Prof: I want to begin by
taking up some general questions
concerning the Quixote
matters,
such as the difference between
romance and novel,
because I know from the last
lecture that you must have been
confused,
and it's good to know it.
Other matters,
which are, what is a chivalric
romance?
 
Because you hear a lot about
it, I'm sure,
and very few people know what a
chivalric romance was--
and who were the Spanish
precursors of Cervantes,
because I want to,
as much as possible,
although in English,
to give you a Cervantes in his
own sauce,
as it were, that is,
within the Spanish tradition,
as well as a European,
but within the Spanish
tradition.
I do that to counter versions
of the Quixote taught
here at Yale in the English
Department and Directed Studies
and so forth,
valuable courses,
but in which Cervantes is seen
only in the context of western
literature.
 
So this is why I want to give
you Cervantes,
as much as possible,
in his own salsa,
as it were, in his own sauce.
 
Now, I will begin by continuing
on the issue of what and why
the Quixote has continued
to be read, why it has had such
common currency.
 
I just learned yesterday that
the detainees in Guantanamo,
Cuba asked for the
Quixote, first of all,
of all of the books that they
want to read.
Now, I have offered the most
common of answers about why
the Quixote is so
current, the least specialized.
The one that I assume general
readers will understand about
wanting to be other and so
forth, that I spoke about in the
last class.
 
But Don Quixote is
notoriously about literature,
covering the entire range of
'about.'
First and first most it's about
the effect that literature has
on its readers.
 
Don Quixote goes mad 'cause he
reads too much literature.
Literature, fiction,
allows us to rehearse in
private our most secret desires
affecting our lives as if these
desires have come true.
 
It's like dreams.
 
Dreams have the same effect.
 
This is its allure,
the allure of literature,
and also it's danger.
 
We can live lives other than
ours full of adventures
untrammeled by society's
constraints and by our own
limitations.
 
Does doing that purge us of
those desires or does it induce
more desires and induce the
desire to close the gap between
desire and reality?
 
But the Quixote is also,
in addition,
about the creation of
literature, the relationship
each text has with previous
texts as well as about questions
of literary genre.
 
The Quixote appears at
the end of the Renaissance when
improvements of the printing
press had created a mass
readership,
so to speak,
mass readership,
nothing compared to what we
have today,
a mass readership for the first
time in history,
and when the discovery,
analysis and imitation of
classical treatises on poetics
had brought to the fore
questions about content and form
as well as of ethics,
public and private.
As you know,
the Renaissance humanists were
interested in the Classics,
in reading the Classics in the
original,
in editing the Classics to make
them available.
 
What is secular literature good
for?
What is good literature?
 
How do new ideas about reading
and writing effect the
interpretation of scripture?
 
Is secular literature in the
vernacular a danger to faith,
religious faith?
 
The Quixote is full of
writers and readers-- you will
meet them as you read the book--
of books, stories,
poems and of people young and
old effected by literature.
You will meet some very early,
Marcela and Grisóstomo.
Now, in this vain about Don
Quixote and the issue of
literature is the originality of
the Don Quixote story.
The fact that it does not
belong to any known tradition or
cycle be it from the pastoral or
chivalric cycles,
not to mention popular
narratives or even mythology,
that is, Don Quixote is
not based on a classical myth or
a traditional story handed down
orally,
the Quixote is a new
story.
Indeed, Cervantes boasts that
it is new.
It is no small accomplishment
to set out to write a narrative
without precedence,
to make an individual invention
a fundamental factor of a
literary work.
The Divine Comedy tells
an original story yet,
it is based on received popular
and cultural traditions,
the sense to hell,
a sense to heaven,
and it calls and incorporates
many stories from biblical and
classical traditions.
 
The Decameron by
Boccaccio--some of which you may
have read it--retells tales
drawn from many popular and
cultural sources,
too.
The same goes for,
of course, for the pastoral and
the chivalric romances about
which I will be speaking soon.
But the story of a man who goes
mad because he reads too much
has only one known source and it
is so trifling as to be
dismissed,
although, the fact that it
exists is of some importance.
 
The very act of invention on
Cervantes' part is an important
modern component of the work.
 
Invention is the hallmark of
modern literature.
Now, how could such a
revolutionary work appear in
Spain?
 
I'm sorry to make this
assumption but your conception
of Spain cannot be but the
result of the Black Legend.
What is the Black Legend?
 
The Black Legend is the bad
press that Spain's enemies
disseminated beginning in the
sixteenth century about the
mistreatment of the Indians and
about Spain's backwardness and
brutality,
and so forth,
your images of the inquisition,
religious intolerance,
a certain primitiveness and
backwardness...
This is all embedded in the
English language you cannot
escape it.
 
It is full of what we call
factoids, things that are almost
true but not quite we call
factoids derisively,
of course.
 
Yet, during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries,
Spain produced Cervantes,
Velázquez,
the character of Don Juan,
the picaresque,
all figures authors or kinds of
writing that are at the core of
the modern western tradition.
 
How could that be so?
 
The Quixote aided by
Elliot's Imperial Spain
which you are,
I hope dutifully reading,
will help dispel these
perceptions as well as my
comments in the course.
 
Now, let me clarify as much as
possible the confusion about
terms such as 'novel' and
'romance,' a confusion that is
augmented by the fact that they
don't quite coincide with their
cognates in Spanish.
 
Cognates are words in two
different languages that sound
the same but then sometimes are
not the same in meaning.
'Romance' is a term derived
from the name Rome,
of course, meaning that
originally these were works
written in the languages derived
from Latin,
that is French,
Spanish, Italian,
Portuguese and so forth--
those are the important ones.
Let us begin with the Webster's
definition for 'romance.'
It says: "Originally,
a long narrative in verse or
prose written in one of the
romantic dialects."
It says in Webster's--Remember
what I said about language and
dialect?
 
A language is a dialect with an
army,
meaning that a people who speak
a certain dialect become
powerful enough and impose it on
the rest of the population.
So, "...
 
originally written in one of
the romance dialects about the
adventures of knights and other
chivalric heroes,
to a fictitious tale dealing
not so much with every day life
as with extraordinary adventures
or mysterious events."
That's the Webster's definition
of romance.
A popular dictionary of
literary terms gives the
following for romance,
"Romance a fictional story
in verse or prose that relates
improbable adventures of
idealized characters in some
remote or enchanted setting,
or more generally a tendency in
fiction opposed to that of
realism."
 
Now, etymologies are fun,
but they don't always clarify
what a word means in the
present,
and, in fact,
sometimes the etymologies work
against such a clarification.
 
How many know or how useful is
it to know that candid,
the word 'candid,' for example,
derives from the Latin word
'candidus' for white?
 
It doesn't help you in the
present to know that at all.
It helps you be pedantic if you
tell somebody,
or if you bring it up in that
party that I always mention
here,
at which a Yalie can be
pedantic by saying,
"Candid derives from
candidus in Latin which
means white,"
or,
"That is a very Kafkaesque
story that you've told me."
 
In any case,
in this case,
knowing that the term 'romance'
derives from Rome and that it
indicates that these stories
were written in the romance
languages,
does provide a historical
insight.
 
Romances emerged after the
breakup of the Roman Empire
during the Middle Ages as the
various national languages
acquired individual identities.
 
So we have now a historical
period that the etymology
romance gives us.
 
So in English,
'romance' means a story with a
linear plot and unchanging
characters.
One episode follows another,
and the heroes and heroines
remain the same.
 
This is the reason romances of
chivalry are called 'romances.'
The romance form is preferred
by popular fiction and by works
with an ideological and
doctrinaire purpose.
They are easy to follow and
their moral is clear.
Many cartoons,
for instance,
have the form of a
romance--cartoons,
comic books.
 
Novels, on the other hand,
are works in which there is a
clash between the characters,
the protagonists and the
settings in which they move--
remember the quotation from
Lukach in my earlier lecture--
and in which the characters
evolve as a result of the
actions in which they are
involved.
 
Characters in the romances
don't change,
they're always heroic and so
forth.
Characters in the novels do
change, evolve,
because of the action.
 
Now, the Quixote is the
first such case of this clash
between the protagonist and his
setting,
though an argument can be made
in favor of the picaresque,
and a work that I'll be
mentioning today again--
I mentioned in it in the
class--La Celestina
already has that clash between
protagonist and setting,
and there is change and
characters evolve.
But the Quixote is the
first case.
Now, I think and I hope now we
have--I hope--a clear
terminological between novel and
romance, and you will understand
when I speak about them.
 
Now, matters get confused when
we know that in English
picaresque stories are often
called romances--
this is particularly among
English department types--
while in Spanish we call them
'novelas,' novels.
I will always refer to
picaresque tales as novels,
because they are,
according to the definitions
that I've given above.
 
Now, if you know Spanish,
you may be further confused by
the fact that 'romance'
in Spanish is a ballad,
a narrative originally popular
poem, like the English ballads.
So you must keep this
distinction clear in mind.
If you happen to read something
in Spanish and you read
'romance,' it is not a
romance in the in the sense that
I've been explaining,
it is a poem.
Now, what was it that Don
Quixote so avidly wanted to
become?
 
Let me clarify,
too, what the chivalric
romances were,
because this is something that
is taken for granted,
everybody knows chivalric...
No.
 
Let us clarify,
I like to clarify things and to
start from the ground up.
 
What is it that Don Quixote
wanted to become?
What's this whole business of
the romances of chivalry?
First, as I did with the term
'romance' let me clarify the
background of the word
'chivalric.'
Chivalric comes from the French
word 'cheval' or horse,
and it reflects the fact that
the knight's form of
transportation was the horse.
 
What does French have to do
with English?
Well, William the Conqueror,
the Battle of Hastings,
the invasion of England by the
French, and all of that which
you learned in elementary school
or high school,
and the fact that French is one
of these sources of modern
English.
 
But the horse was more than
just a form of transportation.
It was an instrument of
warfare, a prized possession
with each having a sonorous name
if at all possible.
The horse was part of the
knight's identity;
hence, the whole business about
naming his horse at the
beginning of the
Quixote--now you understand
that.
 
Part of the culture of horses
was a kind of courtesy,
so we have in English also
'chivalrous,' for instance.
Horses have always spawned a
whole culture of their own and
have left a large imprint on
languages because they were the
principle mode of transportation
until part of the twentieth
century, you can imagine.
 
So technically,
etymologically 'chivalric
romance' is a horse romance or,
more appropriately,
romances about horsemen.
 
In Spanish the etymology is
clearer as the romances of
chivalry are simply called
'novelas de
caballerías' and
'caballo' is the word for
horse in Spanish.
 
Now, chivalric romances or in
Spanish 'novelas de
caballerías' were the
popular literature of the late
Middle Ages and early
Renaissance,
whose dissemination was greatly
aided by the development of
print.
 
I'm talking about the
fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries.
 
The printing press as you no
doubt know was developed in the
fifteenth century making
available to many readers books
including the Bible,
which only a very few had
access before.
 
We have a copy of the
Guttenberg Bible in our
own Beinecke Library,
if you want to go and look at
it.
 
Now, this development of the
printing press had a decisive
impact on literature because it
increased dissemination,
on the Quixote and the
novel, in general,
owe their existence to this
invention.
As we can see by the impact the
romances of chivalry had on our
hero and the large number of
them that he had in his library,
if you got to the chapter on
the scrutiny of the library.
The romances of chivalry were
the first best sellers--They are
entertaining and I encourage you
to read one or two if you have
time.
 
Now, the chivalric romances
originated in France and were
derived from the roman
courtois or courtly
romance--
roman courtois--In
French, 'roman'
eventually became the name for
'novel' but roman
courtois or courtly romance
was a narrative in verse which
was the favorite of feudal lords
no longer engaged in military
exploits who looked back with
nostalgia to a heroic age the
same as Don Quixote will.
The roman courtois took
its themes from classical
legends,
such as the Trojan Wars,
or the exploits of Alexander
the Great,
even oriental tales,
but it preferred themes derived
from Briton legends,
legends from Brittany,
such as that of Tristan and
Isolde,
the knights in pursuit of the
Holy Grail, like Percifal and
Merlin and Lancelot,
or Arthurian tales about
Arthur, the real or imaginary
king of Britain,
and the Knights of the Round
Table-- You have heard about all
of this.
 
All of these adventures take
place in a fantastic atmosphere
shrouded in a very kind of
lyricist and poetry.
When these roman
courtois--remember,
in verse and so forth--were
turned into prose narratives the
chivalric romances appeared.
 
Each of these books had as a
hero a knight-errant that
incarnated heroism,
amorous fidelity and was the
defender of justice and of the
oppressed.
The night was involved in the
most extraordinary adventures
against fantastic and
frightening wrongdoers;
his passionate love for an
idealized lady dominated his
thoughts.
 
Love was a fundamental
component of these narratives.
The knight would offer to his
lady the glory of his feats.
This love for a lady is the
same as courtly love,
which as you may know,
inspired the medieval lyric.
 
 
And was a fashion involving all
sorts of rituals in the courts
of elegant ladies.
 
It's too long a story to be
told, but think that the
romances of chivalry are shot
through as it were the idea of
courtly love.
 
These were not just military
heroes, but they were also great
lovers.
 
In Spain, there were two
notable antecedents to the
romances of chivalry in the
fourteenth century,
La Gran conquista de
ultramar,
El caballero Zifar,
but these should not concern
you.
 
During the fourteenth century,
all of the European books of
chivalry were disseminated in
Spain in adaptations and
translations,
particularly those of the
Breton cycle.
 
The most significant chivalric
romance in terms of circulation
and influence as well as impact
on the Quixote was
Amadís de Gaula--
about which you will hear and
read a lot throughout this
semester,
because he is Don Quixote's
chief moral--
which it was written around
1492--that miraculous year when
so many things happened--
but was published in 1508 in
Saragossa.
 
It is known that there were
stories about Amadís
circulating as far back as the
early fourteenth century,
and Montalvo,
who was its author,
states in the prologue that he
took the story written by
several authors,
divided it into four books and
recast it adding a few touches
and fifth book about
Esplandián,
Amadís's son.
These chivalric romances could
and did have many sequels,
much like today's soap operas
on television,
and responded to the same kind
of demand from the public.
This couldn't end here,
we want more Amadís
adventures, we want
Amadís's son's
adventures, and so forth.
 
In fact, all popular fiction
from Sherlock Holmes to James
Bond is sequential in this
fashion,
which is the reason why soap
operas are derisively called
Spanish culebrones,
from 'culebra,' snake,
because it's a snake that goes
on, and on, and on...
And so this is the way that the
romances of chivalry,
as you saw, if you read the
chapter on the scrutiny of the
library.
 
The Amadís is a
very free adaptation of novels
from the Breton cycle;
but is a complex network of the
most varied and marvelous
adventures.
It tells the story of his birth
virtually in the river,
because he's thrown in a river
as baby to hide his mother's sin
because they were not married,
his parents,
who were a king and a queen,
and he's rescued and trained as
a knight in combat,
then he falls in love with
Oriana, Oriana becomes his
beloved,
so Amadís and Oriana is
one of the great couples of
literary history.
 
He is put through all kinds of
trials and he's enchanted and
disenchanted,
and he is a most loyal and
faithful of lovers against all
temptations from various ladies.
In fact, he is forced to go
through the arch of faithful
lovers which could only be
crossed by lovers who had been
absolutely faithful--
How many people can go through
it?-- and so forth.
 
This is what is in Don
Quixote's imagination and
desires,
this figure of this invincible
hero who is noble and a great
lover,
and this book was so important
in the sixteenth century that it
acquired a didactic value.
 
I mean, it was used as a novel
for deportment and for courtesy,
even more so,
it surpassed the model for
courtly behavior which was
written by a great Italian
writer called Baltasare
Castiglione.
Castiglione is one of several
important Renaissance figures
that you're going to be hearing
about here.
His last name is written like
this, and his book is called
the Courtesan and it was
published in 1528.
It was a very important book.
 
But the Amadís
was much more fun to read,
and therefore it surpassed
Castiglione's book as a source
of models for deportment for
people in the courts.
So it is for all of these
reasons that the
Amadís achieved great
success,
among the greatest in Spanish
literature and many expressed
their admiration for it
including great political and
intellectual figures.
 
It was for the reader's of the
time the only possibility for
evasion, the only food for their
fantasy.
The romances of chivalry were
in the sixteenth century what
movies and television shows are
for us today.
But the romances and
Amadís,
in particular,
had their detractors--
spoilsports are everywhere all
of the time--
who saw in such books a threat
to public morals.
They became a topic of debate,
and this is behind the role
Amadís plays in
the Quixote and the
reason why Cervantes says that
he is writing his book against
them,
to make fun of them in such a
way that people would not read
them any more.
He's entering,
supposedly, the debate about
the value or lack thereof of the
romances of chivalry.
So now, I hope,
you have a clearer idea of what
it was that Don Quixote wanted
to become.
So it's not vague what he wants.
 
It's clearly and concrete.
 
I suppose at modern day Don
Quixote would like to be James
Bond because we have to assume a
modern Alonso Quixano to be
middle aged and to have grown up
with James Bond as the image of
heroism.
 
I read that Senator Kennedy in
the last hours of his life or
days would watch Bond movies for
entertainment.
Obviously, for a man of his
age, James Bond was the acme of
heroism and debonair,
good looking,
all the women fall for him and
that sort of thing.
So, I guess maybe your parents
or your grandparents,
not you, if you wanted to
become a Quixote,
they would want to be a James
Bond.
Now, Amadís was
the most obvious and avowed by
Cervantes precursor of the
Quixote in Spanish,
but what were Cervantes's
predecessors among more serious
Spanish literary work?
 
Which were the Spanish works
that Cervantes had read,
absorbed and incorporated into
his own literary project?
I have mentioned some of these,
I want to mention them again
because I want to lay the ground
work in the most thorough way
possible so that you know.
 
The first was La
Celestina,
which I mentioned in the last
class.
It has several titles,
but I think I'll settle for La
Celestina, which is from 1499,
written by Fernando de Rojas.
It is of indeterminate genre,
the closest description would
be a dramatic dialogue.
 
La Celestina is the most
significant precursor to
Cervantes.
 
It is a tragic story of two
young lovers,
Calixto and Melibea,
who consummate their love under
the guidance of a go-between,
the protagonist Celestina.
Celestina is an old whore,
madam of a whore house and a
witch.
 
But in spite of these unsavory
characteristics she is the
heroine of the work.
 
This is the most original
aspect of this work,
that the protagonist is an old
whore, go between witch and so
forth.
 
Still, she is the heroine in
the sense that she is willful
and goes against fate,
and that.
Now, there is a clear clash
between neo-Platonic notions of
love typical of the Renaissance
and the courtly division and the
sordid and cynical view of
humankind and of love in
particular.
 
Celestina controls the whole
city because she controls
people's erotic adventures.
 
There are two worlds that of
Celestina,
the servants and whores,
and that of the lovers Calisto
and Melibea and Melibea's
parents which are the gentry.
So there is also a class clash
here.
Calixto is a Quixote in the
making because he wants to play
act the role of the courtly
lover.
He is killed when he falls off
a wall, the wall of Melibea's
where he has been making love to
her.
Melibea commits suicide and
Celestina is murdered by the
servants because she has
swindled them,
too.
 
Celestina is a pitiless book
with what can all ready be
called a realistic quality,
and I'll talk about realism in
a minute.
 
The second important work
is--the other one that I
mentioned,
but I want to now mention more
clearly-- La vida del
Lazarillo de Tormes.
Lazarillo de Tormes,
this is the first
picaresque novel.
 
No known author.
 
It is the life told to a judge,
as in a deposition,
by a petty criminal to justify
his current status.
He, at the end,
from the perspective that he
writes, is married to the
archpriest's mistress.
So he is a front,
he is a cuckolded husband who
is compliant with society's
hypocrisies.
Lazarillo tells his life from
birth to the present when he
writes.
 
This is life as seen from the
perspective of a low class
individual,
a criminal who learned his
tricks from his first master who
was, ironically,
a blind man.
 
Guzmán de
Alfarache,
I won't give you the whole
title, but this is good enough
because this is how it is known
is the second most important
picaresque novel that I want to
mention.
Lazarillo is 1554,1599
for Guzmán de
Alfarache.
 
It's a four-part prolix
tale of a criminal told in the
first person,
also following the formula of
Lazarillo,
but the difference is that here
the life is told after a
religious conversion to the
good.
 
So the story of Guzmán's
life is laced with sermons about
where he went wrong and ways to
improve his morals,
but this retrospective
moralizing is always tempered by
the appeal of the stories about
sin--
sin is more interesting,
always--Guzmán became
the model picaresque in
Cervantes' time and there are
clear allusions to it in the
Quixote.
This is so you can see the
genealogy within the Spanish
tradition.
 
Now, what these works show is
the emergence and development of
realism as we know it,
and which would be continued in
the work of Cervantes,
particularly the
Quixote.
 
And lead all the way through to
the seventeenth and eighteenth
century and nineteenth century
novels.
I mean, this is the beginning
of realism.
Its emergence,
in my view, has a great deal to
do with the Catholic Kings about
whom you're reading in Elliot,
the formation of a new modern
state with a large bureaucracy
and a very large also,
penal, not only penal code,
but penal institutions to
punish these criminals.
A Spanish criminologist called
Rafael Salillas,
in the nineteenth century,
links the picaresque with the
birth of the social sciences.
 
He thinks that in the
picaresque and in this kind of
novel we have the beginnings of
the study of society as
criminology,
sociology and so forth would
study it in later centuries,
but this is the origin.
Here, in this work,
there is a search for truth
about human nature in the social
commerce of people of the lowest
possible levels,
where civilization,
as it were, has barely reached.
 
There is an emphasis on the
material and the sordid in these
works against neo-Platonic
conceptions of human kind that
are more typical of the
Renaissance.
The sordid, the ugly,
the dirty becomes esthetically
valuable and appealing in these
realistic works,
in the behavior of the
characters, their actions,
and also their attitudes.
 
The point is that this sort of
probe into the social is an
attempt to uncover a truth about
the human no longer available in
the ancient classical literature
or its imitators in the
Renaissance.
 
It goes against that kind of
version of the human.
This is too complicated,
but I will get to it as the
semester evolves.
 
It is a rejection parallel to
that of Descartes as he
formulates the philosophy of the
self when he sort of erases
received tradition.
 
But I will leave that.
 
I'll put that in the backburner
and we will get to it
eventually.
 
In realism, common objects--you
will see common objects in
the Quixote --appear
frequently.
This begins with
Celestina,
but it's the world mostly of
the picaresque through which
Don Quixote passes.
 
The character's accessories are
what endowed the description of
this world with an aura of
reality,
what it is, what they
have--Sancho's wine skin,
for instance,
and so forth.
Let us look for such common
objects.
As you read the Quixote
you will see there is a focus on
them.
 
This is a parallel to a
development in painting which
began with the work of Leo
Battista Alberti,
known as Alberti.
 
I'll just do this in passing,
but I will allude to it more
during the semester.
 
He wrote a treatise called
De Pictura.
In very simplistic terms,
what Alberti nearly invented
was the sense of perspective.
 
That is, that objects appear in
different sizes depending on
where they are in reference to a
point de fuite,
punto de fuga,
vanishing point in English--
It will come to me--So you
understand objects,
according to Alberti,
are to appear in painting not
flat as they appear in medieval
painting but in relation to how
they appear to the observer,
and how they are arranged
according to perspective.
 
Hence objects appear now in all
of their fullness,
in all of their roundness,
in all of their weight and
measure.
 
This is a form of realism that
begins in painting.
De Pictura is from 1435,
fifteenth century.
Alberti had an enormous
influence on the history of
painting, but on philosophy,
too.
I mean, this was a way of
conceiving the perception of
objects, also subject to time
because perspective in space
involves also a sense of time.
 
If something is back here and
something is here,
this is closer,
I can get to it faster than I
can get to that,
if you understand what I mean.
Now, if you have seen
Velázquez paintings,
I'm sure some of you have,
you will remember how those
objects that are just common
every day objects,
suddenly have a fullness.
 
Now, this is what will appear
in these novels,
in the Quixote,
and this is part of the
development of realism.
 
Now, you will see that this is
a cliché
about Spanish literature of the
Golden Age,
sixteenth and seventeenth
century, what will prevail is a
clash between this realistic
conception or vision of the
world and the idealistic
conception that comes through
the neo-Platonic tradition and
that is, let us say,
embodied in Don Quixote.
 
Don Quixote is an idealist
perspective and Sancho is the
realistic perspective.
 
Sancho is close to the
material, to the world,
material that he wants to eat
if he can possibly can,
while Don Quixote doesn't eat.
 
He doesn't need to eat,
he lives in the world of ideas.
But, of course,
they influence each other.
As you will see,
this is one of the great things
about this novel that these
character's influence each
other.
 
So we could say that that is
overall the overarching class in
these works of Spanish
literature.
But keep in mind above all what
I said about realism,
because realism will be one of
the triumphs of Cervantes's
work.
 
Now, let us finally turn to
the Quixote.
I assume and I hope that you
have read at least the first few
chapters,
and that by the next lecture
you will have read the first 10
chapters,
as well as the assigned
readings in the Casebook
which will give you a background
on Cervantes's life that I'm not
giving you here,
as well as other materials and,
of course, the first chapter in
Elliot.
Now, the prologue.
 
The prologue,
this 1605 prologue is one of
the most important and famous
texts in Spanish literature and
prologues are very important
always for Cervantes.
Why?
 
Because of his concern about
the relationship between creator
and his creation,
and his concern about the
nature of the self,
his own self,
which is a very Renaissance
preoccupation.
Cervantes prologues are very
much like Montaigne's
Essays--Now,
I've mentioned Castiglione.
Now, I mention Montaigne.
 
These are great Renaissance
figures that in the context of
which Cervantes wrote and you
have to remember Castiglione,
Montaigne--,
and it is here that Cervantes
introduces one of his favorite
tropes one that runs through the
whole of the Quixote:
irony.
This is a very ironic prologue
which is conveyed through a very
seductive kind of self
deprecation in Cervantes.
'Desocupado lector' it begins,
"Idle reader,
"Jarvis mistranslates this
as 'gentle reader' in your
translation,
but it is "Desocupado
lector,"
idle reader.
Cervantes assumes a reader who
comes to his book for
entertainment,
not instruction,
and who reads for pleasure,
not for work.
This is a novelty,
and a kind of challenge in a
period when the function of
literature was very much an
issue discussed by secular and
religious moralists.
But we soon see that what
Cervantes means by entertainment
does not preclude consideration
of very thorny ethical issues
that involve reading and
literature in general,
these issues emerge immediately
in the prologue.
It is typical of Cervantes--and
you can expect to see it in the
rest of the work--to deal
lightly and humorously with
weighty issues.
 
This is one of his constants.
 
He's able to deal with very
grave issues in a very light and
humorous way.
 
That is his perspective.
 
It's part of his ironic
perspective.
Now, the prologue,
although it comes first,
is a kind of epilogue.
 
It was written obviously after
he finished the book.
You cannot take for granted the
sequential order of things as
you read them,
they are sequential in a
conventional way.
 
It doesn't mean the prologue
that Cervantes sat down,
wrote the prologue,
and then wrote the novel.
He wrote the novel,
and then wrote the prologue to
ponder about what he had just
finished.
Now, there is in the prologue a
tone, a prevailing theme of
doubt which is,
again, an echo of Montaigne.
Now, perhaps this explains the
self deprecating statements
about his own creation and
inventive powers,
that they're weak and that what
else could he produce and so
forth,
at the very first paragraph
where he belittles himself.
 
It is very much like Montaigne
because Montaigne's stance is
very modern.
 
Montaigne writes with the
resignation of knowing that he
will never outdo the Classics.
 
By the way, there is a very
instructive piece on Montaigne
in the latest New Yorker!
 
I mean Montaigne is still very
relevant and speaks to the
modern mind.
 
He writes with the resignation
of knowing that he will never
outdo the Classics,
that he will never really know
the truth,
even about himself and that
received knowledge is of dubious
value.
For instance,
in his famous essay called
"On Cannibals"
he asks what business the
Europeans have in imposing their
religious doctrines on natives
of the New World who had been
getting along just fine with
their own beliefs.
 
And he says that it is worse to
roast people alive,
as Europeans do to torture
them, than to roast them once
they're dead and eat them--
And, of course,
he's right about that.
 
He's a relativist in a
post-Copernican world in which--
I'm still talking about
Montaigne--in which we know that
the earth is not the center of
the universe,
and hence human kind is not at
the center either in the way
that it was believed to be
before.
In his prologue,
Cervantes sounds very much like
Montaigne who,
if he was not a source was
clearly a kindred spirit.
 
They were both Hamlet like in
their display of doubt.
Of course, Shakespeare had read
Montaigne.
Now, who is this friend who
suddenly appears in the
prologue?
 
Of course, it's a made up
friend, it's an imaginary friend
that Cervantes events and to
turn the prologue into a story
in which he's going to discuss
how to write a prologue while
writing the prologue,
and that is the whole joke
behind this.
 
It's a big joke.
 
Cervantes was fond both of
telling stories rather than
expounding on doctrine and of
dialogue.
He loved dialogue.
 
Of having a topic discussed
from various points of view,
this will be throughout the
whole of the Quixote,
and we have it all ready in the
prologue.
He has a dialogue with this
imaginary friend.
He's having a dialogue with
himself and has created this,
as we do occasionally,
creating an imaginary friend or
someone with whom we speak which
is just another version of
ourselves.
 
Different points of view.
 
Cervantes likes things that are
being discussed from different
points of view,
as you will see.
Now, the main topic of the
prologue is the genesis and
intention of the book,
a common topic for prologues
only that here it is told as the
issue of how to prologue is
discussed.
 
Now, there is an apparent
contradiction here at the
beginning.
 
Cervantes says this book could
be other like myself,
because I'm his father.
 
Then he says,
no I'm the stepfather by which
he means that he's merely the
transcriber of this book by Cide
Hamete Benengeli,
this fictitious Moorish author
about whom you will hear a lot
in the book.
This is the first of many
disclaimers of authorship in
the Quixote.
 
What Cervantes is probing here
is the genesis of literature,
the genealogy of invention
which can no longer be taken for
granted as following the rules
of Renaissance poetics.
In what way does a book belong
to its author?
This is why Cervantes mocks the
usual front matter of other
books,
in which authors boast of their
erudition and ask others to
attest to the quality of their
productions.
 
The whole business that he's
talking about all of these
sonnets that he could have asked
other people to write for him,
and so forth--By the way,
those sonnets exist in the book
and are left out of the
translation.
The front matter in a book is
everything from the title all
the way to the beginning of the
book;
prologue, preface,
acknowledgement.
This is called the front
matter, 'los
preliminares' in Spanish,
if you want to learn that in
Spanish.
 
These sonnets about the book,
in praise of the book,
are like today's blurbs.
 
You pick up a book and you find
that there are blurbs.
"Roberto González
Echevarría says...
blah, blah,"
and there is a praise,
and what has happened is that
the person blurbing the book has
been one of the readers of the
press to accept another book,
and then they ask you to
excerpt something from your
report and put it on the back.
 
Other times,
they just send you the book and
say, "Please,
would you write a blurb for
this book?"
 
I know many people who do it
without reading the book,
"Oh, one of the
greatest..."and they just
write.
 
So it's the same here.
 
This is what Cervantes is
mocking, but what he does is,
instead of going outside for
legitimation,
he has literary characters
write the sonnets in praise of
his book.
 
It's as if I wrote a book and I
had a blurb from James Bond to
continue with our fictional
characters.
What he's doing is showing that
literature is self legitimating.
He is not going outside of
fiction and outside of
literature for legitimation,
but he's using these literary
characters to be those who
praise the book.
It's another game,
another joke that he is playing
on the reader.
 
So what does the friend tell
him to do?
The friend tells him to make up
his own sonnets and also to make
up a false bibliography,
as it were, and put on the
margins all of the sources that
he never consulted--
as if you created a false
bibliography for a paper that
you've written.
 
This is a joke.
 
It's a very amusing joke,
but it's also very serious.
What the friend is telling
Cervantes is:
forget about tradition,
forget about Aristotle;
Aristotle never wrote about
romances of chivalry.
You're doing something new,
you can just make it all up.
This is what the prologue is a
kind of manifesto for the kind
of book that the Quixote
is,
the kind of original new book
that it is, that it can break
with tradition.
 
The friend says: make it all up!
 
I hope you don't take this
seriously yourselves in your own
bibliographies when you write
your papers,
but this is the advice that the
friend gives--
He says: oh,
I thought that you were wise!
No!
 
What you have to do is this.
 
Now, there are digs there at
Lope de Vega--remember I
mentioned him in an earlier
class, Lope, who was a very
successful playwright.
 
He was rich,
famous, and vain,
and Cervantes is taking a dig
at him because apparently Lope
got himself some thesaurus,
compendium of quotations,
of familiar quotations,
and used them in his works to
make it seem like he was very
erudite and learned,
and Lope also added the 'de,'
Lope de Vega,
to his last name to make it
seem as if he were an
aristocrat.
 
You know the 'de' in
French, Spanish or German
'von,' indicates
aristocracy--So he's taking a
dig at Lope de Vega.
 
Lope was just so successful and
Lope had also said a few
disparaging things about him...
 
But all of that is sort of
contingent.
The important thing in the
prologue is that he's saying,
away with tradition,
I'm beginning here anew,
I can make it up.
 
That is the whole point of
the...
Now, I am going to end by
simply alluding to the beginning
of the book.
 
The birth of Don Quixote
is an act of self invention by a
man of fifty.
 
At the age, fifty was a very
advanced age.
Age expectancy didn't go beyond
late thirties,
early forties,
at the time,
so this is also commensurate
with Cervantes's own age.
He's in his late fifties when
he publishes his book,
he says it in the prologue.
 
It's an act of self invention
by a man of fifty.
He feels free to create to
himself beyond family.
We don't learn anything about
Don Quixote's family,
only about his niece,
but, do we learn anything about
his parents?
 
No;
about his birth? No;
about his needs? No.
 
Cervantes has created a hero
who is beyond Freud's family
romance.
 
In Freud's theories the family
romance is mommy,
daddy, and the child;
the boy is love in with mommy,
and all of that.
 
That is the family romance,
and you go through life with
the resentment of daddy,
or your secret love for mommy,
and all of that.
 
That's the family romance.
 
This is a mock version of
Freud--But Cervantes's character
is born beyond Freud.
 
When you're fifty,
who cares about your parents
and all of that?
 
You are who you are.
 
And not only is he who he is,
but he wills himself to be
something else at the age of
fifty.
It is important that Don
Quixote be that old.
Can you think of another
literary hero who is that old?
Celestina, but she had as
co-protagonists the two young
lovers.
 
But no, protagonists were
either men in their full
strength, like Ulysses,
Aeneas, the pilgrim in the
Divine Comedy,
I think, is thirty-three.
Not an old man.
 
Why?
 
Because his self invention is
an act of will based on nothing.
He's beyond all of the
pressures of family and of need,
and this is why he can invent
himself.
Don Quixote's true family and
genealogy is the books that he
read.
 
 
 
