando, paciente, sufrido de trabajos, de prisiones, de encantos” (II,
49).
Part I is so structured as to suggest, however,
that it is the Canon who is in fact right: that the chivalric books are rather
more dangerous than enlightening. Despite his assertions to the contrary,
Don Quixote is often anything but valiant and courteous. He belongs, furthermore,
with a collection of deluded characters whose failures to distinguish the
seductions of literature from the hard facts of life bring them into the
realms of madness, criminality, suicide, adultery, and all manner of behavior
disruptive to a well-ordered republic.
Part I of Don Quixote is a work in which
the struggle between intelligence and the imagination remains far from resolved.
The romances are appealing, as characters from every segment of society attest.
They distract the bored, give pleasure to those who have toiled, and they
appeal even when they indulge excessively in the fantastic. Critics have
rightly been reluctant to buy wholesale the notion that Cervantes really
intended to destroy the romances of chivalry, for Part I is full of indications
that they have been read by all segments of society, and not always with
pernicious results. Furthermore, Part I is structured in such a way as to
mirror the very romances it attacks, being built on a string of episodes
loosely interconnected, and having, therefore, no natural place of ending.
The tendency, implicit in both the romances of chivalry and the pastoral,
to place imagination in a role antagonistic to the intellect, remains firmly
in place in Don Quixote I, thus locking Cervantes into the very dialectic
from which the official declamations regarding his intentions would appear
to free him.
Part II has an entirely different structural
configuration, one which no longer follows the meanderings of the chivalric
books. Though
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called by the same name, the fictional author of Part II is no longer the
problematic figure he was in Part I, wavering between the roles of scribe
and magician, historian and poet. In Part II Cide Hamete executes his task
with consummate authority, stopping and starting the action at will, deliberately
confusing and then enlightening the reader. And behind him, Cervantes expertly
guides his character, Don Quixote, through a calculated process of
disillusionment that begins with his search for Dulcinea and ends with his
realization that she cannot be found; that begins with his struggle to preserve
his chivalric role, and ends with his recantation and death. Part II of Don
Quixote, quite unlike Part I, gives the impression of being carefully
planned. Its chapters represent true units of narrative material. Its characters
have a definite itinerary. The secondary stories maintain firm contact with
the dominant plot line. Beginnings and endings are clearly marked.
The implied theoretical debate regarding the
relative merits of imagination and the intellect, while it continues through
Part II, also takes on a cast different from Part I. The lines of distinction,
for one thing, have sharpened in Part II. Spokesmen for neo-Aristotelian
poetics are both better versed in their material and less sympathetically
portrayed than are their counterparts in Part I. Replacing the bumbling but
reasonably kindly priest of Part I is Sansón Carrasco, a
wet-behind-the-ears bachelor from Salamanca who expertly spouts truisms about
history, poetry, and verisimilitude, but is in fact a pedant with little
genuine concern for his neighbor Don Quixote's well-being, and no true awareness
of self.
Like the priest, Sansón tries his hand
at Don Quixote's own game in an effort to trick the gentleman out of his
madness. While achieving a far more complex and sophisticated likeness than
the priest had managed of the knightly drama Don Quixote has chosen to enact,
Sansón also falls far more deeply into unconscious identification
with his role than did his counterpart in the 1605 novel. When he fails at
his first effort to defeat Don Quixote, his initial desire to humor his crazed
neighbor hardens into a thirst for revenge. He tells his friend Tomé
Cecial, “pensar que yo he de volver a la mía [casa] hasta haber
molido a palos a don Quijote es pensar en lo escusado. Y no me llevará
ahora a buscarle el deseo de que cobre su juicio, sino el de la venganza
. . . .” (II, 15).
An even more shockingly unsympathetic spokesman
for the anti-romance position is the ecclesiastic who lives in the palace
of the duke
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and duchess. Playing a role analogous to that of the Canon of Toledo in Part
I, the ecclesiastic engages Don Quixote in a verbal challenge of his decision
to become a knight errant, bringing to his position his moral authority as
a member of the clergy. Calling Don Quixote “alma de cántaro,”
he assails him with one of the cruelest direct attacks on his character that
Don Quixote has been asked to withstand:
“¿quién os ha encajado en el celebro que sois caballero
andante y que vencéis gigantes y prendéis maladrines?
. . . Dejad de andar vagando por el mundo, papando viento y dando
que reír a cuantos os conocen y no conocen. ¿En dónde,
nora tal, habéis vos hallado que hubo ni hay ahora caballeros andantes?
¿Dónde hay gigantes en España, o maladrines en la Mancha,
ni Dulcinea encantadas, ni toda la caterva de las simplicidades que de vos
se cuentan?” (II, 31).
The lines of separation between those who uphold
the concept of a world of everyday common sense and those who receive
uncritically data presented to the sensory organs may have sharpened in Part
II, but Cervantes' own place within that debate remains ultimately as uncertain
as ever. The question is complicated by the fact that those characters most
actively unsympathetic to Don Quixote —Sansón, the duke and duchess,
the ecclesiastic, Altisidora, the Castilian who calls out to him from the
crowd in Barcelona saying “vuélvete, mentecato, a tu casa
. . . y déjate destas vaciedades que te carcomen el seso
y te desnatan el entendimiento” (II, 62)— these characters are
in the end the ones who win the day. The three characters most thoroughly
committed to carrying through the fantasy of knighthood —Sancho, Don
Quixote, and Cide Hamete— all end their journeys with emphatic denunciations
of the chivalric world they sought to recreate.
Sancho is the first to relinquish the ambitions
his proximity to the chivalric fantasy had inspired in him. After leaving
his long-desired island he says: “Yo no nací para ser gobernador
ni para defender ínsulas ni ciudades de los enemigos que quisieran
acomoterlas. Mejor se me entiende a mí de arar y cavar, podar y
ensarmentar las viñas, que de dar leyes ni de defender provincias
ni reinos” (II, 53).
And Don Quixote, even more damningly, exclaims,
at the end of the novel, “Ya soy enemigo de Amadís de Gaula y
de toda la infinita caterva de su linaje; ya me son odiosas todas las historias
profanas de la andante caballería; ya conozco mi necedad y el peligro
en que me pusieron haberlas leído; ya, por la misericordia de Dios,
escarmentando en cabeza propia, las abomino” (II, 74).
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If Don Quixote leaves everyone high and dry
at the end, going so far as to say in his will that he would disinherit his
niece should she marry anyone who reads chivalric novels, Cide Hamete is
just as forthright. He ends the book saying: “No ha sido otro mi deseo
que poner en aborrecimiento de los hombres las fingidas y disparatadas historias
de los libros de caballerías, que por las de mi verdadero don Quijote
van ya tropezando, y han de caer del todo, sin duda alguna” (II, 74).
In the end Don Quixote and Cide Hamete not only close the door on their own
excursions into fantasy and make-believe, but join in crusade against the
possibility that others might similarly indulge their imaginations.
What are we to make of the rather violent rupture
of the fictional illusion which the readers, as well as Don Quixote's companions,
have come to relish? Many readers have experienced these final words as an
affront, reacting as sadly to them as Don Quixote's friends did to his abdication
of the chivalric and the pastoral. Is Cervantes really taking here the
uncompromising moralist position that the chivalric is injurious to the soul
and should be banned from the republic? Is he making league with the figures
who have most brutally sought to turn Don Quixote from delusion, league,
finally, with the very Avellaneda whose limited imagination led him, in his
imitation Don Quijote, to consign his hero to the madhouse?
The question can be answered only when we realize
that by Part II Cervantes has stepped out of the dialectic in which he and
the theorists who so influenced him were caught. In Part II there no longer
is a commonsense world at all, and therefore, no norm against which to judge
the projections of the imagination. “Reality” and “fiction”
are, as Don Quixote himself seems to have realized, mirrors of one another.
Thus Don Quixote can say, early in Part II: “Hemos de matar en los gigantes
a la soberbia; a la envidia en la generosidad y buen pecho; a la ira, en
el reposado continente y quietud del ánimo, . . .”
(II, 8), suggesting a correspondence between inner states of disposition
and outer perceived realities. In a process that forces him again and again
to contemplate the insubstantiality of that outer reality once so easily
taken for granted, he exclaims, halfway through the novel: “todo este
mundo es máquinas y trazas, contrarias unas de otras” (II, 29).
And in the dream in the cave he can demonstrate the failure of sense data
to produce the sensation of reality on which the intellect must depend for
a correct apprehension of truth:
Despabilé los ojos, limpiémelos, y vi que no dormía,
sino que
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realmente estaba despierto; con todo esto me tenté la cabeza y los
pechos, por certificarme si era yo mismo el que allí estaba, o alguna
fantasma vana y contrahecha; pero el tacto, el sentimiento, los discursos
concertados que entre mí hacía, me certificaron que yo era
allí entonces el que soy aquí ahora (II, 23).
Cervantes' successful characters in Part II
recognize the insubstantiality of even the most commonly-accepted conventions.
Basilio, for example, wins his bride by playing the role of distraught lover
when she is about to be married to his richer rival. Since jilted lovers
are supposed to commit suicide in despair, no one suspects that he
is playing with a literary convention, and all agree, giving in to what seemed
his dying request, that he should be allowed to marry the one he loved. Less
successful characters fail to remain clear about the fictional quality of
the adventures they create, making the theme of the fooler fooled central
to Part II of Don Quixote. Over and over again characters get caught
when they fail fully to understand that all “reality” emerges from
within the perceiving subject.7
Reality is clearly shown in Part II to be simply
what each character makes it. A most interesting example of this can be seen
in the many transvestite episodes in Part II. These episodes demonstrate
the evanescent quality of what might otherwise pass for common sense, or
everyday reality. Men dress up as women in more scenes, both in and out of
playacting, than I need here recount.8 Women
behave in ways belonging to the stereotype of men: they kill their lovers
out of jealousy; dress as Turkish sailors to rescue fiances in captivity;
serenade lovers outside their windows; and more often than not ride their
horses (even in Master Peter's puppet show) “a horcajadas, como
hombres,” in contrast to Sancho, who, in the Clavileño episode,
rides side-saddle.
Other conventions are also challenged in Part
II: The illiterate Sancho, against nearly everyone's expectations, makes
an excellent governor; the supposedly pandering waiting lady Doña
Rodríguez is
7 It is
this profound, and I suspect, thoroughly iconoclastic insight that empowers
such characters as Chirinos and Chanfalla in “El retablo de las
maravillas” and Pedro de Urdemalas in Cervantes' play by the same name.
Chirinos and Chanfalla are master-magicians because they draw out into the
illusion of perceived reality images generated out of their subject's hidden
prejudices and fears.
8 For a fuller
accounting, see Arthur Efron's “Bearded
Waiting Women, Lovely Lethal Female Piratemen: Sexual Boundary Shifts in
Don Quixote, Part II,” in Cervantes
2 (1982), 155-64.
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herself victim of her bosses' mischief; the died-in-the-wool peasant Teresa
Panza gets a fancy for becoming a lady at court; the notorious bandit Roque
Guinart is in fact fair and just, and unhappy in the role in which he finds
himself. Anything is possible in Part II of Don Quixote because reality
has lost the hard surface it had in Part I when it belonged to the world
of pig gelders, highway men, police, goatherds, and inn prostitutes. Everything
in Part II boils down to what Don Quixote counseled Sancho when he was about
to become governor: “Has de poner los ojos en quien eres, procurando
conocerte a ti mismo, que es el más difícil conocimiento que
pueda imaginarse” (II, 42). Knowledge of reality, as Pedro de Urdemalas
as well as Persiles and Sigismunda also demonstrated, emerges only out of
the difficult and painful process of discovering and releasing all the hidden
fears and desires harbored in the dark recesses of the soul.
Don Quixote can in the end attack the books
of chivalry because they stood between him and the self-knowledge he most
ardently desired. Yet it is also true that only through giving himself over
to the fantasy they represented was he able to recognize his own true being
within and beyond the role of country gentleman that otherwise seemed so
uncomfortable. Cervantes can celebrate, in Don Quixote, and everything
else he wrote, the tremendous, transformative powers of the imagination,
showing again and again how the engagement in story —writing, listening
to, telling— effects change in those who participate in
it.9
It no longer seems strange that, late in his
life, Cervantes would boast to Apollo “Yo soy aquel que en la
invención excede.” Imagination, in the late Cervantes, is not
longer in conflict with the intellect. Both faculties, one based on information
provided through the senses, the other, on the soul's capacity to give that
information order and coherence, are radically free of convention, and therefore
subject to infinite change according to one's power of invention. The
9 The
change comes not in an alternate, fantasy world, but out of the release made
possible when the grip of one's lived “reality” is loosened enough
for its contingent, provisional, and alterable quality to become apparent.
Félix Martínez-Bonati explores in a profound and insightful
way the liberating effects made possible through entry into the
mock-communicative world of poetic discourse in Fictive Discourses and
the Structure of Literature: A Phenomenological Approach (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1981). See also my discussion of the
transforming effects of story-telling in Don Quixote in Beyond
Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
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final formulation thus overturns that of the Canon of Toledo and the
neo-Aristotelians for whom intellect took priority. The ultimate judgment
regarding the unfolding of a work of fiction or the unfolding of a life is
how faithfully and how powerfully it generates and marshalls the available
data in the service of the desire that motivates it. That desire, at the
root of all creation, is fiction's —and reality's— true generating
source, and it is that which must be clarified if the resultant work of art
is to be judged. When every phenomenon of the world of the senses is understood
to be the outpicturing of someone's imaginative projection, then truth becomes
a matter not of measuring “fiction” against the pre-established
norm provided by sense-data and the intellect, but of evaluating the product
in the light of the desire out of which it grew.
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