Prof: Today,
I'm going to talk about the
transition from Part I to Part
II of the Quixote;
our transition,
not Cervantes's transition.
Remember that he didn't know
for sure that he was going to
write a second part.
 
Of course, when he wrote the
second part,
he knew for sure that he had
written Part I and it is a
transition for us,
and also a transition in his
life, but not one that was
envisioned when Part I was being
conceived.
 
I underline that fact;
I have said it several times,
because the illusion is created
that it is one book by the fact
that this it is all bound
together.
You will see today that they
are quite different as books,
because we will be seeing the
title pages of them.
I will begin by reviewing what
I call the grand themes of
criticism regarding Part I
before moving on to Part II.
Now, the first of those grand
themes, number one,
is ambiguity and perspectivism.
 
This is a review session as it
were.
Leo Spitzer,
whom you will be meeting in a
week or so when you read his
very fine piece in the
Casebook called
"Linguistic Perspectivism
in Don Quixote"
says the following--
I'm only going to talk about
his conclusions,
we will talk more about how he
comes to those conclusion after
you have read his piece;
but I need to go over his
conclusions.
 
He says: "This means that,
in our novel,
[meaning the Quixote]
things are represented not for
what they are in themselves,
but only as things spoken about
or thought about;
and this involves breaking the
narrative presentation into two
points of view.
There can be no certainty about
the 'unbroken' reality of
events;
the only unquestionable truth
on which the reader may depend
is the will of the artist who
chose to break up a multivalent
reality into different
perspectives.
 
In other words,
perspectivism suggests an
Archimedean principle outside of
the plot--
and the Archimedes must be
Cervantes himself [meaning the
Archimedean principle,
the focus, the center,
the fulcrum is Cervantes
himself,
who has created this
perspective.]"
Spitzer adds:
"And we may see in
Cervantes' two-fold treatment of
the problem of nicknames [which
he studies in great detail in
his article]
another example of his baroque
attitude [we will be talking
about the Baroque extensively in
the next few lectures]
what is true,
what is a dream?
[this is one of the topics of
the baroque]--this time,
[continues Spitzer]
toward language.
Is not human language,
also, vanitas vanitatum,
the vanity of vanities [he is
quoting, of course,
scripture.]"
That's the end of Spitzer,
and we saw that Ciriaco
Morón Arroyo--whose name
you have heard before--what he
said about irony.
I'm repeating a quote that you
heard in a previous lecture.
He says: "I agree with
Spitzer's definition of
Cervantean perspectivism."
 
And now he quotes Spitzer,
who says: "In terms of
morals Cervantes is no way a
perspectivist."
That's the end of the Spitzer
quote within the Morón
Arroyo quote.
 
In a note, Morón Arroyo
continues: "He adds:
'Perhaps we ought to point out
here'--
[this is Ciriaco Morón
Arroyo]--
'perhaps we ought to point out
here that perspectivism is
inherent to Christian thought.
 
Perspectivism is in the sense
of a form of modesty that
recognizes the limits of all
judgment and human knowledge;
is indeed a Christian humility
and intelligence in the
strictest sense,
the capacity to perceive the
limit of our own
creations."
And then he uses the Greek word
for irony, ironea.
So perspectivism,
this partial view that creates
this irony and so forth,
Morón Arroyo underlines,
is a very Christian
perspective.
I would add that the
self-assurance of the
Renaissance is being eroded and
the ordered cosmos of the Middle
Ages has long disappeared.
 
Now, that is the first of the
grand themes:
ambiguity, perspectivism and so
forth.
The second of the grand themes
is that the self can impose its
will on reality,
but only to a certain extent,
and the self is defined--
that self is defined--by the
agonistic struggle to do so to
impose its will on reality.
Captain Ahab in Melville's Moby
Dick is the most obvious modern
example in fiction;
also, of course,
an heir of Don
Quixote--Melville was a great
reader of Cervantes.
 
Remember, in this context of
imposing our will on reality,
what I said about how we invent
our beloveds when in love,
that is part of this willful
imposition of ourselves on
reality.
 
Now, why is doubt such an
integral part of what we could
call the aesthetics of the
Quixote?
How can doubt be a positive
value?
The book gives a substance to
the sense of doubt brought about
by the scientific discoveries
and philosophical ideas of the
period.
 
It enacts doubts,
the Quixote.
It dramatizes it.
 
It is the modern condition.
 
Remember what I mentioned about
Copernicus, Galileo,
the fact that mankind is no
longer at the center of the
world;
the earth is no longer at the
center of the universe,
and this has brought about this
sense of doubt.
 
There is doubt--continuing with
this second grand theme--
there is doubt about the
veracity of texts,
the capacity of texts to convey
the truth,
including, and most
prominently, the Bible,
or the Bible as
interpreted by the Catholic
Church.
 
Such doubt was not only
prevalent among protestant
thinkers but also among catholic
ones, like Erasmus of Rotterdam.
Erasmus is one of these great
Renaissance figures that I have
mentioned as being important for
Cervantes' time.
The humanists,
and Erasmus was one,
were philologists.
 
Philologist means,
'lover of language,'
'philo-logos,' lover of
language,
students of language,
particularly classical
languages,
like Latin, Greek and Hebrew.
Chairs for the study of these
languages were created in Spain
at the University of
Alcalá,
for instance,
that town where Cervantes
happens to have been born,
by the way.
Humanists, like Erasmus,
wanted to read scripture in the
original Hebrew and Greek,
Hebrew, the Old Testament,
Greek, the New Testament,
and challenge St.
Jerome's official Latin Bible;
they wanted to do their own
translations of the
Bible.
The Church didn't like this at
all, and the erasmians in Spain
were persecuted,
but there is an underlying
erasmian subtext in most of
Cervantes.
The humanists,
like Erasmus,
wanted to say,
the reading of this word in
Saint Jerome's Latin version of
the Bible is wrong,
it should be this,
and, of course,
changing that word changes the
meaning of the text,
so there was doubt about the
sacred texts which spills over
into doubt about texts in
general,
and about language,
and we certainly have echoes of
this throughout Cervantes's
work.
There is also,
continuing with the second
grand theme of doubt,
ontological doubt;
doubt about who one is,
which is an encouragement to
self creation,
to self fashioning,
to self invention,
as Stephen Greenblatt calls it
in his book Renaissance Self
Fashioning.
In the Quixote there are
many characters,
we have seen,
who invent themselves,
not just Don Quixote:
Ginés de Pasamonte,
Marcela, Dorotea as Princess
Micomicona,
and so forth.
 
Doubt leads to
pondering--pondering comes from
pondus,
in Latin, 'weigh';
so pondering is to weigh the
difference possibilities,
the different alternatives to
being, to action.
Self-doubt is the precondition
to inventiveness,
to the play of the imagination.
 
It is the gateway to freedom,
which is one of the main themes
of the Quixote,
as I have been pointing out
throughout.
 
Doubt leads to vicarious lives
lived through literature,
as in the cases of Don Quixote
and Marcela,
for instance and many others
that you will meet in Part II.
This is, again,
I underline,
the freedom of the imagination.
 
Why do we want to become others?
 
In the age of myths we wanted
to be gods;
in the modern age,
we want to be heroes,
like Don Quixote wanted to be
one of the chivalric heroes and
like people today want to be
James Bond or such a modern
hero.
 
Dissatisfaction with the world,
the world that is unstable
leads to a desire to make it
other and to make one self
other,
and this very much at the core
of the Quixote from the
very beginning.
Now, the third of the grand
themes that I'm reviewing as we
conclude Part I;
reading.
The Quixote is a book
about reading,
and its protagonist is first
and foremost a reader.
But there are many readers in
the book,
like Marcela,
Grisóstomo,
Cardenio, and even the poor
trooper who has trouble reading
the order of arrest,
as we saw in that hilarious
scene.
 
The Quixote,
the book, the Quixote,
encourages the reader to look
for stories not told,
or told indirectly by means of
other stories,
or imbedded in other stories.
 
It is a book,
the Quixote,
that is a lesson in reading,
in interpreting,
in the broad sense.
 
There are so many scenes in
which interpretations are
challenged, interpretations by
various characters clash.
The pleasure of reading
involves the discovery,
the teasing out of these
sub-textual stories,
as we saw when we talked about
Cardenio's story,
and as we saw when talked about
Princess Micomicona's story.
This is also a lesson for life
that one can learn in the
Quixote.
 
The fourth of the grand themes
is that characters are
relational, not static,
that they develop in relation
to each other.
 
A given to us today,
this was an innovation in
the Quixote,
an innovation developed from
the picaresque,
where there is character
development in fiction for the
first time.
In the Celestina there
is some of that already,
1499, but this begins to
develop with the picaresque,
Lazarillo,
1554, the
Guzmán, and
so forth.
Characters influence each other.
 
The mutual influence and
transformation take place by
virtue of the dialogue,
which posits that the self is
relational and dependent on the
others.
This is evident in one of the
truly grand themes about the
Quixote started by Salvador
de Madariaga,
which is the theme of the
quixotization of Sancho and the
sanchification of Don Quixote,
meaning that Sancho is
influenced by his master,
and that Don Quixote is
influenced by his squire.
 
The most obvious modern example
of this for me is a book and a
film called The Kiss of the
Spider Woman, by
Manuel Puig,
the Argentine writer,
where there are two fellows in
jail in Argentina,
one a political activist and
the other a homosexual,
and the whole story is how the
homosexual transforms the
political activist by telling
him the stories of movies,
and it's a very moving film
with a very quixotic structure
to it,
these two characters talking
and so forth.
 
Now, Don Fernando's
transformation,
as well as that of Dorotea is a
prime example of this evolution
of characters.
 
In addition,
we have seen that characters
can invent themselves,
identities, and have adventures
in their new roles and within
those new fictions,
as in the case of Princess
Micomicona;
we will meet others who do the
same in Part II.
The fifth of the grand themes
of criticism--and this is mostly
my own grand theme about the
Quixote--is improvisation.
I have talked several times
about improvisation in the
Quixote.
 
My Random House gives
two meanings to 'improvise.'
One: "to prepare or
provide offhand or hastily,
extemporize [Well,
actually, four meanings];
to compose verse,
music, on the spur of the
moment;
[three]
to recite, sing
extemporaneously;
[and four]
to compose utter or execute
anything extemporaneously."
 
The Dictionary of the
Spanish Academy says
tersely: "hacer una cosa
de pronto,
sin estudio ni
preparación alguna
[to make or do something
suddenly without study or
preparation.]"
Improvisation has something to
do with bricoler,
a concept that was very popular
during the heyday of
structuralism,
and that means,
according to my Robert:
"Installer,
aménager en amateur et
avec ingeniosité...
 
Arranger, réparer tant
bien que mal,
de façon provisoire...
 
Arranger pour falsifier [To
install something,
to provide or arrange for
something amateurishly and
ingeniously...
 
To fix or repair something more
or less in a provisional way...
To fix something up to falsify
it or pass it off for something
else.]"
To improvise has,
on the one hand,
a positive side:
it is a boast of skill to be
able to do something without a
model or plan,
but it also has a negative
side, because the product of
improvisation is usually shoddy,
imperfect, fragile and
provisional.
We have seen that there is a
great deal of implicit
improvisation in Part I of
the Quixote thematically,
as it were, meaning that things
and actions are described which
are improvised.
 
I gave Juan Palomeque's inn as
an example of this because it is
made up of patchwork,
carried out over time
haphazardly, but I also pointed
out features of the novel itself
that seem to betray their
improvised construction.
They are notorious cervantine
oversights, such as the
disappearance of Sancho's
donkey, but there are many
others.
 
For instance,
I don't know if you noticed,
that Cervantes pulls out of his
hat at the end,
that the innkeeper,
that Juan Palomeque,
was a trooper of the Holy
Brotherhood,
something that goes unmentioned
during the earlier episode in
the inn,
when Juan Palomeque puts out a
candle to prevent a trooper from
finding out what is going on in
his establishment.
 
How come, if was a trooper
himself?
Are these lapses on the part of
Cervantes or part of the
aesthetics of the book?
 
I would like to think that it
is part of the aesthetics of the
book,
and that the air of
improvisation is very much
inline with the book's informal
tone,
with the fact that its origin
is presumably a found manuscript
whose discovery is episodic,
and whose redaction seems to be
concomitant with the action,
and the reading,
most notoriously,
the prologue.
 
The prologue dramatizes the
process of improvisation because
it tells how it is being
laboriously written;
the prologue sets the tone for
the book, and it is also its
defining epilogue,
as I said earlier.
It is an ode to improvisation,
to an imperfection,
qualities, to which the author
resigns himself.
Remember that Menéndez
Pidal,
in the piece that you read,
attributes improvisation to the
Spanish character--
he says this with resignation;
he is a Spaniard,
since he was a Spaniard
himself;
and E.C. Riley,
a British Hispanist who loved
Spain,
admiringly compares the
improvisation in the
Quixote to bullfighting and
to flamenco dancing,
which are activities in which
improvisation is the order of
the day.
 
I believe that it is a
theoretical statement on the
part of Cervantes which he
proposes,
again, in chapter V of the 1615
Quixote--
the second part--when he has
the translator apologize,
and you will get to that
chapter, for transcribing a text
in which Sancho does not sound
like himself;
he sounds too learned.
 
This is a text that undoes
itself as it is being read;
it is also a critique of
mimesis, of representation;
it is an improvisation made
from what there is,
and that the translator and
transcriber passed on resigned
its imperfections.
 
All of this is connected to the
themes that I mentioned before
about doubt, self doubt and
linguistic uncertainty.
How can my poor self create
something perfect and enduring
in language given what I have
said about doubt,
self doubt and the instability
of language as conceived by the
humanists?
 
The whole thing also opens the
question of temporality,
about this text that says,
well, it doesn't sound like
Sancho,
I transcribe it because it is
my duty to do so and so forth.
 
In what moment,
or at what moment,
does the text exist in relation
to the originals in which it is
based?
 
One solution,
perhaps the only solution is to
say that the text exists only at
the moment of reading,
of each reading,
and that is a very modern
current conception of textuality
that is already present in
Cervantes.
 
So these are the grand themes
that I wanted to review with you
about Part I.
 
And now, we move to Part II.
 
1615, ten years,
a whole decade has elapsed.
Cervantes was an instant
success with Don Quixote,
and he moved to Madrid in 1616.
 
Publishers become interested in
his work and he brings out the
Novelas ejemplares,
The Exemplary Stories
that you have in 1613,
and Ocho comedias y ocho
entremeses,
Eight Plays and Eight
Interludes in 1615,
the same year that the second
Quixote appears,
and I have a page here that you
have read,
but I want to read again,
from Durán's book
Cervantes,
and from the little
biographical chapter at the
beginning that I reproduced in
my Casebook so that we
have a synoptic view.
 
"In 1606 [Durán
goes]
the Court settled again in
Madrid [and you have been
following in Elliott the
migrations of the Spanish
Court]: Cervantes and his family
moved with it.
Cervantes wanted to be in touch
with other writers and was
looking for new publishers;
the women in his household,
busy with fashion,
designing and sewing were
looking for customers.
 
Miguel's last years in Madrid
were relatively serene.
He overcame through patience
and wisdom all of his
adversities,
the neglect of famous writers
such as Lope de Vega--
who seldom had a good word for
his works--
and the sadness of family
crises;
his daughter married but soon
became the mistress of a wealthy
middle-aged businessman;
when Cervantes intervened in
the interest of preventing
scandal, she became estranged
and never again visited him.
Cervantes immersed himself in
his work.
It was harvest season for him:
late in life,
yet in full command of his
talent, he produced in quick
succession his Exemplary
Novels,
1613, the second part of Don
Quixote 1615,
and finally Persiles y
Sigismunda,
a novel which his imagination
and his love for adventure found
almost limitless in scope."
 
And he adds,
quoting Ángel del
Río,
a great Hispanist who was a
professor at Columbia University
for many years,
and who in the forties
published a great history of
Spanish literature.
 
Durán goes:
"Objectively,
Cervantes' life was not a
success story.
He was seldom in full control:
he was too poor;
for many years he lacked public
recognition.
Yet, as Ángel del
Río points out [and here
he quotes Ángel del
Río],
'there is no reason to lament
Cervantes' misfortunes nor the
mediocrity of his daily life.
 
He could thus,
through an experience which is
seldom obtained when the writer
is successful and wealthy,
know, observe and feel the beat
of Spanish life in its greatness
and its poverty,
in its heroic fantasy and in
the sad reality of an imminent
decadence.
He was to leave in his books
the most faithful image of this
life,
reflected in multiple
perspectives with bittersweet
irony and penetrating
humor.'"
So this moment,
where the beginning of the
decline of the Spanish empire
begins,
and so to also have a very
clear vision of this moment,
I want to read a text that
presumably you have also ready
from Imperial Spain,
Elliott's marvelous book which
I do,
do hope that you read,
and he goes as follows on
page--
this is 319,320 of your Penguin
Classics edition--
He has been talking about how
the writers could find sponsors
for their work,
and so forth:
"At the same time,
the moral and emotional
involvement of the intellectuals
in the tragic fate of their
native land seems to have
provided an additional stimulus,
given an extra degree of
intensity to their imagination
and diverting it into rewarding
creative channels.
 
[Ironically,
a moment of crisis can create a
great literature.]
This was especially true of
Cervantes,
[says Elliot]
whose life--from 1547 to 1616--
spans the two ages of imperial
triumph and imperial retreat.
 
[This is the important
sentence, spans the two ages of
imperial triumph and imperial
retreat.]
The crisis of the late
sixteenth century cuts through
the life of Cervantes as it cut
through the life of Spain,
separating the days of heroism
from the days of
desengaño [this is
a word that we will be visiting
again during the semester,
'to be undeceived'.]
Somehow Cervantes magically
held the balance between
optimism and pessimism,
enthusiasm and irony,
but he illustrates what was to
be the most striking
characteristic of
seventeenth-century literary and
artistic production--
that deep cleavage between the
two worlds of the spirit and the
flesh,
which co-exist and yet are
forever separate.
This constant dualism between
the spirit and the flesh,
the dream and the reality
belonged very much to
seventeenth century European
civilization as a whole,
but it seems to have attained
an intensity in Spain that it
rarely achieved elsewhere.
 
It is apparent in the writings
of Calderón [de la Barca,
whose name I have mentioned
before]
and the portraits of
Velázquez [whose work we
have seen and continue to see],
and it prompted the bitter
satires of Quevedo [Francisco de
Quevedo,
one of the great writers of the
Spanish seventeenth century.
He is quoting here Quevedo.]
'There are many things here
that seem to exist and have
their being,
and yet they are nothing more
than a name and an appearance,'
Quevedo wrote at the end of this
life.
[...]
Was the reality of Spanish
experience to be found in the
heroic imperialism of Charles V
or in the humiliating pacifism
of Philip III?
In the world of Don Quixote,
or the world of Sancho Panza?
Confused at once by its own
past and its own present,
the Castile of Philip III--the
land of arbitristas--
sought desperately for an
answer."
Arbitristas,
you will meet in the first
chapters of Part II--
from arbitrio,
which was an opinion--
Arbitristas were people
who offered advice to the
government on matters of the
economy,
on military matters;
some of their advice was really
outlandish.
These are the people who
developed into today's
economists,
the ones who have brought us to
the present crisis-is what I
always think of when I think of
the arbitristas.
 
You will be meeting them,
as I said,
at the beginning of Part II,
when the characters discuss
them and discus some of this
advice to the--
and Don Quixote himself act as
an arbitrista by giving
some advice on how to take care
of the threat of the Turks,
coming down again after the
defeat in Lepanto.
So we are not responsible for
answering the question of what
happened in Spain,
why was it different,
but we are responsible for
seeing the effects of this
crisis as reflected in
Cervantes's work,
and I wanted you to have a
clear view of these two ages of
empire,
one of triumph and one of
defeat.
 
Now, the second part,
let us look at the various
titles,
the title page that we saw of
the 1605 Quixote,
the title page of the 1615
Quixote, and the
title page of the Avellaneda
Quixote.
 
He's known by his second last
name, as some people are,
and you have to remember his
name;
you will see it complete now on
the screen...
Avellaneda.
 
Because the two things that
have happened to Cervantes since
the publication of 1605,
the most important things is
the success of the
Quixote,
and in 1614 the appearance of
an apocryphal Quixote
published by Avellaneda.
 
Now, this is the title page of
the 1605 Quixote,
the one we have just finished;
Part I, as is known:
"El ingenioso hidalgo
don Quixote de la
Mancha."
 
Remember we went over each one
of those words in one of my
first classes.
 
Now, we go to the title page of
the 1615 Quixote,
and you see:
"Segunda parte
del ingenioso caballero don
Quixote de la Mancha."
There has been a major change;
he's no longer an
hidalgo,
now he is a caballero:
"Por Miguel de
Cervantes Saavedra,
autor de la primera
parte:"
By Miguel de Cervantes
Saavedra,
author of the first part.
 
It is being underlined because
Avellaneda,
in 1614, there had appeared an
apocryphal Quixote:
"Segundo tomo del
ingensio hidalgo Don Quixote de
la Mancha que contiene la
tercera salida [the third
sally,
it will be the third sally]
y es la quinta [the
fifth part,
because, remember,
the first part is divided in
four,
so this is the fifth part,
and so forth,
by: "Alonso
Fernández de Avellaneda,
natural de la villa de
Tordesillas [born in the
village of Tordesillas.]
Tordesillas is a very famous
little town near Valladolid.
Why?
 
Does anyone remember why?
 
No one remembers why.
 
Student:
The treaties of Tordesillas
Prof: The Treaties of
Tordesillas,
you're all very learned Yalies,
the Treaties of Tordesillas,
whereby the Pope in 1494
divided up the New World between
Portugal and Spain.
 
Francois I, Francis the First
of France later complained in
the sixteenth century,
he says he wanted to see Adam's
will,
where Adam had bequeathed all
of this world to the Spanish.
 
So Tordesillas,
so you remember Tordesillas.
Now, so he is a
caballero,
not only an hidalgo.
 
Is it because Cervantes felt
that his "deeds,"
quote/unquote,
in the first part elevated him
to knight?
 
Some believe that the change
was made at the printers,
and not by Cervantes.
 
In part, to distinguish this
book from Avellaneda's which
still called it hidalgo,
so you call it
caballero,
knight,
to distinguish it from the
apocryphal.
Also, some have said that the
printers felt--
you see the Quixote,
as you have learned,
was immediately translated into
several languages,
English, French and so forth,
and the printers felt that
caballero,
knight, was easier to translate
into other languages than
hidalgo.
Editors tend to make such
changes in the interest of
profits,
but we don't know exactly,
but the fact is that the title
has been changed,
and this is a good way of
remembering that this is a
different book.
 
Now, the second part was
finished in a hurry by Cervantes
due, in large measure,
to the publication of the 1614
Avellaneda spurious second part.
 
Second parts had appeared of
Lazarillo,
of Guzmán,
of La Celestina,
not to mention those of
romances of chivalry as we saw
in the episode of the scrutiny
of the books;
there were whole cycles,
second, third,
fourth parts.
 
Why?
 
William Henricks has recently
finished a doctoral dissertation
about sequels,
and demonstrated that sequels
dominated the sixteenth century
in Spain;
were among the most popular of
books and that the whole poetics
of the sequel emerged.
 
It's not the same thing to
write a book from scratch than
to write a book that is the
continuation of a previous book.
Why did this happen?
 
Well, it happened because with
the advent of printing it was
easier to produce these books
and to disseminate them and to
make a profit from them,
so second parts proliferated.
So in writing a second part of
the Quixote,
Cervantes is following this
trend most recently,
the second part of the
Guzmán de
Alfarache,
which had been published right
before the first part of the
Quixote.
Now, why was he so upset at the
appearance of the Avellaneda
Quixote?
 
Because these novels and these
characters were becoming
commodities over which people
would quarrel.
Remember that we're talking
about authors,
as I have mentioned in earlier
classes,
who are the first professional
authors,
who are trying to make a living
from their writing,
so the Quixote was a
commodity for Cervantes
particularly because this was
not a character derived from
classical mythology to which
anyone had a right,
or from one of those cycles of
chivalric romances which had
been used and reused,
this is a character that he
invented so he felt it was his
own.
Of course, the character would
become a literary myth and then
taken up by others,
but at this juncture Cervantes
was very jealously guarding his
creation.
He is very much aware of the
value of his invention because
it brought him fame,
and also because it brought him
a profit.
 
In fact, you will get to an
episode in Part II that is a
brilliant satire of the
relationship between money and
literary creation,
something that we take for
granted now,
and it is the episode when Don
Quixote smashes a puppet show
that was brought by none other
than Ginés de Pasamonte
disguised as Maese Pedro,
and he breaks up all of the
figurines,
and after the episode Don
Quixote has to pay for each one
of those figurines,
each one of those characters
depending on the importance of
the character in the story.
So you can see that it is a
satire of the value of literary
invention.
 
It is as if Ian Fleming said my
James Bond is worth so much and
Pussy Galore,
this woman who appears in one
of his movies,
outrageously named Pussy
Galore, is worth so much,
and so forth and so on.
So the second part was written
in a hurry,
and let me show in how much of
a hurry in detail by quoting one
Henry Sullivan,
who in a book called
Grotesque Purgatory
writes the following,
and I'm quoting--and follow
this closely.
He says:
"Part II of the
Quixote was begun in 1612
[seven years after],
on the stocks and well on its
way by July 1613,
about half complete by
twentieth of July 1614,
then continued at breakneck
speed in fall 1614,
and finally completed by
January or February 1615,
a period of about
two-and-a-half years in
all." Unquote.
 
I will return to this by using
a quote from Manual
Durán,
but you can see--how does
Sullivan know this?
 
From evidence and documents and
statements by Cervantes and
others and so forth about how
the novel was developed;
you will see that Part II is
quite long.
Now, one of the best critics of
Avellaneda's Quixote was
Stephen Gilman,
who was for many years a
professor at Harvard,
and he wrote an essay called
The Apocryphal Quixote,
very much worth reading,
in which he has a memorable
phrase.
Gilman says that Cervantes,
rather than confront
Avellaneda,
which he does to a certain
extent, quote:
"prefers to encompass him
in a web of irony."
 
This is Cervantes through a net
of irony, a web of irony over
his rival.
 
You will see how he does that,
because actually Avellaneda's
greatest triumph--
his book didn't have much
success--was to wind up as a
character within Don
Quixote's fiction,
and having his characters
incorporated into Don
Quixote's fiction,
to add to the game of mirrors
that the Quixote already
was.
 
In fact, a critic--and with
enough time in their hands
critics and scholars will almost
say anything--
a critic claimed in 1915 that
the apocryphal Quixote
had been written by Cervantes
himself.
That's absurd,
but at some level it makes
sense,
because if Avellaneda hadn't
existed,
Cervantes would have had to
invent him in the way that he
uses him in Part II of the
Quixote.
 
Now, if you want to read the
most outlandish take on all of
this,
you must read a story by the
Argentine master Jorge Luis
Borges,
who wrote a story called
"Pierre Menard,
Author of the
Quixote"
in which a French poet,
minor scholar and so forth
decides to write the
Quixote again,
but not a different
Quixote,
but the same Quixote
word-for-word as Cervantes had
written it.
 
It is a dizzying theoretical
meditation on all of these games
of authorship that Cervantes
initiates himself in Part I of
the Quixote and continues
in Part II.
In a sense, the appearance of
Avellaneda is like a
self-fulfilling prophecy.
 
If there was a Cide Hamete
Benengeli who was supposed to
have been the real author of
the Quixote--
and is, of course,
a fictional author--
suddenly Cervantes finds
himself with a real false author
of the Quixote;
so this is what the Avellaneda
book adds to the Quixote.
 
Now, the Avellaneda book is
tremendously boring.
It is conceived within
scholastic philosophy,
the characters instead of
engaging dialogue have long
monologues that are really
obnoxious,
Don Quixote is not in love with
Dulcinea,
he is the "unloving
knight,"
Sancho is a bit pornographic,
it is, in fact,
a very dull book that only
those of us who are cervantistas
and cannot avoid doing so read.
 
So much about Avellaneda,
and now let's move on to Part
II.
 
You have a treat in store
because, in my view,
Part II is better than Part I,
if that is possible,
although scholars argue back
and forth about this,
but I think there's no question
Part II is a superior book and
is even much more complicated,
and complicated by the fact
that characters in Part II have
read Part I,
adding to the game of mirrors,
and you will find this in the
very early chapters of Part II.
 
I'm going to read you now a few
quotes,
again, from Durán's
"Cervantes,"
because they serve as a good
introduction to Part II,
because it is kind of a
synthesis of what Durán
thinks or thought about the
Quixote at this point,
and you have some general ideas
before embarking on reading Part
II of the Quixote.
 
These are quotes.
 
He says: "The art of
dialogue in Cervantes reaches
its peak in the second half of
his novel."
It is true, the second part
there is much more dialogue,
and not just between Sancho and
Don Quixote--
those dialogues that we enjoy
so much and there are more
here--
but among many different
characters with different points
of view,
different ways of speaking and
so forth.
Again, Durán:
"It is also in the second
part when the interaction of the
two main characters,
the knight and his squire,
reaches a climax:
Sancho Panza becomes
increasingly quixotized and even
at certain moments occupies the
center of the stage,
having become temporarily the
novel's central character.
It is an impressive trick.
 
It is not done with mirrors,
it is achieved through
dialogue."
 
Unquote.
 
And this is true.
 
You will see that Sancho,
in various chapters that I'm
not going to anticipate and ruin
for you,
becomes the protagonist of the
novel,
and there is a back and forth
between Don Quixote and Sancho.
Again, Durán:
"Human memory,
the memory of the squire and
his master, ruminates upon the
past.
 
Nothing that occurs in their
travels is entirely finished.
They will talk about what has
happened to them and try to find
a meaning to every obscure
detail etched in their memory.
Every possibility the future
holds open will influence their
present attitudes,
since the past keeps on echoing
upon the present and the future
keeps on working its magic upon
the minds of the two characters,
each moment of the present is
made richer and more subtle by
the interplay of past,
present and future."
 
Unquote.
 
To this I might add that the
presence of Part I,
as a memory,
is an important one in Part II,
and a device of Part II is that
many episodes are in some way a
rewriting of episodes of Part I,
a rewriting that is usually
much more complicated and
elaborate,
but you can see the kernel of
the episode from Part I in the
episode in Part II.
 
This raises,
of course, philosophical issues
about memory and about the
repetition of the past,
and all of that,
that we will be talking about
when we reach those episodes.
 
The interaction between the
individual and his environment
is shown to be unique,
it escapes logic and language
because logic and language are
systems of labels superimposed
upon our experience,
and Cervantes wants to free us
from all labels by showing how
much each individual is capable
of interpreting his own facet of
a multifaceted reality.
The presence of reality in its
multifaceted ways,
and the way of interpreting
becomes much more complicated in
Part II,
because disguises proliferate
and a lot more of the action
takes place not in the open air,
but indoors,
where charades can be organized
and so forth.
 
Now, the following quote which
is a little long,
but takes us back to the
composition of Part II,
and I think will,
I hope, round out your
knowledge of it as you approach
reading it.
Durán goes:
"The sense of unreality is
heightened throughout Part II
when Don Quixote and Sancho have
to face their doubles,
their reflection in the mirror.
They meet people who have read
Part I or have heard about it,
they have to react to what
these readers of their previous
adventures think about them.
 
Even worse, after chapter XXXVI
[which is when Cervantes finds
out about the existence of
Avellaneda's book]
after chapters XXXVI,
they have to fight off another
image of themselves,
the bogus image in the crooked
mirror of Avellaneda's fake
second part,
the false Quixote.
 
Towards the end of 1614
Cervantes was working [this is
what we went over,
but now I'm going to repeat in
a different key]
on chapter XXXVI of his second
part.
 
Avellaneda's book appeared in
October of the same year.
Cervantes reacted by writing
thirty-eight chapters in seven
months, a strenuous effort which
may have exhausted what was left
of a precarious health.
 
The spurious second part was
the work of an unknown author
[Avellaneda is obviously a
pseudonym,
it's a pen name,
we don't know who really
Avellaneda was],
but Cervantes's hard won
reputation was in danger until
he could refute the piracy by
issuing his own Part II.
 
He was also indignant at the
lack of intelligence and
sensitivity of his imitator.
 
[He was even a bad imitator,
if he had been a good imitator
he may have been flattered.]
His anger is expressed through
his main characters,
Don Quixote and Sancho,
have to face their ugly ghosts.
 
They must convince the readers
of Avellaneda's book that they
are real and Avellaneda's
characters are intruders trying
to usurp their personality,
their selves,
their reality,
it is a situation only
Cervantes or Pirandello could
have devised."
The allusion here is to Luigi
Pirandello,
a great Italian playwright of
the twentieth century who wrote
a famous play called Six
Characters in Search of an
Author;
so Cervantes' characters are
disputing other characters,
their reality or fictionality.
In a way, having read Part I
yourselves,
you are like some of the
characters in Part II of the
Quixote,
and you are in a very similar
situation as you go through that
second part.
Okay.
 
Leave it there.
 
 
 
