Prof: There are three
issues that I want to bring up
as I begin today's lecture that
will determine my general themes
today: improvisation,
the international dimension
that the fiction of the novel
acquires,
and the influence of art or of
literature on reality;
those are the general topics.
 
As we move to the conclusion of
the Quixote,
the issue of how to bring the
novel to a close must have
loomed large in Cervantes' mind.
 
The plot of the novel is
repetitive,
more than sequential,
with a vague quest of the
protagonist to revive the age of
chivalry,
concretely, to participate in
the jousts in Saragossa as
goals,
but there is no obvious or
impending goal to the
characters' wonderings.
Although, one could argue,
with Williamson,
the critic I mentioned in the
last lecture,
that the disenchantment of
Dulcinea is the main purpose of
Don Quixote and Sancho set by
Merlin's prophecy and involving
the three thousand lashes that
Sancho must apply to his bottom,
and the interplay between the
two about accomplishing that
goal of disenchanting Dulcinea.
 
Yet, even, this is no clear
mission whose accomplishment
would bring the novel to an end.
 
What if Dulcinea is
disenchanted?
How could she be disenchanted?
 
What would that mean?
 
Would she and Don Quixote,
then, marry?
This is not mentioned by the
protagonist, nor is marriage
normally a desired end to
courtly love.
Love itself is the purpose of
courtly love:
the love of love.
 
It is obvious that the only end
possible would be the death of
Don Quixote,
making his life the shape of
the fiction,
though, which life,
would be the question?
 
Is it the life of Alonso
Quijano, the hidalgo who went
mad and became Don Quixote,
but about whose early life and
family we know next to nothing?
 
We only know about his niece;
then, later,
we learn that the niece was the
daughter of a sister,
but we really don't know
anything about his life.
Or is it the life invented by
Don Quixote, the would-be
knight-errant?
 
Would that be the life that
comes to an end,
to close the novel?
 
Improvisation,
I have been saying all along,
seems to rule the plot of
the Quixote,
the serendipitous actions
provoked by chance encounters on
the road,
and by characters who pop up in
the second part,
wanting to script the knight's
life,
or, at least,
episodes of the knight's life.
 
What role will improvisation
play in the ending of the novel?
There is a confluence of--we
will be talking about that,
or we will be seeing about that
in the next few lectures,
and as we come to the very end
of the novel,
and discuss that.
 
There is a confluence of actual
geography with current
historical events,
such as the expulsion of the
moriscos,
brigandage in Catalonia,
and the Turkish and Huguenots
menaces in the final episodes of
the Quixote.
 
These events return us to the
beginning of Part II,
and the discussion at Don
Quixote's house about some of
them, particularly the Turkish
threat.
This is a form of closure,
too, this return to those
discussions in the beginning of
Part II.
The novel acquires an
international dimension
announced by Don Quixote,
the priest, and Sansón
Carrasco,
talking about the Turkish
threat in the early chapters,
as if Don Quixote were going
after all to try to resolve that
issue.
But notice the concurrence of
real geographical settings.
We spoke of the Ebro river,
and now we have Barcelona,
with historical actions.
 
We have today,
Elena Pellús and I,
produced a slightly primitive
map of Spain,
but I think that it is clear
enough to give you a notion of
what I'm talking about.
 
But, of course,
you have a real map of Spain in
the website that you can see on
your own.
I will be alluding to it.
 
So we have seen the Ebro river;
Barcelona, we have now,
and now we'll see historical
actions involving that region.
Now, none of the historical
actions that appear in the
Quixote--
by historical I mean current
historical events--
none is more current and
pressing than the expulsion of
the moriscos,
which is taking place as
Cervantes is writing Part II.
The topic of the expulsion
centers on the character of
Ricote and his family.
 
He is one of the principal new
characters in Part II.
The international dimension of
the novel allows Cervantes to
introduce fresh kinds of
characters who are different
from those mainly Castilian ones
that he has presented so far.
Though, as we know--and I'll
talk about it again--not
exclusively Castilian.
 
That's the second of the broad
topics, and the third is the one
about art-influenced reality.
 
In several of these episodes
that I will be discussing,
particularly the one involving
Tosilos,
but also in others,
there seems to be a decided
influence of art on reality,
and a coalescence of the two,
by which one could say that
reality,
or the real,
is improved by art,
as we have already seen in
other episodes before,
but we have some today where
that seems to be the main topic.
Now, let us begin with Ricote.
 
One could say that this story
is a rewriting of the captive's
tale from Part I with Ricota,
whose name is Ana Félix--
I'll be talking about this name
in a minute--
Ricota is the name given to his
daughter;
her name is Ana Félix.
 
She will be the Zoraida of this
rewriting,
and Pedro Gregorio,
her suitor, would be the
captive,
but I mean this is--these two
episodes are very different at
the same time.
The one of the captive and the
one involving Ricote,
or, at least,
the Ricote episode,
is much richer in some
respects,
although the captive's episode
is quite elaborate.
In these last few chapters of
the Quixote Cervantes
appears to be offering many
possible variations of narrative
fiction,
or some of the narrative modes
available to him at that moment.
 
Ricote and his family provide
the opportunity for a mini
novela morisca,
or moorish novel.
A novela morisca is a
tale about the love between a
Christian young man and a
Moorish young woman with all of
the predictable obstacles.
 
The best known of these
novelas moriscas is
called after its protagonists,
Ozmín y Daraja,
and this novel is embedded in
the Guzmán de
Alfarache.
 
I won't put the name on the
board, because you've had it
many, many times during the
semester.
The other fictional mode in
this kind of smorgasbord of
narratives is the byzantine
romance,
the byzantine romance,
which entailed drawn out
adventures over vast
geographical areas,
adventures of lovers seeking to
find each other and suffering
abductions,
shipwrecks and being lost in
strange lands,
only to find,
when they finally meet,
that unbeknownst to them,
they are brother and sister and
cannot marry.
This is kind of romance written
at the time, very convoluted,
hence, byzantine.
 
Now, Cervantes was writing such
a romance as he raced to finish
the Quixote.
 
It's called Los trabajos de
Persiles y Sigismunda,
The Trials of Persiles and
Sigismunda.
We will be revisiting this when
we talk about the prologue to
that work,
which Cervantes thought would
be the culmination of his
life's--
of his career, but he was wrong.
 
A very interesting idea,
that, I don't know if criticism
has taken it up,
would be to study the influence
of the writing of The Trials
of Persiles and Sigismunda
on Part II of the
Quixote,
as these were books that
Cervantes worked on at the same
time.
 
Towards the end of his life,
he's rushing to finish the
Quixote,
and rushing to also finish
The Trials of Persiles and
Sisgismunda,
and it would be interesting to
see how much one influences the
other.
 
But here, as I will mention in
a little bit,
the influence is obvious.
 
Ana and Pedro's abduction by
the Turks,
and their sea-journey and
rescue, are like a small-scale
byzantine romance that is played
out in front of the port of
Barcelona.
 
This is like a byzantine
romance in a nutshell;
they are abducted by the Turks,
they are taken away,
they finally meet,
and there is no ending to it,
because she's a morisca
and she cannot come back to
Spain,
and all of that,
but that is kind of a little
byzantine romance.
A hilarious tidbit,
if you have already read this,
in this story,
is that Ana,
eager to protect Pedro from
their abductors,
and Pedro is a very beautiful
young man,
dresses him as a woman to make
him less attractive to the
Turkish captors.
 
It is a comic dig at the Turks,
whose alleged sexual
proclivities were notorious,
and are even mentioned in good
old Sebastián de
Covarrubias' Tesoro,
in the entry on the Turks,
there is a not so veiled
allusion to this practice that
Cervantes is alluding to in a
very,
I think, comical way.
It is kind of transvestitism to
the second power or something
like that, it's unbelievable.
 
Now, why Cervantes wanted to
provide this smorgasbord of
narrative possibilities at the
end is a mystery to me.
One answer is that other than
just a boast of artistic mastery
is that he is consciously
seeking variety in his work,
and he is aware and has been
since Part I that for all of the
possibilities of his newly found
hero,
Don Quixote's adventures could
become monotonous and decided to
include this technical
extravaganza as a kind of
overture or something.
 
This accumulation of narratives
is also a sort of closure by
accumulation,
one could say.
But let us get back to Ricote.
 
First, let us consider the
name: Ricote;
"rico"
means "rich"
in Spanish;
being rich, one is
"rico."
 
"Ric-ote"
is an augmentative ending,
an ending that increases
something.
Remember that I mentioned this
at the beginning of the course:
"gordote"
is a big fatso,
no?;
so "Ricote" is--
means that he's very rich,
which he is,
though some claim,
some critics claim that his
name derives from his being from
the Valley of Ricote,
a valley with that name,
but I don't buy that,
that is, I think,
a little bit too tangential.
It's obvious that he's
"ricote,"
because he is very rich,
and we know about that because
he talks about the treasure that
he has buried.
Now, with Ricote,
Cervantes passes judgment on a
current event,
one that is taking place as he
writes the book.
 
The moriscos were
expelled in 1609,
the Edict of Expulsion,
but the whole process lasted
several years,
so remember,
these are the years when he is
writing this book.
If you read your Elliott you
will know that a long debate
preceded the expulsion,
as there were many people
against it, mostly for economic
reasons.
The moriscos were an
integral part of the economy of
several regions of Spain and had
some clout in the government.
Their expulsion,
as you have learned in Elliott,
caused ruin in some areas of
Spain,
as the expulsion of the Jews,
in 1492,
had also brought about all
kinds of dire consequences to
Spain.
 
There is a confluence,
a coalescence of the text,
of the fiction with current
history that we had not seen
before in Part I or even Part
II,
nor in any other fiction
anywhere, with the possible
exception of the
Guzmán de
Alfarache,
but there it is not explicit,
and the events mentioned are
not as dramatic and as current
as the expulsion of the
moriscos.
Now, the fact that the story
will eventually remain
unfinished--
remember, they have to petition
to Madrid to have Ana
Félix pardoned for
returning to the peninsula.
 
She faces the possibility of
being sent back or even of being
executed.
 
Now, the fact that the story
remains unfinished leads me to
think that Cervantes is
considering here how closure can
be brought about in a story that
blends with ongoing time.
How can you bring closure to a
story that deals with something
that is in the process of
happening?
How can fictional time offer
closure to something that is
happening in real time?
 
If you do that,
closure would be a way of
fictionalizing what is real,
by giving it an artistic shape.
So this is a theoretical issue
that,
I'm sure, was in Cervantes'
mind, and if you remember,
in Part I, the very last of the
stories is also left unfinished.
I will take this up again as I
consider the ending of the
novel.
 
But what is the meaning of all
of this business of current
events in terms of Cervantes'
opinion about the expulsion of
the moriscos?
 
This has been,
as you can imagine,
a hotly debated issue with
presentism playing a heavy role
in the debate.
 
Presentism is a way of alluding
to a form of criticism,
be it of literature,
or an interpretation of history
that favors the present.
 
You interpret the past in terms
of the present;
or you project the present onto
the past.
Of course, the issue is whether
one can completely avoid this
ever,
but there are some critics and
some historians who exercise
this to the point where it is
obvious that it's not right,
and a lot of presentism has
played a role in this debate
about whether Cervantes really
favored or not the expulsion of
the moriscos.
All of this colored by all of
the twentieth
century--particularly--debates
about minorities,
and their roles,
and so forth.
In other words,
some critics want to make
Cervantes into a contemporary
and have him espouse views of a
modern liberal thinker.
 
Cervantes is obviously appalled
at the expulsion of those
moriscos who were
obviously part of the fabric of
the country,
those who had truly converted,
but I think he tries to give a
balanced view of the whole
thing,
obviously, worried about an
internal enemy to the state,
given the international
situation.
 
It is possible,
and it has been mentioned,
that he was also worried about
himself, if he expressed an
opinion obviously opposed to
that of the crown.
But think of this:
Morocco is barely across the
Straight of Gibraltar.
 
Here.
 
I'm sure that most of you know
that area of the world if you
have seen Casablanca,
which is not there but near
enough,
but I don't know young people
like you have seen that classic.
 
But in any way, you know this.
 
This is the Straight of
Gibraltar;
here's Spain,
and Morocco is here.
So Morocco was in the hands of
enemies of Spain,
of the same race and religion
as the moriscos.
In other words,
as opposed to the Jews,
who had been expelled in 1492,
the moriscos had an
international projection,
a potential international
projection.
 
They could be allied with
foreign enemies and become a
fifth column within Spain.
 
A fifth column is where you say
about a group of individuals who
are against a government but
living within the state,
within the nation.
 
The moriscos,
as the episode of the captive
in Part I,
allude, with their presence,
to one of the central myths for
the constitution of modern Spain
after the unification of the
country under Ferdinand and
Isabella: the re-conquest;
meaning the recovery of Spanish
territory from Moorish control,
which culminated with the fall
of Granada in 1492.
 
What I mean by this is that the
moriscos were a--
with their very presence,
recalled the presence of the
Moors in Spain until 1492,
and the Reconquista,
the re-conquest,
had become sort of a central
patriotic myth that held Spain
together.
So the moriscos are
expelled in 1609 appealing to
people's fears that the
re-conquest could be undone,
and hence that the whole
country would collapse.
This is ridiculous,
of course, but governments due
tend to motivate the populace
with such fears,
particularly totalitarian
governments do that.
Hitler did that;
in Cuba, Fidel Castro has been
announcing the impending
invasion of the Yankees for
fifty years--
it has never come--to keep the
people aroused,
and this is what is happening
in the Spain of this moment,
the moriscos could
somehow unleash a counter
re-conquest and bring the whole
country down.
 
Now, in terms of our
protagonists,
Don Quixote and Sancho the
relevant thing is that,
here, we observe Sancho making
a difficult and delicate moral
decision with respect to Ricote;
that decision is,
whether to help him,
and he is in need,
and Ricote also offers him a
very substantial material
reward,
or, for Sancho,
to be loyal to the king by
obeying his edicts.
Sancho's memories,
by the way, play a part in the
episode.
 
He recalls crying when Ricote's
family left his town,
and reveals that Ana
Félix has Pedro Gregorio,
a mayorazgo,
as his suitor.
A mayorazgo is a word
you already know.
Pedro Gregorio is not only a
Christian young man,
but a very well-to-do Christian
young man.
Sancho chooses a middle ground:
he will not help Ricote dig up
the treasure,
but he will keep silent about
Ricote's illegal return to Spain
and his plan to take the money
out of the country,
which is also illegal.
There were heavy sanctions
against taking money out of the
country,
because, with the expulsion,
as always happens when certain
people are expelled from a
country and they take the
riches,
this affects the economy of
country tremendously.
So there were laws against the
moriscos taking their
wealth with them,
too.
So Ricote is guilty of two
crimes;
having returned,
and also planning to take money
out of the country.
 
Sancho makes a very difficult
decision, because he himself is
taking a risk;
if it is learned that he has
not reported Ricote's return,
he could be also held
responsible.
 
Now, Ricote himself is a
complex character and is one of
the few figures not mocked at
all in any way in the book.
By complex, I mean that he's
caught in conflicting dilemmas,
and he's able to weigh
different points of view.
He is comparable to Hagi
Morato, Zoraida's father in Part
I,
but here this is more--this is
expanded,
because his wife has converted
to Christianity,
his daughter was born into
Christianity,
he has not quite converted,
he is in a very difficult
situation.
Ricote says that he's not
against the Edict of Banishment,
of expulsion;
he understands the reason of
state behind it,
but laments that even those
moriscos who have joined
the mainstream of society,
even converting to
Christianity,
are paying for the actions of
those who are seditious and with
whom he does not agree.
 
Sancho confesses to his
neighbor in passing,
in this marvelous postprandial
exchange they have,
after he and the German beggars
and all of that get drunk with
their wine and eat and so forth,
Sancho confesses his travails
as a governor and unsuitability
for the position,
and Ricote, who is clearly
better educated than Sancho,
and can tell that the whole
thing had to be a hoax,
does not press the matter.
 
In this, Ricote displays a deep
human understanding and
forbearance for the shortcomings
of another human being;
Sancho's ignorance.
 
It is a very subtle touch on
the part of Cervantes.
There is a certain neighborly
complicity by which the figures
of Sancho and Ricote are rounded
out, filled out.
The squire is growing
intellectually and spiritually
as the novel progresses,
and Ricote, as I said,
is a very complex and
well-rounded character who goes
through a very dramatic process
here.
My friend, the distinguished
Puerto Rican scholar Luce
López-Baralt,
Professor at the University of
Puerto Rico,
has written eloquently--she's
an arabist--
has written eloquently about
the moriscos and the
literature they produced,
learning about it may help us
understand better Ricote's
plight,
as depicted by Cervantes in
the Quixote.
 
I'm referring to a study by
Lopéz-Baralt entitled
"What Image Did the
Moriscos Have of
Themselves?"
 
She writes: "If I were to
symbolize the fundamental image
of themselves that the Spanish
moriscos had,
I believe that the epithet used
by Mancebo [a morisco she's
writing about]
would be the most appropriate,
'criers,' 'or weepers.'
 
When the moriscos,
being deposed [by the
authorities]
cried.
Instead of rewriting elegant
passages from their literature,
they were determined to
preserve for posterity a
faithful image of themselves and
how they reacted before the
historical crisis that was
coming upon them.
[Then she adds]
And this is precisely what
morisco literature is
about [because there was a
morisco literature].
 
It constitutes a literary
monument to the collective
effort to preserve at all costs
Islamic identity,
mortally wounded in the Spain
of the Golden Age.
It was an enormous effort,
because the basic elements of
Islamic culture,
the language,
proper names,
distinctive dress,
religious ceremonies,
even the zambra dance
had been strictly forbidden by
numerous official decrees issued
all along the sixteenth
century."
Unquote.
 
She adds, finally:
"But these very same
moriscos,
divided in the deepest recesses
of their souls,
found themselves before a new
dilemma when Philip III decreed
against them the Order of
Expulsion in 1609.
 
They had not been allowed to
become bona fide
Spaniards in their country of
origin,
but they did not have time
either to become authentic
Muslims during the first decades
of their exile in berberie.
The morisco community
went through two different
processes of assimilation,
their Islamic identity had been
torn from them forcibly in the
Spain of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries,
and when they finally immersed
in the process of assimilating
themselves to official
Spanishness,
they were forced by
circumstances to begin another
process,
now the opposite one,
of cultural assimilation."
Unquote.
 
In other words,
as you have read here,
when they went back to their
countries of origin--What
countries of origin?
 
They were from Spain--they
found that they were not
accepted in the Muslim
communities where they thought
that they would be welcomed,
and where they would be able to
blend themselves into the
mainstream.
No!
 
They were exiles,
again, within their own people;
they were in a no-man's land
culturally speaking.
This is the drama that Ricote
and his family is living
through, and that Cervantes is
mentioning here.
In short, what Cervantes
accomplishes in the episodes
involving Ricote is to provide a
view,
a vision of the effects of
political decisions made,
with concern for the nation as
a whole,
on the people that are affected
by those decisions.
The novel is not a treatise on
political philosophy,
nor is it a commentary on
government policies,
it is a medium through which
the particular can be perceived
in the lives of specific people.
 
Of course, what Cervantes is
dealing with here,
is an issue that has affected
humanity since time immemorial,
and that would continue to
affect it until the present,
until today,
until the issues that we are
facing in this country,
today.
It is the presence of
minorities within a body
politics and how a state can
deal with them without
endangering its own existence.
 
More broadly speaking,
the issue is how nations and
states define themselves
negatively,
as that which they are not,
and try to wage wars against
real or perceived enemies,
and cleanse their own
population of potential internal
enemies that may be accomplices
of external ones.
 
This seems to be a constant in
human history,
and one can see its
manifestations in the Bible and
classical literature.
 
The modern history of abuses
provoked by these tendencies is
long and shameful from the
expulsion of the Jews,
from Spain in 1492,
to the extermination of
millions of them by the Nazi
regime in Germany.
In the Spain that we are
studying, it was not only the
moriscos that did not fit
within the homogenous body of
the nation: gypsies,
conversos,
and the people in regions,
such as Catalonia and Galicia
who were out of sorts with the
Castilian driven state.
Catalonia, Galicia up here.
 
We have seen through the
Quixote characters from
other provinces,
like the Basque,
the Galicians,
the Asturians.
Spain is a country divided
against itself,
and continues to be so,
if not, google "ETA,"
the Basque terrorist group,
the Basque terrorist group
whose activities are centered
all over,
but I mean, they are in both
Spain and France,
because that's where Basque
people live,
and have lived there since the
beginning of time.
They have no idea where the
Basque came from;
their language is not
Indo-European,
they have no idea where it came
from,
so they are separatists,
and the extreme group,
the terrorist group ETA is
fearsome to both the Spanish and
the French state.
 
Cervantes' Quixote is
the first substantial work of
fiction that dramatizes this
conflict, and the Ricote story
is the most dramatic.
 
From the point of view of
literature,
the thing to keep in mind is
that the conflict involving the
expulsion of the moriscos
is seen in its particulars,
not in general terms,
and that its poignancy is due
to the believability of the
characters,
especially Ricote,
but also in the tenderness,
the neighborly solidarity that
he and Sancho display.
These are human qualities and
emotions that are beyond
political policies,
and the novel will from now on
always be about them,
these particulars,
not the general themes.
 
So, so much for Ricote and Ana
Felix for the time being.
We may have to return to them.
 
But now let us fall into the
pit with Sancho.
I assume that you have read
this wonderful chapter,
in which Sancho falls into a
pit, which is a symmetrical
episode to the Montesinos cave,
adventure of his master Don
Quixote.
 
There is an internal parallel,
by means of which Cervantes
parodies himself within Part II.
 
I had told you that there are
episodes in Part II that are
repetitions of episodes within
Part II.
This episode is a parody of the
Montesinos cave,
which was itself a parody of
several chivalric episodes,
as well as others,
episodes in Homer,
Virgil and Plato.
 
These lifts Sancho to a kind of
equality with his master,
it is a funny one,
but nevertheless,
it is an equality with his
master.
It is to be noted,
however, that Sancho falls into
the pit cave after losing his
island: fall of Troy,
Aeneas' descent,
there is a kind of pattern,
here.
 
I have a series of quotes,
here, that I want to gloss from
an excellent article written
jointly by Raymond McCurdy and
Alfred Rodríguez,
and I will quote them and gloss
them as I did with the
Lopéz Baralt:
"As an internal parallel
[they say]
the series of actions that we
study [meaning the fall into the
pit]
have exceptional
characteristics.
 
It is, in the first place,
the most prominent example of
the deliberate parallelism that
largely structures the
Quixote,
the parallel in which the
obvious resemblance that strikes
one is descent,
fall, common subterranean stay
[he's talking about the cave of
Montesinos in this parallelism,
he calls it a
parallelism]."
 
They quote Juan Marasso,
who says,
M-A-R-A-S-S-O:
"'We notice the
correspondence,
the striking parallelism of
cycles in Part II:
enchantment of Dulcinea [like
the loss of Troy],
descent to Montesinos cave [the
infernal descent of Aeneas],
Sancho Panza loses his island
[loss of Troy],
falls into a deep and very dark
pit [infernal descent].'"
So you can see that they have
noticed these parallelisms in
great detail.
They add: "The parallel
that we're studying by offering
a curious parody of a parody
becomes a mirror that reflects
Cervantes' entire creative
process [because this is a
parody of a parody,
a parody of Cervantes himself].
Cervantes [they say]
produces with a Sancho Panzean
adventure [now you can make
Sancho Panza into an adjective]
at least for the reader who
picks up all of the hints strewn
by the novelists and innovative,
and at the same time snide
re-parody,
double parody.
By doing this,
the great novelist touches on
purpose the aesthetic limits of
his own artistic procedure,
for it would appear to be the
limit of parodic creation,
a limit insurmountable and
innovative,
a self parody that is,
moreover, a parody of a
parody."
 
This is reaching deep into that
series of images that are
repeated deep into that mirror
where we see each other in the
barber shop,
as a little boy,
when you're reflected over and
over,
and over, and over, and over.
 
Now, we also noticed now,
having abandoned McCurdy and
Rodríguez,
that this episode involves a
desengaño,
which makes Sancho even more
reflective,
and he no longer yearns for the
island.
 
He values more his service and
his attachment to Don Quixote;
he yearns for the intimacy of
their relationship.
Now, they are--then,
because Don Quixote finds
Sancho,
because he has gone out to
practice for this joust,
his encounter he's supposed to
have,
and, by chance,
hears Sancho's laments,
and that encounter is going to
be the one to restore
Doña Rodríguez's
daughter's honor by having the
young man,
who promised to marry her,
and compromised her honor,
go ahead and marry her.
 
So, here, we have--we go to the
third of the topics I had
mentioned, an instance of art
influencing life.
The prank organized by the duke
and his minions brings about the
possible marriage of the young
woman to the young man who plays
the role of her estranged
fiancé,
because it is not longer the
real fiancé
who's involved,
but it's someone who's playing
the estranged fiancé.
 
This adventure will turn out
like the love conflicts of Part
I that Don Quixote solves,
except that here the fiction is
turning to reality,
whereas, in the Dorotea,
Fernando, Pandafilando affair,
the giant is only symbolically
slain.
 
Fiction and reality are no
longer separate in Part II.
They are part and parcel of
each other.
Fiction dose not simply reflect
reality, it affects it;
it affects it.
 
Fiction and reality appear to
be one and the same.
Or in other words,
reality is nature improved by
art.
 
In the episode,
we have, again,
a marriage where social
mobility is involved.
Dueña Rodríguez's
daughter was going to marry up
economically,
because this young man was
aloft, but the groom proxy,
Tosilos, is a mere servant,
a lackey.
 
She, however,
concludes that it is better to
marry than not at all,
and accepts him in a gesture of
pragmatism that is completely at
odds and funny,
but is completely at odds with
all of the notions of idealized
love that we have here.
 
She sees that it's better to
get married than not to be
married at all,
in the situation in which she
is in,
and the context in which she
finds herself.
 
There is an echo here,
I find, a very funny one,
suddenly about--the fight is
about to begin,
and this proxy groom looks at
the woman,
huh!, and falls in love with
her, and says,
I don't want to fight,
I surrender,
I'll marry her;
and in the end she says,
okay, I'll marry him,
better him than nobody,
and this is what is funny,
so the fiction becomes the
reality,
that is, the fiction--well,
it's very obvious.
 
There is an echo here of
Camacho's wedding,
so in a sense this episode is
also repetition of an episode in
Part I,
like Sancho's fall in the cave
of Montesinos adventure.
 
But the point is that fiction
has improved reality,
and this is a theme that is
repeated in the next two
episodes that I'll discussed
very briefly,
but they are very significant.
 
The first and most commented
about is when they find these
images of chivalric saints
covered with sheets on the road.
This episode is remindful of
the one towards the end of Part
I,
when the penitents carry an
image of the virgin-- remember,
in the procession--and Don
Quixote takes her to be a lady
in distress.
Here, as with the actors in the
wagon of death episode,
Don Quixote makes no mistakes.
 
Actually, he does quite an
erudite study of the image of
Saint George.
 
Don Quixote knows that these
are representations.
Critics have seen in this
episode echoes of the debates
involving erasmians,
and those whose Protestant
leanings about images and other
devout representations in this
episode.
 
If you've read,
in the Elliott,
and you know,
there was a whole debate about
whether there should be
religious images in the churches
or not.
 
Of course, the faction in favor
of religious images obviously
won in Spain,
but there was a debate.
It involved Erasmus, too.
 
But the point is that reality,
here, appears to have turned
into art;
what he finds on the road are
already representations of these
saints, are artistic images of
the saints.
 
They're there, out there.
 
The second episode,
which I find most charming,
is when Don Quixote is caught
in a net,
in a green net that was set
there among the trees to capture
birds,
by these young ladies playing
at being shepherdesses,
and getting ready to perform an
eclogue by Garcilaso,
that poet I have mentioned so
man times in the semester,
that I hope you remember his
name--eclogue,
these pastoral poems.
They are about to stage one of
them.
They have learned the lines,
and all of that,
she says, and Don Quixote vows
to stand in the middle of the
road and defend him for however
long it takes,
and--so reality again appears
as art: young women dressed as
shepherdesses about to stage an
eclogue by the great Garcilaso.
Notice that Garcilaso's poetry
has become a part of common
discourse;
it has improved common every
day discourse.
 
These young ladies want to
represent his poetry.
Garcilaso--remember,
1501-1536, only thirty-five
years he lived,
but when his poetry was
published in 1543,
posthumously,
it changed poetry written in
the Spanish language forever,
until today.
 
That's how important he was.
 
But notice that his poetry has
been incorporated into every day
life, by these.
 
So we conclude by talking about
Roque Guinart.
Roque Guinart is a
Catalán bandit,
who really existed,
and like the moriscos he
brings out an international
dimension to the novel.
Brigandage of this kind was
common on Catalonia,
there were bands of brigands
like this,
which the crown felt that it
had to put down,
not only because they were
outlaws,
but because they could become
accomplices of the French
Huguenots.
 
Now, notice,
again, the map that we have
here.
 
Now, in the case of the
moriscos,
we had the threat of Muslims
across the Straight of
Gibraltar.
 
Here, Catalonia is right next
to France, and in some ways is
more French than Spanish.
 
Certainly, more French than
Castilian, and the language and
all of that, and has been very
secessionist,
like the Basques.
 
To today, the Catalans think
that they have their own
culture,
they should have their own
nation, many of them do,
and so forth,
and so on, and these bandits,
like Roque Guinart,
could be in cahoots with the
French Huguenots--
Huguenots were the French
Protestants,
Huguenots were the French
Protestants with a Calvinist
background,
who believed in the--that they
could attain salvation without
the intervention of the Church,
who believed in reading and
interpreting scripture directly,
typically the things that the
Catholic Church rejected
violently,
especially from Spain;
so Huguenots were dangerous.
 
Also Spain and France had been
at odds throughout the sixteenth
century,
so the French were no friends
of the Spaniards,
and so the Spanish crowd feared
these Catalan bandits,
because they could be agents of
the French Huguenots.
 
Remember what I said about
states defining themselves
negatively, as what they are
not.
What the Spanish crown was not
was Protestant for sure,
and not French,
and not Muslim.
But Roque Guinart is a
compelling attractive figure.
Cervantes was fascinated by the
autonomous world of the bandit
and by his chivalry.
 
A bandit like Roque invents
himself on the margins of the
law.
 
There is something romantic
avant la lettre,
in Roque;
he anticipates the bandit
figures who are heroes in
nineteenth-century novels,
Jean Valjean,
and all of the others.
Guinart is a kind of Catalan
Robin Hood, who robs the rich
and helps those in need.
 
He's lawless,
except within the very strict
laws of his band.
 
You saw how strict they are.
 
One of his associates questions
the division of the booty,
and he beheads him.
 
In this respect Roque is like
Monipodio and his brotherhood in
Riconete y Cortadillo;
his band is an anti-utopia,
a counter society,
a self enclosed world built
from within itself.
 
Is goodness possible within an
outlaw society?
Goodness always appears
possible in Cervantes.
Remember Maritornes who is good
to others.
She's kind to Sancho,
and also reliable within the
practices of her profession,
perhaps not a bad trade,
even if her profession is being
a prostitute,
but she delivers.
 
Is Guinart a new exemplar of
the heroic that Cervantes can
never stop dreaming about?
 
Is he an exemplary man of arms
as opposed to a man of letters?
Is Guinart Don Quixote's
counterpart?
Is he not a modern
knight-errant of sorts?
Isn't this what makes him
attractive to Don Quixote?
Notice that they treat each
with respect,
that Don Quixote knows about
the existence of Roque Guinart,
and Roque Guinart seems to have
read or heard about Part I of
the Quixote,
because he also knows about Don
Quixote,
so there is a kind of self
recognition parallel to the one
we find in the episode with
Cardenio,
when Don Quixote finds Cardenio
and they have that meeting,
where they looked at each other
having the uncanny feeling that
they know each other,
and here, when Don Quixote
meets Roque Guinart,
we have the same kind of
recognition,
of mutual recognition,
and, I know you because I know
myself, kind of.
 
So that is Roque Guinart,
who makes possible Don
Quixote's entry to Barcelona,
because this bandit is in
touch, and has influence,
with the important people in
the city of Barcelona,
so Don Quixote gets a kind of
safe conduct from the bandit to
enter the great city of
Barcelona,
but not before--we cannot
conclude without mentioning an
episode within the episodes of
Roque Guinart,
and it's that about Claudia
Jerónima.
 
In Claudia Jeronima we have yet
another story,
another love story,
with a lady in distress,
because her lover seems to not
be willing to marry her,
because there is a class
disparity or something,
but Claudia Jerónima
takes drastic action by killing
her fiancé,
Don Vicente,
who's a potential Don Fernando,
who in his death throws swears
that he has been the victim of
rumors,
that he has not been unfaithful
to Claudia Jerónima.
Too late, Claudia
Jerónima took care of
him.
 
This is one of the cervantean
women characters who wants to
take her destiny into her own
hands;
she goes a little too far, here;
perhaps it is a reprise of the
bodas de Camacho,
because of the scene,
but with a different and very
tragic ending.
Here, uncharacteristically,
tragedy occurs before marriage,
which is unusual.
 
Tragedies in the Golden Age
Spanish literature tend to
happen after marriage,
and we don't know if it is just
another instance of Cervantes
taking episodes from Part I,
or even within Part II,
and taking them one step
further.
 
In the next class we will be
talking about our protagonist's
arrival in Barcelona,
also about Avellaneda's
spurious Quixote,
which, by now has appeared,
and Cervantes knows about it,
and which resurfaces in the
scene of their visit to the
printing shop,
and also we will talk about Don
Quixote's final defeat.
But I want you to pay special
attention to Altisidora's dream;
Altisidora is this very active
young lady with an active
imagination and proclivity to
acting,
and all of that,
who has a marvelous dream in
one of the episodes,
when Don Quixote and Sancho go
back to the duke and duchess's
palace,
and it's an episode her dream
in which the whole issue of
books will resurface again.
 
 
 
