Dunn, Shaping Experience, Narrative Strategies in Cervantes

Shaping Experience: Narrative Strategies in CervantesAuthor(s): Peter N. DunnReviewed work(s):Source: MLN, Vol. 109, No. 2, Hispanic Issue (Mar., 1994), pp. 186-203Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2904775 .

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Shaping Experience: Narrative Strategies in Cervantes

Peter N. Dunn

I One of the most influential books to appear in our time on the history of the novel is The Rise of the Novel by Ian Watt.1 Watt's book placed that rise in the land of Defoe and Fielding; consequently, since 1957 hispanists have been raising their voices, more in anger than in sorrow. More recently, historians of literature as well as novelists have increasingly come to agree with the protesters.2 So we hispanists can now look back with satisfaction, knowing that the abducted infant genre, the novel, has finally been restored to its rightful parent, like the heroines of La gitanilla and of La ilustre fregona. Our story has a happy ending, as all such stories should. Our champions have returned with the prize, and the prize is the bright, shining clich6 which says that Cervantes is the father of the modern novel. After so happy and so providential a conclusion, it would surely be unmannerly not to bask in the steady glow of that cliche. Even so, some scholars, have puzzled and debated over its authen- ticity: is Don Quixote really a novel? What should be the appropriate generic description, not only of Don Quixote, but of all the various prose works of Cervantes? Should they be classified as novel or as romance?

1 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957). 2 The tide turned with David Grossvogel, The Limits of the Novel, (Ithaca, NY:

Cornell UP, 1968); Robert Alter, Partial Magic The Novel as a Self conscious Genre (Berkeley: California UP, 1978); Walter L. Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1981).

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It is generally recognized that several of the Novelas exemplares as well as the Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda are composed in the tradition of romance. So how do we explain the fact that the "father of the novel", who wrote the supreme parody of romance, persisted in writing romances? There have been various attempts to answer this question during our century. In the early decades, scholars could confidently assert that the so-called "idealist" stories were composed relatively early, whereas the so-called "realist" ones be- longed to a later, more mature period.3 It is not difficult to identify the prejudices that underlie that argument, and the biographical model that sustains it. The Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617) caused the greatest embarrassment, being a full blown romance unredeemed by parody. It has been suggested that Cervantes began the Persiles as early as the 1590s, and could not bring himself to abandon it, although the antiromance of Don Quixote gives proof of how greatly his judgment had matured. Other critics have held that it was the work of his declining years.4 So this large, expansive and complex work has had the distinction of being dismissed as a prod- uct of Cervantes's immaturity and also of his dotage, asjuvenilia and also as senilia. These examples show clearly that the question of genre has been hopelessly entangled with the equally obstinate problem of the chronology of the works in prose.

Many years ago I suggested that La senora Cornelia, which is one of the least read of the Novelas exemplares (it is usually dismissed as naive and therefore an early piece) was neither naive nor early. On the contrary, it shows much of the mature, serene, and deliberately playful implausibility that we find in the romantic comedies with which Shakespeare graced his later years.5 A little later, Ruth El Saffar in her book Novel to Romance tried to turn the whole critical tradition around, suggesting that a chronology of the Novelas ejemplares could be based on Cervantes' increasing detachment from the postulates of documentary realism.6 That did not work very well, so it was not unreasonable of Edward Riley to propose, with a fine

3 Abundant documentation can be found in Dana B. Drake, Cervantes: A Critical Bibliography (Blacksburg: Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 1968).

4 Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce summarizes the conjectures on dating the Persiles in his ed. (Madrid: Castalia, 1969), 14-16.

5 "Las Novelas Ejemplares", in Suma cervantina, ed.J. B. Avalle-Arce and E. C. Riley (London: Tamesis, 1973). The essays in this collection were written in the late 1960's.

6 Novel to Romance A Study of Cervantes' 'Novelas ejemplares' (Baltimore: Johns Hop- kins UP, 1974).



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sense of compromise, that the Novelas are all more or less novel, and all more or less romance.7

Beneath most of these debates lie several unexamined assumptions and judgments of value. First, that 'novel' can be distinguished from 'romance' by formal criteria, and that the two are not merely different but opposed. Second, that 'novel' is not merely different from 'romance', but is superior to it. Third, that this superiority can be demonstrated by its place in an evolutionary sequence. Fourth, that 'novel' is therefore modern and progressive, whereas 'romance' is archaic and regressive. The positivist bias in all of these suppositions is plain to see. We also find associated with them the simplistic notion that to parody, as Cervantes parodied certain romances in Don Quixote, means to reject the object of parody.8 All of these assumptions should be discarded. And for the present I propose to put aside questions of genre. I believe that the study of the typology of the narrative structures will prove to be more rewarding and that, in any case, such study should logically precede the attempt to draw generic distinctions. I shall therefore attend to the patterns of plot.

I could perhaps have introduced this topic by saying that it deals with Cervantes's variations on a theme. More precisely, I would like to examine his variations on a form; but with the understanding that forms implicate themes, and ideologies as well, since forms are a principal vehicle by which themes and ideologies are encoded and articulated. The more traditional they are, the more heavily such forms are likely to be encoded.

One of the pleasures of reading Cervantes' writings is to be found in following the line of the story. By this I do not mean just the succession of events, one thing following another, but rather those events seen as if moving in space, tracing a trajectory, changing direction, dividing and following separate paths, ascending or de- scending, in gentle or abrupt courses, in lines that may be direct or sinuous. Aristotle and Horace both compare the structure of a poem to a living creature with its necessary limbs, and they both employ visual imagery that is no longer fashionable when speaking

7 E. C. Riley, "Cervantes: A Question of Genre", in Mediaeval and Renaissance Stud- ies 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 Literatures, 1981).

8 See especially: Margaret Rose, Parody/Metafiction (London: Croom Helm, 1979); Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), and the work of the GROUPAR at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario.



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of literary works. We eschew such analogies as being impressionistic and naive. But in renouncing what Paul Julian Smith has called "pictorialism"9 and excluding it from our own practice, we must be careful not to ignore something which in past times may have been important and even essential to both authors and readers. The regu- larity with which writers repeat Horace's exhortation to avoid put- ting together a monstrous aggregation of parts?1 was powerfully canonical, but its prescriptive force is supported by examples in the practice of literature, in both writing and reading, of what we would have to call visualizing activity. We encounter this practice most obviously in emblem literature, which enjoyed tremendous prestige all over Europe until it was swallowed up in the nineteenth century by political cartoons and commercial advertizing. This prestige de- rived from the joining of visual with verbal, text and image, general situation and particular embodiment, aphorism with conceptual- ized space, enigma with physical representation. In Cervantes's own writing we find a memorable example of the writer's awareness of the shape of his narrative in the comment by the dog Cipi6n that if Berganza continues to tell his story as he is doing, it will come to look like an octopus.1l

In recent decades we have not paid much attention to the forms of narrative structures, preferring to note the play of rhetoric, or to locate the narrative voice, or the gaps, the indeterminacies, the internal contradictions that invite deconstruction.l2 But forms have power. A student of Arthurian romance must still take account of the interlacing design, and of the author's comparison of that design with a tapestry. Cervantes often gives the impression of letting the narrative develop as it will, growing from within according to some hidden genetic code. I propose to discuss this element of design in Cervantes, this exercise of the spatial imagination, but not from a purely formalist perspective, and not as the practice of craft for craft's sake.

John Jay Allen has written on "The Providential World of Cer-

9 Paul Julian Smith, Writing in the Margin: Spanish Literature of the Golden Age (Ox- ford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

10 Epistula ad Pisones, de arte poetica, 1-5. 11 "Cipi6n.-Quiero decir que la sigas de golpe, sin que la hagas que parezca pulpo, segun la vas afiadiendo colas." Novelas Ejemplares, ed. Harry Sieber (Madrid: Catedra, 1986), II, 319. All references are to this edition.

12 For the place of 'gaps and indeterminacies' in the process of reading, see Wolfgang Iser, "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach", in The Im- plied Reader (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1974), 274-294.



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vantes' Fiction".13 To talk of the concept of "providence" in fiction is not just to talk of how the readers' moral sense or their desire for poetic justice may be satisfied. If we read enough seventeenth century fiction we meet many cases of the supposed operation of divine providence: shipwrecks, captivity, multiple coincidences, sudden re- versals of fortune, can all be explained, or explained away, with a pious reference to los inescrutables designios de Dios, "the inscrutable designs of God". Of course, the "inscrutable designs of God" are nothing but the only too scrutable designs of the novelist, and they can sometimes be very clumsy ones. Epic and romance would be inconceivable without this awareness of a telos: the sense of mission or purpose in the life of the protagonist, the presence of a guiding hand behind apparently chance events are so common that we can identify them as generic markers. In the hero's life, chance equals providence. This proposition is an ideological-structural cliche that Cervantes adopts for purposes of design, in Don Quixote, in Persiles y Sigismunda, and elsewhere. But he has a lot of fun with it, as when Don Quixote lets Rocinante choose which road to follow, and when- ever the knight declares a situation to be an adventure reserved for him alone. So, providence and novelistic design are one. Allen's project was to show that Cervantes created a meaningful universe in his fiction, and mine is to examine some of the significant forms with which that fictional universe is constructed. We could sum this up by saying that when any character testifies to the designios del cielo, we find that the lexical doublet designio and diseno denote two as- pects of the same: the plot is the economy of providence.

Let us begin with Don Quixote. In the first five chapters of Part One, the protagonist sets out, then returns home, battered. After a few days, he sets out again with a companion, and returns again after a longer lapse of time. In Part Two, he sets out once more, but his journey takes him much farther before he comes home in defeat. Three journeys out, three returns. Obviously, Cervantes has adopted one of the oldest plot types in recorded literature, and one of the most persistent: the hero sets out, passes through trials and adventures, and returns home with his task completed. Here is an example of whatJoseph Campbell called the 'monomyth'.14 Within this plot is one of the basic narrative structures: the journey of the hero which ends either with his return, or with his arrival in a new

13 In Thought 55 (1980), 184-95. 14 The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1949).



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land. If it is in a new land, that land becomes his home and the land of his posterity, and since that posterity includes his audience, the new home is both structurally and ideologically equivalent to a return. Homer's Odyssey and Vergil's Aeneid are both highly elaborated forms of this basic narrative, in the heroic mode. This structure, like all such structures, can be exploited in order to transgress the norms that it denotes. In a nonheroic mode, the protagonist may return with no greater prize than a knowledge of his own foolish- ness: such is the parable of the Prodigal Son, a very economical version, pared right down to the bare line of the plot. It is not difficult to recall works of literature from all periods that are mod- elled on this journey pattern: Tom Jones, Pilgrim's Progress, Gulliver's Travels, Candide, Lolita, to name a few. In outline, this is the proto- typically heroic pattern of narrative. A son sets out with a purpose: to avenge his father's death, or an insult, perhaps. Or a champion sets out to retrieve a precious stolen object that symbolizes the iden- tity of the community, and which will make him into a splendid representative of the community when he returns. This same basic structure has characterized both epic and romance; the first of these, epic, linking its narrator, its hero and its audience in a circle of mutual approbation and reinforcement; the second, romance, reflecting, originally, an aristocratic caste's fantasies about itself and its world.15 When Aristotelian theorists of literature claimed that prose fiction may be classified as a kind of epic, they sanctioned a reading of Don Quixote for the traces of both epic and romance that are in it, and Cervantes plays with this ambivalence: a pretty example of the intertextuality of theory and praxis.

Don Quixote returns from his first sally, not in victory but in defeat, and he realizes that he should have had a squire. He took up his role so hastily, and mastered its codes so incompletely that he has to return in order to begin again; this underscores the comic nature of both the hero and his narrative. Then, if we focus on his sorry state and set it against the narrative paradigms, we see that he has brought back no prize, no magic ring or golden fleece, no secret

15 But heroes of medieval romance often begin their story not knowing who they are. And Fredric Jameson has pointed out that many heroes of romance approach their tasks naively, unaware of what is required of them: this, too, is relevant to a reading of Don Quijote. See his "Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre," in New Literary History 7 (1975), 135-63. This article is valuable for its corrective critique of Northrop Frye's idea of a "natural" world, and of the good/evil dichotomy in Frye's widely read The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976).



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wisdom or news from the end of the world. His journey and return is over in double quick time. Again, the drastic brevity of this heroic cycle is a comic distortion of the paradigm. But if we read this part as the first of a sequence of three sallies, each one being of longer duration and larger range, the non heroic mode is even more marked, as each defeat is more severe than the one before, and brings deeper humiliation. In the end, the protagonist does pro- duce the jewel, the one that is reserved for him alone; his lucidity, his desire for self knowledge. By a bitter irony, it is a prize that all those around him reject. Moreover, he is unable to achieve it as long as he wears the persona of Don Quixote. So we encounter a double paradox: first, the prize is reserved for the new persona, Alonso Quijano, not for the questing Don Quijote; and yet, he could not have attained that lucidity and the courage to die had he not undertaken the mad adventure of being Don Quixote. Cervantes will not let us resolve this ambivalence, as he relentlessly trivializes the heroic endeavor and demythologizes the grand mythic structure. When our hero finally reaches the shore of the Mediterranean, that turbu- lent arena of jealous gods where ancient heroes were tested and where they proved themselves, he is merely dwarfed by the world of commerce and the engines of modern war. When we look back to the first sally, then, we see that it signals comic absurdity, but also something else. It foreshadows a peculiarly modern mutation of the hero: the protagonist of a story that has no end, or has an end without closure, a life that comes to nothing, the pathetic journey of one who never arrives, or of one who returns, but with a handful of dust.

The narrative pattern of journey, quest, ordeals, and return im- poses a powerful teleology upon any fiction that embodies it. The ending is seen to be providential; but beyond that, it serves to justify everything that leads towards it including, of course, the beginning from which it all started. The story does not simply stop; it is the end in a purposive sense, a consummation, the telos or final cause that embraces the beginning and reintegrates it, as the hero is reinte- grated, full of splendor and rare experience into the world he had left behind, and he enriches that world with his meaning.

There is a special moment in the hero's career when he and the audience are made aware that his personal trajectory is inscribed in the vaster destiny to which he is subject, and which is encoded in the cyclical form of the plot. That moment is the descent into the underworld, and it occupies a mathematically central position in the



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narrative of both the Odyssey and the Aeneid. This visit to the dead is where the hero learns not just about his personal destiny, but about his place, his instrumentality in the transcendent scheme that the epic attempts to frame. It is there that the hero sees himself in the timeless perspective of his culture and his race, and draws the psy- chic charge that he needs in order to bear that knowledge. Aeneas in Hades consults the shade of his father Anchises in order to have the future revealed. He learns that the lost generations that per- ished in Troy will be redeemed in the new empire he is going to found on the soil of Italy. The lost city of Troy will be reborn in the everlasting empire; from the Trojan holocaust will spring, like a new phoenix, the Pax Romana.

In Don Quixote there are two moments, one in each part, when the protagonist is withdrawn from all contact with other people. The second of these, when he descends into the Cave of Montesinos, is the one that most obviously recalls the epic paradigm. An earlier virtuoso performance, in which he invents the story of a knight plunging into the lake of boiling pitch (DQI, 50), is a reminder that chivalric romances also contain marvellous adventures under ground. But what distinguishes the vision in the cave is the knight's encounter with the heroes of old, as Odysseus and Aeneas had conversed with the shades of their comrades in arms.16 Now, here are Durandarte, Montesinos, and other worthies from the world of chivalric fantasy waiting in their underworld for a liberator to come and release them 'in the fulness of time.' The myth buried in the romance allows Cervantes to play with the prophetic mode. Don Quixote's self proclaimed mission from the outset is to be a savior, a liberator. But in chapter 22 of Part Two he descends and resurfaces empty handed. We may detect a sarcastic parallel with chapter 22 of the Part One, where he performed his one and only successful act of liberation: freeing the convicted criminals. So, setting our knight's performance within the traditional pattern of a heroic career frames a critique.

The descent of the ancient epic hero into Hades takes him to the core of the cosmos, beyond time, to the world as idea and purpose. It is also ajourney to the center of the self which will be called upon to embody the idea and the purpose when he returns to the world of

16 A powerful version of this heroic story occurs in the Gospel of Nicodemus and other apocryphal Christian writings that tell of Christ's descent into Hell, where he freed the Hebrew prophets and patriarchs, a story that remained part of Christian lore as the "harrowing of Hell."



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action. The descent is therefore a nodal point in the epic structure, where time and eternity, the linear and the cyclical intersect, where the self can contemplate its destiny. In brief, it is where the epic's ideological baggage is most strongly encoded in the structure. Now, if we situate the descent into the Cave of Montesinos in that same pattern, we find no opening out into eternity and purpose, but the very opposite; a complex and absurd image of unreality, a frozen temporality and frustrated purpose, that form the perfect emblem for Don Quijote's mythic universe. Cervantes' powerfully encoded narrative typology has served a double purpose: it offers yet another ground on which to critique his protagonist, of course, but as we accept this offer we are compelled to question our conventional identification of the heroic enterprise with that very typology.

I would like now to shift our attention to another powerful subtext in Don Quijote, also of ancient lineage, namely the myth of origin. Quite early in Part One (in 1.11, to be precise) our hero delivers his speech on the Age of Gold, the Graeco-Roman counter- part of the Garden of Eden. It is the same myth that both troubles and amuses the spectator of Shakespeare's As You Like It and The Tempest. Don Quijote's monologue expresses his desire to link the practice of chivalry with a myth of origin and primordial innocence. Its egalitarian rhetoric serves him as the moral basis for heroic action, the impulse to knighthood. It also is the key to the secondary narratives that take shape around him. It is the mirage that draws Gris6stomo and Marcela towards tragic self destruction, in the irrec- oncilable claims of absolute freedom and absolute passion. What is usually overlooked is its relevance not only to the protagonist and to the pastoral episode it leads to, but to all the secondary narratives that form themselves in the presence of the hero: Cardenio and Luscinda, Fernando and Dorotea, as well as El curioso impertinente. These are all stories of beautiful young people who, at the start, appear to have everything: they have wealth, standing in the community, respect, as well as youth, beauty, and love. And yet they all move into varying degrees of mishap and frustration. So the decline from original perfection described in Don Quixote's declamation upon the Age of Gold and his lament for our Age of Iron is the paradigm for all the various fictive worlds that are to come in this book. At the same time, as Cardenio and Dorotea narrate their lives they make their experience intelligible to themselves and to their listeners by emplotting it in the mode of romance.



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II

Everything that I have designated as the pattern of romance-a journey, trials endured, reward attained, restoration of original order, or attainment of new integration-all of this can be found elsewhere in the works of Cervantes. It most obviously describes the ground plan of Persiles, but it is also susceptible of the most intrigu- ing and unexpected variations. It is easily identified in such stories as La gitanilla and La ilustrefregona, where the high born young man voluntarily abases himself in order to prove himself worthy of the humble girl who is eventually discovered to be his social equal. In these cases, where desire is put to various tests and purified, the journey is a descent into a lower social or moral world of disorder and temptation. The gypsy society of La gitanilla is, from this stand- point, a demonic subworld, made alluring by reason of its perverse freedoms; an amorphous world, one in which there is ceaseless movement with no point of arrival, no terminus, and through which the hero must pass unsullied, surrendering his aristocratic personal name for the generic one of Andres (andros, 'man') Caballero. He emerges from this lower region of trial and temptation bearing the prize, the priceless Preciosa, and is finally restored to his family and to his distinguished name.17

The novella El celoso extremeno offers some interesting variations and innovations on this pattern, which is easily missed. The journey motif is still present, but it appears in two parts. First, the young Carrizales leaves the home of his noble parents and squanders his inheritance, "como un otro Pr6digo", as the narrator says. Next, he goes to the Indies to repair his fortune, which he does with such success that he returns to Seville loaded with gold ingots. On the passage out, we are told that he suffered a change of heart and resolved to become a new man. Here Cervantes employs the potential of the journey to plot a change in the self as well as to mark stages in the pursuit of external goals. But this transformation is full of irony; the hidalgo has gone from extreme to extreme, from spend-thrift to nouveau riche, a change which is not a deep transformation at all. He is immensely rich in barren metal but no richer in spirit and character. When Carrizales returns to Spain he finds that, unlike the Prodigal Son, he has no surviving friends or relatives. His

17 For a similar reading, see Robert ter Horst, "Une Saison en Enfer: La gitanilla", in Cervantes 5 (1985), 87-127.



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return leads to no recognition and no reintegration. Instead, he attempts literally to build a new life, which is given form in the house, the dream palace and monument to folly that encloses the rest of the narrative.

This extraordinary house, closed to every direction except up- wards to the sky, and the marriage of the old man to a child wife whom he hopes to keep from knowledge of the world, inevitably incites an ingenious young layabout to find a way to break in, for the hell of it, and to attempt to seduce the young wife. The greater part of the novela consists of the preparations for Carrizales's marriage (this, in good bourgeois fashion, is undertaken in order to secure a future for his wealth), the construction of the house, and the scheming of the young seducer. All this is a matter of a mere few months, whereas the journeys and the half century of life that precede it are summarized in a few brief paragraphs at the beginning. It is easy to overlook the structural relevance of the few paragraphs of personal prehistory, because of our fascination with everything that follows, the comic details of the household, the tragic folly of the old man's defiance of nature, and Loaysa's plans to penetrate this quasi nunnery, in which old Carrizales and the eunuch doorkeeper are the only permitted evidences of the male gender. As experi- enced readers, we may well be holding our breath as we contemplate the task Cervantes has set himself, which is nothing less than to retell that ancient chestnut, the farce of the old man and the young girl (exemplified in Chaucer's "Marriage of January and May"), to dare to acknowledge its tragic potential, and to dare to humanize it against the force and the grain of the bawdy fabliau tradition from which he lifted it.

And yet those introductory paragraphs, schematic as they are, are essential-the more schematic the more necessary. They are effec- tive precisely because they reduce Carrizales's life to a significant outline in the form of the quest journey of romance, but thwarting our expectation that he will achieve ripeness, or anything valuable, in the fulness of time. The noble tree of romance is here withered to a dry twig. So Cervantes's reversal of the normal proportions between journey and arrival, his substitution of connivance, disrup- tion, and tragic pathos for joy and integration at the end, are appropriate for a life of monumental banality that would not have been worth recording, except insofar as it is an affront to our desire for balance and moderation. When the debauched spendthrift was siezed by the desire to be reborn from his mortaja de esparto (II, 100),



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he merely flipped, and became an equally hard-driven getter of wealth.

Carrizales's house is not a home that has awaited the return of a hero. Indeed, it is not a home, having been designed to eliminate traffic with the world beyond its walls. It does not look out towards a community, but up, as if through a shaft sunk into the earth. Win- dows have been blocked. To Carrizales, who deposits there his gold and his child bride, it is an earthly paradise: to the girl's parents it is a tomb (II, 104). This house now resembles Hades: dark, timeless, sterile, the place where old Pluto hoards treasure and keeps his captive bride. Loaysa makes his way into it with guile, with song, with perjured promises, as a false Orpheus who comes not to retrieve his own bride, but to soil another's, or as a thieving Hermes. This novela has more allusions to classical mythology than any of the others (to Hades, to Vulcan/Mars/Venus, to Argus, to lo) and so to ill- guarded treasures and misplaced trust, and they all confirm the net of fatal self delusion that Carrizales has cast around himself. The allusions are scattered, fragmentary, ironic, as the structure of the heroic journey is also broken, disjointed, wrenched out of propor- tion in this story. This is one of the most remarkable of Cervantes's stories for its daring, in counterpointing the world of myth, the stereotypes of comedy, everyday reality, and a sensibility towards the human claims of the characters. For risk-taking it may be compared to Velazquez's painting of the Fable of Arachne, better known as Las hilanderas.

Equally notable in its way is Rinconete y Cortadillo. Here Cervantes plays with his picaresque antecedents, in an example of that intergeneric and transgeneric play that characterizes so much of the literature of this period: Lazarillo de Tormes may be read as an ironic counter statement to the romances of chivalry; Guzmdn de Alfarache is patterned on the widely praised Byzantine romances. Both La- zarillo and Guzmdn rehearse the circularity that we have remarked on, the circularity that compels us to review the beginning as we reach the end, to see the end as a transfiguration of a moment of origin.18 Rinconete y Cortadillo appears to have no such structural coordinates, and it is uneventful and open ended to an almost scandalous degree. However, if we look more closely we find the

18 The variable intergeneric characteristics of picaresque writing are treated at length in my Spanish Picaresque Fiction: A New Literary History (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993).



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same essential elements of narrative pattern, although those elements are truncated, and the proportions are radically altered. Once again, the mythic descent is disguised in the everyday reality of a great and populous city. The two boys who, from this perspective, may be viewed as a single protagonist, have both left home, and their life is unmistakably a road. Arriving in Seville, the boys are led into the underworld, from which we do not see them emerge. Here

again is our master trope of the journey and the road, with initiation into knowledge in the nether region. And Cervantes plays a double intertextual game of closure/non closure: he refuses to close the structural loop at the same time as he mimics the ambiguous closure of his picaresque antecedents. And once again we note how often in his writing the reduction of master tropes and myths to fragments and allusions is made to signify uncentered existences, crippled sensibilities, lack of self awareness, or other significant lack.

Thus far, all our examples have seemed to confirm the observation that Cervantes employed the patterns of epic or romance structure and the forms of myth with deliberate sophistication, not auto- matically, and not just because they were privileged as historic, transliterary givens. He makes us read them rather as normative fictions, as metaphors for order. As signifiers they are capable of mod- ulation and modification, interference and fragmentation. Norma- tive fictions and structures are always ripe for parody and irony.

Finally, in the most astonishing of all the shorter works, El casamiento enganoso y Coloquio de los perros, we can observe the experience of the characters and the experience of reading being shaped by the most elaborate and the most elusive of narrative configurations. Here, at the conclusion of the collection of the Novelas ejemplares, we have to process the most dubious information (one man's highly suspect account of his fraudulent marriage, followed by two dogs' convincing account of the human world). Whom would we rather believe, a man or a dog? Then we puzzle over which is the container and which the contained. The temporality of this compound narrative is artfully disrupted. As readers, our engagement with a text is necessarily a linear process determined by our existence in time, but here we are compelled to confront the text's blatant transgressions of linearity, time after time.

This final piece in the collection goes far beyond anything Cer- vantes had attempted before. The Coloquio represents the experience of narrating in the dialogic relation between the two dogs, who are more than just teller and listener; they are the narrating self and



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the internal critic, the narrator facing the implied reader, who barks back at him. This is familiar ground. So is the problematic relation between the Casamiento and the Coloquio, which busy anthologists like to tear apart. In passing I will mention just one paradox that is seemingly too big to have been noticed: within the world constituted by the text, one story (Casamiento) is enunciated orally, and the other (Coloquio) is a written text. Here is the paradox: the orally delivered story of the marriage is highly literary in its style, tightly organized around internal symmetries, and ends epigrammatically, citing Petrarch for a witty recognition of poetic justice (Che chi prende diletto di far frode,/ Non si de' lamentar s'altri l'inganna). The story could be taken for an exemplum designed specifically to confirm the Petrarchan epigram. The oral story is an exemplary demon- stration of the literary art of the novella. The Coloquio's written text, on the other hand, transcribes a conversation which, although it is directed by the familiar trope of life as journey, escapes from the speaker's control at every turn. What do these oppositions, or these complementarities, mean? This spoken text full of literary artifice, this written text that has all the vagaries and indirections of direct speech? In part, they urge us to be aware of our role as readers and listeners beguiled by stories, but I am not satisfied that this is a complete answer. Consider that reader in the text, the Licenciado Peralta, who concludes his reading of that rambling dialogue, by declaring, "Yo alcanzo el artificio del Coloquio y la invenci6n, y bas- ta." The matter is further complicated by the fact that we are not merely reading the Coloquio; we are reading the Licenciado Peralta reading the Coloquio.

The more we read this complex work, the more we come to real- ize that such questions as these are merely the surface manifesta- tions of much deeper ones: the reader's commitment to the act of reading, the truth value of fictions, the problems of origin, the problems of desire at the heart of the quest, at the core of the role, and in the act of reading. I can only touch on a few of the issues that this marvellous story forces us to confront, beginning with something as apparently clear as the way it starts. This is not so easy. We begin at the beginning of the text, of course, but the plot has many beginnings.

Salia del Hospital de la Resurrecci6n, que esta en Valladolid, fuera de la Puerta del Campo, un soldado que, por servirle su espada de baculo y por la flaqueza de sus piernas y amarillez de su rostro, mostraba bien claro



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que, aunque no era el tiempo muy caluroso, debia de haber sudado en veinte dias todo el humor que quiza granje6 en una hora.

This soldier is clearly not soldiering; his wounds were inflicted by syphilis, and his "pinitos" and "traspies" reaffirm his shaky condition and our expectation of an amorous adventure to be related. An old friend sees him and greets him, barely recognizing him in his changed condition. They have not met for a long time. Here, within a few lines of the start, are two threads for the reader to pursue, two traces of earlier events: a friendship, and an amorous misadventure. Neither of them corresponds with the beginning of any of the nar- rated events, and we are left in suspense as to where they begin. Observe how many times we have to begin reading. First, at the opening words of the text; next, as we observe a friendship making a new start; then at the beginning of the alferez's story of his Casamien- to; then the discussion of the two men; then the story of the dogs; after which we eagerly await the verdict of the skeptical reader, Peralta, on the story he and we have been reading.

If we disentangle the temporal sequence that Cervantes has so cunningly ravelled up, we discover that he begins his telling almost at the end of the sequence, as two friends are united and express mutual astonishment. And it is not until we reach the final words of the whole, in which they agree not to discuss further the question of the truth of the Coloquio, but to go out together to "recrear los ojos del cuerpo, pues ya he recreado los ojos del entendimiento"-not until then do we perceive that the renewal of friendship, this insig- nificant event, has been the real climax, the recognition scene of the untold story. What the telling of the Casamiento and the reading of the Coloquio do is reconstitute an event as the characters' experience. The reader who at first simply observes two men embracing at the gate of the city, comes to understand it from within, as a recognition, a recognition. Between this beginning and the closure, stories are told, incorporated as flashbacks; but these flashbacks do not relate to the main narrative as flashbacks usually do; they explain nothing, they reveal no hidden cause, provide no complementary angle of vision. Instead of explaining, or creating suspense in the principal narrative, they displace it, and even efface it from the attention of the reader. Here is one of many ways in which Cer- vantes challenges the reader's expectations concerning structure, temporal sequence, and causality. It is also his way of problematiz- ing the reader's desire for stories.



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Both the Casamiento and the Coloquio are bounded and defined by formal beginnings that are plainly marked. The dialogue of Cipi6n and Berganza is repeatedly constituted by a succession of new beginnings on the level of the story and on that of the discourse. There are other origins that are occluded or obscure, and desires for origin that are fueled by demonic stories and become obsessive fantasies. Most prominent among these is the dog Berganza's belief in the story, told him by the witch Cafiizares, that he is a changeling, having originally been a human child. In the empty prophetic verses uttered by the witch to his 'mother',

Volveran en su forma verdadera cuando vieren con presta diligencia derribar los soberbios levantados y alzar a los humildes abatidos con mano poderosa para hacerlo

there is promise of a personal apocalypse, a final return to an original shape by means of which the end will reinstate the beginning. In that promise of a return and reincorporation into the site of origin Cervantes shows us the Ur-form of romance. It is a bewitching form of narrative, binding us to our desire for the mother. So the dog's illusory desire for an end that will confirm his beginning and thus make sense of his existence becomes obsessive. He represents our wish to return in fiction to a beginning that never was. His desire is mediated by a witch, a representative of the devil, so it must be understood as a self destructive illusion. It also reveals a compulsive pattern from which there is no escape: the search for the ending thatjustifies the beginning and thereby confers direction, structure, and significance upon the middle, this middle in which we are forever wandering without a compass. It is by means of such strategies and patterns of illusion that we read and tell stories, including those of our own lives. So, as we end, we have come around again to the beginning.

In the words of a philosopher of history, the late Louis Mink, the past "can be made intelligible only as the subject of the stories we tell."19 The same may be said of the place of story telling in our individual lives; Peter Brooks tied a recent book to the observation that we largely define and construct our sense of self through our

19 Louis O. Mink, Historical Understanding, ed. Brian Fay, et al. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987), 202.



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fictions, within the constraints of a transindividual symbolic order.20 Contrary to what the convict Gines de Pasamonte tells Don Quixote (DQI.22), a story is not assured plenitude of meaning just because it spans the birth and the death of its subject. A life contains many stories, many meanings. We understand ourselves, if we are fortu- nate enough ever to do so, through repeated acts of demystification and deconstruction that we practice upon the fantasies and the narratives into which we have braided our experience. We call such acts by various names: confession, purgation, analysis. They all attempt to recover and reconstitute the buried narrative, the subtext that underlies the fictions with which we have beguiled ourselves.

The friendship of Campuzano and Peralta is both the frame and the core of this extraordinary narrative, though Cervantes gives us the merest glimpse of it, at a moment of renewal. This act of renewal does take place on a road, but it is a road that starts and ends at no place that is on the map, either real or fictional. The beginning is hidden from us and so, of course, is the end. But it is a companionable road, a road without pretensions to heroic elevation, or to craggy singularity. It takes us from the Hospital outside the city gate to a house within the city, where a meal is shared. Finally, after the conversations and the reading, it leads out once more, to the pleas- ant walk in the open where the two men take a view of the city and its river margin. City and river, inner and outer: we note the oppos- ing pairs, and read them how we will, as society and nature, as structure and flow, as design and turbulence, as we let them reso- nate and penetrate our understanding of the doubleness of this fiction as much as we are able. Inevitably they bond with all the other obstinate and eternally problematic pairs that start up as we read: nature/artifice, reality/dream, fiction/truth, presence/ absence, experience/knowledge. But before they go out, the two friends eat together under one roof, then they worship together, and one of them lays out his shameful experience and his strange fantasies before the other. And the two friends, of course, are none other than armas and letras; no longer rhetorical antagonists thirst- ing for glory, as in the world of Don Quixote, but weary, skeptical, and open to each other's presence. Dichotomies finally meet in an embrace, and that embrace rather than the images of the world's

20 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Knopf, 1984), xiv.



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evil (pace Forcione) may be what needs to be read back into the Novelas.21

The road, I repeat, is a companionable one. In the varied worlds of Cervantes, solitariness is found to be the most dangerous condition, solipsism the worst sin, as the source of destructive fantasies.22 Friendship is the way of escape from solipsism and despair. If one friend can suspend his skepticism, his irritable disbelief, so far as to read the other friend's fantasies of talking dogs, and then conclude "No volvamos mas a esa disputa", "let us go outside, and see" (II, 359), perhaps that dog's despairing view of the world may not be entirely true.23

Wesleyan University

21 See his Cervantes and the Mystery of Lawlessness (Princeton UP, 1984). 22 Alban K. Forcione has eloquently stressed the sociability of the "mesa de trucos"

of the Prologue to the Novelas as well as the scenes of shared reading and understanding in his fictional communities: "Afterword," in Cervantes's "Exemplary Novels" and the Adventure of Writing, ed. Michael Nerlich and Nicholas Spadaccini (Min- neapolis: Prisma Institute [Hispanic Issues, 6], 1990), pp. 331-52.

23 This paper originated as the Cervantes Lecture, given at Fordham University in April, 1989, and has been rewritten for other audiences in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Poland. The present version is not and cannot be definitive. If it succeeds in demonstrating that even in his most unromantic works Cervantes never renounced romance as a structural paradigm, it should also provoke the suspicion that he exploited the processes and recycled the devices that typified that paradigm more extensively than we have realized, and not only in the service of parody or irony. As we observed in the cases of El celoso extremeno and Rinconete y Cortadillo, fragmentation and truncation of a paradigm also have significance. At the same time, we need to stress the fact that he uses other narrative strategies, or modelling types, based on other traditional modes of story-telling, either indepen- dently of or in complex combinations with the patterns of romance. The suggestion made many years ago by Walter Pabst that one could read the Novelas in terms of fairy tale and folk tale found little favor and has never really been explored. Nev- ertheless, there are specific traits in the typology of the folk tale that illuminate those very novelas that have proved least attractive to modern readers. Various framing devices also await examination. Finally, I am aware that the concept "experience" requires discussion. For the purposes of this paper, it may be sufficient to define it as that reality which takes shape in the existences of Cervantes's fictional characters. Its literary representation is dependent on notions of verisimilitude and historical con- text that are beyond the scope of an article. A book which I am preparing with Yvonne Jehenson will deal with this question as part of a fuller investigation of Cervantes's narrative strategies.



Documents

Dunn, Shaping Experience, Narrative Strategies in Cervantes