From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
11.1 (1991): 45-59.
Copyright © 1991, The Cervantes Society of America
The Waverley Series and Don Quixote: Manuscripts Found and
Lost
HILE they
even more frequently describe Fielding's or Sterne's influence on the Waverley
novels, Scott's critics are often interested in how his novels reflect Scott's
awareness of Cervantes. When he was only fourteen, Scott began a translation
of Don Quixote and he remained fond of that novel throughout his life,
as Jerome Mitchell reminds us in Scott, Chaucer and Medieval
Romance1. There are numerous references
to and quotations from Don Quixote in the Waverley series. Best known
of these are the title for the Waverley subseries “Tales of My
Landlord” and Scott's instructions to his readers in Waverley:
From the minuteness with which I have traced Waverley's pursuits, and the
bias which they unavoidably communicated to his imagination, the reader may
perhaps anticipate, in the following tale, an imitation of Cervantes. But
he will do my prudence injustice in the supposition. My intention is not
to follow the steps of that inimitable author, in describing such total
perversion of intellect as misconstrues the objects actually presented to
the senses, but that more common aberration
1 Jerome
Mitchell, Scott, Chaucer and Medieval Romance (Lexington, Ky,: University
Press of Kentucky, 1987), p. 11.
45
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from sound judgment, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their reality,
but communicates to them a tincture of its own romantic tone and
coloring2.
Edward Waverley is like Don Quixote in that
his worldview is the result of his reading, an unstructured education consisting
of
much curious, though ill-arranged and miscellaneous information. In English
literature he was master of Shakespeare and Milton, of our earlier dramatic
authors, of many picturesque and interesting passages from our old historical
chronicles, and . . . of Spenser, Drayton, and other poets who
have exercised themselves on romantic fiction. . . . In classical
literature, Waverley had made the usual progress and read the usual authors;
and the French had afforded him an almost exhaustless collection of memoirs,
scarcely more faithful than romances, and of romances so well written as
hardly to be distinguished from memoirs. The splendid pages of Froissart
. . . were among his chief favorites. . . . The
Spanish had contributed to his stock of chivalrous and romantic lore.
While secluded at Waverley Manor and left to educate himself, “young
Waverley drove through a sea of books, like a vessel without a pilot or
rudder”. Like Quixote, Waverley leaves home with this education as his
guide. His peculiar military career leads Waverley to the turning point when
“he felt himself entitled to say firmly, though perhaps with a sigh,
that the romance of his life was ended, and that its real history had now
commenced.”
Alexander Welsh maintains that Waverley is
“in some ways a youthful counterpart of Don
Quixote”3. Welsh regards Quixote not
as mad, but as merely foolish —arguing vigorously that the pursuit of
justice which Quixote symbolizes may be essentially a fool's blessed errand.
In turn, Waverley is certainly not deranged, but merely very young. Thus,
“an ‘aberration from sound judgment’ is not a lifetime affliction,
but an aspect of . . .
2 All
citations are from the Magnum Opus edition of the Waverley novels: 48 volumes
(Edinburgh: Cadell, 1829-1833). This is the final, authorized edition of
the series published under Scott's supervision and the first to include his
second series of prefaces.
3 Alexander Welsh,
The Hero of the Waverley Novels (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1963), pp. 10-11.
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youth” and “when the cure for quixoticism consists simply in growing
up, the nineteenth-century novel of disillusionment has been
founded”4.
Even so, critics have rarely seen Cervantes'
influence in Scott's novels anywhere but in some variation of the
quixote5. Little has been said about his
farther-ranging structural and narrative influence. Suggestions that these
exist have been typically rejected, as Welsh demonstrates in The Hero
of the Waverley Novels:
Scott's good sense saved him from associating too warmly with the Knight
of La Mancha. . . . The same good sense, however, restricted
Scott's understanding of Cervantes' parody. He does not seem to have understood
. . . the play between fiction and reality in Don Quixote.
He neither practices himself nor quite recognized the method of posing fiction
against fiction. . . . Instead, Scott's instinct was to
rationalize Cervantes' parody6.
Actually, Scott makes an extensive practice of setting up “the play
between fiction and reality,” as well as the play among levels of fiction.
Not only do we find an illusion-filled figure wandering through the novel's
landscape as a trace of Cervantine influence; but, more significantly, we
also find as evidence textuality foregrounded, layers of fictionality
superimposed, and the author portrayed as editor. Best representing Cervantes'
extensive influence are the Waverley prefaces.
4 Welsh,
p. 18.
5 Overlooking
Cervantes' influence on the Waverley series may lead to remarks such as David
Brown's:
Waverley was in a way Scott's prentice-work
as a novelist, however, and it is only right to criticize the novel's weakness
in some respects. Most obvious is Scott's reliance on his reading to supply
both his irony and his narrative style. The mock-Spenserian overtones, for
example, eventually become tiresome, and the Shakespearian allusions (though
usually well-handled) make the work overly self-conscious at points. Maria
Edgeworth quite properly took exception to the rather uneasy authorial addresses
to the reader that Scott inserted in Waverley: “They are like
Fielding, but for that reason we cannot bear that an author of such high
powers, of such original genius, should for a moment stoop to imitation.”
Sterne's influence in this respect is also apparent. In all these cases,
Scott is leaning too heavily on other writers —not an unusual fault
in a first novel, and one which he subsequently avoided in the best of his
work (From Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination [Boston: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 19791, p. 28).
6 Welsh, p. 15.
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They make extensive use of four narrative devices
found in Don Quixote: the journey and inn motifs, the found manuscript
device, and the strategy of self-conscious textual referentiality. But the
series adds a dimension to the questions raised by Don Quixote concerning
narrative authority, the nature of fiction, and the relationships between
life and art, appearance and reality by applying these questions to historical
fiction. For instance, we may hypothesize that the found manuscript device
and the historical novel link in the idea that history is itself a found
manuscript —the plot, action, and characterization having already been
acted out in historical events, then laid aside to await discovery and narrative
treatment by later transcribers, editors and others.
The motif of the journey, punctuated with inns
as resting points, provides the organizational basis for Don Quixote's
plot, character development, and narrative structure. Quixote travels to
seek adventure, and finds it in abundance. His journeys are the stuff of
which Cid Hamete Benengeli s manuscripts are made; Benengeli records and
comments upon Quixote's experiences, while transcribing the tales, ballads,
and adventures narrated to Quixote by other characters. The journey motif
brings these narrators together, while also providing narrative raw material.
The inn and its landlord give these travelers a stopping point where they
may encounter one another in person or through narrative, when the story
of one character is told to and by others. Ironically, Quixote finds little
rest at these inns —along with varied reactions from their keepers—
since he is sometimes at his maddest during these interludes, as his encounter
with Maritornes illustrates. But it is the first innkeeper encountered who
makes Don Quixote's journeys what they are: by dubbing him a knight, the
ceremony without which the transformation from Quixada/Quesada/Quexana to
Don Quixote could not have occurred, and by advising Quixote to equip himself
with money and clean shirts “in slim saddlebags” —information
which the books of chivalry apparently neglect.
The journey motif is also the organizational
device in the Waverley novels. The “Tales of My Landlord” subseries
opens with two epigraphs. The first is from Robert Burns:
| Hear, Land o' Cakes and brither Scots, |
| Frae Maidenkirk to Johnny Groat's, |
| If there's a hole in a' your coats, |
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| I rede ye tent it; |
| A chiel's among you takin' notes, |
| An' faith he'll print it! |
In these lines, the traveling narrator is a spy —one with a keen eye
for realistic detail, for ‘local color’, who could be anywhere,
recording anything. The found manuscript for this “chiel” is not
necessarily already on paper. The implication is that the subject of this
found manuscript might want to be cautious while the process of finding it
is at work. The second epigraph reads:
It is mighty well, said the priest; pray, landlord bring me those books,
for I have a mind to see them. With all my heart, answered the host; and
going to his chamber, he brought out a little cloke-bag, with a padlock and
chain to it, and opening it, he took out three large volumes, and some manuscript
papers written in a fine character. —Jarvis's Translation.
Quixote is enthusiastic about being the subject of transcription —and
so the found subject of a later manuscript intermittently lost and found:
As our new-fledged adventurer paced along, he kept talking to himself. “Who
knows,” he said, “whether in time to come, when the veracious history
of my famous deeds is made known, the sage who writes it, when he has set
forth my first sally in the morning, may not do it after this fashion?”
“Scarce had the rubicund Apollo spred o'er the face of the broad spacious
earth the golden threads of his bright hair, scarce had the little birds
of painted plumage attuned their notes to hail with dulcet and mellifluous
harmony the coming of the rosy Dawn, that, deserting the soft couch of her
jealous spouse, was appearing to mortals at the gates and balconies of the
Manchegan horizon, when the renowned knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, quitting
the lazy down, mounted his celebrated steed Rocinante and began to traverse
the ancient and famous Fields of Montiel,” which in fact he was actually
traversing7.
7 See
E. C. Riley, Cervantes' Theory of the Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1962). For discussion of the dilemma of the relationships between fact and
fiction, see Leonard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English
Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) and Jerry C. Beasley,
Novels of the 1740s (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1982).
Indeed, the idea of ‘factual fiction’ is the seminal dilemma faced
by the realist novel.
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Here is a manuscript waiting to be found, but other potential characters
may be more reluctant concerning their possible transcription.
Found manuscripts also appear in Cervantes'
novel, as the scene described in the epigraph
illustrates8. “A Story of Ill-Advised
Curiosity” provides another found manuscript; this tale is “written
in a very good hand” and left with the landlord in “an old valise
secured with a little chain.” The Landlord “mean[s] to return it
to the person who forgot the valise, books and papers here, for maybe he
will return some time or other.” Here is a primary example of a manuscript
separated from its unknown author, mislaid by its owner, found by someone
else, and then interpolated into the text of Don Quixote.
Cervantes' landlord is paralleled in Scott's
“Tales” by the landlord of the Wallace Inn, but it is not in his
possession that the tales are found. Instead, the subseries is named for
him because he is a link with Scott's tutor text and because he, like Cervantes'
landlord, provides and oversees a meeting place for potential taletellers.
There are tales told at the Wallace Inn: The Black Dwarf is one of
these. These are tales collected by Peter Pattieson during his own limited
ramblings: Old Mortality is one of those. But all of the tales in
the series are first transcribed by Pattieson and then edited by Jedediah
Cleishbotham from Pattieson's “papers [which] had been left in
[Cleishbotham's] care (to answer funeral and death-bed expenses).”
By sharing the journey and inn motifs with
Don Quixote, the Waverley novels demonstrate their own textuality.
The epigraph above provides the Waverley subseries with its title, while
establishing the series' textuality by referring to a novel outside its scope.
The novels attach themselves to their forebear or tutor text by referring
outside themselves to this text and by appropriating bits of Don Quixote
into themselves. But the most significant link between Don Quixote and
the Waverley novels is that both call attention to themselves as texts by
self-consciously exposing their own narrative machineries. This machinery
is encased in the found manuscript device. Don Quixote is superlatively
self-conscious in that it claims to be the result of
8 All
references to Don Quixote are to the Norton Critical Edition, which
is the Ormsby translation, revised, edited by Joseph R. Jones and Kenneth
Douglas (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981).
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discovery and editing by one person, translation by an anonymous Morisco,
and transcription by Cid Hamete
Benengeli9. Quixote's adventures are additionally
transcribed by others in other texts and remembered by the citizens of La
Mancha. By using the found manuscript device, the author of the book at hand
defers narrative authority and responsibility by attributing the production
of the original text to another writer —one who is at least one remove
from the reader because of this ploy. The more or less present author may
claim to be a compiler, editor or translator, but does not claim final narrative
responsibility for the text.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines
the verb find as “I. To come upon by chance or in the course
of events” and “II. To discover or attain by search or effort.”
These definitions give positional preference to the element of chance in
the activity of finding and well suit the Waverley prefaces and their
manipulation of the found manuscript device. Don Quixote's use of
this motif also stresses the accidental. But what happens to the concept
of the accidental when the found manuscript motif is located within a historical
novel? This question brings the second definition of find into
configuration with the first: the manuscript is both accidentally and
deliberately discovered, both an artifact and a link with the past. Obliquely,
a significant observation about the nature of historical discourse is made
and a hint that history itself may be described as a found manuscript is
given.
Further, it is important to realize that what
is found has been lost and can easily be lost again. In Don Quixote,
loss of a manuscript section stops the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance
in mid-battle at the end of Chapter 8, and more of Benengeli's manuscript
must be found before the battle can be resolved. In the Waverley prefaces,
an ongoing tension is created by the image of the ever-receding past, which
is inevitably slipping away from the best of antiquarians, historians, minstrels,
folklorists,
9 See
John J. Allen, Don Quixote: Hero or Fool? A Study in Narrative Technique
(Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1969); Anthony Close, The Romantic
Approach to “Don Quixote”: A Critical History of the Romantic
Tradition in “Quixote” Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1977); Howard Mancing, The Chivalric World of Don Quixote: Style,
Structure, and Narrative Technique (Columbia, Mo.: The University of
Missouri Press, 1982) as examples.
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storytellers, and historical novelists. Metaphorically, the loss of the past
may be seen as bringing any human group to the impasse of liminality, just
as the loss of the Cid's manuscript has arrested Don Quixote. The reader
cannot proceed in discovering what has already happened to Quixote without
being able to read what has been transcribed about him. The Waverley prefaces
suggest that human activity in the present is somehow impaired if we cannot
read the manuscript of the past.
Waverley authorial personae find manuscripts
in abundance. In the “Tales”, Jedediah Cleishbotham finds Peter
Pattieson's manuscripts among other papers. Laurence Templeton and Captain
Clutterbuck find and are given manuscripts to which they pay some editorial
attention; then, hoping for assistance, they send these on to the Author
of Waverley. Templeton's manuscript source is “the singular Anglo-Saxon
MS., which Sir Arthur Wardour preserves with such jealous care in the third
drawer of his cabinet, scarcely allowing anyone to touch it, and being himself
not able to read one syllable of its contents.” Thus, the manuscript
of Ivanhoe is found in the possession of a character in The
Antiquary, the Author of Waverley's second novel, and referred to the
Author for editing. Clutterbuck's manuscript source for The Monastery
and The Abbot —“a clasped paper book, about the size of
a regimental orderly-book, full . . . of memoranda”—
is given to him by a mysterious Benedictine monk. This text is also passed
on to the Author of Waverley for further revision. Dr. Dryasdust receives
the manuscript for Peveril of the Peak —a very boring
“narrative, running to the length of perhaps three hundred and thirty
pages in each volume”— through the mail. The manuscript reaches
Dryasdust “about a week before” its anonymous author does. Dryasdust
then identifies his visitor as the Author of Waverley, but also refers to
him as the Eidolon. The Greek term eidolon means “spectre or
image”; to this, English adds “phantom”. The term suggests
that authorial authority is a fading, illusory thing and that the author
is merely an image instead of a viable being. Woodstock's truly anonymous
narrator opens that novel's 1826 preface with this statement about found
manuscripts:
It is not to my purpose to inform my readers how the manuscripts of that
eminent antiquary, the Rev. J. A. Rochecliffe, D. D., came into my possession.
There are many ways in which such things happen, and it is enough to say
they were
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rescued from an unworthy fate, and that they were honestly come by.
Crystal Croftangry, the last of the Waverley narrative personae, is presented
with the most personal found manuscript in: that this one is a remnant of
his own family history and all that remains for him of a failed fortune.
By equipping itself with an intricately layered
preface, Don Quixote sets the model and thus becomes a found manuscript
for the Waverley series. The layers include title and dedication page, price
declaration, corrector's statement, royal letter of permission to publish,
dedication to the Duke of Bejar, prologue, and preliminary verses. The prologue
establishes the problematic image of the author as stepfather to the text,
and discusses the problem of writing prefaces. So difficult is this task
that a trusted friend appears to help Don Quixote's first-person narrator
write the preface, thus facilitating (the narrator tells us) the novel's
completion. The friend maintains that the prologue already exists in a certain
way and needs only to be found. In this case, the activity of finding is
that of bricolage: all the current author has to do is to lift bits from
standard texts and piece them together in the pattern already established
by literary tradition and reader expectation. According to this formula,
Horace, Holy Scripture, Cato, mythology, Ovid, Homer, Virgil, Julius Caesar,
Plutarch, Leon the Hebrew, Fonseca, Aristotle, Saint Basil, and Cicero are
all standing by, waiting to fulfill specific preface functions. Reference
to them, as long as it coincides with reader expectation, is all that is
needed to establish narrative authority and to produce an impressive
prologue.
This description forms a powerful parallel
to the scene in the “Minutes of Sederunt of the General Meeting of the
Shareholders Designing to Form a Joint-Stock Company, United for the Purpose
of Writing and Publishing the Class of Works Called the ‘Waverley
Novels’” a situation calling together almost all of the Waverley
narrative personae. Here, the Eidolon (also called the Preses on this occasion)
describes an invention by which “at the expense of a little mechanism,
some part of the labor of composing these novels might be saved by the use
of steam.” Already, division of labor is being used in series production,
with each authorial persona assigned a role in this monumental task. But
now, technology can go a step farther in generating the generic Waverley
text:
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Gentlemen, it is to be presumed that this mechanical operation can only apply
to those parts of the narrative which are at present composed out of
commonplaces, such as the love-speeches of the hero, the description of the
heroines person, the moral observations of all sorts, and the distribution
of happiness at the conclusion of the piece. Mr. Dousterswivel has sent me
some drawings, which go far to show that, by placing the words and phrases
technically employed on these subjects in a sort of framework . . .
and changing them by such a mechanical process as that by which weavers of
damask alter their patterns, many new and happy combinations cannot fail
to occur, while the author, tired of pumping his own brains, may have an
agreeable relaxation in the use of his fingers.
Here is another sort of bricolage: a text made up of set pieces from other
texts in the series to which the resulting bricolage will belong. A standard
critical barb aimed at the Waverley novels is being deflected here; critics
characterize the series by its wooden, intrusive set pieces. But something
more is also at work. While the friendly advisor in the preface to Don
Quixote recommends that its authorial persona look to earlier authors'
texts for immediately portable pieces out of which to assemble a preface,
the Preses suggests in the preface to The Betrothed that future Waverley
novels themselves should look to past Waverley novels for these useful bits,
thus creating a circular, perfectly self-referential text.
Don Quixote and the Waverley novels
share another link: each underscores its own referentiality and its own status
as text through copious use of source materials and citations. In Don
Quixote, these sources are themselves literary: ballads, poems, and plays
the contemporary audience was familiar with and —first in importance—
the books of chivalry which the novel borrows from and professes to attack.
All of these sources are satirical targets in the novel, but they all exert
influence upon Quixote's behavior in the textual present and account for
his vision of the past. For the Waverley series, source materials are ballads,
poems, oral narratives, and historical texts, all of which create the layered,
embedded narratives that constitute what this series means by historical
fiction, historiography, and, indeed, all forms of historical discourse.
These are the found manuscripts that Scott's novels make use of and, in using
them in a particularly self-conscious manner, the series describes historical
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discourse as referential, eclectic, and inextricably involved in its own
self-conscious textuality.
Herbert Butterfield regards historical fiction
as an act of resurrection10. In a sense,
historical fictions resuscitate a once-lived past, revitalizing the lost
text and reviving its characters and their motivations. But a false immediacy
is suggested because what is resurrected, what is found are not in fact past
events themselves, but merely the text of past events. The manuscript to
be found is always already an artifact, whether written or otherwise inscribed
in stone, paint, or memory. Further, the Waverley novels as historical fictions
demonstrate a remarkable urgency in their search for the lost manuscripts
of the past: the human past as manuscript is ephemeral and constantly receding,
determined to lose itself or to remain lost. David Brown remarks about The
Antiquary's “characters” own obsession with history as a
subject”11; this anxiety permeates the
entire Waverley series. The historical urgency of some of the narrative personae
is ironically underscored by the apparent detachment of others, as evidenced
by the latter's cynicism concerning their own found manuscripts and their
sniping remarks on the subject among themselves.
However history is evaluated, memory
—personal or shared— constitutes a significant sort of found manuscript
in the Waverley prefaces, and one that is particularly vulnerable to loss.
Scott's critics usually like those Waverley novels that are referentially
founded in personal memory better than those that use more ‘bookish’
source materials12. They particularly favor
the novels that draw on Scott's personal memory, memory that falls within
the boundaries of familial oral tradition (e.g., the “sixty years”
of Waverley's subtitle). This time period includes the life experiences
of immediate generations who can narrate these events to the young.
In Waverley's first chapter, The Author
comments about the vulnerability of memory. He points out that the subtitle's
“sixty years since” are rapidly increasing in number, causing the
date of Waverley's action to recede farther into the past. Time's
10 Herbert
Butterfield, The Historical Novel: An Essay (Cambridge, Mass.: The
University Press, 1924), preface.
11 David Brown,
Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination (Boston: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 63.
12 John O. Hayden,
“Introduction,” Scott: The Critical Heritage (New York:
Barnes and Noble, 1970), p. 4.
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passing weakens the vigor of shared memory and increases the need for the
aid and supplement of transcription. The passage of time underscores
Waverley's status as a historical novel and defines the text as vulnerable
to this process in the same manner as are the events and characters which
it attempts to protect from erasure. Waverley's “Introductory”
deals with this dilemma in two seemingly contradictory ways: by describing
human nature as universal and constant and by ironically undermining this
claim. If human nature does not vary with time and place, then it stands
outside the limits of history and constitutes a significant sort of permanent
found manuscript, impervious to the erasures of time. In this case, the
historical novel too partakes of this universality and its task of preserving
an ephemeral past through its representations is not quite such a desperate
one. In fact, the Author suggests:
By fixing, then, the date of my story Sixty Years before this present 1st
November, 1805, I would have my readers understand, that they will meet in
the following pages neither a romance of chivalry nor a tale of modern manners;
that my hero will neither have iron on his shoulders, as of yore, nor on
the heels of his boots, as is the present fashion of Bond Street; and that
my damsels will neither be clothed “in purple and in pall,” like
the Lady Alice of the old ballad, nor reduced to the primitive nakedness
of modern fashion at a rout. From this my choice of an era the understanding
critic may further presage that the object of my tale is more a description
of men than manners. . . . I must be understood to have resolved
to . . . [throw] the force of my narrative upon the characters
and passions of the actors; —those passions common to men in all stages
of society, and which alike agitated the human heart, whether it throbbed
under the steel corslet of the fifteenth century, the brocaded coat of the
eighteenth, or the blue frock and white dimity waistcoat of the present
day*. . . . It is from the great book of Nature, the same
through a thousand editions, whether of black-letter, or wire-wove and
hot-pressed, that I have venturously essayed to read a chapter to the public.
Here the image of the great book of Nature suggests a found manuscript of
yet another kind. This one demands especially careful transcription and allows
for very little editorial textual play. It is the text which inscribes all
others, with any given historical event as merely a particular manifestation
of human
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nature's constants. But the Author cannot leave this pronouncement alone.
He immediately undermines it with this footnote:
*Alas! that attire, respectable and gentlemanlike in 1805, or thereabouts,
is now as antiquated as the Author of Waverley has himself become since that
period! The reader will please to fill up the costume with an embroidered
waistcoat of purple velvet or silk, and a coat of whatever color he pleases.
Just as the cultural artifacts of fashion change with time, the historical
novel itself is subject to the boundaries of “manners” which the
Author describes.
Tangential to the limits of memory,
Waverley's Magnum Opus preface takes up the problem of the unrecallable
source. But here, the narrator expresses despair over these limits, as he
describes his situation:
I think I have seen some account of the real estate of the transaction, and
of the machinery by which the wizard worked his wonders; but whether in a
book, or a pamphlet I am uncertain. I remember one passage particularly to
this purpose.
If memory is itself the reference or the repository of source material, then
it empowers narrative authority, a category always in question in a text
based on a found manuscript. Two types of metaphorical found manuscripts
are juxtaposed here: that from which the fictional author or editor creates
her/his text and that which is found in memory and historical record.
Both types are called into question by the
Waverley authorial personae. The found manuscripts of memory and historical
event are vulnerable to the erasures of time. Even the definitive found
manuscript of “the great book of Nature” is not impervious to this
process. The Author of Waverley undermines the found manuscript motif as
it is modeled after Don Quixote. In his letter to Captain Clutterbuck
in the preface to The Monastery, the Eidolon writes:
One walks on the sea shore, and a wave casts on land a small cylindrical
trunk or casket, containing a manuscript much damaged with seawater, which
is with difficulty deciphered, and so forth. Another steps into a chandler's
shop, to purchase a pound of butter, and behold! the waste-paper on which
it is laid is the manuscript of a cabalist. A third is so fortunate as to
obtain from a woman who lets lodgings, the curious contents of an antique
bureau, the property of a
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PATRICIA S. GASTON |
Cervantes |
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deceased lodger. All these are certainly possible occurrences; but I know
not how, they seldom occur to any Editors save those of your country.
The Author does not identify his own work as based on such luck, though he
claims that status for Cleishbotham's manuscript; nor does he mention Don
Quixote here. Instead, he refers the reader and the Captain to “the
History of Automathes”, “Adventures of a Guinea”, and
“Adventures of an Atom” and continues:
At least I can answer for myself, that in my solitary walks by the sea, I
never saw it cast ashore anything but dulse and tangle, and now and then
a deceased starfish; my landlady never presented me with any manuscript save
her cursed bill; and the most interesting of my discoveries in the way of
waste-paper was finding a favorite passage of one of my own novels wrapt
round an ounce of snuff. No, Captain, the funds from which I have drawn my
power of amusing the public, have been bought otherwise than by fortuitous
adventure. I have buried myself in libraries, to extricate from the nonsense
of ancient days new nonsense of my own.
The Eidolon situates Clutterbuck in the country
of “utopia” and so exposes —or at least threatens to expose—
the Captain's essential fictionality. Inversely, this threat underscores
the desire of the Waverley narrative personae for independent lives and for
escape from the boundaries of the preface. But it also turns the found manuscript
motif back upon itself in a curious, informative way: being an extension
of a literary tradition, any later text is, in a very real sense, a found
manuscript; being grounded in historical event, the same is true for any
form of historical discourse —including the historical novel. The manuscript
may be found in a variety of hiding places: in personal or communal memory,
oral tradition, ballad, historical records, architecture, artifacts. But
the finding will not always be through luck, though this characteristic is
definitional and established by the experience of numerous Waverley personae.
According to the Eidolon, finding is more typically a result of method and
diligence —characteristics also established in defining find.
He implies that behind all of the manipulations of text and narrative
responsibility attached to the found manuscript device, there is still the
hand of an author who in the end accounts for the artistry of a particular
text.
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| 11.1 (1991) |
The Waverley Series and Don Quixote |
59 |
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The point of juxtaposing the found manuscript
motif and the historical novel is this: history itself can be seen as a found
manuscript, one created by many hands. It is a manuscript continually in
danger of being forever lost. History requires fiction to salvage the text
of the past, fill in its blanks, and make it legible to the general reader.
For, according to the numerous authorial personae in Don Quixote and
the Waverley novels, something of immeasurable value is lost with the permanent
loss of this text, however partial and fragmented it may by necessity be.
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Digitized with
the help of Contessa Marion |
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