edward j. dudleyusers.ipfw.edu/jehle/cervante/csa/artics09/csa2009-1_text.pdf · rafael barroso...

Edward J. Dudley

CervantesBulletin of the Cervantes Society of America

The Cervantes Society of America

PresidentFrederick De Armas (2007-2010)

Vice-PresidentHoward Mancing (2007-2010)

Secretary-TreasurerTheresa Sears (2007-2010)

Executive Council

Bruce Burningham (2007-2008) Charles Ganelin (Midwest) Steve Hutchinson (2007-2008) William Childers (Northeast) Rogelio Miñana (2007-2008) Adrienne Martin (Pacific Coast) Carolyn Nadeau (2007-2008) Ignacio López Alemany (Southeast) Barbara Simerka (2007-2008) Christopher Weimer (Southwest)

Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of AmericaEditor: Tom Lathrop (2008-2010)

Managing Editor: Fred Jehle (2007-2010)

Book Review Editor: William H. Clamurro (2007-2010)

Associate Editors

Antonio Bernat Adrienne Martin Jean Canavaggio Vincent Martin Jaime Fernández Francisco Rico Edward H. Friedman George Shipley Luis Gómez Canseco Eduardo Urbina James Iffland Alison P. Weber Francisco Márquez Villanueva Diana de Armas Wilson

Cervantes is official organ of the Cervantes Society of America It publishes scholarly articles in English and Spanish on Cervantes’ life and works, reviews, and notes of interest to Cervantistas. Twice yearly. Subscription to Cervantes is a part of membership in the Cervantes Society of America, which also publishes a newsletter: $25.00 a year for individuals, $50.00 for institutions, $30.00 for couples, and $10.00 for students. Membership is open to all persons interested in Cervantes. For membership and subscription, send check in us dollars to Carolyn Nadeau, Buck 015; Illinois Wesleyan Univer-sity; Bloomington, Illinois 61701 ([email protected]), Or google Cervantes become a member + “I’m feeling lucky” for the payment page. The journal style sheet is at http://www.h-net.org/~cervantes/bcsalist.htm. Manuscripts should be sent as an attachment to an e-mail message to Tom Lathrop ([email protected]). The Board reviews submissions without knowing who the author is. The au-thor’s name, address, and e-mail adddress should be at the top of the manuscript and will be left off during the evaluation process. References to the author’s own work should be couched in the third per-son. Authors of articles must be memebers of the Society for at least the year that their article appears. Books for review should be sent to William H. Clamurro, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Emporia State University, Emporia, Kansas 66081-5087 ([email protected]).

Copyright © 2009 Cervantes Society of America

Cervantesvolume xxix, number 1

Table of Contents

Articles“Digo que yo he compuesto un libro intituladoEl ingenioso hidalgo de la mancha” Fernando Bouza and Francisco Rico ..............................................................13

Don Quijote and the Art of Laughing at Oneself Michael Scham .......................................................................................................31

Yo sé quién soy’: How don Quijote Does Things with Words (Part I, chaps. 1-5) Charles Oriel ........................................................................................................57

Early Modern Illusions of Perfect Male Friendship:The Case of Cervantes’s “El curioso impertinente” Juan Pablo Gil-Osle ............................................................................................. 85

Cervantes’s Laboratory: The Thought Experiment of “El curioso impertinente” Alison E. Krueger ................................................................................................ 117

Societal change and language history in Cervantes’ entremeses:The status of the Golden Age vos Jeremy King ........................................................................................................... 167

Don Quijote, Felipe II y la tecnología de la escritura Jesús Botello ........................................................................................................ 197

Did Cervantes Stutter? John Beusterien ..................................................................................................209

A propósito de un “descuido cervantino”:la alternancia yangüeses/gallegos en el Quijote Rafael Barroso Cabrera and Jorge Morín De Pablos ...........................221

ReviewsFriedman, Edward H. Cervantes in the Middle: Realism andReality in the Spanish Novel from Lazarillo de Tormes to Niebla Anne J. Cruz ...........................................................................................................231

Anthony Close. A Companion to Don Quixote Michael Scham .................................................................................................... 233

José Manuel Lucía Megías. Leer el Quijote en imágenes. Hacia una teoríade los modelos iconográficos Rachel Schmidt ................................................................................................... 237

José R. Cartagena Calderón, Masculinidades en obras: El drama de lahombría en la España imperial John Beusterien .................................................................................................. 238

Emilio Martínez Mata. Cervantes comenta el Quijote Michael Scham ....................................................................................................242

Juan Carlos González Faraco. Il cavaliere errante. La poetica educativadi Don Chisciotte Luis Gómez Canseco ........................................................................................ 245

5

Edward Dudley

At Ed Dudley’s retirement party in 1999, I remarked to him that I had known him longer than anyone else at that gathering excepting his wife. He had to agree. I was his student at ucla in the Spring of 1964 in a course called “Spanish Literature 1850-1898.” The Galdós novel scheduled to be read by us was Fortunata y Jacinta. (I remember thinking: “I hope it’s a short one, like Marianela.” ) I was at that party because it was among the festivities in connec-tion with the symposium given at suny Buffalo in his honor. Some of the papers from that symposium, and other solicited ones, ap-peared in a Festschrift published in my Juan de la Cuesta—Hispanic Monographs series. This book, Cervantes for the 21st Century, is popu-lated by a Who’s Who of Cervantists who wrote articles to show their appreciation for Ed’s contribution to our field. Ed Dudley’s major contribution to the field, his magnum opus without a doubt, is his award-winning The Endless Text. Don Quixote and the Hermeneutics of Romance. Since it was published at the end of the century, as one reviews the Cervantine scholarship from that hundred-year period, it can safely be said that it was one of the ten best books about Don Quijote in the 20th century. It was also pub-lished at the end of Dudley’s active career. With a lifetime of study—in Spanish literature, in English literature, and in Comparative Literature—he put everything together into this groundbreaking work. Certainly he forsook other projects over the years to devote his scholarly attention to this book.

6 Edward Dudley Cervantes

John Cull ends his on-line review for the American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain by stating: “Dudley’s study is a provocative and challenging reading which proves at times to be both controversial and brilliantly insightful.” And Nicholas Spadaccini, in his review publsihed in this Bulletin (18.2 (1998): 148-50.) begins by saying: “This beautifully-written, erudite book is the work of a distinguished comparatist who combines the best tools that philological scholarship has to offer with sophisticated contem-porary theories of reading.” If there are csa members who do not know that book yet, they should go immediately to their university library—it’s in the colleci-tont—and check it out. What follows is an obituary written by Edward Wescott, a short appreciation of Ed Dudley by Geoffrey Ribbans, and a listing of Dudley’s pubished works.

Tom Lathrop

Edward J. DudleyJuly 18, 1926 — July 21, 2008

Edward J. Dudley, Ph. D., Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature and longtime chairman of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the State University of New York at Buffalo, died from the effects of Parkinson’s disease July 21 in Sanford University of South Dakota Medical Center, Sioux Falls. He was 82. Born in St. Paul, Minn. in 1926, Ed Dudley joined the Navy at 17 and served in the final years of World War II. After the war, he re-turned to the University of Minnesota on the gi Bill and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature. He traveled ex-tensively in Europe and South America during the early 1950s, work-ing as an English language professor, before teaching Spanish at St. John’s University in Minnesota and earning his doctorate in Spanish literature in 1963. In 1959, he married Patricia Hayes, a concert pianist.

Volume 29.1 (2009) An Appreciation 7

Dr. Dudley, a scholar on the works of Miguel de Cer-vantes, taught Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Pittsburgh before joining the faculty of suny at Buffalo in 1974 At sunyab, Dr. Dudley served as chairman of the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese and then the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. He stepped down in 1983 to return to the classroom. He also was the director of the Council on International Studies from 1981 to 1983. Edward Dudley retired from teaching in 1999, at which time his life work was honored with “Convergencias Hispánicas,” an in-ternational Hispanic studies symposium sponsored by the suny at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences and its Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Featured speakers were Rosario Ferré, Puerto Rico’s most celebrated and popular author, and eminent critic and editor Diana de Armas Wilson. Author and editor of several articles and books, Dr. Dudley’s most recent book is The Endless Text: Don Quixote and The Hermeneutics of Romance, which was selected as an outstanding academic book in English of 1998 by Choice, the journal of the American Library Association. He continued to publish articles and mentor graduate students and younger colleagues until the effects of Parkinson’s disease limited his ability to write and study. He is survived by his wife, Patricia, and two sons, John and David. A memorial service was held on August 9 in Holy Spirit Church, St. Paul.

Edward J. Wescott

Way back in 1970, it was a marvelous experience for a visiting pro-fessor from England to encounter at Pittsburgh a chairperson as urbane, cultured, and generous as Ed Dudley. With Javier Herrero, we formed an all but inseparable trio in academic and non-academic discussions. As a result, with Ed, and his charming wife Patty, and


their fine sons, John and David, I developed a warm and enduring friendship, consolidated when I came to the United States in 1978. At both Pittsburgh and Buffalo, Ed gave to the departments he led, which included Comparative Literature as well as Hispanic Studies, the firm, yet considerate, direction they needed, as well as provid-ing an outstanding example of dedicated scholarship, especially on Cervantes and related Golden-Age themes. He justly deserved the tribute of a major Festschrift a few years ago. He will be sorely missed by his innumerable friends.

Geoffrey Ribbans

Volume 29.1 (2009) An Appreciation 9

Edward Dudley:A Bibliography of Published Works

BooksEl Cuento. Co-edited with John Crow. New York: Holt, Rinehart

and Winston, 1966.The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the

Renaissance to Romanticism. Co-edited with Maximilian E. Novak. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1972.

American Attitudes Toward Foreign Languages and Foreign Literatures. Co-edited with Peter Heller. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1983.

El Cuento. Second Edition [revised]. Co-edited with John Crow. New York: Holt,

Rinehart and Winston, 1984.The Endless Text: Don Quijote and the Hermeneutics of Romance. Albany:

State U of New York P, 1997. [Choice Magazine “Outstanding Academic Book” Award for 1998.]

Articles, Chapters, Reviews“Three Patterns of Imagery in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Revue

des Langues Vivantes/Tijdschrift Voor Levende Talen. XXXI-1965-6: 568-78.

“Court and Country: The Fusion of Two Images of Love in Juan Rodríguez’s El siervo libre de amor.” LXXXII (1967): 117-20.

“Don Quijote as Magus: The Rhetoric of Interpolation.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. XLIX (1972): 355-68.

“The Wild Man Goes Baroque.” The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Eds. Edward Dudley and Maximilian E. Novak. Pittsburgh: U Pittsburgh P, 1972. 309-13.

“Concussion: Avatars of the Wild Man.” The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism.


Eds. Edward Dudley and Maximilian E. Novak. Pittsburgh: U Pittsburgh P, 1972. 115-39.

“Boccaccio and Cervantes: Novella as Novella.” Hispano-Italic Studies. 2 (1979): 23-40.

“The Inquisition of Love: Tratado as a Fictional Genre.” Mediaevalia. 5 (1979): 234-43.

Review of Cervantes and the Renaissance. Ed. Michael McGaha. Easton, PA: Juan de la Cuesta, 1980. Journal of Hispanic Philology. 5.1 (1980): 65-68.

“Cervantes and Wordsworth: Literary History as Literature and Literature as Literary History.” Cervantes: Su obra y su mundo. Ed. Manuel Criado de Val. Madrid: EDI-6, S.A., 1981. 1097-1104.

“Profess and Confess: Reflections on a Cultural Displacement.” American Attitudes Toward Foreign Languages and Foreign Cultures. Eds. Edward Dudley and Peter Heller. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1983. 57-70.

“Ring Around the Hermeneutic Circle.” Cervantes. 6.1 (1986): 13-27.Review of Beyond Fiction: The Recovery of the Feminine in the Novels

of Cervantes by Ruth El Saffar. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1984.Comparative Literature. 39.2 (1987): 183-85.

“Giants and Exiles: A Voyage with Thomas Mann and Don Quixote.” Crisis and Culture in Post-Enlightenment Germany: Essays in Honor of Peter Heller. Eds. Hans Schulte and David Richards. U Press of America. Lanham, Maryland, 1993.405-13.

“Goddess on the Edge: The Galatea Agenda in Raphael, Garcilaso and Cervantes.” Caliope. 1. 1-2 (1995): 27-45.

“The Lady is Out of this World: Erotic Conceits and Carnal Displacements in Three Protocols of Desire.” Negotiating Past and Present: Studies in Spanish Literature for Javier Herrero. Ed. David Thatcher Gies. Charlottesville: Rockwood Press, 1997. 176-93.

“Rescuing Dorotea.” Don Quijote. Miguel de Cervantes. Trans. Burton Raffel. Ed. Diana de Armas Wilson. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. 810-13.

“Nueva Crítica americana. La `Nueva Crítica’ americana o el arte

Volume 29.1 (2009) 11An Appreciation

nuevo de leer poemas en nuestro tiempo.”El hispanismo en los Estados Unidos: Discursos críticos/prácticas textuales. Ed. José del Pino and F’raneisco LaRubia-Prado. Madrid: Visor, 1999. 55-70.

“‘¡O más dura que mármol a mis quexas!’ Presencia intertextual de Garcilaso en La Galatea de Cervantes.” Literatura y pensamiento en España: Estudios en honor de Ciriaco Morón Arroyo. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2003. 15-32.

“Beyond Petrarch: Garcilaso’s Thoroughly Modern Galatea.” Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance & Baroque Hispanic Poetry 10.1 (2004): 105-22.

13

“Digo que yo he compuestoun libro intitulado

El ingenioso hidalgo de la mancha”

________________________________ Fernando Bouza y Francisco Rico

El primer lector del Quijote1

Fernando Bouza

“Miguel de Çervantes, digo que yo e conpuesto un li-bro intitulado el ingenioso hidalgo de la mancha del qual hago presentaçión.” Así comienza el memo-

rial autógrafo por el que, siguiendo los pasos preceptivos, Miguel de Cervantes entregaba—presentaba—el manuscrito del Quijote al Consejo Real y le rogaba la concesión de licencia y privilegio para poder imprimirlo. La definitiva andadura hacia la publicación de esta obra cumbre de la cultura universal daba entonces comienzo. Como era habitual en esta clase de escritos, la petición no va fechada, pero Gil Ramírez de Arellano y Juan Gallo de Andrada se ocuparon de ella en Valladolid, a 20 de julio de 1604. Su primera decisión fue elegir a Antonio de Herrera para que leyese la obra y, en su caso, la aprobase. Apenas un mes y medio después, en Valladolid, a 11 de septiembre, el cronista real firmaba su aprobación, arguyendo que “será de gusto y entretenimiento al pueblo.” Una vez remiti-

1 Publicado en ABCD las artes y las letras (suplemento del diario ABC), 19 de abril de 2008

14 Fernando Bouza y Francisco Rico Cervantes

da al Consejo, se emitió la conocida cédula de licencia y privilegio (Valladolid, 16 de septiembre de 1604), aunque no en los exactos tér-minos de la petición, pues el privilegio se dio por diez años y no por los veinte que Cervantes había solicitado.

1. Facsímil de la petición de licencia y privilegiopor parte de Cervantes.

Volume 29.1 (2009) El ingenioso hidalgo de la Mancha 15

Gracias a estos nuevos datos es posible reconstruir documental-mente los primeros pasos del proceso de publicación del Quijote, al tiempo que conocer la aprobación de Antonio de Herrera, no inclui-da ni en la princeps de Juan de la Cuesta ni en las posteriores edicio-nes de la primera parte de la novela. Asimismo, tanto el memorial de Cervantes como la mencionada aprobación contienen apreciaciones sobre cómo entendía el autor su obra y cómo la recibió el cronista real, a quien se podría considerar el primer lector de un Quijote to-davía manuscrito.

2. Facsímil de la aprobación del Quijote por Antonio de Herrera.

Las noticias provienen del expediente de tramitación del me-morial de Cervantes que se conserva en la sección de Consejos del Archivo Histórico Nacional. Dicho expediente ha sido localizado en el marco de una investigación en curso sobre la relación del escri-bano de cámara Juan Gallo de Andrada y las materias de imprenta. Los resultados de dicha investigación, con una especial atención al memorial cervantino, serán dados a conocer a la comunidad cien-tífica en el II Congreso Internacional de la Sociedad Española de Estudios Medievales y Renacentistas que se celebrará en San Millán


de la Cogolla el próximo mes de septiembre. En breve, la nueva do-cumentación se podrá consultar en el Portal de Archivos Españoles (PARES) del Ministerio de Cultura.

El Libro de cédulas del año 1598 hasta fin de 1604 (Archivo Histórico Nacional, Consejos, legajo 41056) en el que Gallo iba asentando las cédulas reales que pasaban por su escribanía constituye una fuente privilegiada para la historia del libro español del Siglo de Oro. Por ello, fue una de las piezas más importantes que se pudo contem-plar en la exposición El mundo que vivió Cervantes organizada por la Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales en 2005.

En los folios 316 vuelto y 317 recto de este Libro asentó el escri-bano de cámara la licencia y privilegio para la impresión del Quijote que, más tarde, se incluyó en la princeps cervantina. No sucedió lo mismo, sin embargo, con la aprobación de Herrera, pues, para sor-presa de los estudiosos, la primera parte de la novela cervantina se publicó sin hacer constar su aprobación, contrariamente a la segun-da, que contiene no una, sino tres aprobaciones, dos ordenadas por el Consejo y una tercera por el vicariato madrileño.

Como ya se ha señalado, la consulta directa de los papeles que pasaban por las manos del escribano de cámara ha permitido loca-lizar esa aprobación y el memorial de Cervantes al que acompaña. En términos generales, los papeles de Gallo de Andrada revelan la actividad continua de la Monarquía en materias de imprenta a ca-ballo de los siglos XVI y XVII, un interés que se plasmaba en una labor normativa que buscaba ordenar y controlar una imprenta en continua expansión.

Gracias a los papeles del Consejo Real es posible conocer qué se imprimía, pero también qué no llegaba a hacerlo. Y esto no porque hubiera muchas obras a las que se denegase la licencia, sino porque, a lo que parece, sus autores no reunían el dinero necesario para cos-tear su posterior edición. Tal parece haber sido el caso de un Arte y vocabulario en lengua otomí de Cristóbal de Porras, para el que Gallo tramitó licencia en 1601, o del Libro de misas de canto de órgano reco-pilado por Cristóbal Grande y que, a través del mismo Gallo, aprobó Tomás Luis de Victoria en 1611.


En otras ocasiones, la escribanía de cámara se ocupaba de las quejas de autores de libros ya impresos que no estaban de acuerdo con la cuantía de la tasa por pliego decidida por el Consejo y que suponía un recorte en el precio final al que podían ser vendidas sus obras. Incluso, hubo de ocuparse de averiguar dónde había sido im-preso algún texto que circulaba sin pie mediante el recurso a oficiales de imprenta que aclaraban quién disponía de los tipos empleados en su composición. En este contexto documental que, como vemos, re-fleja el día a día del Consejo en materias de imprenta es donde se en-cuentra la documentación relativa al Quijote que ahora se ha hallado.

En su petición, Cervantes pide licencia y privilegio por veinte años y lo hace en atención “al mucho estudio y travajo” gastado en componer el Ingenioso hidalgo de la Mancha, que es como se refiere a su obra. También es así como, de hecho, lo llama la definitiva licencia de impresión de septiembre de 1604, que se hace eco de esas pala-bras del memorial, consignando expresamente que “os había costado mucho trabajo.”

La licencia, sin embargo, no reproduce la apreciación completa que el propio Cervantes hace de su libro. Para su autor, aquella obra merecía recibir la autorización para ser impresa “atento al mucho estudio y trauajo quen componer el dicho libro e gastado,” pero tam-bién por “ser de letura apacible, curiosa y de grande ingenio.” Una proposición en la que se dejan oír tanto los ecos de la aprobación que Gracián Dantisco compuso en 1584 para la Galatea—“tratado apaci-ble y de mucho ingenio”—como de un conocido pasaje quijotesco, el de la despedida del conocido como primer autor (I-8), donde asegura “que no se desesperó de hallar el fin desta apacible historia.”

Mucho ha sido lo que se ha discutido a propósito de la condición de “historia” de las ficciones del Quijote, con un Cervantes empeñado en calificar así su obra. En este sentido, entre otros, puede resultar muy sugerente que el Consejo decidiese confiar a un historiador la aprobación del Ingenioso hidalgo de la Mancha.

Bien conocido como cronista de Indias, pero bregado en la escri-tura de obras de polémica en materia de defensa de la reputación in-ternacional de la Monarquía, Antonio de Herrera no encontró nada


en la obra cervantina que pudiera ir en contra de las buenas costum-bres y policía. Pero no fue éste su argumento principal, por otra parte un lugar común en el particular género de las aprobaciones, para recomendar la concesión de la licencia solicitada. Para quien también fue traductor de los Anales de Tácito, el Ingenioso hidalgo podía ser impreso “porque será de gusto y entretenimiento al pueblo a lo qual en regla de buen gobierno se deue de tener atención.”

El juicio del que podemos considerar primer lector del Quijote insiste en su carácter de obra de entretenimiento y gusto para, expre-samente, el pueblo. Lo que no es, en modo alguno, una mala aprecia-ción. Como tampoco lo es que un cronista real, por entonces en ex-celente relación con la dirección de la Monarquía, afirme que el buen gobierno también pasa por ofrecerle esa clase de títulos al público.

Después de Antonio de Herrera han venido miles de lectores, para suerte, gusto y entretenimiento de todos y cada uno de ellos.

Los primeros pasos del Quijote2

Francisco Rico

A finales de julio de 1604, Miguel de Cervantes solicitaba del Consejo Real las autorizaciones necesarias para imprimir “un libro intitulado El ingenioso hidalgo de la Mancha”; un mes y medio después, Antonio de Herrera respaldaba que se le concediera la licencia pertinente. La instancia de Cervantes, de su puño y letra, y la aprobación de Herrera han sido publicadas recientemente en el ABCD las Artes y las Letras por mérito (uno más) de Fernando Bouza.

Con ejemplar sobriedad, Bouza da noticia de su descubrimiento sin salirse del campo en el que tantas contribuciones de primerísimo orden se le deben: la historia de la cultura escrita y las formas de comunicación social. Como no sé que ningún estudioso haya valo-rado todavía su enjundiosa aportación, quizá se acepten unas cuantas

2 Publicado en ABCD las artes y las letras (suplemento del diario ABC), 14 de junio de 2008.


observaciones mías desde la perspectiva, no de cervantista, que ni lo soy ni quiero serlo, sino de mero curioso de las fortunas textuales y editoriales del Quijote.3

El título originalEl aspecto más llamativo que los nuevos documentos vienen a con-firmar es que el título original de la que hoy llamamos “Primera parte del Quijote” es El ingenioso hidalgo de la Mancha, sin recoger expresamente el nom de guerre del protagonista.

Indicios de vario género me habían llevado hace años a esa con-clusión, que, sin embargo, no dejó de suscitar reparos. Es mucho el peso de la rutina, y mucha la fe ciega, sin estudio, en que la edición princeps representa fielmente la voluntad del novelista. Pero los datos eran ya entonces abrumadores. Por una parte, todos los testimonios administrativos conocidos concuerdan en ese título. Por otro lado (y por ejemplo), cuando al final de la Segunda parte Cervantes se despide de su criatura y del lector, los términos que se le vienen a la pluma son los del elegante endecasílabo que había sido su idea ini-cial, y que cita ahí, precisamente, revuelto con un eco inequívoco del glorioso comienzo: “Este fin tuvo el ingenioso hidalgo de la Mancha, cuyo lugar no quiso poner Cide Hamete puntualmente…”

Gracias a Bouza, la cuestión queda ahora zanjada: lo que el autor escribió, “por estos pulgares,” fue El ingenioso hidalgo de la Mancha, y no otro era el título oficial que en julio de 1604 quería para el vo-lumen. Pues si por culpa de un lapsus hubiera omitido la mención de “don Quijote,” no habría vacilado en corregirse al margen o entre líneas (como hizo más abajo), o sencillamente habría empezado de nuevo el memorial, aún por el tercer renglón.

¿Cómo llegó, pues, el título primitivo a ampliarse con el nombre del héroe? Que Cervantes cambiara de opinión después de julio no es imposible, pero sí improbable, en especial porque está claro que no intervino para nada (luego vuelvo sobre ello) en el pliego en el que la

3 Varios de los puntos que aquí toco rápidamente a la luz de los documentos dados a conocer por F. Bouza los he tratado por extenso en mi libro El texto del “Quijote” (2005).


añadidura se produjo. En ese pliego, el pliego de la portada, los editores e impresores de

antaño ejercían crudamente su prepotencia. Hacia 1605, en el taller regido por Juan de la Cuesta, era frecuente disponer los títulos en tres líneas de mayúsculas en cuerpos cada vez menores. Si al tipógra-fo le pareció, atinadamente, que “El ingenioso hidalgo de la Mancha” se prestaba mal a pareja disposición y convenía alargarlo con un “don Quijote,” para que diera tres líneas más airosas, no dudemos de que lo hizo con toda la tranquilidad del mundo: libertades mayores se permitían las imprentas de la época.

3. Títulos de portada en la Primera parte del Quijote y en otro libroimpreso el mismo año por Juan de la Cuesta.

Más autoridad que nadie tenía sin embargo el editor, en este caso Francisco de Robles. De ser él quien decidió estirar el título, hemos de descubrirnos. No se equivocaba ni comercial ni literariamente: el


solo nombre de “don Quijote” dice más sobre la obra y el personaje, entrañable deformación grotesca de la caballería, que el rótulo en de-finitiva propuesto por Cervantes, sonoro, pero demasiado vago y una pizca incongruente. (Porque “ingenioso,” en la Primera parte, es ad-jetivo que no se aplica jamás al protagonista en el cuerpo del relato.)

No inferiremos de ahí que Cervantes se sintiera molesto por el cambio. Para él, la portada sería uno de los muchos detalles cuya responsabilidad debía cederse a los artífices materiales y económicos de un libro. Como lo era la ortografía, que juzgaba cosa de impre-sores y le traía tan al fresco como para escribir “Cervantes” (primero con minúscula) en cabeza de su instancia y en la firma retocarlo a su vez en el “Cerbantes” que normalmente empleaba (aunque en la solicitud omite el “Saauedra” que en cambio sí se leía al principio de su original).

Una aprobación ausente, una dedicatoria apócrifa. Amén de la solicitud autógrafa de “licencia y previlegio,” Bouza ha encontrado también la aprobación correspondiente, firmada por el cronista Antonio de Herrera. Es un texto escueto, frío, para despa-char el trámite con las mismas fórmulas condescendientes que en multitud de otros análogos y en otros libros del propio Cervantes. Las gentes de orden no pasaban de tolerar las obras de ficción como mal menor, para dar “gusto y entretenimiento al pueblo,” según dicta-mina Herrera, quien, contra un uso corriente, ni siquiera se digna ha-cerse eco de los calificativos que en la petición del autor se aplicaban al Quijote: “letura apacible, curiosa y de grande ingenio.” El cronista está perdonándole la vida al novelista, con un inequívoco tonillo de superioridad.

Así, más interesante que el contenido de la aprobación es el hecho mismo de su existencia. En el Antiguo Régimen, los libros debían insertar al principio, como primer pliego, una serie de docu-mentos similares al copyright, el depósito legal y otros requisitos mo-dernos: la Tasa, con el precio de venta; la Fe de erratas, para certificar que lo impreso se adecuaba al manuscrito presentado a la censura; el privilegio real y, cuando menos, una aprobación. ¿Por qué ésta brilla


por su ausencia en el Ingenioso hidalgo? Astrana Marín proponía res-puestas posibles e imposibles: “o no se solicitó, o no llegó a tiempo, con la prisa de Robles, o era muy extensa, o no gustó…” Pero, gustara o no, la ley exigía incluirla, y ahora nos consta que sí se solicitó, y que estuvo a tiempo, y que era brevísima.

Ello sabido, cobran todo su relieve las irregularidades de diversa índole que se advierten en el primer pliego de la princeps, con la por-tada, la dedicatoria y los documentos de marras. El rasgo más visible son los desmesurados espacios en blanco, sin imprimir. Para eviden-ciarlo, basta comparar la página de las Erratas en la Primera y en la Segunda parte del Quijote: la una casi vacía, la otra colmada de texto.

La anomalía más escandalosa, no obstante, es la presunta dedica-toria del autor al Duque de Béjar: no una pieza original, sino zurcida, línea a línea, con hilvanes de los prefacios a las Obras de Garcilaso de la Vega con anotaciones (1580) de Fernando de Herrera. ¿Es concebible que a Cervantes le faltara aliento para componer una dedicatoria, só-lita o insólita, en serio, en broma o como le diera la real gana? ¿A él, que tuvo fuerzas para redactar la del Persiles, quizá la página suprema de la prosa española, cuatro días antes de morir? Desde luego que no y que incomparablemente menos trabajoso le habría sido componer una dedicatoria propia que espigar en campo ajeno unas palabras aquí y otras allá. La dedicatoria al Duque, a todas luces, es apócrifa.

La suma de esas dos anormalidades (entre otras), los blancos desproporcionados y la dedicatoria mentida, denuncia manifiesta-mente lo que sucedió. El primer pliego de los libros se reservaba para contener documentos que, como la Tasa y la Fe de erratas, no se ventilaban hasta que el resto del volumen estaba impreso. Por ello mismo, ese pliego inicial era el último en componerse y tirarse, y ahí se acumulaban todas las incidencias del postrer minuto. En el caso del Ingenioso hidalgo, las prisas por rematar la impresión y presentar la obra en la Corte (en 1604, Valladolid) dieron lugar a varias ope-raciones excepcionales en las que no voy a detenerme. Pero no hay duda de que llegado el momento de elaborar el primer pliego, en la vorágine del sálvese quién pueda, los tipógrafos madrileños se en-contraron con que les faltaban algunos papeles que habrían debido


4. Página de la Fe de erratas en la Primera y en la Segunda parte del Quijote.


imprimirse en él, y señaladamente la aprobación y la dedicatoria.Con Cervantes en Valladolid o en ignorado paradero, ¿adónde

echar mano? La ausencia de la dedicatoria la salvó el editor encar-gando a un empleado o paniaguado que pillara en alguna parte un convencional parrafillo ad hoc (un género de plagio, por otra parte, que contaba y cuenta con numerosos paralelos). En cuanto a la apro-bación o aprobaciones que asimismo se echarían de menos, paciencia y barajar: el espacio que se les destinaba quedó eternamente en blan-co. Pero si en la imprenta no daban con la aprobación de Herrera, ¿quizá tendrían que haber ido a sacarla de entre los legajos felizmen-te exhumados por Fernando Bouza?

La mano del editorLa falta de la aprobación, en contra de los preceptos legales, es uno de los muchos puntos en que se revela la vara alta de Francisco de Robles. Juan de la Cuesta, a quien a menudo se atribuye una falsa responsabilidad en la aparición del primer Quijote, no era más que un mandado, el regente (que no dueño) del taller donde se estampó. Fue Robles quien contrató la novela y financió todo el proceso edito-rial con una inversión importante: alrededor de ocho mil reales, una sexta parte de la cantidad en que unos años después se evaluaban sus activos comerciales. Entendemos que le importara poner en juego sus poderosos recursos para acelerar tal proceso, comenzando por las diligencias administrativas.

Cuenta Lope de Vega, en una carta del 14 de agosto de 1604, que Cervantes había andado buscando quien escribiera para el Quijote las poesías de alabanza que era costumbre imprimir al frente de un libro, pero nadie se había prestado a dárselas; y, en efecto, las que al cabo se publicaron se deben confesadamente al propio novelista. La chismorrería del Fénix no puede referirse sino a las últimas semanas o poco más. Pues bien, Cervantes tenía que entregar al Consejo Real el original entero de su obra, incluidos los versos laudatorios: si en fechas cercanas a la carta de Lope aún seguía intentando conseguir-los, quiere decir que sólo en fechas también cercanas desistió del empeño y se resignó a depositar el original sin más elogios que los


que él mismo, justísimamente, se dedicaba. De ahí inferí yo en su día (permítaseme la cita) que ello hubo de ocurrir “hacia agosto de 1604, no antes.” Bouza nos precisa ahora que los funcionarios se ocuparon del asunto el 20 de julio.

Los trámites imprescindibles para la impresión de un libro po-dían alargarse hasta la exasperación. No fue así con el primer Quijote. Hacia el 20 de julio, el escribano Juan Gallo de Andrada se hizo cargo de la copia presentada por Cervantes y hubo de rubricar, una a una, todas sus páginas; el 11 de septiembre, Antonio de Herrera firmaba la aprobación; el 26, se extendía la regia licencia. Son plazos que para sí habrían querido muchos. Pero el ritmo de la última etapa en la gestación material del Ingenioso hidalgo no fue menos ligero. Una vez impreso el libro, a comienzos de diciembre, urgía en par-ticular ponerlo en circulación y darlo a conocer en la Corte, donde, por otro lado, debía obtenerse la Tasa. Conque el corrector oficial li-cenció el volumen sin hojearlo (pues no señaló ni una de las infinitas erratas), Gallo de Andrada despachó la Tasa el 20 de diciembre, y ya con ella, en la misma Valladolid, se improvisaron en pocas horas cien o doscientos ejemplares completos.

En todas partes se transparenta la mano influyente del editor. Como el hallazgo de Bouza parte de una bienvenida investigación sobre Juan Gallo de Andrada, basten dos palabras en relación con éste. Francisco de Robles, inversionista, tahúr y librero del Rey nues-tro Señor, sólo por excepción costeó alguna obra literaria y en cam-bio menudeaba un tipo de folletos de tirada copiosa y venta segu-ra: las pragmáticas y otras disposiciones legales. Como quien dice, el Boletín Oficial del Estado. Es el caso que la licencia para su pu-blicación se concedía habitualmente a secretarios y escribanos del Consejo Real, quienes a su vez podían negociarlo a conveniencia. Pues bien: uno de los covachuelistas que con más fortuna explotaron semejante momio, y concretamente en asociación con Robles, era ni más ni menos que Juan Gallo de Andrada, de cuyas manos pendió el primer Quijote del principio al final de su recorrido por el Consejo, desde que entró allí hasta que allí fue tasado.

Pero sería temerario invadir un terreno que las fatigas de


Fernando Bouza van a ilustrar decisivamente. De su talento y de la suerte amiga esperemos que nos lleguen también luces sobre un asunto que los nuevos documentos vuelven a poner sobre la mesa: Cervantes y Antonio de Herrera, el autor de la aprobación, ¿cola-boraron de algún modo en la relación de las fiestas vallisoletanas que en 1605 celebraron el “felicísimo nacimiento del príncipe don Felipe Dominico Víctor”?

Textos y nota

Francisco Rico

TextosLa claridad de la reproducción aneja y la evidencia de que el cuerpo de la solicitud no es autógrafo del novelista (como en seguida se dirá en la nota) hacen innecesaria una transcripción paleográfica. (Baste advertir que el Cervantes del principio se escribió primero con mi-núscula y con ç, y que en el cerbantes de la firma la b es corrección de una v. Por otra parte, entre la i mayúscula—con grafía de j– y la n de ingenio se ha tachado con un borrón una i minúscula, cuyo pun-to es perfectamente visible.) Doy, pues, una edición modernizada y dispuesta como hasta recientemente solía hacerse con un texto de ese tipo.

Muy poderoso Señor:Miguel de Cervantes digoQue yo he compuesto un libro intitulado El ingenioso hidalgo

de la Mancha, del cual hago presentación. A Vuestra Alteza pido y suplico sea servido de darme licen-

cia y previlegio para imprimirle por veinte años, atento al mucho estudio y trabajo que en componer el dicho libro he gastado y ser de letura curiosa, apacible y de grande ingenio, que en ello recebiré gran bien y merced.

Y para ello, etc.Miguel de Cervantes


En edición también modernizada, la aprobación de Antonio de Herrera reza así:

Por mandado de Vuestra Alteza he visto un libro llamado El in-genioso hidalgo de la Mancha compuesto por Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra y me parece, siendo dello Vuestra Alteza servido, que se le podrá dar licencia para imprimille, porque será de gusto y entretenimiento al pueblo, a lo cual en regla de buen gobierno se debe de tener atención, aliende de que no hallo en él cosa contra policía y buenas costumbres. Y lo firmé de mi nombre, en Valladolid, a XI de setiembre 1604.

Antonio de Herrera

Nota: Los dos artículos que figuran en las páginas anteriores surgie-ron al calor inmediato del afortunado hallazgo de Fernando Bouza, como una primera noticia y una primera valoración del documento, y ha parecido aconsejable reimprimirlos aquí sin ningún cambio. Las cosas se van averiguando, cuando se averiguan, paso a paso y hombro con hombro. Unas sagaces dudas de Harvey Sharrer e Ian Michael me han llevado a cotejar el memorial con un par de autógrafos de Francisco de Robles y creo que podemos dar por hecho que, aparte la firma, la letra de los dos textos es la misma. Del editor, pues, no del autor. No hay más que fijarse un poco en la lámina aneja, desde el digo del segundo renglón al y para ello etc. del último. Con una última reserva y sobre la base de otros materiales, Bouza se inclina también por esa opinión.

La mano de Robles ha resultado ser aun más larga de lo que apuntaba yo. Era y es cosa general que los editores, no los autores, se ocupen en el papeleo administrativo. Está probado que Robles pre-sentaba en el Consejo tasas ya parcialmente redactadas que los es-cribanos no tenían sino que completar y autorizar. La petición de li-cencia y privilegio caligrafiada por Robles y rubricada por Cervantes equidista, con cabal simetría, de ambas prácticas corrientes. La pre-gunta menor que ahora nos intriga es dónde demonios estaba el bue-


5. Documento autógrafo de Francisco de Robles (1599)


no de Miguel en el momento de firmar la solicitud.La firma, en efecto, tiene toda la pinta de ser auténtica, y no lo

dificulta que se omita el habitual pero no omnipresente Saavedra, ni que falte (o en el facsímil no se distinga) el lazo, cerrado o abierto, que Cervantes situaba regularmente encima de su nombre, pues una y otra ausencia se constatan asimismo en testimonios indiscutibles.

Por otro lado, si es cierta mi impresión de que el novelista escri-bió primero Cervantes con una v y luego retocó la v para convertirla en una b, esa grafía inicial de la firma, con v, supone una llamativa excepción a la que fue norma suya constante. Dos explicaciones se me ocurren para la anomalía. Una es que por un instante se dejó influir por la forma que vio en cabeza de la instancia que se disponía a suscribir; la otra es que, tratándose de la publicación de un libro, se le ofreció como más adecuada, también por un segundo, la v que los tipógrafos empleaban mayormente para su apellido. Sea como fuere, sobre la ortografía de los manuscritos de la época es harto ilustrativo comprobar que de hecho, con las correcciones, el apellido aparece de cuatro maneras distintas en una docena de líneas: çervan-tes, Çervantes, cervantes y cerbantes.

La certeza de que el documento es de puño y letra de Robles hace todavía más ostensible el carácter puramente formulario de su contenido. ¿”Mucho estudio y trabajo”? ¿”Letura apacible, curiosa y de grande ingenio”? Sí, pero no son apreciaciones del Quijote expre-sadas por el propio autor, sino la fraseología curialesca que incluso en los libros de Cervantes, como señala Bouza, se arrastraba ya desde La Galatea.

En otros lugares he mostrado que algunas dedicatorias al pie de las cuales se lee “Francisco de Robles” fueron con toda probabilidad escritas por Cervantes, mientras la dedicatoria del Ingenioso hidalgo se pergeñó aprisa y corriendo en el taller de Cuesta sin intervención alguna del novelista. Ahora nos tropezamos con una página material e intelectualmente del editor y sancionada con la firma del autor. Los cervantistas, sin reparar en barras ni entretenerse en filologías, suelen dar por supuesto que todo cuanto se halla en los impresos de 1605 y 1615 responde a la inspiración directa y divina del novelista: ¡hasta la


división del título en renglones, en la portada, se ha atribuido a pre-suntas intenciones del autor! En realidad, el Quijote, como todos los libros de antaño (y muchos de hogaño), es el producto de una alianza entre los distintos agentes que intervenían en el proceso de publica-ción y que actuaban con un margen de libertad harto más amplio de lo que se piensa. El caso de los paratextos recién mencionados debe hacernos pensar en lo que pudo ocurrir con el texto.

31

Don Quijote and theArt of Laughing at Oneself

________________________________________________ Michael Scham

Our own peculiar condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh. Montaigne, “Of Democritus and Heraclitus”

Nabokov’s complaints over its “cruel and crude” humor notwithstanding, readers have responded to and identi-fied a tremendous comic range in Don Quijote. As Michael

Nerlich remarked, “In the case of Cervantes […] we can say, as a her-meneutical minimum, that every understanding that omits laughter must be essentially wrong” (250). In what will probably long stand as the most substantial inquiry into cervantine humor, Anthony Close makes a similar point: “one cannot treat the comicality of Cervantes’s fiction as simply an obvious and superficial layer, detachable from the more thought-provoking layers that lie beneath. It pervades and conditions the whole work, and if we neglect it, our understanding of the work is basically flawed” (7). Close’s expansive study of humor and shifting cultural norms in early modern Spain is also constric-tive, since he wants to temper the anachronistic exaggerations of critics who insist upon Don Quijote as the first modern novel, with all of the perspectivism, socio-political engagement, indeterminacy and metaphysical angst that such a label might imply.1 Anyone who

1 According to Close, Spitzer, building upon Castro, “opened up for Cer-vantes the rich quarry of prismatic reality, self-conscious narrative, and fictional

32 Michael Scham Cervantes

has sustained exposure to academic writing, and possessing a sense of humor, is compelled to acknowledge the virtue of Close’s argu-ment. Much interesting speculation exists regarding what, precisely, we are laughing at in Don Quijote: a decadent nobility, a Spain that refuses to relinquish antiquated chivalric and pastoral ideals, the hu-bris and injustices of imperialism, repressed sexual inclinations. But occasionally we go astray, sometimes hilariously, when elucidating the phallo-hegemonic, ontic-transgressive negotiations of Cervantes’ jokes—especially when they involve caricature, solecisms, and timely flatulence issuing from ample buttocks.

Cervantes himself repeatedly pokes fun at various forms of ped-antry, from the minutiæ of hair-splitting scholarship to the over-determined formulas of theory. We have, for example, the figure of the primo humanista in Part II, always seeking grist for his superflu-ous books (II, 22-24). And after the farcical adventure of the Carro de la Muerte (II, 11), don Quijote pontificates on theater as meta-phor, only to have Sancho point out that his analysis is not exactly groundbreaking:

…lo mesmo […] acontece en la comedia y trato deste mundo, donde unos hacen los emperadores, otros los pontífices, y, final-mente, todas cuantas figuras se pueden introducir en una come-dia; pero en llegando al fin, que es cuando se acaba la vida, a to-dos les quita la muerte las ropas que los diferenciaban, y quedan iguales en la sepultura. —Brava comparación—dijo Sancho—, aunque no tan nueva, que yo no la haya oído muchas y diversas veces… (II, 12; 121)

The impulse to allegorize is checked. In such instances Cervantes forms part of a rich comic tradition, including two figures we will

viewpoint” (2). Curiously, Close focuses on Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque as the nefarious hinge upon which much “romanticising” theory turns. For a thoughtful argument against closing off such a potentially fruitful and historical approach, see the review article of Iffland.

Volume 29.1 (2009) The Art of Laughing at Oneself 33

consider further below: Erasmus and Montaigne.2 There is of course an irony to this gentle ridicule, since the complex structure of Cervantes’ novel compels us to interpret even while it illustrates the perils of interpretation. But Cervantes was also undeniably in-terested in the physical pleasure of a good laugh, or, as the narrator presages in one episode, at least a monkey grin or chuckle (II, 44). When, in the streets of Toledo the curious narrator asks a morisco if he is able to translate some of the papers he has happened upon, we are given an indication of a central narrative concern:

En fin, la suerte me deparó uno, que, diciéndole mi deseo y poniéndole el libro en las manos, le abrió por medio, y leyendo un poco en él, se comenzó a reír. (I, 9)

Amidst our ingenious explanations regarding the function of humor in Don Quijote, we do well to keep in mind that Cervantes, like Boccaccio, Castiglione, Huarte, El Pinciano and others, believed in the therapeutic effects of laughter.

At the risk, however, of exposing myself to Cervantes’ ridicule as another pedantic scholar, I will venture to analyze some rather subtle aspects of the humor in Don Quijote. The humor in ques-tion is modern in the sense that it expresses a suggestive skepticism: if not exactly the “prismatic” relativism rejected by Close, at least the awareness that rational and insane responses to the world are often separated more by degree than kind. To illustrate this, I will focus on epistemological aspects of the humor, on how a range of contemporary knowledge systems is mischievously drawn into the comic vortex. While much of the humor is satirical in nature, finding resolution in the ultimate control of the narrator and the superior knowledge of the reader vis a vis the characters, in other instances there is a lack of clear resolution and restoration of order, a lingering disorientation. I do not intend to argue that Cervantes was necessar-ily a “subversive artist,” overtly opposing the official values and epis-

2 For some delightful examples of academic satire, see The Praise of Folly, 52-54, and the Essays, I: 25 & II: 12, 442-43.


temology of his time. Rather, as is typical with humorists, when the comic logic of a particular situation ranged into sacrosanct terrain, Cervantes was sometimes willing to let it run its course. The result can be confusion as to precisely what we are laughing at. Laughing with Cervantes, we realize how, complicit in sustaining illusions, we are in certain ways not so different from don Quijote.

I. Laughing At, Laughing WithBefore proceeding, some clarification of terminology is in order. Adrienne Martín’s distinction between “humor” and “satire” in Cervantes helps illustrate a type of laughter I wish to emphasize:

While satirists refuse to forgive or to see in themselves the “vices” they castigate and instead remain at a critical distance, humorists use ironical distance to allow them to include themselves in the collective object of their humor. This is one Don Quixote’s most important lessons to the reader: the recognition that all of us are to an extent quixotic or pancine. (165)

In his study of laughter and the novel, James Wood articulates what he calls a “comedy of correction,” a laughing at that corresponds to a stable, theological, Aristotelian world-view, and which is “pre-novelistic.” This he contrasts with a more lenient “comedy of for-giveness,” a laughing with characteristic of an unstable and secular vision, and the domain of the novel (3-19). While Wood associates the full development of the novelistic “comedy of forgiveness” with late nineteenth and early twentieth-century innovations in form and character, he identifies a few “transitional” works that contain both types of humor, The Praise of Folly and Don Quijote among them.3 Like Pirandello’s notion of “the feeling of the opposite” (and

3 Citing Cervantes’ use of irony, parody and paradox, James Parr contends that Don Quijote is better understood within the Lucianic-Horatian satirical tra-dition than as an early example of “realism” (97-102). In addition to exposing pedants and the proximity of man and beast, Parr maintains that the principal function of the satire is “the repudiation of a sociopolitical ideology,” which he


Martín’s distinction of humor from satire), Wood’s comedy of for-giveness involves an element of compassion, a breaking down of the derisive opposition between the laughing subject and comic object. A trace of pathos arises along with a broadening of our knowledge: we sense there is more to the laughable character than we originally judged. An example of such characterization, as Martín points out (171), is the unexpected dimensions taken on by Maritornes, who initially appears as the comic type of the grotesque prostitute. The effect becomes even more notable when she extends humane charity to Sancho after he has been decimated by the bálsamo (I, 17).

As chroniclers of wisdom such as Plato, Lucian and Montaigne have affirmed, greater knowledge can come at an epistemological cost, as we become less sure of our assumptions. Wood discusses how such a process is at work in the rise of the novel: “This comedy, or tragicom-edy, of the modern novel replaces the knowable with the unknowable, transparency with unreliability, and this is surely in direct propor-tion to the growth of the characters’ fictive inner lives” (10). Painting in broader strokes, Milan Kundera sees in Cervantes the first great novelist whose comic irony “tore the curtain” of our presumptions to knowledge, thereby disorienting but also freeing the reader, who must deploy an active imagination and judgment in order to make sense of the world. Of Don Quijote, he has written: “We are laughing not because someone is being ridiculed, mocked, or even humiliated but because a reality is abruptly revealed as ambiguous, things lose their apparent meaning, the man before us is not what he thought himself to be” (109). And then there are critics, such as Michael Wood, who claim that Cervantes outdoes the moderns in their own game:

In Nabokov we have endless grounds for a fine modern distrust, but find ourselves trusting (some of ) what our shifty narra-tor says. In Cervantes the situation is more or less the reverse.

conceives as “a somewhat subversive message about the futility of trying to ressu-rect a largely illusionary golden age” (101-102). Trueblood has discussed laughter and sympathy, as well as therapeutic laughter in Don Quijote. For a focus on the humor generated by the incorporation of chivalric elements, see Eisenberg.


Broadly: where there is trust Cervantes finds multiple grounds for mistrust; indeed finds such grounds pretty much everywhere; devotes himself to finding them, gets many of his best jokes out of such moves. (33-34)

I grant that not all of the preceding observations are based on a rigorous historicism. But the dichotomy between the “hard school,” insisting on historical context, and the “romantic approach,” which seeks to bring out incipient or unappreciated potential meanings, is in certain respects false: both yield valid and important insights, and either can be taken to a distorting extreme. Of particular interest is the fact that some of the pillars of “romantic” interpretations, sup-posedly predicated on a disregard for the comic content of the work, can be supported by an analysis of the humor. Perhaps even more importantly, the aspects of humor I ascribe to Cervantes are also found in some of his illustrious contemporaries.

II. Democritus, Horace, and Humanist Views of Delusion and KnowledgeIn similar ways, Erasmus, Montaigne and Burton articulate an im-portant refinement to Aristotle’s oft-repeated maxim that a defining trait of human beings is the ability to laugh. As Montaigne puts it, “Our own peculiar condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as to laugh” (I: 50). Of course, an emphasis on risible humanity dates back at least as far as Diogenes and Democritus. But there was a tendency in early modern humanists to explore the tension between laughing at and laughing with, between ridiculing folly in others and acknowledging one’s own. It is an interesting tension because “corrective” laughter occasionally shifts to one that accepts and even validates the folly that occasions it. The rational faculty, which al-lows us to recognize laughable defects, cedes some of its authority to the affective, and there is deference to the pleasure of laughter it-self. Key emblems for such an outlook are found in Horace’s Second Epistle, in his congenial image of the bustling banquet hall, and of the otherwise rational man from Argos who enjoyed theatrical per-


formances in an empty theater and laments the “cure” of his well-meaning friends. We will consider how Erasmus, Montaigne and Burton give such figures an ambiguity they may not have possessed in their original contexts.

A volatile blend of satirical with humane laughter pervades The Praise of Folly, in which the “madness of the Furies” is derided along-side the productive delusions of which we all partake. Although the distinctions between types of madness are not always clear, Folly embeds a tempering mechanism in the form of an additional Democritus: “…not even a thousand Democrituses would suffice to laugh at them; and then you’d need one extra Democritus to laugh at the thousand laughers” (49). Democritus is human, therefore also fit to be laughed at. Erasmus alludes to Horace’s banquet hall in the following passage:

As wisdom out of place is the height of the ridiculous, so pru-dence perversely misapplied is the height of imprudence. The perverse man fails to adjust his actions to the present state of things, he disdains the give-and-take of the intellectual market-place, he won’t even acknowledge the common rule of the barroom, drink up or get out—all of which amounts to demanding that the play should no longer be a play. On the other hand, the truly pru-dent man reflects that since he is mortal himself, he shouldn’t want to be wiser than befits a mortal, but should cast his lot in with the rest of the human race and blunder along in good com-pany. (29, my italics)4

Life in society involves role-playing, an acceptance of rules and conventions; to refuse to participate simply because one sees the ar-

4 Montaigne would cite from the common source—Lucretius, via Horace:

If you know not right living, then give wayTo those that do; you’ve had enough of play,Of food and drink; ‘tis time you left with grace,Lest lusty youth expel you from the place. (II: 12, 366).


bitrary nature of convention is more a sign of boorishness than wis-dom. Such illustrations of the ludic element at the center of human intercourse blur the traditional distinction between play and serious-ness. While Folly refers to prudence, reflection, and the intellectual marketplace, the dominant images are affective and corporeal: play, drinking, and blundering along in good company. And although an intellectual understanding of limits is important for social interac-tion, Folly repeatedly suggests that pleasure plays an even greater role. “For what is this life, should it even be called life at all, if you remove pleasure from it?” (13); “…but absurdities like these are what binds society together in mutual pleasure” (21). Fundamental to the wisdom of Erasmus’ paradoxical praise is that happiness and com-munity are achieved in part through rational reflection, but perhaps even more through felicitous delusion.

In “Of Democritus and Heraclitus,” Montaigne distinguishes between the comic and the tragic outlook, preferring the former:

Pity and commiseration are mingled with some esteem for the thing we pity; the things we laugh at we consider worthless. I do not think there is as much unhappiness in us as vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity. We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless. (I: 50)

It bears emphasizing that this is an early essay, by a youthful and somewhat severe Montaigne. The passage cited describes ridi-cule, a satirical laughing at. In contrast with tragic commiseration, the comic outlook affirms a separation between subject and object, an analytical distance involving censorious judgment. It is not the novelistic humor discussed above, which entails a narrowing of the gap between subject and object, but rather what “hard critics” would identify as typical of Cervantes’ age: an Aristotelian laughter at de-fects. But as the use of the first-person plural indicates, Montaigne does not exempt himself (“Our own condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh”). He expresses ambivalence toward a being that possesses a degree of rational function and discern-


ment, and is thus “able to laugh,” but which nevertheless remains mired in absurdity. Montaigne’s later essays contain a more lenient, Epicurean sensibility, with greater acceptance of human vanity and delusion. Like Folly, who deploys an extra Democritus to reign in the thousand censors, he develops an outlook more humorous than satirical.In his “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” Montaigne again cites Horace, recounting the anecdote of the man from Argos:

Alas, you have not saved me, friends, quoth he,But murdered me, my pleasure snatched away,And that delusion that made life so gay. (II: 12, 366)

Montaigne considered tenuous the foundations of knowledge, based on an unstable combination of conjecture, subjectivity, imagi-native exuberance and custom. As a consequence, it is misguided to base one’s happiness on certain knowledge. The art of living well in-volves an acceptance of ignorance, receptiveness to pleasure, and an adaptive flexibility that allows us to interact in human community: “Greatness of soul is not so much pressing upward and forward as knowing how to set oneself in order and circumscribe oneself. […] There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally” (III: 13, 852). Endowed with imagination and an active, mediating intelligence, humans cannot simply be; we “play the man,” which means balancing freedom and constraint, the intellect and the senses, individuality and conformism. As Montaigne comments in his meditation on the absurdity of vilify-ing and repressing sexuality: “Our life is part folly, part wisdom” (III: 5, 677-78). Recognizing this central truth about humanity, Montaigne, like Erasmus before him, adjusted his discourse to the subject mat-ter, and the resulting serio ludere was presented not just as a mode of philosophical writing, but also as an approach to life’s conduct.5

5 Incorporating the categories of Roger Caillois, François Rigolot discusses the theatrical element in Montaigne as the favored mode of play: “Pour reprendre les catégories proposées par Roger Caillois, on peut comprendre porquoi les Es-


Robert Burton joins Erasmus and Montaigne in citing Horace and proclaiming himself a partisan of Democritus. Insofar as it cata-logues human dispositions and behaviors that lead to dysfunction and vice, The Anatomy of Melancholy is a panoramic satire. But it is also notable for rhapsodic accounts of the “sweet delights” contained in certain types of melancholy, reading and study in particular (II. ii. 4). Burton twice mentions the idea that the narration or read-ing of a thing brings a pleasure comparable to actually seeing or experiencing it (II. ii. 4, 78 and 81). Like Cervantes, who also voiced concern with alleviating melancholy, Burton’s enthusiasm for the tremendous variety and imaginative engagement offered by books frequently overrides the conventional moral and therapeutic con-cerns he cites along the way. A great practitioner of paradox, Burton ambivalently endorses many of the “vices” he has purportedly set out to remedy.6 It is therefore not surprising that Horace’s man from Argos should repeatedly resurface, as in the following discussion of the humors and the power of imagination in melancholy subjects:

…they are in paradise for the time, and cannot well endure to be interrupt; with him in the poet, Pol, me occidistis, amici, non servastis, ait [“In sooth, good friends, you have killed, not cured me, says he]; you have undone him, he complains, if you trouble him: tell him what inconvenience will follow, what will be the event, all is one, canis ad vomitum [like a dog to his vomit], ‘tis so pleasant he cannot refrain. (I. iii. 4, 406)Like Erasmus, Burton recognizes that there are malignant as

sais refusent l’agôn, l’alea et l’ilinx. Par les activités compétetives (la chasse ou les échecs) on prend au sérieux les règles toutes arbitraires qu’on se donne (agôn); par les jeux de hasard (les cartes ou les dés), on se soumet inconditionnellement aux arrêts du sport pour de futiles raisons (aléa); par la recherche du vertige, on tente inconsidérément d’ébranler la stabilité de ses perceptions (ilinx). Seule l’illusion théâtrale permet de devenir «autre» en échappant `a l’aliénation et donc, en un sens, de devenir soi-même (mimicry)” (337).

6 For a discussion of paradox in Burton, his indebtedness to Montagine, and the tension between Democritus and Heraclitus in The Anatomy of Melancholy, see Colie (430-60).


well as salubrious varieties and aspects of folly, and that one should curb the former while cultivating the latter. To attempt to eliminate all forms would be inhuman. It is telling that even the highly moral-istic Juan Luis Vives cites the man from Argos while discussing the therapeutic value of laughter and the pleasures of the imagination: “pues algunos consiguen por el solo reflejo de la imaginación con-vencerse de que gozan de los mayores bienes.” According to Vives, Horace’s deluded man is not an aberrant exception, but the rule: “Harto sabido es el cuento. Es un fenómeno común en todas aficio-nes” (III: 9).

Here it is important to recall that a source for much of the above, Horace’s second Epistle, does not in fact hold a favorable view of delusion. The man from Argos, sitting happily in his empty theater, is meant to illustrate that “…it is profitable to cast aside toys and to learn wisdom; to leave to lads the sport that fits their age” (437). And the banquet hall image, like its model in Lucretius, promotes a rath-er stoic withdrawal, a deferential acceptance of old age and mortality. In his satire on human follies, Horace sketches a broad landscape of varied and nearly universal madness, with the goal of fostering a corrective awareness of vice (Satires II. iii). Erasmus, Montaigne and Burton, we might say, went some way toward “romanticiz-ing” Horace. In the following consideration of Don Quijote we will see many instances in which the humor deflates not only the mad knight’s delusions, but also broader human pretenses toward gravitas and certitude. Furthermore, many of the same comic traits that come in for ridicule are revived in the generous light of Cervantine laugh-ter, which is capable of vindicating the very foolishness it initially derides. In view of the preceding observations on humanist writers, it should be clear that assigning such characteristics to Cervantes’ humor need not be symptomatic of viewing Don Quijote through the lens of the modern novel. Rather, as Hugo Friedrich has shown, it involves an appreciation of Cervantes’ affinity with some of the greatest writers of the early modern period.7

7 Of Montaigne and Erasmus Friedrich writes the following: “They both have in common the fact that they replace ethical unconditionalness with a hu-


III. Comic Doubt and Delusion in Don QuijoteThe “epistemological humor” I refer to above is introduced in the very first words of Don Quijote—“En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme”—, and sustained in the initial presentation of the hero:

Quieren decir que tenía el sobrenombre de Quijada, o Quesada, que en esto hay alguna diferencia en los autores que deste caso escriben; aunque por conjeturas verosímiles se deja entender que se llamaba Quejana. Pero esto importa poco a nuestro cuento; basta que en la narración dél no se salga un punto de la verdad. (I, 1, my italics)

Faced with such a flurry of uncertainty, Cervantes compels us to ponder what sort of precise narrative truth we are dealing with. The question increases in complexity as we continue reading. One notable instance is when don Quijote and the marginally sane Basque have their furious battle interrupted by the curtailment of the manuscript, and the author meanders through the streets of Toledo inspecting scraps of paper, generating news of a presumed “second author,” of the historian Cide Hamete Benengeli who composed the original in Arabic, and of visual illustrations of the characters accompanied by descriptive notes. Our narrator seems aware of the somewhat chal-lenging implications all of this poses in transmitting a faithful ac-count of his hero in Castilian, but he reassures us in the same terms employed some eighty pages earlier:

Otras menudencias había que advertir, pero todas son de poca importancia y que no hacen al caso a la verdadera relación de la

manity of modest averageness, and they shelter man in a wisdom that lies beyond the inconsequential contrast of reason and irrationality. Both also have in common the fact that they praise illusion as the mover of the human soul which brings happiness, regardless of whether the illusion manifests itself in the simplicity of fools or in the vision of believers, or in the poets’ process of getting outside of themselves” (309). Friedrich also discusses the common sources in Ecclesiastes and Horace.


historia, que ninguna es mala como sea verdadera. (I, 9)

Of course this can only make sense if we are dealing with some-thing other than a factual conception of truth. Close dedicates con-siderable space to the problem, maintaining that Cervantes’ notion of narrative truth derives from contemporary rhetorical precepts regarding the separation of extrinsic and essential information in storytelling, and the poetics of verisimilitude, of making that which is recounted both plausible and vivid, or “present” (Ch’s 4-5). I be-lieve that Cervantes also expands the notion of truth, extending the principles of well or poorly constructed narratives to extra-literary concerns. The humorous subversion that calls into question criteria of textual interpretation insinuates itself into the making sense of lived experience.

The Toledan Merchants episode (I, 4), in which don Quijote affirms the importance of faith and the merchants favor empiri-cal evidence, is an early example of Cervantes’ playing with—if not “problematizing”—, the notion of truth; the interpolated tale of the Curioso impertinente (I, 33-35) does so in a more serious and troubling manner. While Part I begins with complicating the notion of nar-rative truth, Part II starts off by drawing into the humorous field a striking range of knowledge sources, as the priest and barber test the convalescing knight’s sanity. In response to don Quijote’s arbi-trio recommending knight-errantry to save Spain, the barber tells the story of the “loco” with “lúcidos intervalos” in Seville. The comic anecdote recalls Horace’s man from Argos (“a man who would cor-rectly perform all other duties of life”), and has the purpose of elicit-ing a didactic, corrective laughter. Don Quijote will have none of it, and rejects the intended exemplarity of the tale: “¿éste es el cuento, señor barbero […] que por venir aquí como de molde, no podía dejar de contarle? ¡Ah, señor rapista, señor rapista…” (II, 1; 47). He pro-ceeds to give a moral defense of chivalry, deploying a conventional topos of social decline similar to that delivered in his Golden Age speech (I, 11). The curate then voices his doubt regarding the histori-cal existence of the famous knights: “…imagino que todo es ficción,


fábula y mentira, y sueños contados por hombres despiertos, o, por mejor decir, medio dormidos” (II, 1; 50). Rather than mimic the “loco de Sevilla,” who, once diverted from his good reason is completely insane (“que soy Neptuno […], lloveré todas las veces que se me antojare y fuere menester”), don Quijote expresses his belief in an interesting way:

la cual verdad es tan cierta, que estoy por decir que con mis pro-pios ojos vi a Amadís de Gaula, que era un hombre alto de cu-erpo, blanco de rostro, bien puesto de barba, aunque negra, de vista entre blanda y rigurosa, corto de razones, tardo en airarse y presto en deponer la ira; y del modo que he delineado a Amadís pudiera, a mi parecer, pintar y describir todos cuantos caballeros andantes andan en las historias en el orbe, que por la aprehensión que tengo de que fueron como sus historias cuentan, y por las hazañas que hicieron y condiciones que tuvieron, se pueden sacar por buena filosofía sus faciones, sus colores y estaturas. (II, 1; 50)

This is an example of narrative truth in the form of a compelling verisimilitude, of making the character “present” before the reader. The vivid detail of don Quijote’s description recalls his account of the massing armies in the rebaños episode (I, 18) and his famous “knight of the boiling lake” narrative (I, 50), delivered in refutation of the canónigo’s objections to chivalric romance. In place of the clear exemplarity of the loco de Sevilla story, which warns against be-ing fooled by temporary appearances of sanity, we see a defense of belief which, although risible in a literal sense, rests upon venerable æsthetic ideas.

As the barber, in humorous condescension, inquires about the size of Morgante, the distinction between narrative truth and larger epistemological issues becomes more tenuous:

En esto de gigantes—respondió don Quijote— hay diferen-tes opiniones, si los ha habido o no en el mundo; pero la Santa Escritura, que no puede faltar un átamo a la verdad, nos mues-


tra que los hubo, contándonos la historia de aquel filisteazo de Golías, que tenía siete codos y medio de altura, que es una des-mesurada grandeza. (II, 1; 50)

Now, when the narrator at the beginning of Part I says that “bas-ta que en la narración dél no se salga un punto de la verdad,” we can either take it as a dismissive joke (“of course this is all make-believe, not really to be compared with serious texts”) or, following Close and others, as an example of how Cervantes is interested in illus-trating others sorts of truth (rhetorical, artistic). But when nearly identical terms are applied to the Bible (“no puede faltar un átamo a la verdad”), the implications are more complicated. At the very least, we can say that the Goliath references goes some way, according to contemporary standards of proof, toward legitimizing don Quijote’s belief in giants. The knight then adds two additional layers to his ar-gument, referring to the archeological evidence of large bones found in Sicily, and concluding that, since Morgante was described sleep-ing indoors, he could not have been so huge. As with don Quijote’s literary debate with the canon of Toledo (I, 47-50), part of the hu-mor here resides in the spectacle of a confirmed lunatic managing to destabilize some assumptions of his learned interlocutors. One is inclined to agree with Michael Wood’s assertion that where there is certainty, Cervantes finds grounds for doubt.8

The barco encantado adventure (II, 29) is one of those episodes,

8 Wood judiciously refrains from seeing in Cervantes a full-blown relativ-ism, although he does not dismiss the possibility: “…the most ordinary truths can be made to look unsafe. Whether they are unsafe because they can be made to look so, is one of Cervantes’s great questions” (34). In a very good recent book, the hispanist Martínez Mata rejects the idea that Don Quijote contains epistemo-logical quandaries, although his analysis at times borders on such a view: “En el Quijote […] la realidad no se muestra ambigua (y así lo señalaba Parker en 1948), son los personajes los que falsean la realidad cuando les conviene” (107). Martínez Mata also maintains that, given the “contexto burlesco” and fantastical nature of his narrative, don Quijote’s response to the Canon’s neo-Aristotelian æsthetic cannot be taken seriously. I express some partial disagreement with this position in my review of his book (forthcoming in Cervantes).


like the Cueva de Montesinos (II, 23) or the cabeza encantada (II, 62), that functions as a sort of concentrated illustration of the mecha-nisms and concerns of the entire novel, and it contains a striking density of resonances—of image, theme, diction—with other parts of the work. It is also one of the novel’s funniest scenes. The comedy ranges from farcical to linguistic, and includes some epistemologi-cal games similar to those examined above. As usual, don Quijote’s imaginative transcription of the mundane phenomena (the Ebro River, an oarless boat on the banks) works on the principle of associ-ation and signs, although the process has been complicated by recent experiences. A sort of focalization occurs as the narrator modulates into a pastoral register:

…llegaron don Quijote y Sancho al río Ebro, y el verle fue de gran gusto a don Quijote, porque contempló y miró en él la ame-nidad de sus riberas, la claridad de sus aguas, el sosiego de su curso y la abundancia de sus líquidos cristales, cuya alegre vista renovó en su memoria mil amorosos pensamientos. (II, 29; 261)

The conventionality of the pristine locus amoenus may be a set-up for another prosaic deflation, but, as elsewhere, Cervantes delights in the very material he travesties: there is ambivalence between parody and æsthetic pleasure. The crystalline waters, the love associations, the boat—all unmistakably beckon don Quijote, “porque éste es es-tilo de los libros de las historias caballerescas” (262). But he is preoc-cupied by his recent grotesque visions in the Cave of Montesinos, and by the monkey’s equivocal pronouncements on them: “puesto que el mono de maese Pedro le había dicho que parte de aquellas cosas eran verdad y parte mentira, él se atenía más a las verdaderas que a las mentirosas, bien al revés de Sancho, que todas las tenía por la mesma mentira” (261). The doubt accompanying the interpretative freedom that the narrator playfully instilled in the reader (e.g. II, 5 & 24) has crept into the consciousness of our protagonist.

In addition to foregrounding the question of truth, the accom-panying concern of transcendent order emerges at the outset of the


episode. The boat signifies that another knight is in trouble, and only a true peer can help: “que no puede ser librado dél sino por la mano de otro caballero.” Despite the uncertainty occasioned by the skepti-cal comments regarding our hero’s consecrated status by the captives in the Cave of Montesinos (“cuando así no sea, paciencia y bara-jar,” II, 23; 217), and by his financial inadequacy when asked there to lend money to Dulcinea (221-22), don Quijote commands Sancho to prepare for the adventure: “ata juntos al rucio y a Rocinante, y a la mano de Dios, que nos guíe; que no dejaré de embarcarme si me lo pidiesen frailes descalzos.” The potential contradiction between a re-ligious order and divine will generates a dissonance, as does the odd juxtaposition of God’s hand and the bare feet of the friars. It is a curi-ous variation on what El Pinciano would call “adjunto de lugar” (IX, 399).9 Don Quijote attempts to mitigate Sancho’s dismay at leaving behind the animals, and his reference to the mysterious powers that guide them commences the scene’s linguistic comedy:

Don Quijote le dijo que no tuviese pena del desamparo de aquellos animales; que el que los llevaría a ellos por tan longinc-uos caminos y regiones tendría cuenta de sustentarlos.

—No entiendo eso de logicuos—dijo Sancho—, ni he oído tal vocablo en todos los días de mi vida. (II, 29; 263)

Although don Quijote excuses Sancho’s misunderstanding of the Latinate “longincuos,” (“que no estás tú obligdo a saber latín”), the knight resumes his erudite register, albeit with explanatory re-phrasing: “Santiguarnos y levar ferro; quiero decir, embarcarnos y cortar la amarra con que este barco está atado.” Such humor does not serve the exclusive function of undermining chivalric delusion. Sancho’s solecisms and facetious etymologies draw attention to the

9 As we consider Cervantes’ playful representation of pious gestures in this scene, it is worth recalling that Juan de Valdés satirizes these very friars in his Diálogo de la lengua: “Ora sus, vedme aquí ‘más obediente que un fraile descalço quando es conbidado para algún vanquete’” (131). As Barbolani notes in her edi-tion, the Erasmian quip was censored in Spain.


physicality of words, expressing his own corporeal, earthy values.10 As Spitzer illustrated, the great range of linguistic registers in Don Quijote has epistemological implications. Even if, as Martínez Mata and others have argued, this does not involve the radical subjectiv-ity of what Spitzer termed “hybrid reality,” Cervantes does examine the dynamic relationship between characters’ life (and reading) ex-perience, language, and perception of the world. We will see further instances of this linguistic humor below.

Once underway, don Quijote embarks on a lengthy disquisition regarding the distance they have traveled. There is talk of the astro-labe and Ptolemy, the poles and Equator and the Indies. When, sen-sibly observing that he can simply look at the shore, Sancho refuses to gauge their position relative to the equinoctial line by checking whether his lice have died, don Quijote delivers himself of the fol-lowing barrage:

que tú no sabes qué cosa sean coluros, líneas, paralelos, zodíacos, clíticas, polos, equinocios, planetas, signos, puntos, medidas, de que se compone la esfera celeste y terrestre; que si todas estas cosas supieras, o parte de ellas, vieras claramente qué de paralelos hemos cortado, qué de signos visto y qué de imágenes hemos dejado atrás, y vamos dejando ahora. (264-65)

There is an impressive energy of comic accumulation here, al-

10 El Pinciano’s discussion of linguistic comedy dealing with the “body” of words provides fine illustrations: “Vamos, pues, a las figuras; de las cuales digo que unas tocan al cuerpo del vocablo; otras al alma. Las que al cuerpo, o le añaden o quitan; otras ponen o mudan […] Mudando, como si alguno por decir tanto dijes-se ‘tonto’; añadiendo como por decir lengua latina decir lengua latrina y, por decir latina, decir ‘latinaja’” (402). It is tempting to connect such a view of the plasticity of language and Sancho’s physical orientation with the atomistic materialism of Lucretius: “Now do you see the point of my previous remark, that it makes a great difference in what combinations and positions the same elements occur and what motions they mutually pass on and take over, so that with a little reshuffling the same ones may produce forests and fires? This is just how the words themselves are formed, by a little reshuffling of letters, when we pronounce ‘forests’ and ‘fires’ as two distinct utterances” (I, 53).


though don Quijote is in fact indicating one of the virtues of the chivalric genre praised by the Canon of Toledo: “…que era el sujeto que ofrecían para que un buen entendimiento pudiese mostrarse en ellos […] Ya puede mostrarse astrólogo, ya cosmógrafo excelente…” (I, 47; 566). It is also quite similar to Burton’s awestruck enumeration of cosmographical topics in his praise of books and study:

But in all nature what is there so stupend as to examine and calculate the motion of the planets, their magnitudes, apogeums, perigeums, eccentricities, how far distant from the earth, the big-ness, thickness, compass of the firmament, each star, with their diameters and circumference, apparent area, superficies, by those curious helps of glasses, astrolabes, sextants, quadrants, of which Tycho Brahe in his Mechanics, optics (divine optics), arithmetic, geometry, and such-like arts and instruments? (II. ii. 4, 95).

Of course, Cervantes does not suggest that don Quijote is mod-eling the type of ideal narrative, based on versimilitude and variety, outlined by the Canon. Rather than epic “perfección y hermosura,” don Quijote’s creation is absurdly hyperbolic, and subverted on nu-merous counts. For one, his speech is framed by Sancho’s virtuosic mis-hearings and informal etymologies: from Ptolomeo and cosmó-grafo, he comes up with “puto y gafo, con la añadidura de meón, o meo, o no sé como,” causing one of the very few incidences in which the Caballero de la Triste Figura actually laughs. But, as in Burton’s wonder at the folly and range of human endeavors, the variety and detail of don Quijote’s account carries a peculiar force, as does the “layering effect”—seen also in his discussion of giants—of referenc-ing so many concepts that had contemporary currency.11

don Quijote insists that Sancho conduct the experiment of checking for lice:

11 Not much later Sancho will claim, in his own particular idiom, that he also knows something about “la esfera celeste y terrestre” when he gives his ac-count of the cosmos seen from Clavileño (II, 41). For a discussion of the centrality of the Clavileño episode in Sancho’s emergence as an artist figure, see Forcione.


…tórnote a decir que te tientes y pesques; que yo para mí tengo que estás más limpio que un pliego de papel liso y blanco.

Tentóse Sancho, y llegando con la mano bonitamente y con tiento hacia la corva izquierda, alzó la cabeza, y miró a su amo, y dijo:

—O la experiencia es falsa, o no hemos llegado adonde vuestra merced dice, ni con muchas leguas.

—Pues ¿qué?—preguntó don Quijote—. ¿Has topado algo? —¡Y aun algos!—respondió Sancho. (265)

Sancho’s expressive coinage—the plural “algos”—confirms not only what looking over at Rocinante and the ass on shore tells them (that they have not traveled very far), but also that it was fool-ish of don Quijote to assume that Sancho would be limpio. There are numerous echoes from the batanes episode of part I, in which Sancho’s uncontrollable corporeality deflates don Quijote’s vision of adventure. One is the narrator’s adverbial flourish when describing Sancho’s surreptitious lowering of his trousers: “bonitamente y sin rumor alguno, se soltó la lazada corrediza con que los calzones se sostenía” (I, 20; 245).12 But also, in his attempt to delay don Quijote’s departure by saying dawn is near, it is Sancho who claims knowledge of the constellations and don Quijote, observing that it is too dark to even see the stars, who undermines the speculation with empiri-cal evidence. Sancho concedes this point, while offering two inter-esting counterarguments: “Así es […]; pero tiene el miedo muchos ojos, y vee las cosas debajo de la tierra, cuanto más encima en el cielo; puesto que, por buen discurso, bien se puede entender que hay poco de aquí al día” (I, 20; 240). On the one hand, Sancho entertains the pseudo-perspectivistic notion that one’s state of mind enhances perception—an idea that will find fertile ground in the underworld

12 During the Clavileño episode, Sancho removes his blindfold in similar manner: “…bonitamente y sin que nadie lo viese, por junto a las narices aparté tanto cuanto el pañizuelo que me tapaba los ojos” (II, 41; 353). Martínez Mata also comments on the use of the term, which he interprets as “disimuladamente” (64), in the description of the bálsamo de Fierabrás (I, 10).


and celestial realms of the Cueva de Montesinos and Clavileño epi-sodes. On the other hand, the practical squire falls back on “buen discurso”: they both have a sense for how long it has been dark, and may thus reasonably anticipate the arrival of dawn. Here we recall don Quijote’s concluding logic in his discussion of Morgante, his common-sense deduction based on the information that the giant slept indoors.

After the scatological climax on the Ebro (“¡y aun algos!”), which undermines don Quijote’s navigational and cosmographical refer-ences, Sancho washes his hand:

Y sacudiéndose los dedos, se lavó toda la mano en el río, por el cual sosegadamente se deslizaba el barco por mitad del corriente, sin que le moviese alguna inteligencia secreta, ni algún encanta-dor escondido, sino el mismo curso del agua, blando entonces y suave. (II, 29; 265)

The absence of a transcendent order is perhaps deceptively sim-ple here. An indifferent if pleasant natural phenomenon (“el mismo curso del agua”) contrasts with the malign forces of an “encantador escondido”—or any secret intelligence, for that matter. Without put-ting too fine a point on it, we might notice, as the farce resumes in the collision with the flour-coated millers, the description of a ter-rified Sancho:

Púsose Sancho de rodillas, pidiendo devotamente al cielo le li-brase de tan manifiesto peligro, como lo hizo, por la industria y presteza de los molineros, que oponiéndose con sus palos al barco, le detuvieron. (266)

While his behavior recalls the frenzied ceremony and supersti-tion in Erasmus’ “The Shipwreck,” Sancho’s prayers are answered, but in the mundane form of the “industria y presteza” of the millers. Where is the “mano de Dios” or “inteligencia secreta”? As Basilio memorably answered the astonished onlookers at Camacho’s wed-


ding a few scenes earlier, “¡No <<milagro, milagro>>, sino industria, industria!” (II, 21; 200). After the narrow escape from drowning, Sancho renews his pieties, this time requesting deliverance from don Quijote: “…puesto de rodillas, las manos juntas y los ojos clavados en el cielo, pidió a Dios con una larga y devota plegaria le librase de allí adelante de los atrevidos deseos y acometimientos de su señor” (266-67). And don Quijote makes a final, frail appeal to divine as-sistance, before recognizing that his is not the “mano de caballero” capable of prevailing in such an incoherent world: “Dios lo remedie; que todo este mundo es máquinas y trazas, contrarias unas de otras. Yo no puedo más” (II, 29; 267). As in the aftermath of Maese Pedro’s puppet show, there is nothing left for don Quijote to do but pay the fishermen for their broken boat.

While don Quijote and Sancho are undoubtedly the objects of our laughter, the range of their responses and the subject matter encompassed turns our laughter, at first confidently uncomplicat-ed, in sometimes unexpected directions: notions of narrative truth, the comparative efficacy of chivalric and religious ceremony, com-mon sense versus theory, elements of pathos and doubt that give complexity of character. Don Antonio’s famous plea against Sansón Carrasco’s “curing” of don Quijote expresses another aspect of the ambiguity I have been trying to bring out:

—¡Oh señor —dijo don Antonio—, Dios os perdone el agravio que habéis hecho a todo el mundo en querer volver cuerdo al más gracioso loco que hay en él! ¿No veis, señor, que no podrá llegar el provecho que cause la cordura de don Quijote a lo que llega el gusto que da con sus desvaríos? […] y si no fuese contra caridad, diría que nunca sane don Quijote, porque con su salud, no solamente perdemos sus gracias, sino las de Sancho Panza su escudero, que cualquiera dellas puede volver a alegrar la misma melancolía. (II, 65; 536-37)

The therapeutic value of pleasure (“el gusto”) overrides rational didactic concerns (“el provecho”), and the alleviation of melancholy


is again affirmed. Don Antonio’s lament provides a final variation on Horace’s man from Argos, although in this case the primary beneficiaries are not the deluded subject, but those with whom he comes into contact (“todo el mundo”). Nevertheless, the effects of Carrasco’s remedy are swift and, despite the conventional exemplari-ty expressed in the knight’s renouncement of chivalry, don Antonio’s concern seems to resonate with that of Horace’s disillusioned man: “Egad! you have killed me, my friends, not saved me” (435).

R. B. Gill observed that “Comedy not only wishes its form to be appreciated, it demands that our understanding of the strategies of meaning become part of the meaning itself ” (244). I have indicated some ways in which Don Quijote compels the reader to appreciate the strategies of creating literary meaning, as well as those by which the world beyond the book is ordered. Cervantes explored the sa-tirical “comedy of correction” in the uncompromising Licenciado Vidriera. Although I would argue that he tired of the severe judg-ments of such a figure, it is worth recalling that the prologue to the Novelas ejemplares invites the reader to approach the stories as a sort of billiards game, in the public setting and open air of “la plaza de nuestra república.” Such communal, transparent imagery would seem consistent with the didactic function and unambiguous meaning of satire—much like the “romance” stories of the collec-tion serve the ostensible purpose of reinforcing social structure and a clear hierarchy of values. The reader of Don Quijote is described in very different terms, alone at home, involved in a possibly subver-sive activity: “estás en tu casa donde eres señor della […], y sabes lo que comúnemente se dice, que debajo de mi manto, al rey mato” (I, Prólogo). Given such freedom and lack of the homogenizing laugh-ter of a surrounding community, the reader of Don Quijote may de-lightfully lose his or her bearings.

University of St [email protected]


Works Cited

Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Ed. Holbrook Jackson. New York: NYRB, 2001.

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Luis A. Murillo. 5th ed. 2 vols. Madrid: Castalia, 1978.

———. Novelas ejemplares (2 vols.). Ed. Harry Sieber. Madrid, Cátedra, 1989.Close, Anthony. Cervantes and the Comic Mind of His Age. Oxford: Oxford UP,

2000.Colie, Rosalie. Paradoxica Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox.

Princeton: Princeton UP, 1966.Eisenberg, Daniel. A Study of Don Quixote. Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta,

1987.Erasmus, Desiderius. The Praise of Folly and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Robert

M. Adams. New York: Norton, 1989.———. The Colloquies. Transl. Craig R. Thompson. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago

Press, 1965.Forcione, Alban. “Cervantes’ Night-Errantry: The Deliverance of the Imagination.”

BSS, Vol. LXXXI, No’s 4-5, 2004, 451-73.Friedrich, Hugo. Montaigne. Ed. Philippe Desan, trans. Dawn Eng. Berkeley:

Univ. of California Press, 1991.Gill, R. B. “Why Comedy Laughs: The Shape of Laughter and Comedy.” Literary

Imagination, 8.2 (2006), 233-50.Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica. Transl. H. Rushton Fairclough. Cambridge:

Harvard UP, 1926.Iffland, James. “Laughter Tamed,” Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 23. 2

(2003), 395-435.Kundera, Milan. The Curtain. transl. Linda Asher. New York: Harper Collins, 2005.López Pinciano, Alonso. Philosophía antigua poética. Obras completas, I. Ed. José

Rico Verdú. Madrid: Biblioteca Castro, 1998.Lucretius, The Nature of the Universe. Transl. Ronald Latham. Middlesex: Penguin,

1951.Martín, Adrienne. “Humor and Violence in Cervantes.” The Cambridge Companion

to Cervantes. Ed. Anthony J. Cascardi. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.Martínez Mata, Emilio. Cervantes comenta el Quijote. Madrid: Cátedra, 2008.Montaigne, Michel de. Essays, transl. Donald M. Frame. Stanford: Stanford UP,

1965.Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Don Quixote, ed. Fredson Bowers. New York:

Harvest, 1983.Nerlich, Michael. “On the Philosophical Dimension of El casamiento engañoso

and El coloquio de los perros,” in Nerlich, Michael, and Nicholas Spadaccini, eds. Cervantes’s “Exemplary Novels” and the Adventure of Writing. Minneapolis:


Prisma Institute, 1989.Parr, James. Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Related Subjects. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna

UP, 2004.Pirandello,Rigolot, François. “Les Jeux de Montaigne.” Le Jeux á la Renaissance. Ed. H. Aries

& J-C. Margolis. Paris: VRIN, 1982.Trueblood, Alan. “La risa en el Quijote y la risa de don Quijote.” Cervantes 4

(1984): 3-23.Valdés, Juan de. Diálogo de la lengua. Ed. Cristina Barbolani. Madrid: Cátedra,

2006.Vives, Juan Luis. “Tratado del alma.” Obras completas (Vol II). Ed. and trans.

Lorenzo Riber. Madrid: Aguilar, 1948.Wood, James. The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. New York: Picador,

2005.Wood, Michael. “Invisible Works: Cervantes Reads Borges and Nabokov.”

Cervantes and the Modernists, ed. Edwin Williamson. London: Tamesis, 1994.

57

‘Yo sé quién soy’:How don Quijote

Does Things with Words(Part I, chaps. 1-5)

_________________________________________________ Charles Oriel

The many complex problems surrounding the related con-cepts of identity and subjectivity continue to be the focus of much critical thought and have been very close to the

center of debate in Spanish Golden-Age studies for more than thirty years. One fine example of this concern is George Mariscal’s Contradictory Subjects: Quevedo, Cervantes, and Seventeenth-Century Spanish Culture (1991). This insightful study of the discursive con-struction of subjectivity provides the following notion that will serve as a fundamental assumption throughout this essay:

…the subject is constituted by multiple and often contradictory subject positions and thus is always only a provisionally fixed entity located at various sites within the general relations of production, systems of signification, and relations of power…. early modern culture produced subjects through a wide range of discourses and practices … to view any of these as autonomous and originary is to efface the ways in which the construct of the individual was emerging from competition between discourses and was being constituted within writing itself. (5)

Within speaking, as well, I would add. As we all know, mod-

58 Charles Oriel Cervantes

ern linguistics points out the dialectical construction of subjectiv-ity as something inherent to language. In his Problems in General Linguistics, for example, Emile Benveniste posits subjectivity, not as pre-existent to discourse nor as its origin, but rather as a function of it: “I is the individual who utters the present instance of discourse containing the linguistic instance I” (218). There is, of course, an im-plicit dialectic to this concept, and not only in the most obvious way; just as the “I” cannot be conceived outside of a dialogical situation—a context that necessarily includes a potential other, a “you”—so does it contain a tension between the grammatical subject of a sentence and the discoursing subject that produces it: both uttered and utterer. The subject emerges as invariably dialogical: producer and produced, referrer and referred, subject and object, potential “I” and potential “you,” contingent upon a variety of factors. Jürgen Habermas echoes this dialogical and “contradictory” aspect of subjectivity within his general theory of communicative competence:

The system of personal pronouns enables every participant to assume incompatible roles simultaneously, namely that of the I and that of the You. Every being who says “I” to himself asserts himself towards the Other as absolutely different. And yet at the same time he recognizes himself in the latter as another I, and is conscious of the reciprocity of this relationship; every being is potentially his own Other. (370) This formulation finds harmony, not only with Mariscal’s ‘con-

tradictory’ subjects and with structuralist and post-structuralist no-tions of identity, which are, after all, largely based on linguistics (two obvious examples are Derrida’s and Lacan’s), but also with earlier conceptualizations in analytic philosophy, such as speech act theory.

If J.L. Auston’s theory of speech acts has taught us anything at all, it is that to say something is always also to do something: the theory is, in effect, not simply one of language, but also one of agency and communicative pragmatics. Beginning with How to Do Things with Words, first published in 1962, the theory has exercised

Volume 29.1 (2009) How don Quijote Does Things with Words 59

enormous influence over a variety of contemporary modes of criti-cism and philosophy. I would like to begin by quickly reviewing one or two essential concepts from Auston’s text and then briefly ad-dressing some of the (Derridean) critiques they inspired. Despite the fact that this debate is now over thirty years old, its parameters are still vital to the concept of subjectivity which I am here attempt-ing to elaborate. The second part of this essay aims to suggest how a speech-act lexicon might be useful in generating a critical approach to subjectivity in Don Quijote.

Auston begins his theory by dismissing the so-called “descrip-tive” fallacy, according to which language is essentially a symbolic system used to express, describe or refer to concepts and states of reality. He dismantles this long-held assumption by establishing an opposition, at least primarily, between ‘constative’ and ‘performative’ utterances. Constatives purport to declare or describe a pre-existing state of reality. Performatives, on the other hand, do not describe, but rather, enact or effect realities. (A classic example would be a declaration of war: such a declaration, whether in oral or written form, does not describe a state of war, but actually brings it into be-ing.) Obviously, performative utterances depend upon certain con-textual factors already being in place, especially social institutions and conventions; otherwise, they will be hollow or void. Constatives and performatives might adequately be distinguished by considering their relationship to the world-at-large: in the case of constatives, words normally “fit” the world, while in the case of performatives, the world is “changed” by words.

Near the end of How to Do Things with Words, Auston collapses his initial opposition between these two types of utterance by claim-ing that constatives are merely a special variety of performative: all utterances function to enact or “perform” the communal reality that gives them their substance. Social conventions enable utterance but, conversely, communal utterance and agreement constitute social conventions. Despite Auston’s final dismantling of his own prelimi-nary opposition, I shall retain the distinction for my own purposes throughout this essay.


Auston winds up by proposing a general theory of illocutionary forces. Illocution is the true center of his theory and refers to the so-cial and conventional forces inhering in a given utterance or speech act. How to Do Things with Words ends with a tentative classification of such acts: veridictives (the giving of a verdict, an estimate or an appraisal), exercitives (appointing, voting, ordering, advising), com-missives (promising or undertaking), and others. For my purposes here, I shall invoke Wittgenstein’s notion of the “language game” as a rough equivalent to what Auston calls illocution, although I’ll also use this term somewhat figuratively.1

One thing that makes Cervantes’ masterpiece a potential object for this type of study, especially in relation to the question of subjec-tivity, is that it obsessively exemplifies and, to a great extent, paro-dies the problematic status of literary and other forms of discourse. Another is that it has such a central place, both in the canon of world literature and in contemporary thinking, about early modern concepts of subject formation. Finally, and perhaps most important-ly, it is one of a number of canonical Spanish Golden-Age texts, such as La Celestina and El burlador de Sevilla, that seem to be inexorably self-conscious about their own presentation of illocutionary acts.2In the case of Don Quijote, there are three ‘levels’ of illocution that are potential objects of a speech-act analysis; these levels are, however, by no means easily separable: what complicates and confuses their relation is precisely what makes Cervantes’ novel into the elaborate and complex epistemological game that it is. There is, first off, what is regarded as Cervantes’ original illocution (the complete novel Don Quijote). This act is complicated by the fact that it is actually com-

1 Jean-Francois Lyotard makes explicit this association between illocution and ‘language games’: “Wittgenstein … calls the various types of utterances … language games. What he means by this term is that each of the of the various categories of utterance can be defined in terms of rules specifying their properties and the uses to which they can be put—in exactly the same way as the game of chess is defined by a set of rules determining the properties of each of the pieces, in other words, the proper way to move them” (10).

2 Inés Azar perceptively analyzes speech acts in La Celestina (“Self, Respon-sibility, Discourse”).


prised of two, one occurring in 1605 (Part I) and one in 1615 (Part II). Then there are the illocutions produced by characters within the novel itself: don Quijote, Sancho Panza and anyone with whom they happen to have contact. Finally, and perhaps most difficult to isolate, are those illocutions offered by all the potential and partially-realized narrators, such as Cide Hamete Benengeli, the anonymous Moorish translator, etc., etc. This last, mediate, level has been a primary prob-lem for critics attempting to justify use of speech act theory as an approach to the novel, because, by virtue of all the above-mentioned narrative filters, it is difficult, if not impossible, to assign with abso-lute certainty any discourse to any given speaker: as readers, all we really have in Don Quijote is a labyrinthine regress of narrative refer-entiality: “ …someone said that someone said that someone said…,” which brings into obvious question the text’s ostensible reliability and authority. The narrators in Don Quijote are very much like that liminal figure at the back of Velázquez’ painting “Las Meninas”: as Michel Foucault has pointed out in his well-known analysis, this figure is neither “here” nor “there,” appearing to enter and leave at the same time (11). It is a very different situation with drama, when, as members of an audience at a live theatrical performance or as readers of a dramatic text, we have direct access to discourse spo-ken by individual characters. This is one reason there has been much more speech-act criticism devoted to drama, as opposed to the novel. Another reason is that the performance aspect—so explicitly related to the notion of the performative—makes drama an almost natural object of study for this type of approach. A speech-act reading of any novel must therefore make a certain leap of faith regarding di-rect discourse by individual characters: the only thing that one can depend upon with any real degree of certainty is the first level men-tioned above—Cervantes’ original enunciations—and these, too, are mediated by centuries of variant editions and emendations.

Another broader problem engaging speech act theory is the il-locutionary status of literature per se, that is, “imaginative” literature. The use of speech act theory to elicit questions about literature ap-pears to go very much against Auston’s own stated intentions, for


just as Plato banished the poets from his Republic, Auston appears to banish literary discourse from the land of performatives: “A per-formative utterance will be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy…. Language in such circumstances is in special ways used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use” (22). This exclusion is the basis for one of the main critiques aimed at Auston’s theory by Jacques Derrida, who claimed in his well-known essay “Signature Event Context” that the use of the term “parasitic” to describe literary texts, in opposition to so-called “normal” use of lan-guage, aligns Auston with a long-standing metaphysical tradition that depends upon just such structures of hierarchical opposition. By this reading, Austin apparently considers literary texts to be second-ary—supplemental—to “ordinary” usage and, therefore, in a stan-dard deconstructive gesture, Derrida reverses the terms of this oppo-sition to say that the “parasitic” supplement—literature—is actually primary, not supplementary: so-called “literary” effects are endemic to all language (190-91).

This reading, however, is not wholly consistent with Auston’s ac-tual wording. It is ironic how much debate this passage has inspired, for, as always, Auston’s formulations depend upon a thoroughly so-cial and contextual matrix. The passage refers to an actor on a stage. If, for example, an actor is playing the role of Hamlet, his illocu-tions as Hamlet would clearly be “hollow or void” with respect to the pragmatic world offstage, but they would clearly not be insofar as he “is” Hamlet and interacting with other characters that together form part of the dramatic world of Shakespeare’s text. His utterances as Hamlet have illocutionary force in that world, just as they do when he is interacting verbally with others in the so-called “real” world.33

Another of Derrida’s critiques relates to Auston’s ostensible de-

3 The performative status of fiction is, of course, highly problematic: fictional works are, indeed, performative insofar as their discourse functions to “enact” or “produce” a world. However, as previously noted, the illocutionary force of literary texts—if, indeed, one may speak of such a thing—is short-circuited (“hollow or void”) with respect to extra-textual reality. (Searle 78-79)


pendence on oral utterances as examples of so-called “normal” usage, leading to accusations of phonocentrism, that is, of presuming the primacy of oral over written communication. As in the other case, Derrida inverts the terms of this opposition by claiming that writing is primary to oral communication (and not the other way around), and that all discourse is governed by an inherent “iterability” or “gra-phematics” (179-8l). This is another (perhaps willful) misreading, be-cause there is, in fact, nothing in Auston’s text indicating any such preference: both written and oral utterances exercise illocutionary force, though it may function in different ways.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly for my purposes, Derrida accuses Auston of appealing to an implied ethical dimension, em-bodied in the following well-known phrase: “Accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond” (10). This ethics again appears to imply a ‘metaphysics of presence’ that presumes unified subjectivity, intentionality and accountability; as Derrida has it: “One of those essential elements remains, clas-sically, consciousness, the conscious presence of the intention of the speaking subject in the totality of his speech act” (187). Derrida contests this implied ethics by questioning the viability of the very concept of subjectivity: if there is no such thing as a stable, self-consistent and unified subject, how can accountability or ethics, as such, exist? It is true that some versions of speech act theory do depend on the notion of transcendent, unified subjectivity in their formulations of discursive acts. Perhaps the most important aspect of “ordinary language” philosophy, however, is its insistence on the dialogical context—the “total speech situation” (52) of every utter-ance and the fact that this context is actually an essential aspect of the speaking subject.

Auston’s theory derives much of its force from the fact that, socially speaking, such things as intention and even subjectivity it-self are effects inhering in the act of illocution, rather than causes of it. Thus, Stanley Fish in his well-known speech-act analysis of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus tells us (quite correctly) that, for speech act theory,


…intention is a matter of what one takes responsibility for by performing certain conventional (speech) acts. The question of what is going on inside, the question of the “inward perfor-mance” is simply bypassed; speech act theory does not rule on it. This means that intentions are available to anyone who invokes the proper (publicly known and agreed upon) procedures, and it also means that anyone who invokes those procedures (knowing that they will be recognized as such) takes responsibility for hav-ing that intention. (203-04)

A useful analogy might be made here with the “intentionalist fallacy”: texts, literary or otherwise, are no more determined in their significance or illocutionary force by authorial intention than are in-dividual oral utterances, which are likewise enabled by formalized convention. Nor does Auston’s theory posit subjectivity as static, but rather as the constantly evolving intersection of a wide variety of “postures” and situations. As Mary Louise Pratt points out in “The Ideology of Speech-Act Theory”:

…people always speak from and in a socially constituted posi-tion, a position that is, moreover, constantly shifting, and defined in a speech situation by the intersection of many forces. On this view, speaking ‘for oneself ’, ‘from the heart’ names only one posi-tion among the many from which a person might speak in the course of her everyday life. At other points, that person will be speaking, for instance, as a member of some collective, or as a rank in a hierarchy, and so forth …. the context and the subject continually mutually determine each other. (9)

Judith Butler invokes a similarly dynamic and discursive notion of subjectivity: “Untethering the speech act from the sovereign sub-ject founds an alternative notion of agency and, ultimately, of re-sponsibility, one that more fully acknowledges the way in which the subject is constituted in language …” (15-16). These two last quotes echo my opening quotation from Mariscal’s Contradictory Subjects.


Rather than positing a unified subject that “stands behind” and pro-duces discrete speech acts, Auston’s theory (implicitly) posits a sub-ject that is itself created in the very act of producing utterances—more “process” than “product.”

Essential questions asked by speech act theory are: who is doing the talking?, to whom? and, most importantly, under what condi-tions? In short, what is the dialogical situation that enables words to do things? The speaker’s position vis-a-vis his or her audience, as defined by a variety of factors—most of them conventional—de-termines both significance and force in Auston’s universe of perfor-matives, and that positionality is both determined and determining in an unceasing dialectic. Thanks to Auston, and despite his (and our) counting on the fact that “words are our bonds,” we no longer take it for granted that utterances simply describe or express or even “mean what they say.” While locution (utterance in and of itself ) has been the focus of a number of modern theories of language, including those of Chomsky, Benveniste, Lacan and Derrida, what distinguishes Auston’s is its insistent focus on illocution, invariably situating language and subjectivity in a fully pragmatic, socially con-structed, dialogical context.

I offer the following simple, if trivial, example to illustrate a radi-cal change in illocutionary force, based on context and not on con-tent: a pronouncement declaring the “death of the author” means something very different coming from Roland Barthes in one con-text than it does when issued by the Ayatollah Khoemeni in an-other. Now, the Adeath of the author” is something that is important to invoke here, because any consideration of a text’s illocutionary force must take into account, at least in the case of Don Quijote, the literal death of the author, that is, the fact that Cervantes’ original “enunciation(s)” occurred in a context radically different from our own. A complex web of factors—economic, historical, cultural, re-ligious (all social and literary conventions)—constituted Cervantes’ reality, and our awareness of them invariably alters our understand-ing of his novel.

Given the “death” of the author, it is significant that one of


Auston’s first examples of the performative is a clause from a last will and testament: “I give and bequeath my watch to my brother” (5). As in the case with Cervantes, the death of the author of this illocution is not at all metaphorical, but rather quite literal and functional. As Sandy Petrey puts it: “…both a will and a text exercise conventional power through conventional means, both interact with readers in the absence of an author, neither depends on physical presence for its words to perform” (79). Just as our reading of Don Quijote or any oth-er “classic” begins with a consciousness of the death of its author, it likewise ends, in the case of the final chapter of Part II of Cervantes’ novel, with our awareness of the death of its protagonist, whose final illocutionary act is the oral declaration of his own Last Will and Testament. This testament amounts to a final renunciation of his identity as don Quijote and an explicit recognition of his place, as Alonso Quijano el Bueno [the Good], in the world of death, laws, and material properties. In perhaps the strongest (and saddest) irony of Cervantes’ novel, the price of regaining that life is, quite literally, death.44 So it is that questions about who is doing the talking, to whom and under what conditions, are all represented in the text as questions of life and death, and most particularly in relation to the concepts of identity and subjectivity.

My remaining comments aim to provide at least a preliminary sketch of some of the more important speech acts that occur at the beginning of Don Quijote, including don Quijote’s first sally—the first five chapters of Part I—and attempt to relate them to the con-struction of subjectivity.

Illocutionary forces play an important role, not only in framing our critical uptake of the text, but also in framing the universe it rep-resents, because what happens at the end of Cervantes’ novel stands in rigorous symmetry to what occurs at its beginning (Schmidt 102). Essentially what occurs in the first chapter of Part I is that, after the well-known description of an unnamed country gentleman and of his general lifestyle and habits, this same gentleman sets about

4 Rachel Schmidt sheds light on the illocutionary status of don Quijote’s final act of renunciation in her excellent essay “Performance and Hermeneutics.”


establishing a new identity for himself, based entirely upon his ob-sessive reading of chivalric novels. The principal way he does this is to reconstruct reality, first off, by reshaping some ancient armor and then, most importantly, by naming or, rather, by re-naming things: first his horse, then himself and finally his lady. These acts of re-naming are performative insofar as they enact a new reality, but are clearly problematic from a speech-act standpoint. As Mary Malcolm Gaylord tells us: “In J.L. Auston’s terms, Don Quixote’s chronic failure to achieve the perlocutionary effects he seeks in his attempts to do things with words makes him an emblematic author of infelicitous speech acts” (77).

The fact is, the country gentleman’s renaming himself amounts to a self-actualization, at least in textual terms, because the narrator has already made it clear, near the beginning of the chapter, that the protagonist has no (fixed) name until he gives one to himself. Under normal circumstances, the act of naming should ideally conform to the first of Auston’s rules for the “happiness” of performative utter-ances: “There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the utterance of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances” (14). The gentleman’s self-naming clearly violates nearly every word of this rule. Names, like epitaphs, are normally conferred by the au-thority of parents, relatives, or—in some cases—by society itself, but invariably by someone other than the one actually named. As Charles Taylor points out in his masterful Sources of the Self:

The close connection between identity and interlocution emerg-es in the place of names in human life. My name is what I am “called.” A human being has to have a name, because he or she has to be called, i.e., addressed. Being called into conversation is a precondition of developing a human identity, and so my name is (usually) given by my earliest interlocutors. (575, n.13)

Judith Butler’s explanation of the act of naming also has clear ramifications for this problematic scene at the beginning of Don


Quijote:Consider for a moment the more general conditions of nam-

ing. First, a name is offered, given, imposed by someone or by some set of someones, and it is attributed to someone else. It requires an intersubjective context…. The scene of naming appears first as a uni-lateral action: there are those who address their speech to others, who borrow, amalgamate, and coin a name, deriving it from avail-able linguistic convention, and establish that derivation as proper in the act of naming. And yet, the one who names, who works with-in language to find a name for another, is presumed to already be named, positioned within language as one who is already subject to that founding or inaugurating address. This suggests that such a subject in language is both addressed and addressing, and that the very possibility of naming another requires that one first be named. The subject of speech who is named becomes, potentially, one who might well name another in time. (29)

The unnamed country gentleman appears to exercise his act of naming outside of the conventional intersubjective parameters es-tablished by Butler (and priorly by Auston), and he is undoubtedly “both addressed and addressing”—in this sense, he is an ‘unnamed’ namer (of himself ): intrasubjective rather than intersubjective.

In the vaunted books of knighthood, the protagonist will often take on a new name as the result of a particular adventure—as don Quijote himself does at several points55—but this confers a certain “constative” force upon the name because it then serves to point or refer to that given adventure. By what authority or social conven-tion, then, does the gentleman perform this change upon (and for) himself ? Only that which derives from his own self—a self that, in

5 “After having received the proper name, one is subject to being named again. In this sense, the vulnerability to being named constitutes a constant condi-tion of the speaking subject. And what if one were to compile all the names that one has ever been called? Would they not present a quandary for identity? Would some of them cancel the effect of others? Would one find oneself fundamentally dependent upon a competing array of names to derive a sense of oneself ? Would one find oneself alienated in language, finding onself, as it were, in the names ad-dressed from elsewhere?” (Butler 30)


turn, derives from the textual authority of his books of knighthood: his only prior adventure is one of reading. There is certainly no “con-ventional procedure” here and certainly no sense of any “other” that might serve to ratify this metamorphosis, either intersubjectively or conventionally. The only “other” that might be posited is, indeed, those same books of knighthood. In that magical moment, who is doing the talking, and to whom?

Part of the problem is manifested by a term used near the end of the chapter to describe the gentleman’s transformation:

Limpias, pues, sus armas, hecho del morrión celada, puesto nom-bre a su rocín y confirmándose a sí mismo, se dio a entender que no le faltaba otra cosa sino buscar una dama de quien enamorar-se; porque el caballero andante sin amores era árbol sin hojas y sin fruto y cuerpo sin alma. (77, my emphasis)

[Now that his armor was clean, his helmet made into a complete headpiece, a name found for his horse, and he confirmed in his new title, it struck him that there was only one more thing to do: to find a lady to be enamoured of. For a knight errant without a lady is like a tree without leaves or fruit and a body without a soul.] (Cervantes 1950; all translations are from this edition.)

The term confirmar [to confirm] alludes, of course, to one of the Holy Sacraments from the Roman Catholic liturgy, and I press the point here because “confirming” essentially has the illocutionary force of constating a pre-existing reality. This is its force in Roman Catholic doctrine, being the second of the Sacraments: to uphold and to ratify something that has previously occurred. The first Sacrament, not mentioned in the text, is baptism, which is, in fact, what has occurred here (in the sense of “christening” or “naming”), even though the term used is “confirmation.” By apparently fusing the two acts into one, however, this first act by the novel’s protago-nist anticipates Auston’s own move at the end of How to Do Things with Words, when he deconstructs his original opposition between


the two ostensibly separate forms of utterance. It likewise anticipates the dialectical tension that, to my way of thinking, constitutes and determines much of Cervantes’ novel: that between constative and performative utterance. Part of don Quijote’s problem, we remem-ber, is an essential confusing of purportedly constative enunciations and performative ones: what the protagonist does here with words is create a curious language game by which he may “describe” himself at the same time that he “enacts” himself.

The gentleman calls his horse Rocinante because this name is: “alto, sonoro, y significativo de lo que había sido cuando fue rocín, antes de lo que ahora era, que era antes y primero de todos los ro-cines del mundo” (76) [grand and sonorous, and expressing the com-mon horse he had been before arriving in his present state: the first and foremost of all hacks in the world].With the name Dulcinea, the implication of dulce (sweet), both to the gentleman himself and to the reader, could not be more obvious. The only name that ap-pears arbitrary and relatively “unmotivated,” at least from a purely descriptive standpoint, is “don Quijote.” It is, of course, derived from the gentleman’s real name, Quijano, a name not fully revealed until the final chapter of Part II; but this is simply another way of saying that the name is not constative of any reality, but is rather a pointer to another, prior and (at this point) unknown name. The gentleman’s self-naming in this respect anticipates the principal way he will re-shape reality: caught in a curious twilight zone between constativ-ity and performativity, between Alonso Quijano and “don Quijote,” his own discourse can ultimately do nothing but recreate itself in its own imageBlanguage imitating language, in this case, chivalric discourse. Michel Foucault has remarked on this as being one of the most important aspects of Cervantes’ representation of the quixotic subject, noting of the protagonist that: “His whole being is nothing but language, text, printed pages, stories that have already been writ-ten down” (46).

This same confusion between constative and performative utter-ance recurs in chapter 2; don Quijote here reveals his new name to someone else for the first time, while singing a ballad to two prosti-


tutes (that he, of course, perceives as fine ladies), but then immedi-ately regrets having done so:”…puesto que no quisiera descubrirme fasta que las fazañas fechas en vuestro servicio y pro me descubrier-an, la fuerza de acomodar al propósito presente este romance viejo de Lanzarote ha sido causa que sepáis mi nombre antes de toda sazón” (86). [Although I did not wish to reveal myself till deeds done in your service and for your benefit do so for me, the need to adapt this old ballad of Lancelot to the present occasion has betrayed my name to you before the due season]. Leaving aside his antiquated language, used in imitation of chivalric discourse, don Quijote admits that, ac-cording to that same chivalric archetype, names should be motivated by and constate a given reality: a name should, by all rights, reflect heroic deeds already accomplished. But don Quijote has no deeds to his credit except, ironically, that of naming himself. At this point, his name is as “blank” as those white armaments sported by new knights and referred to earlier in this same chapter (79). Instead, it is his name that anticipates and will enable those heroic deeds: a case of the “carriage preceding the horse.” Don Quijote’s new name thus performs as much as it constates.

The “fit” between words—the authoritative, monoglossic dis-course of the chivalric novels—and the pragmatic world is also problematized by the negotiation that don Quijote makes between the ballad and the situation in which he currently finds himself: by altering the words of the original ballad, the text demonstrates a circular flux whereby textual reality and lived reality are mutually influential and ceaselessly dialectic—just as the protagonist is a con-duit by which literature is enabled to reshape life (performatively), he also enables life to reshape literature. This interchange serves to awaken in the gentleman an awareness, at the end of this chapter, that his name, having no constative value, ultimately lacks any au-thority in and of itself and thus needs some sort of external, con-ventional (intersubjective) ratification:”…lo que más le fatigaba era el no verse armado caballero, por parecerle que no se podría poner legítimamente en aventura alguna sin recibir la orden de caballería” (87) [what distressed him most deeply was that he was not yet


knighted, for he believed that he could not rightfully embark on any adventure without first receiving the order of knighthood]. The subjectivity that was so explicitly self-actualized in chapter 1 comes increasingly and inevitably to depend on the society of others to define itself. Interestingly, and as though to reinforce the need for communal ratification, even the narrator waits until the middle of chapter 2 to start indulging the protagonist by referring to him with his new name (82).

Due to don Quijote’s growing need to ratify his new status con-ventionally, chapter 3 opens with his request that the innkeeper dub him as a knight:

… llamó al ventero y, encerrándose con él en el caballerizo, se hincó de rodillas ante él, diciéndole: —No me levantaré jamás de donde estoy, valeroso caballero, fasta que la vuestra cortesía me otorgue un don que pedirle quiero, el cual redundará en alabanza y en pro del género humano. El ventero, que vio a su huésped a sus pies y oyó semejantes razones, estaba confuso mirándole, sin saber qué hacerse ni decirle, y porfiaba con él que se levantase, jamás quiso, hasta que le hubo de decir que él le otorgaba el don que le pedía. No esperaba yo menos de la gran magnificencia vuestra, señor míoBrespondió don QuijoteB; y así, os digo que el don que os he pedido y de vuestra liberalidad me ha sido otorgado, es que mañana en aquel día me habéis de armar caballero … (87-88).

[… {he} called the host. Then, shutting the stable door on them both, he fell on his knees before him and said: ‘Never will I arise from where I am, valiant knight, till you grant me of your cour-tesy the boon I am going to beg of you; it is one which will re-dound to your praise and to the benefit of the human race.’ Seeing his guest at his feet and hearing such language, the innkeeper stared in confusion, not knowing what to do or say, and pressed him to get up; but in vain, for the knight refused to rise until his host had promised to grant him the boon he begged.


‘I expected no less from your great magnificence, dear sir,’ replied Don Quixote. ‘So I will tell you that the boon I begged of you, and you in your generosity granted, is that you will knight me on the morning of tomorrow’.] Now, why does don Quijote ask this of an innkeeper and why

does the innkeeper comply? In the first place, don Quijote has im-plicitly authorized him to do so, partly because the innkeeper is the first male interlocutor he has run into and partly because he is al-ready in a position of authority by virtue of being the master of what don Quijote perceives as a castle. Don Quijote, on first meeting the innkeeper, thus calls him a “valeroso caballero” [valiant knight] and, in so doing, performatively recreates him: in effect, don Quijote must implicitly dub the innkeeper as a knight before the innkeeper can explicitly dub him. Another strange aspect of this interchange is the fact that, despite his conferring of ostensible authority on the inn-keeper with respect to himself, don Quijote does so from a position of communicative authority, because his request of the innkeeper is conditional, backed up by an explicit threat: unless the innkeeper agrees to what he asks, don Quijote claims that he will never get up from that spot. A further anomalous condition of his request is the fact that don Quijote does not reveal its specific content—the dubbing itself—until after the innkeeper has agreed to comply. As is by now apparent, don Quijote violates the basic conventions—the language game—of requesting in a number of extraordinary ways that tend to confuse statement and performance, describing and en-acting.

Another question about chapter 3 concerns—most obviously—the illocutionary force of the dubbing ceremony with which it ends. By what authority, then, with what “happiness,” does the innkeeper issue this pronouncement? The event itself is comically deconstruct-ed from the start by its own context: in a stable, with two prostitutes as witnesses and an innkeeper as master of ceremonies, chanting inaudible gibberish from a book he is pretending to read from and which is emphatically not the authoritative text that don Quijote


(and the rest of us) might believe to be the appropriate one, namely the Bible—instead, he uses his accounting book. All these uncon-ventional factors render this utterance radically “unhappy.” Needless to say, none of this matters from don Quijote’s viewpoint, because there has been no violation of convention, at least, not of literary convention. For him, like any promise issued insincerely, the cer-emony counts as a dubbing, and that is all that matters.

In chapter 4, don Quijote comes upon Juan Haldudo, a laborer, whipping one of his servants named Andrés, who is tied to a tree. Andrés’ first words in this episode are a promise that responds to his master’s accusations that the servant has lost many sheep due to lack of attention: “No lo haré otra vez, señor mío; por la pasión de Dios que no lo haré otra vez, y yo prometo de tener de aquí adelante más cuidado con el hato” (95) [‘I won’t do it again, sir. I swear to God I won’t do it again. I promise I’ll take better care of your sheep in the future’]. As a performative utterance, the commissive (here, a promise) conforms nicely to the discursive mode of the chivalric enterprise: the sense of personal integrity that all promises entail implies an ethic that is one of the principal ideals of knighthood. Furthermore, Andrés is most obviously a menesteroso, i.e., someone badly in need of don Quijote’s newly-ratified status as a knight-errant. This automatically converts his master Juan Haldudo into the evil ‘other’ who, according to the chivalric myth, must be either con-verted or defeated.

When don Quijote menacingly challenges him, Juan attempts to explain the situation by claiming that Andrés is lying when he accuses Juan of cheating him out of his wages, even though they are being withheld due to the servant’s apparent lack of vigilance. This does nothing, however, but reinforce don Quijote’s primary impres-sion—by calling Andrés a liar, Juan confirms a judgment dictated by the chivalric myth, namely, moral consistency from its players: the helpless victim cannot lie maliciously, for if he or she is good (that is, worthy of being protected or saved), then that goodness is absolute. And, of course, if Andrés is not lying, then it is Juan who must be. His faith firmly established in the apparent reality of the


immediate situation, don Quijote perceives no distinction between his own discourse—imported from the books of chivalry—and that of his interlocutors, for he has spontaneously incorporated them into that myth. So it is that he elicits by the threat of force a commis-sive from Juan, a promise to pay Andrés all that is owed to him. For his part, Juan plays along with don Quijote’s language game by addressing him as “señor caballero” (96) [Sir Knight] from the start, thereby appropriating chivalric discourse in order to then issue a deceptive oath: “Yo juro por todas las órdenes que de caballerías hay en el mundo de pagar …A (97) [‘I swear by all the orders of chivalry in the world to pay’]. There are, of course, no chivalric orders left in the world except the one instituted by don Quijote when he named himself and which has recently received external ratification by the dubbing ceremony. Juan’s dubious commissive has the desired effect of placating his opponent, because he knows how to behave dis-cursively as the knight into which don Quijote has performatively transformed him, much like the knight-errant did with the innkeep-er. Another similarity with the earlier situation at the inn is that, once again, the knight elicits a commissive by issuing a threat. Don Quijote perceives the “here and now” of this adventure—its perfor-mance and its performative aspect—with such intensity that he loses sight of any outer context, any logical chain of events, that might have guided things to this point. In effect, the dialogical context that normally determines the illocutionary force of utterances has been suspended and replaced by the chivalric myth. The past lives of Andrés and Juan are effectively erased and whether what they each tell don Quijote is constatively “true” or not is unimportant; as in the case of the dubbing ceremony, the only thing that matters is don Quijote’s utter faith in the efficacy of performative utterance. This is made clear by his indifference to Andrés’ verbal protests that Juan will not fulfill his promise because he is not, in fact, the knight into which don Quijote’s words have magically and performatively transformed him (97).

In this adventure, don Quijote and Juan Haldudo emerge as pro-tagonist and antagonist, while Andrés, the one most obviously af-


fected by its outcome, remains powerless. Once the verbal exchange between don Quijote and Juan begins, Andrés cannot act, linguis-tically or otherwise, for he has been caught and reified as a mute object of exchange between two opposing discourses, one mythic and unitary, the other representing economic and material concerns. Andrés is thus relegated to the extreme margins of discourse: either cries of pain or (what amounts to) passive silence. As in the case of the dubbing ceremony, what matters here to don Quijote is what the words uttered count as within the immediate context, their confor-mity to a literary model—this determines their illocutionary force as constituting a true “adventure.” What happens outside that context, either earlier or later, does not matter from the standpoint of don Quijote’s appropriation of chivalric illocution.

However, the text does provide that outer context: as soon as don Quijote leaves the scene, Juan once again ties Andrés to the tree and proceeds to whip him even harder than he might have otherwise (98). In this way, don Quijote’s ‘heroic’ intervention has precisely the opposite of its intended effect. This, of course, is one of the novel’s main sources of irony, that is, the principal way it deconstructs the chivalric myth: by making it dialogue with a variety of other, more down-to-earth, discourses. This becomes explicit to don Quijote in chapter 31 of Part I, when Andrés reappears to inform him about what ultimately occurred with Juan afterwards (389-90). Upon learning what happened, don Quijote immediately renews his own earlier vow to force

Juan to honor his promise, but Andrés now won’t have any of that: “No me creo de estos juramentos … más quisiera tener agora con que llegar a Sevilla que todas las venganzas del mundo: déme, si tiene ahí, algo que coma y lleve” (391) [‘I don’t believe in these vows … I’d rather have something to get me on to Seville, than all the vengeance in the world. Give me something to eat and take with me, if you have anything here’]. Rather than making a believer of Andrés in the efficacy of chivalric honor and the performative utterances that constitute it, don Quijote has made him into a cynic. According to Andrés, what is more important than words and the satisfaction


of honor’s demands is the satisfaction of material needs like food and money. In this way, Andrés ultimately reinforces the economic discourse proffered earlier by his master, Juan Haldudo.

The other adventure that occurs in chapter 4 is don Quijote’s confrontation with the merchants from Toledo. Upon seeing them, the knight orders them to halt their journey, unless they issue a dec-laration that Dulcinea del Toboso is the most beautiful damsel in the world (100). Unlike Juan Haldudo, the unnamed merchant who speaks for his companions does not enter quite so readily into don Quijote’s language game, because, having perceived his madness, he wishes to have a bit of fun with him. He therefore declares that they would be willing to admit to Dulcinea’s beauty if only the knight can show her to them. Don Quijote responds by insisting that they make this declaration entirely on faith: “Si os la mostrara … , )qué hicierades vosotros en confesar una verdad tan notoria? La impor-tancia está en que sin verla lo habéis de creer, confesar, afirmar, jurar y defender …” (l00) [‘If I were to show her to you, what merit would there be in your confessing so obvious a truth? The essence of the matter is that you must believe, confess, affirm, swear and maintain it without seeing her’]. Once again, don Quijote backs up his re-quest with an explicit threat, stating that if they refuse to comply, they must do battle with him. And once again, as in the earlier cases of Juan Haldudo and the innkeeper, the important thing for don Quijote is not the constative power of words to describe a reality (in this case, Dulcinea’s supposed beauty) somewhere in the ‘real’ world, outside of the immediate dialogical situation, but rather the performative utterances themselves and the things words do—their illocutionary force—in this particular context.

The merchant then replies that they would be willing to make such a declaration if only they might see a portrait of her:

… quedaremos con esto satisfechos y seguros, y vuestra merced quedará contento y pagado; y aun creo que estamos tan de su parte que, aunque su retrato nos muestre que es tuerta de un ojo y que del otro le mana bermellón y piedra azufre, con todo eso,


por complacer a vuestra merced, diremos en su favor todo lo que quisiere. (100)

[‘we shall rest assured and satisfied with this, and your worship will be pleased and content. I even think that we are so far in-clined to her side already that supposing your portrait shows us that she squints in one eye and drips vermilion and sulphur from the other, even then, to please you, we will say all that you ask in her favor’].

Needless to say, these ostensibly conciliatory words do noth-ing but infuriate don Quijote, for they insult Dulcinea’s (supposed) beauty and the knight’s honor, at the same time as they effectively undo the force of any declarative whatsoever that might be issued: the merchant’s desire for entertainment at don Quijote’s expense has implicitly deconstructed the power of chivalric utterance in this situation.

The only avenue left by which don Quijote might preserve the efficacy and unity of a chivalric adventure is to attack, but when he spurs Rocinante on toward the merchants, the horse trips and falls (101). Unable to rise, due to the weight of his armor, he resorts once again to verbal abuse and insults the merchants as they leave, but one of them, now angered, breaks don Quijote’s lance into pieces and proceeds to beat its owner with it. Unlike the previous adventure with Juan and Andrés, don Quijote is asked here to make his dis-course conform constatively to a pre-existing reality, rather than to enact it. By requiring don Quijote to show them Dulcinea and, bar-ring that, to show them a portrait of her, the merchant forces him to make his words “fit” the world in the most literal sense, and when the merchant then expresses willingness to say anything at all, so long as a portrait of some type is shown, don Quijote understands that the rules of his chivalric language game have been broken and, with them, the game itself. He attempts to recuperate the game and to reincorporate the merchants back into the chivalric model by attack-ing, but this fails as well. The shattering of the unity of performative


utterance, derived from the chivalric myth, is symbolized at the end of the adventure by the fracturing of his lance: a final “castration” of what could accurately be called a thoroughly phallocentric discourse.

To summarize: don Quijote has three principal interlocutors during his first sally, all of whom speak a discourse that manifests an increasingly materialist sensibility, a concern with monetary val-ues. The innkeeper, we remember, has his accounting book—the one that served as a figurative Bible during the dubbing ceremony—and makes don Quijote promise to go home and procure clean shirts, bandages and money, before embarking on any new adventures: those material needs that go unmentioned in the books of knight-hood (90). Juan Haldudo’s major concern is, first, with lost sheep and the subsequent financial loss they represent, and then with avoiding paying the wages he apparently owes to Andrés. Andrés, too, returns later on in Part I as a subject now largely informed by economic and material discourses, despite don Quijote’s efforts to the contrary. Finally, the Toledan merchants make explicit the need for words to conform constatively to reality, before swearing to Dulcinea’s beau-ty—in short, they wish to “see the goods” before “buying into” don Quijote’s version of reality. The discourse of these three is constative, relative to that of don Quijote, in that the material economic world constitutes its essential mode of reference; according to this point of view, words have no value except in their ability to describe and/or refer. They anticipate the introduction, in chapter 7, of another interlocutor who incarnates this growing materialist sensibility, and who will dialogue with don Quijote throughout the remainder of the novel: Sancho Panza.66

After having been beaten, don Quijote cannot move and, lying helplessly on the ground, he reverts back to his chivalric models, singing a ballad that presents one of his heroes in a similar situa-tion. One of his neighbors happens by and, recognizing him, calls him by name, but don Quijote does not respond and simply goes on

6 Antonio Gómez-Moriana offers an intelligent analysis of the increasingly materialistic discourses with which don Quijote comes into contact; he also com-pares Juan Haldudo’s promises with don Juan’s in El burlador de Sevilla (88-92).


singing fragments of ballads, taking on different literary identities as fast as they come to him: Valdovino, Abindarráez, Abencerraje. While the neighbor takes him back home, don Quijote attempts to incorporate him into this new language game, by transforming him into—naming him as—a character from Montemayor’s La Diana, don Rodrigo de Narváez; the neighbor resists this, however, and at-tempts to bring him back to reality by simply stating that he is Pedro Alonso, a neighbor of his. At the same time, he informs don Quijote that he is neither Valdovinos nor Abindarráez of the ballad tradition, but señor Quijana. Don Quijote responds angrily by maintaining that he has full awareness of who he is: “Yo sé quién soy” (l06) [‘I know who I am’]. Yet, if there were ever a moment at which that identity is in doubt, especially one posited on self-consciousness and discursive continuity, this is it. Who, indeed, is doing the speaking here? That subjectivity which was performatively enacted and uni-fied by naming in the first chapter has been fragmented, like the broken lance, into a plurality of increasingly competing discourses: a man of many names. Perhaps one of Cervantes’ greatest novelis-tic accomplishments in Don Quijote is the positing of a more mod-ern subjectivity based on agency and a process of knowledge (“Yo sé quién soy”), rather than an essentialized tautology comprised of blood or honor (“Yo soy quién soy”) [‘I am who I am’]: “In a world reconfigured as an enterprise, the self is no longer necessarily defined through bloodline but may indeed be realized as a process” (Castillo and Spadaccini 187).77

The chivalric archetype constitutes a subject, an “I,” whose func-tion as knight-errant is conceived largely in ethical terms: to go out and conquer or convert all that is Other—either that which is un-known or that which is evil—into that which is the “same”: either the “known” or the “good.” This is precisely don Quijote’s mission, except that it plays itself out, not on an explicitly ethical battlefield of good and evil, but rather on the battlefield of subjectivity itself or, to put it another way, of language. Don Quijote attempts to convert

7 José Antonio Maravall offers a convincing account of the emergence of the concept of the individual as an ongoing process (168-71).


everything and everyone he sees into performing and performative participants—sometimes unwilling ones—of his own private (chi-valric) language game, but in so doing, uncovers the brutal fact that his game was never private to begin with, that it was always already derived from and dependent upon prior conventions of discourse. This process determines the shape of Cervantes’ novel and, I be-lieve, of new discursive models of subjectivity that were beginning to emerge in early modern Spain. Like the dialectic between consta-tive and performative utterance, don Quijote’s language shapes real-ity, just as his language is shaped by the reality it encounters. What starts out as an attempted private language is drawn inevitably into more and more active dialogue with other subjects, other discourses. Ultimately, the relation between don Quijote and those other dis-courses is mediated by Sancho Panza, but in the case of don Quijote, the “other” that is a potential “I” and toward which he asserts him-self, as in Habermas’ model, consists of everything and everyone that exists outside of his library, and that Other has a name: don Alonso Quijano el Bueno. As Habermas says: “ … every being is potentially his own Other.”

I have attempted to show how a consideration of speech acts enables a vision of some of the discursive modes by which the sub-ject is constructed—performatively enacted—in Don Quijote. Other important aspects, which I have not touched upon except in passing, are the nature of the conception of the Other, how it shapes that construction, and how that dialectic reflects a crisis of sensibility in early modern Spain. One aspect of that crisis is a growing mercantile sensibility; another is the decline of an imperialist consciousness; another is the gradual transition from an essentially oral episteme to one that is inscribed.88

Perhaps, after all is said (and done), however, it is no accident that don Alonso Quijano’s nickname, “el Bueno” [the Good], discloses an ethic, and we must remember in this instance that the chivalric myth—outmoded as it was, even in Cervantes’s day—still represent-

8 Maravall’s Culture of the Baroque remains the most comprehensive descrip-tion of these changes.


ed an ideal of honor that was essentially oriented toward the good, however culturally specific and phallocentric that notion of morality, that ethos, might be. Indeed, as Charles Taylor tells us, most (if not all) of our notions of identity are intimately related to concepts of morality: “Selfhood and the good, or in another way selfhood and morality, turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes” (3).

As an object lesson in both literary and cultural criticism, it is useful to think that Cervantes helps to initiate Spain’s passage into the modern world of mercantile sensibility by effectively decon-structing a medieval myth that had long outlived its usefulness as a discourse by which to live, by which to construct subjects. However, it might likewise be useful to consider whether his novel does not also function to preserve that myth’s implicitly moral dimension, to keep alive the ideal—despite new and ever more rapidly changing discursive constructions of subjectivity—that words were still their bonds.

University of [email protected]

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Age. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.Habermas, Jürgen. “Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence.” Inquiry

13 (1970): 360-75.Lyotard, Jean-Francoise. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Tr.

Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.Maravall, José Antonio. Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure. Tr.

Terry Cochran. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.Mariscal, George. Contradictory Subjects: Quevedo, Cervantes, and Seventeenth-

Century Spanish Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.Petrey, Sandy. Speech Acts and Literary Theory. New York: Routledge, 1990.Pratt, Mary Louise. “The Ideology of Speech-Act Theory.” Centrum 1.1 (1981): 5-18.Schmidt, Rachel. “The Performance and Hermeneutics of Death in the Last

Chapter of Don Quijote.” Cervantes 20.2 (Fall 2000): 101-26.Searle, John R. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 1997.Stern, Charlotte. “Dulcinea, Aldonza, and the Theory of Speech Acts.” Hispania

67.1 (1984): 61-73.Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge,

Harvard UP, 1989.

85

Early Modern Illusions ofPerfect Male Friendship: The Case of Cervantes’s

“El curioso impertinente”____________________________________________ Juan Pablo Gil-Osle

The rhetoric of male friendshipoccupied an impossible space. Alan Bray. The Friend

Mi amigo usque ad portam. Cervantes. “El viejo celoso”1

“El curioso impertinente” culminates in the death of all three main characters. One traditional explanation of this dramatic ending points to the extravagant curiosity

of Anselmo, who plots to test his wife’s fidelity by tempting her with his best friend, Lotario. Anselmo forces Camila and Lotario to share an artificially contrived intimacy for such a prolonged period that they eventually end up falling in love, thus confirming Anselmo’s deepest fears. Later, on the brink of death, Anselmo asserts that his curiosity regarding the limits of his wife’s virtue was a “necio e im-

1 See Ramirez-Araujo, about the use of the idiom Amicus usque ad aras and its variants in Cervantes as an affirmation of the institution of marriage as more important than the practice of friendship. See Bray for another take on the issue of the rituals of sworn male friendship, which resulted in religious ceremonies in churches (The Friend 13-41).

86 Juan Pablo Gil Osle Cervantes

pertinente deseo” (422). Mortally ill after discovering the unfaithful-ness of his wife and his best friend, he seeks refuge in the house of another friend. This friend is the anonymous reader of Anselmo’s last writing, in which he repents for his wrongdoings. The actions of this anonymous friend at the end of “El curioso impertinente” are neither idealistic nor heroic; they are grounded in simple common sense. He does what any sensible friend would do—help in mo-ments of distress. But this novella is not a story about common sense in friendship; rather, it is about male perfect friendship, a highly codi-fied set of rules of male, as well as female, behavior, which underwent a transformation between the Middle Ages and Modernity.2 In this paper, I will analyze the connections between the fraught friendship of “El curioso impertinente” and the models of friendship proposed for commercial societies, as well as the weakening of the patronage economy in Western Europe. In order to do so, I will answer the fol-lowing questions: Is friendship in “El curioso impertinente” modern, pre-modern, or a mixture of both? How do our post-Enlightenment practices of friendship affect our judgment of this novella? Does the creation of professional literature markets affect the textual repre-sentations of male friendship?

In recent years, we have seen a full fleshed trend of studies on the “material world” in Cervantes and more generally in the early mo-dern literature of Iberia. Works such as Cervantes and the Material World by Carroll B. Johnson, Modernidad bajo sospecha: Salas Barba-dillo y la cultura material del Siglo XVII by Enrique García Santo-To-más, Cervantes’s Novel of Modern Times by David Quint, Writers on the Market by Donald Gilbert-Santamaría, and An Early Bourgeois Literature in Golden Age Spain by Francisco J. Sánchez all illustra-te how thought provoking the connections between literature and

2 Regarding the qualities and capacity of women as friends, according to humanists, Montaigne sets one of the most paradigmatic examples: “The ordinary capacity of women is inadequate for that communion and fellowship which is the nurse of this sacred bond” (qtd. in González 214). Women intellectuals of early modern Europe would revolt against these disqualifications, but in this paper there is not room to develop this proto-feminist aspect of amicitia.

Volume 29.1 (2009) Cervantes’s “El curioso impertinente” 87

the marketplace can be. Although addressing the will of Cervantes’s patrons would be an interesting undertaking to understand better the material world of Cervantes, this lies outside the scope of the present study, and in any case would be difficult to undertake given the absence of extant documents pertinent to such an inquiry. For our current purposes, I will assume, as Harry Sieber puts it, that Cervantes himself was dissatisfied with his patrons:

Whatever favor and protection he may have received from the Count of Lemos and the Archbishop of Toledo, Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas, in the end he may have found himself captu-red in a system which was—at least metaphorically—as constra-ining and frustrating as his imprisonment at Algiers. Freedom would come only in a marketplace in which readers—not pa-trons—provided the necessary ransom. (“The Magnificent” 109)

On the other hand, to recognize that Cervantes’s intellectual property was unprotected by the laws and his patrons had neither an interest nor an obligation to support him, revalidate my purpose of proving that the lack of satisfaction in a given literary career can be detected through the analysis of the textual representations of friendship in connection with seventeenth century patronage eco-nomy.

After reading the extensive criticism on “El curioso imper-tinente,” one realizes that exemplarity and fidelity in marriage,3

3 Many critics propose that because they focus on the moralistic issues of the test of the wife and marriage, Orlando furioso’s canti 42 and 43 are the main literary model for “El curioso impertinente.” See Ayala (302-04), Barbagallo (208, 211), Hahn (133), Kaplan (285), McGrady (769, 771), Morón Arroyo (179-80), Wilson (16-17), and Percas de Ponseti (194). Nevertheless, McGrady proposes the Novella 14 by Gentile Sermini as the real and supplementary source for parts of “El curioso impertinente” (769-71). Other critics consider that a Spanish prec-edent such as El Crotalón—which for the purposes of this study will be considered a variation of the story from the Decameron—is creditable for parts of the plot. For Illades, who maintains the older tradition of proposing Disciplina clericalis as the fundamental turning point of this oriental story, the Disciplina clericalis would be


curiositas,4 gender,5 mimetic desire,6 and psychoanalytic,7 as well as literary history and theory,8 have frequently been brought to bear on “El curioso impertinente,” though without addressing Cervantes’s textual representations of friendship in a satisfactory way in terms of the theory of friendship.9 This is not to say that previous critics have not done a thorough job in examining the likely sources for this novella’s treatment of friendship; rather, the classical theories of friendship and the ways in which they were evolving in the sevente-enth century have only occasionally been analyzed in relation to “El curioso impertinente.”

The serious work on the tradition of amicitia in “El curioso im-pertinente” began with Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce’s article “Una

the real model for Anselmo, Camila and Lotario’s fates (Tres12). Percas de Ponseti has a more eclectic point of view: “Lo más probable es que Cervantes tuviera pre-sentes las más de las mencionadas fuentes [Boccaccio, Ariosto, Villalón, Luciano, San Anselmo, entre otras]” (202). After Percas de Ponseti’s 1975 study, an increas-ing number of critics such as Wilson, De Armas, and Faliu-Lacourt, have ac-knowledged a variety of sources for different aspects of “El curioso impertinente.”

4 A number of critics interested in curiositas consider The Histories, by Herodotus, [De Armas (11, 13), Wilson (14)], and the Golden Ass, by Apuleius, (Scobie 75), as important sources. Hahn explains the relation between curiositas in Saint Bernard and Cervantes (130-33). For more critical information about the connection between the story of Candaules in The Histories and “El curioso impertinente,” see Arriola’s article.

5 About the homoerotic desire between Anselmo and Lotario, see Amat (81) and Wey-Gómez (173). On Camila’s character see Wilson (27-28), El Saf-far (“In praise”), Jehenson, and Mancing (15-16, 18). On the traffic of women between the male protagonists see Wilson.

6 See Cesáreo Bandera and Diana de Armas Wilson’s works.7 Sieber (“On Juan”), Cascardi, Illades (El honor 491), González, Wey-Gó-

mez (172-78).8 One thorny issue has been the “pertinence” of this novella for the inter-

pretation of Don Quijote. The majority of critics are in favor of the unity of sig-nification; a few of the many who take this position are Castro (128), Wardrop-per, Immerwhar, Percas de Ponseti (188), Arriola (33-34), Bandera (“La novella”), Weiger, Wilson, Güntert (787), Brown (El curioso 797), De Armas, El Saffar (“On Praise” 205-06, 217), Quint (xii) and Flores (79).

9 For more information on related critical history, see Kenneth Brown (789), Hanh (128-30), and Percas de Ponseti (182-202).


tradición literaria: el cuento de los dos amigos,” in which the critic sought to supplement Louis Sorieri’s work on the early modern Eu-ropean imitation of the story of the two friends found in Boccaccio’s Novella 10.8.10 For Sorieri, the main plot of this tale follows these li-nes: the “rivalry between the two” male characters for the “beloved” is resolved peacefully thanks to the “voluntary sacrifice of the generous friend for the other” (5). Avalle-Arce, following and enlarging upon Sorieri’s work, considers that Boccaccio’s story is the main source for the many variations on this basic plot found throughout sixteenth and seventeenth century literature including “El curioso imperti-nente” (34-35). Chrisitane Faliu-Lacourt agrees with Avalle-Arce by asserting that “el paso determinante entre la tradición histórico-didáctica y la obra de arte atractiva se da en la octava novela del décimo día del Decamerón de Boccaccio, [un] verdadero cambio de perspectiva” (“Formas” 171).

Critics have noted that desire constitutes a fundamental aspect of friendship in its early modern European textual representations. It is well known that the popularity of the triangular desire, in the aforementioned mentioned Boccaccian plot, overshadowed the me-dieval model of the half-friend.11 Here I will not address the medie-

10 On the tale of the two friends, I have found the following works very useful: Arriola (1971), Avalle-Arce (1957), Ayala (1965), Ayerbe (1969), Cavallo (1993), De Armas (1992), Faliu-Lacourt (1985), Gimber (1995), Hyatte (1994), Johnson (2003), Kirkham (1993), Langer (1994), Percas de Ponseti (1975), Schol-berg (1958), Sorieri (1937), Valli (1946), and Wilson (1987).

11 “The story of the Half-Friend is one of several ‘test of friendship’ tales that are found in medieval collections of fables and apologues. It first appeared in western European literature in twelfth century Disciplina clericalis… The plot, briefly, is this: An Arab, nearing death, calls his son and asks him how many friends he has acquired. The son says he has one hundred friends. The father, who has gained only a half-friend in his lifetime, suggests that they test the son’s friends. He tells his son to kill a calf, cut it into pieces, and put them in a sack. Then he is to take the bloodstained sack to the homes of his friends, announce that he has killed a man, and seek their help. The son does as his father orders, but finds that none of his friends will aid him; instead they drive him away. Then he goes to the half-friend, who sends his wife and family out of the house, and buries the sack. The son tells the half-friend the truth and thanking him, returns home,


val versions and varieties of this topos, but rather the history of the two male friends, which Boccaccio built around triangular desire in the novella 10.8, and which would be imitated throughout Europe for centuries.12 Not only “El curioso impertinente,” but Don Quijote as a whole has been analyzed in terms of mimetic desires. As Girard puts it:

Don Quixote, in Cervantes’ novel, is a typical example of the victim of triangular desire, but he is far from being the only one. Next to him the most affected is his squire, Sancho Panza. (De-ceit 3)

Cesáreo Bandera has worked extensively on “El curioso imperti-nente” in relation to the concept of triangular desire. Diana de Armas Wilson published the most important work on the male desire of Anselmo y Lotario, whose friendship becomes a frame for the traffic of women between the males. I completely agree with Bandera and Wilson in their valuable interpretations; however, the focus of their work does not align well with the objectives of this current paper, which is to argue that pre-modern ideas of friendship in Cervantes are shaped by the realities of the patronage economy, as well as the market economy and the individual desires of the players. Additio-nally, I would draw a fundamental distinction between studies like those of Bandera and Wilson, which are based on triangulation of desire and the traffic of women, and the approach undertaken here. The foundation of this study lies in the classical theories of philia-amicitia and post-structuralist theories of friendship.

For instance, in Don Quijote, Anselmo, Lotario, and Camila per-fectly represent the aforementioned triangle of desire. However, in his analysis of this phenomenon, Bandera takes the reader into a re-

where he informs his father of the results” (Scholberg 187).12 “Girard calls desire ‘triangular’ because there is no straight line between

the desire of a subject for an object; one desires only what is given value by another, who becomes part of the process of mimetic rivalry as both rival an double of the subject” (McCracken 338-39).


gion where jealousy between the characters becomes his main focus, and he values Cervantes as an “extraordinario and prolífico inven-tor de circunstancias individuales específicas” that might evolve into transcendental human problems (“Monda” 250). In fact, Bandera’s emphasis on individualistic representations is the basis of the dis-tinctive freedom of Cervantes’s characters, as opposed to society’s constrained ones:

Esta separación entre, por una parte, el individuo y sus circuns-tancias, y por otra, el problema mismo, no solo confiere al indi-viduo cervantino su característica libertad, sino que hace posible al mismo tiempo una visión más clara del problema en sí; más clara que si la intención de Cervantes fuera la de presentar casos sicológicos específicos, interesantes por su singularidad (249).

I agree with Bandera that a characteristic of “El curioso imper-tinente” is that it calls attention to the problem of friendship. But I differ with him when he turns the plots of friendship in La Galatea, Don Quijote, Novelas ejemplares, and Persiles y Segismunda into mere intrigues on jealousy (251, 266), which results because his approach values post-Enlightenment views of friendship and the premium they place on love and affection. An example of such understandable post-Enlightenment views and the way the affect our interpretation of Cervantes can be seen in the following:

Resulta, por tanto, sorprendente observar que los celos no apare-cen para nada en esta historia de los dos amigos que nos cuenta Silerio. . . la ejemplaridad del comportamiento de Silerio resulta bastante artificial. (“Monda” 266-67)

Because of Bandera’s post-Enlightenment disposition, he finds the lack of Timbrio and Silerio’s jealousy “surprising” and Silerio’s “exem-plary behavior” quite artificial. However, I argue that this puzzling artificiality is the crux of the story of the two friends.

The social symbolic value of the sacrifices between male friends


must be understood from a perspective where artificiality becomes rhetoric, to reinforce individual behavior of fidelity, in order to en-hance trust in social exchange.13 In fact, the story of Anselmo and Lotario is as rhetorical as the one of Timbrio and Silerio. The latter reinforces, just as the former undermines, the same set of symbols. In Avalle-Arce’s opinion, Cervantes composed two plots about the two friends: one in La Galatea, and the other in “El curioso imperti-nente” (18-24). For him, the crux of the Boccaccian story of the two friends is not jelousy, but that “un amigo se sacrifica para liberar a otro de una muerte segura, y los dos amigos se enamoran de la mis-ma mujer” (19). Avalle-Arce posits this scenario in contrast to the medieval tradition of the test of friendship in the story of “a half-friend and a friend and a half ” (Scholberg 187). His explanation for this difference draws on the concept of “displacement” from content into form:

La validez de la moral es lo esencial [en la tradición medieval del cuento], las filigranas artísticas lo de menos; de aquí la repe-tición de la materia sin variar casi la forma… Las propias cir-cunstancias de nuestro cuento lo convierten en instrumento ideal de las ejemplificaciones éticas… para sus autores el verdadero interés no está en el contenido narrativo, sino en el contenido simbólico [de la gran cadena del ser]. (33)

13 The repetition of the rhetorical stories of the two male friends seems to have been a pertinent tool to make true certain symbolisms: “Given the various characteristics of patron-client relations in general, and the various ambivalences built into them in particular, and also given their tendency to become institu-tionalized to reinforce in a way the very patterns towards which their attitude is ambivalent, it is no surprise that, in the societies in which these relations are predominant, other types of highly symbolic interpersonal relations tend to de-velop, partly in conjunction with and partly in opposition to them. These relations attempt, as it were, to overcome the ambivalences inherent to institutionalized patron-client nexus and to go beyond them into the realm of pure, undiluted meaning and trust, uncontaminated by exigencies of power or instrumental con-siderations” (Eisenstadt and Roniger, Patrons 218-19).


In Avalle-Arce’s analysis of this long and complex tradition, there are two basic extremes: on the one hand, the moralistic medieval model, and on the other, the artistic variations of the Renaissance.14 By the sixteenth century, he argues, the moralistic and the artistic versions coexist, but do not mix. During the early 1600’s, the topic undergoes further modifications by virtue of a process of allusion to the original model.15

Though useful in its own right, Avalle-Arce’s study of probable literary models and transformations does not account for Cervantes’s decision to give a tragic twist to his version of the story; this is es-pecially true if the majority of the critics are correct in concluding that the most likely models for Cervantes’s version are Orlando fu-rioso, the Decameron, and a variation of the latter in El crotalón, all of which end in a constructive fashion from the point of view of androcentric amicitia.

Examining the early modern tradition of the tale of the two friends, one realizes that the topic of the story—the triangulation of desire between two male friends and a woman—does not necessarily lead to either disappointment or calamity, since characters in other stories finding themselves in the same initial scenario of triangular desire negotiate it in a manner that ultimately leads to a non bloody outcome. Tradition teaches that for each major decision confronting

14 The question of the morality and exemplarity of the tale has been the object of much discussion, as has its relevance within Don Quijote; these issues have given rise to highly disparate critical stances (Castro, El pensamiento 126-27, Wilson 9-10). Álvaro Molina asserts that Anselmo’s “medieval” attitudes and ac-tions within the framework of amicitia symbolize a rejection of the non-Christian spirit of the Renaissance (51). Nevertheless, until the mid-seventeenth century, the network of signifiers of friendship theory was grounded more in issues of eth-ics than of moral doctrine.

15 Avalle-Arce contends that towards the end of the sixteenth century, the tremendous popularity of the motif led to a flourishing “allusive process” whereby “the author knows he will be understood by all, given the popularity of the original [story]” (35). If the numerous and diverse variations on the theme of the two rival friends essentially allude to the “original,” these Renaissance and Baroque texts may allude, in turn, to Boccaccio’s tale of the two friends, or others, depending on various factors.


the main characters of “El curioso impertinente,” there are at least two options. First, Anselmo decides to test his wife. The object of in-vestigation is inadequate, as it is said in Orlando Furioso’s test of the woman. Second, Lotario fails even when he tries to deter his friend from his plans. Anselmo then forces Lotario and Camila to spend so much time together that they eventually fall in love. In the Crota-lón, for instance, the friend and the wife are not adulterous because the friend rejects the advances of the wife. In other cases, the wife rejects the friend, or both decide not to take advantage of the private space that the husband has created for them. Third, if adultery takes place, the husband could either remain unaware of it, as happens in Sermini’s novella 14, or discover it. In the last situation, the laws of honor lead to flight, disgrace, bloodshed, and death, as in “El curioso impertinente.” Perhaps the best counterexample to this scenario can be found in Guillén de Castro’s play, El curioso impertinente. In 1606, just one year after the publication of Don Quijote, Guillén de Castro, in his version of Cervantes’s story introduced a relatively happy en-ding in which the husband dies, leaving an appropriate social space for Lotario and Camila’s love (Arellano 79). In fact, throughout the play, we see Anselmo portrayed as an obstacle to the consummation of the preexisting love between Camila and Lotario.

Cervantes’s deviation from previous literary models in “El cu-rioso” stands in stark contrast to his earlier use of the tale of the two friends. In his first published book, La Galatea (1585), Cervantes rendered his first imitatio of the classical topos. In that work, the au-thor portrayed the connections between friendship, generosity and desire through an idealized tale of amicitia perfecta in which the two male friends choose to forgo the fulfillment of their desire for the same woman in order to remain faithful to one another. Therefore, neither the philological nor the comparative approaches offer much help in understanding the social meaning of Lotario’s betrayal and Anselmo’s obsession in connection with the symbolism of generosity and control of desire in friendship.16 Cervantes’s highlighting of un-

16 For Kathy Eden, at the base of the theory of friendship lie a number of


faithfulness and disloyalty—rather than nobility and virtue—among males undermines the tradition of amicitia perfecta.

As we have already seen, scholars from a variety of critical schools have exhaustively considered the topic of friendship in the literary sources Cervantes probably used in creating “El curioso impertinen-te.” However, for the most part, these scholars have chosen not to examine the work’s broader philosophical implications vis-à-vis the classical and early modern traditions of amicitia perfecta and the En-lightenment tradition of cool friendship and sympathy. It is between these two different notions of virtuous friendship that “El curioso impertinente” is situated. Within the symbolic economy of the clas-sical concept of perfect friendship, friends must be politically attuned, socially equal, and virtuous. Such an ideal of human interrelations-hip is often expressed as a willingness to die for one another during feats of military heroism and to live in partnership—sharing all ma-terial wealth17—as well as to share the same education.18 Moreover, friends are supposed to possess everything in common (koinonia).19

proposals to coordinate personal desires and community life. Therefore, we may consider the representations of perfect and imperfect friendship in Cervantes from the point of view of how they portray the issue of the individual’s desires within social constraints.

17 Regarding the central role of property and education in ancient friend-ship and political theory, see Kathy Eden (109-42). On the connections between the military, politics and friendship, see Bray (2003), Derrida (1998), and Hutter (1978). A non-exhaustive list of other important works on friendship from a va-riety of approaches used for this article includes: Fraisse (1974), Hill (2004), Lager (1994), MacNamara (1958), Meilaender (1981), El Murr (2001), Neili (1986), Nygren (1982), Pizzolato (1993), Remer (1999), Rorty (1980), Schwarzenbach (1996), Silver (1990), Wandell (1991), and Zetzel (1972).

18 On the characteristics of idealistic models of friendship, there exists an extensive literature. I have found very informative the works by Bray (2003), Burke (1999), Charlier (1977), Fraisse (1974), Follon (2003), Green (2004), Halperin (2002), Hutter (1978), Hyatte (1991, 1994, 1999), Johnson (2003), Kelly and Rosemann (2004), Langer (1994), Lohuizen-Mulder (1977), Morford (1991), and Smith (1935).

19 Regarding the connection between friendship, property and justice in Plato’s The Republic, Kathy Eden notes: “In taking friendship as its model, the koinonia or partnership formed by the guardians evokes both our proverb that


Numerous scholars have interrogated our notions of friendship throughout the ages, but one voice that especially deserves consi-deration in our discussion of this subject belongs to the eighteen-th century economist and moral philosopher, Adam Smith. Since Adam Smith rejects the practice of friendship as described above, he usually prefers to discuss the concepts of commerce and sympa-thy rather than friendship, it can be difficult to identify a succinct definition of the latter in his work. However, the following state-ment—one of the very few in which Smith directly addresses the characteristics of a proper friendship—gives a good indication of how he conceives this aspect of interpersonal relationships should manifest itself in human nature:

The prudent man, though not always distinguished by the most exquisite sensibility, is always capable of friendship. But his friendship is not that ardent and passionate… It is a sedate, but steady and faithful attachment to a few well-tried and well-cho-sen companions; in the choice of whom he is not guided by the giddy admiration of shining accomplishments, but by the sober esteem of modesty, discretion, and good conduct… He rarely frequents, and more rarely figures in those convivial societies which are distinguished for the jollity an gaiety of their conver-sation… The prudent man is always sincere… But though always sincere, he is not always frank and open… His conversation… is always perfectly inoffensive… [he] is not a meddler in other people’s affairs… He is averse to enter into any party disputes, hates faction, and is not always very forward to listen to the voice even of noble and great ambition. (Smith, The Theory 214-15)

To this reassignment of meanings of friendship corresponds a shift on the virtues on amicable exchanges. A good rendering of the vir-tues that Adam Smith considered necessary among prudent men to the operation of a commercial society is as follows:

friends hold all things in common and also the traditional source of this prov-erb—Pythagoras” (83).


Forbearance and mutual non-interference are Smith’s favouri-te virtues. The ‘impartial spectator’ monitors our ‘passions and appetites’, constantly judging ‘how far’ each of them was ‘either to be indulged or restrained’ (Smith, Adam III.5.5, 165; Hill and McCarthy, “Hume” 41).

After the seventeenth century, a similar change took place in France and Germany. The definition of friendship in the Encyclopédie is as follows: “L’amitié n’est autre chose que l ’habitude d’entretenir avec quelqu’un un commerce honnête & agréable” (1:361). In his Metaphysics of Morals, Kant stresses the same idea of distance and communica-tion: “L’amitié (considérée dans sa perfection) est l’union de deux personnes par un même amour et un respect réciproques. On voit facilement qu’elle est un Idéal de sympathie et de communication” (El Murr 193). All in all, Adam Smith is one of the most important theorists contributing to this shift of the notion of friendship during the transition from pre-commercial to commercial societies:

For Smith, market society dramatically transforms friendships by deintensifying them and making possible more ubiquitous and pacific forms of cool friendship. Because the stable and or-ganized commercial state provides adequate internal and exter-nal security, commerce flourishes; such security also facilitates the domestication and general radiation of necessitudo. (Hill and McCarthy, “On Friendship” 12)

Profound social changes resulted in a transformation of the institu-tion of friendship, whose original values were no longer necessary. For Allan Silver, the Enlightenment Scots “understand solidaristic and heroic forms of friendship in pre-commercial society as perva-sively shaped by calculations of interest, in contrast to the personal and civic friendship possible in commercial society” (1482, 1486).

Adam Smith and the Enlightenment Scots were not the first to theorize about these social changes. The discussion about idealistic


and practical models of friendship must have been a reality in early modern intellectual circles as we can see in Alberti (247-317), and Castiglione (135-38).20 This type of discussion about the usefulness of the discourse on amicitia for banking families and court officers led to the appearance of what Faliu-Lacourt refers to as the “formas vicariadas.” We see this “formas vicariadas” in the Boccaccian tale of the two friends, such as “El curioso impertinente” by Cervantes and the play by the same title by Guillén de Castro. In literature:

plasmaciones íntimamente emparentadas de un mismo tema aparecen vicariantes según varios parámetros: el momento y el lugar de su difusión, el enfoque literario, el género elegido, y las convenciones de este género en una época determinada. (“For-mas” 169)

Even though Faliu-Lacourt defends the use of this biological voca-bulary in terms that recall Propp’s formalist theories, in the conclu-sion this critic recognizes the importance of subjectivity: “las formas vicariantes de un mismo tema corresponden a factores objetivos, pero también, en última instancia, a factores subjetivos, más importantes aún” (179). During the seventeenth century one of the most famous “formas vicariadas” of the formulae of amicitia appeared in print and was read in many countries: “El curioso impertinente.” In this no-vella, Cervantes responded to the subjective and objective factors at play in the evolution of both economic systems and understandings of friendship during the early modern period in Europe.21

Friendship and patronageIt has been said that fidelity is the common point between the rhe-toric of friendship and the rhetoric of patronage (Lytle 48). This

20 See the informative articles by Christensen and Wootton on friendship in Alberti, Erasmus, and More.

21 Some philological works on the influence of “El curioso impertinente” on British literature are Rosenbach (1902), Peery (1946); and in French literature, Kaplan (1953).


rhetorical insistence on the purity of human relations serves to mi-tigate the ambivalences of the patron-client relationships and tends to develop highly symbolic institutions of friendship (Eisenstadt and Roniger 218-19). This leads us to ask if descriptions of fraught friendship might be read in terms of uncommitted or problematic patron-client relationships. As loyalty is equally important in both of these notions, the expressions of friendship and patronage in pre-modern societies have much more in common than not, since the exchange of goods—or gifts, and services—is a fundamental part of both institutions. On the other hand, the difference between pa-tronage and friendship would be that patrons and clients form a voluntary or compulsory vertical association, in which some form of exchange is mandatory, while friendship is a horizontal and volun-tary association in which barter or exchange is not a requisite (Ket-tering, Friendship and Clientage 145-46). Friendship, nevertheless, could still respond to vested family interests grounded in historical or occasional alliances (Christensen 18, 22).

In order to frame the concept of friendship, I will focus on re-presentations of male perfect friendship in relation to the rhetoric of patronage in early modern Europe. The connection between patro-nage and friendship derives from the fact that each practice mi-rrors the other as a complementary or dual reality. Patronage is a fundamental element of early modern economic exchanges, whe-reas friendship is the language of these economic exchanges when they must not be explicit (Bourdieu 177-82). This rule of silence about certain exchanges of goods between kin, families, and friends makes the study of friendship extremely difficult. When we read about friends, then, could the language of friendship be the sign of an asymmetrical association between kin and/or neighbors? Might clients such as writers and painters seek the benefits codified in the language of amicitia when that language is used in the context of unequal patron-client relationships?

Patronage, being a “permanent structural characteristic of all early European material high culture, based as it [was] on produc-tion by specialists” might be transformed in certain instances into


an apparently non-economic relationship through the language of friendship.22 I will argue here that this transformation can go both ways: from the materialistic exchanges of patronage to the symbo-lic tokens of friendship. Conversely, the literary representations of friendship—either fraught or loyal—reflect the healthiness of the patron-client association. In pre-capitalist societies, this transforma-tion of economic relationships into altruistic ones is a key part of the movement between an economy of material goods and its counter-part, the economy of symbolic goods (Bourdieu 175, 183).

The concept of the symbolic economy has to do with the ex-change of gifts—such as wives, services, or art—which seemingly have no price. As Bourdieu says:

L’économie des biens symboliques repose sur le refoulement ou la censure de l’intérêt économique (au sens restreint du terme). En conséquence, la vérité économique, c’est-à-dire le prix, doit être cachée activement ou passivement ou laissée dans le vague. L’économie des biens symboliques est une économie de la floue et de l’indéterminée. Elle repose sur un tabou de l’explicitation. (209)

In the conversations about Sancho’s salary, Don Quijote insists on the fabulous prize that awaits Sancho at the end of one of their ad-ventures. Sancho, though, has doubts about the security of his time

22 The definition is from Werner L. Gundersheimer, who adds that in pre-industrial Europe “[t]he effects of patronage are also pervasive in such diverse areas as appointments to secular and religious offices; the conception and creation of the structures and spaces within which people work, pray, and live; the execu-tion of the artifacts of material and intellectual culture; the systems of transactions into which the behavior of social groups—families, clans, guilds, classes (whether economic, social, occupational, or sexual)—is organized, and through which the relationships of such groups to one another are expressed… it is important to recognize that particular patrons, and individual acts of patronage of all kinds and degrees, should be understood not only within their own immediate cultural con-text. They may also be subsumed within a more encompassing theory concerning the systemic effects of patronage in European social and intellectual history” (3-4).


investment in his job:

Sancho clearly manifests his preference for the security of a sa-lary when he states simply that he does not believe in nor expect the insula… Sancho’s request poses a threat to his [don Quijote’s] personal authority and to the old order on which it is based. It has a revolutionary potential to destabilize and then transform the entire relationship between the two men. And indeed, Don Quixote declares the relationship in crisis. ( Johnson, Cervantes and the Material 29)

This crisis, in fact, is put in terms of the end of their friendship, as well as their client-patron relationship.

The taboo on explicitness can be found elsewhere, for example in Velázquez’s and Lope de Vega’s self-representations as creative gentlemen whose works are not for sale, but rather exist to be offe-red as gifts (Brown, Velázquez 250-52; Wright 22). In these exam-ples, creativeness refers to the aristocratic symbolic economy, while craftsmanship belongs to the material market. Gifts, according to the taboo of explicitness, mask other transactions. Friends exchange gifts. But the inequality of the value of the gifts might make them become master and servant, or patron and client, in what is called symbolic alchemy (Bourdieu 184). Complementarily, the inequali-ty of these associations might be masked by purposeful gestures of friendship. Artists, clients and servants can become public friends by virtue of a ritualistic expression of solidarity, or they might attempt to fashion a public image of friendship through images, dedications, and texts. Consequently, textual representations of friendship, such as the emblematic story of the two friends, will be studied as a lin-guistic repository of economic and productive bonds.

Don Quijote de la Mancha: A thorny representation of friendshipOf course, these remarks underline the utilitarian aspects of the re-lationship between Sancho and Don Quijote in such a way that the


idealistic portrait of the heroes is ruined.23 In fact, the publication of Cervantes’s masterpiece constituted a significant break with the narrative tradition in which fictions of friendship were characterized by idealized, heroic pairs of male friends.

Matthew Alan Wyszynski goes so far as to state that, according to the Aristotelian concept of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics, friendship does not exist between Sancho and Don Quijote:

Though… utility is not anathema to true friendship, whose foundations are rooted in virtue, Don Quijote and Sancho have no such virtue upon which their association is based, and so this can only be interpreted as a strict accounting of favors or servi-ces. (172)

Many readers would reject Wyszynski’s sound analysis, since the knight and the squire alternately need, miss, and even love each other. Nevertheless, the opposition of these two extreme interpretations—of Quijote and Sancho as either ideal friends or not as friends at all—is less extreme than it seems. Our difficulty in comprehending why Sancho and Don Quijote are not perfect friends, as described in the classical theories of friendship, points to a break in the notion of friendship which took place during the early modern period. Kee-ping those classical theories in mind as we shift our attention away from the broader narrative of Sancho and Don Quijote to consider the catastrophic friendship of the “perfect” friends Anselmo and Lotario in “El curioso impertinente,” Cervantes’s reassessment of the obsolete classical model becomes strikingly clear.

23 Elsewhere, I have interpreted amicitia perfecta in La Celestina as a pre-modern system of protection against misfortune and tyranny. In this sense, San-cho and Don Quijote act as real friends who help and complement each other in moments of distress—but only sometimes. In this sense, their relationship would follow Perkin’s definition of friends as “all those who expected or, reciprocally, from whom one could expect, the benefits of patronage” (46-51). In a so-called modern society, however, interested and disinterested commerce can be differenti-ated, since in theory, the law, the state, and the market provide protection to the citizen against tyranny, and sometimes against misfortune, as well.


Anselmo’s impertinent curiosity The text of “El curioso impertinente” initially presents the male pro-tagonists, Anselmo and Lotario, as “tan amigos, que, por excelen-cia y antonomasia, de todos los que los conocían ‘los dos amigos’ eran llamados” (375). Furthermore—as two young, single men “de la misma edad y de unas mismas costumbres” (376)—the pair os-tensibly possesses the characteristics of social equality and shared values inherent to both the classical model and its later variants. Ne-vertheless, the subsequent narration reveals this “perfect friendship” to be anything but exemplary. Following his marriage to the beau-tiful noblewoman Camila, Anselmo ultimately explodes the social constructs of heterosexual marriage and male friendship by violating the boundaries of both. Having originally secured Camila’s hand on Anselmo’s behalf and negotiated the terms of their marriage, Lota-rio begins to distance himself from his friend’s home following the marriage on the grounds that:

por parecerle a él (como es razón que parezca a todos los que fueren discretos) que no se han de visitar ni continuar las casas de los amigos casados de la misma manera que cuando eran sol-teros, porque aunque la buena y verdadera amistad no puede ni debe de ser sospechosa en nada, con todo esto es tan delicada la honra del casado, que parece que se puede ofender aun de los mesmos hermanos, cuanto más de los amigos. (376)

Despite his good intentions, Lotario’s prudence backfires. An-selmo takes offense at his friend’s absence, objecting that he never would have gotten married at all had he known it would negati-vely affect his friendship (376-77). Insisting that Lotario continue to visit him daily, Anselmo soon conceives a plan to test his bride’s faithfulness by instigating Lotario’s feigned seduction of her, and the tale ends in tragedy. Through Anselmo’s own written apology, com-posed shortly before his death, we learn that he is aware of having acted wrongly. He recognizes that his obsession was greater than his respect for the sacred bonds of both friendship and marriage. His


last will is to write about his “necio e impertienente deseo” (422). He pardons Camila for her unfaithfulness on the grounds that she could never have resisted temptation, given the unreasonable circumstan-ces which he forced her to endure. Furthermore, he had no right to ask so much from her: “sepa que yo la perdono, porque no estaba ella obligada a hacer milagros, ni yo tenía necesidad de querer que ella los hicese” (422).

It is striking that in his last will Anselmo does not mention Lo-tario at all. His unfaithful friend’s behavior does not merit a single remark; since the moral for Anselmo is that only his own “imperti-nente deseo” has provoked his dramatic change of fortune. In his own words, he was the “fabricador” of his own dishonor (422). Neverthe-less, the absence of recriminations against his former friend Lotario must have some significance; the theory of friendship has offered alternately philosophical, political, or religious reflections upon hu-man desires and their control within a given society. Anselmo takes responsibility for all the unethical decisions that he has made and forced upon his wife and friend. The lack of ethical decision-making in all critical points of the story makes “El curioso impertinente” an emblematic example of “imperfect friendship” and therefore a fascinating case study of the Renaissance evolutions of amicitia. The question here is, how do we analyze these ethical issues?

Friendship as symbolic economy of patronageWe are in need of a theoretical frame that explains why Cervantes sometimes frustrates the “reader’s desire for textual stability” by sig-nificantly altering his literary models (El Saffar 206)?24 In an attempt to provide this frame, I will link the theory of friendship to studies of patronage through the sociological concept of the “economy of symbolic goods.” According to modern sensibilities, the pairing of a patron-client relationship with friendship may seem abusive and/or opportunistic; such relationships might be described as involving

24 El Saffar refers to Don Quijote as a whole, but it is also true of “El curioso impertinente.”


“nepotism” or “servility.” However, in early modern culture, the rhe-toric of patronage and the rhetoric of friendship were two sides of the same coin.25 Alison Weber has argued that “participants in the early modern patronage system developed a highly codified langua-ge… clients… declared themselves variously to be children, servants, slaves, and abject lovers of their benefactors” (404). Alan Bray goes so far as to state that “all [the] world knew [that] the language of ‘friendship’ was also part of the language of ‘service’” (199).26 Both the language of friendship and the language of service represent ne-gotiations between the individual’s desires and the constraints of his or her social network. When Cervantes represents unfaithful friends in his works, he thus undermines the “economy of symbolic goods” that was so important to the patronage system.

There exist two complementary levels in social exchanges: the symbolic layer and the economic layer (Bourdieu 175-211). Symbo-lic goods (friendship) and economic goods (favors) are different, but they collaborate in the process of symbolic domination and violence. During the Renaissance, authors consistently expressed their rela-tionships with their patrons in terms of idealized friendship, accep-ting the terms of an unwritten contract between unequals. Therefore, I argue that the dramatic shift represented by Cervantes’s take on the tale of the two friends may be understood as a function of the author’s growing frustration at his own failed patron-client relation-ship.

In La Galatea, invoking the same rhetoric of patronage, Cervan-tes represents himself as surrounded by friends. Keeping in mind the pervasive language of friendship in the textual expression of patron-client relationships, the vast number of representations of friends-

25 Cicero claims that patron-client connections are not real friendships (Hill and McCarthy, “On Friendship and necessitudo” 9-10).

26 “But it was only in Thomas More’s land of Utopia that the adages of male friendship could be embodied… [Fulke Greville’s] triumphal distinction of friendship from service and from the role of a counselor was possible only in rhetoric: as he and all his world knew, the language of ‘friendship’ was also part of the language of ‘service’” (Bray 199).


hip in La Galatea may be regarded as an expression of Cervantes’s aspirations to a perfect patronage network. In fact, the imitatio in Timbrio and Silerio’s novella is so exact in its rendering of male ami-citia perfecta that the story provides very few surprises (Sorieri 237). As dictated by the tradition of “the tale of the two friends,” family bonds unite two youths. They are schoolmates, travel together, and love each other deeply. As usual in the Boccaccian model, the plot moves two males in a safe relationship into a dangerous triangle by adding a woman to the equation.27 To a great extent, the challenges to perfect male friendship are presented as the result of the desire for the female character. Heterosexual love and duties disrupt the social script of masculine amicitia that should govern the acts of Timbrio and Silerio. When the two young men fall in love with the same woman, Nísida, they trigger the dangerous mechanics of a triangle of desire. As a result, guilt, doubt, and lies are brought to the fore. Even if, in La Galatea, the potential for tragedy is great, the novella of Timbrio, Silerio, and Nísida has a happy ending because the two friends do not betray each other. On the contrary, they both sacrifice their desire for Nísida in order to respect “las leyes de la amistad” (Cervantes, La Galatea 289).28 Timbrio and Silerio stage, once again, the traditional contest of generosity that made a sym-bol of friends such as Orestes and Pylades, Scipio and Laelius, and Anselmo and Lotario in Guillen de Castro’s version of El curioso im-pertinente. However, it is well known that Cervantes’s patron-client aspirations, as expressed both metaphorically and explicitly in La Galatea, never became a reality: Ascanio Colonna, to whom he de-dicated La Galatea, left for Italy; Cervantes dedicated only one book, Don Quijote I, to the Duke of Béjar; and the Count of Lemos, to whom he dedicated the bulk of his production, was far away in Sicily

27 For an analysis of “El curioso impertinente” in connection with Freud’s Oedipal triangle and René Girard’s theory on triangular desire, see Diana de Ar-mas Wilson (13) and Cesáreo Bandera (“La novella”).

28 Silerio describes his internal struggle in these terms: “A vuestra considera-ción discreta dejo el imaginar lo que podía sentir un corazón a quien de una parte combatían las leyes de la amistad y de otra, las inviolables de Cupido” (289).


and Napoli as Cervantes wrote.29 In fact, La Galatea—Cervantes’s earliest publication—is the only work in which the author includes a representation of amicitia perfecta that truly conforms to the clas-sical model. In subsequent works, his representations of friendship become increasingly problematized.

Despite his failed patron-client relationships, Cervantes never-theless continued to use the language of friendship in dedications to his patrons (or potential patrons), and to write extensively about friendship in his work. His persistent use of the friendship motif, however, is typical of the inequality inherent to patron-client rela-tionships and their literary expressions. An “alchimie symbolique,” in which servants and their masters become friends, corresponds to a well-known “hypocrisie structurale,” which is to say a relationship in which the patron plays a dominant role and the artist abets his or her own domination (Bourdieu 183-85). The writer accepts the patron’s acts of symbolic domination, while portraying the nexus as friendship, love, service, and even parenthood (Weber 404). Howe-ver, for the symbolic exchange to work, both sides must have iden-tical categories of appreciation and perception (Bourdieu 185). The key concepts of this codified language are loyalty and generosity bet-ween unequals.

Loyalty and ostentatious acts of generosity are essential to repre-sentations of perfect friendship, as well as to public demonstrations of patronage. Self-sacrifice among friends and lavishness on the part of patrons are complementary and often described with terms such as virtue and magnificence. In order to maintain the loyalty of clients, patrons must render payment in the form of mercedes; in response, the artist-client must increase the patron’s social credit by publicly using the highly codified rhetoric of friendship. However, if the ca-tegories of appreciation and perception of the roles of friends and servants do not match in the literary expression of a patron-client relationship, this might lead to subversions of the codes of amicitia, such as betrayal or infidelity. Hence the representation of unfaithful

29 See Sieber (“The Magnificent”), Fernández (417).


friends such as Anselmo and Lotario implicitly undermines the language and structure of one of the symbolic economies of early modern societies, that of the idealized—though always unequal—patron-client relationship.

Cervantes and the evolution of therepresentation of friendshipThe changes in the representations of friendship from perfection to imperfection, such as those that we may observe throughout the literary career of Cervantes, are related to drastic changes in the sys-tems of production of works of art in early modern Europe, and in particular with the weakening of the patronage system. Commerce and the growing market economy played a major role in the weake-ning of the patronage system, which in turn affected the definition of friendship. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, changes in social structures altered the lifestyles of writers. The au-thor became more a professional and less a creature of courtly life and pomp. Even though the existence of a larger professional and artistic network meant that writers could choose for whom they wrote—the patrons, the market, or both—Cervantes was not a successful player in a new milieu where artists were gradually freed from the res-trictive rhetoric of loyalty proper to traditional patronage-friendship relationships. This evolution affected the nature of the link between artists and patrons, and the literary story of the two friends evolved from the exaltation of male amicitia into depictions of the depraved exploitation of the other.

In “El curioso impertinente,” Cervantes pointed at the weaknes-ses of the idealized theory of male perfect friendship. The undermi-ning of the social script of friendship in “El curioso impertinente” amounts to a declaration of the death of the symbolic values con-veyed by classical constructs of amicitia as a mask of the declining economic system of patronage. This dramatic shift in Cervantes’s treatment of friendship is symptomatic of the fact that by the be-ginning of the seventeenth century, traditional representations of idealized friendship were either on the verge of disappearing, or of


adapting themselves to the representational needs of the new com-mercial societies of the 1700’s.30 Soon Hume, Ferguson, Smith, Vol-taire, Diderot, and Kant, among others, would assign new meanings to the social practice of friendship.

To speak properly of friendship in the work of Cervantes we must first frame his representations somewhere between early mo-dern and modern ideas of friendship; and we must evaluate the evolution of the matter during the lifetime of Cervantes himself. As Helena Percas de Ponseti puts it, Cervantes’s characterization of Anselmo “equivale a la evaluación renacentista de Cervantes del concepto medieval del mundo, inoperante en la sociedad del 1600” (191). A consideration of some of the historical processes at play in patron-client relationships during the late sixteenth and early se-venteenth centuries clarifies the way in which Cervantes’s work re-flects a sea change in the social institutions of both friendship and patronage, as well as the socioeconomic changes that made that shift a reality. Long before eighteenth century thinkers began to reflect upon amicitia, sympathy, commerce, and communication, Cervan-tes, from the realm of literature, showed Europe that the shift was already taking place. His characters are imperfect human beings; their acts are dominated by passions, which lead them to disregard their duties. Because of this, characters like Anselmo and Lotario, as imperfect individuals, cannot create and sustain the illusions of the classical, aristocratic, and male amicitia perfecta.

Arkansas State [email protected]

30 In fact, friendship is not included as a component of modern conceptions of state; liberal thinkers do not consider amicitia or philia as a political tool to fight against tyranny and misfortune: “One searches in vain, for instance, through the writings of the founding fathers of the American republic… for any discus-sion of friendship between citizens… no theorist of the modern period explicitly argues that furthering relations of philia is a primary function of the modern state. Instead, shared interests in security and a commodious life, the protection of property and individual freedom, or the establishment of law, order and justice are normally invoked” (Schwarzenbach, “On Civic” 108-9).


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In Don Quijote Part I, the interpolated tale of “El curioso im-pertinente” can be read as a prism with which to examine as-pects of the stories of the characters who listen to the narration

of the unraveling designs of Anselmo, Camila, and Lotario. Even studies of this novella that have focused mostly on an analysis of the work itself generally include remarks as to its “pertinence” to Don Quijote. David Arbesú Fernández, in his article “Auctoritas y experiencia en ‘El curioso impertinente,’” also observes that “En lo que toda la crítica del ‘Curioso’ está de acuerdo, no obstante, es en que la novela trata de alguna manera sobre el conocimiento de la ‘verdad’” (24). Nevertheless, the majority of critical attention dedi-cated to this novella demonstrates a concern as to whether Anselmo was “right” or “wrong” to test Camila; and since critics will gener-ally say that he was wrong to do so, they often then discuss why he was wrong. As a result, the critical focus of interpretations of the novella shifts to moral rather than epistemological concerns. Even Arbesú Fernández’s thesis as to the “correct” approach to truth and knowledge in the novella is dictated by this interpretive imperative: Anselmo was wrong to test Camila, and hence his method for ap-proaching truth was the wrong one; meanwhile Lotario was correct in opposing the test of Camila, and hence his method for approach-

Cervantes’s Laboratory:The Thought Experiment of

“El curioso impertinente”______________________________________________ Alison E. Krueger

118 Alison E. Krueger Cervantes

ing truth was the right one.1 In summary, since scholars have made the assumption that to test Camila is “wrong,” they have not dedi-cated intensive analysis as to what is wrong with Anselmo’s test as a test in itself. Of course, in order to do so, one must clearly delineate what exactly it is Anselmo’s experiment is testing. It has occurred

1 Arbesú Fernández writes: “El castigo de Anselmo se explica entonces de una manera más convincente en el esquema medieval en el que la autoritas refleja la palabra divina y la figura del Dios, y la experiencia se contrapone representando el pecado” (32). By making curiosity a sin and connecting curiosity with experi-ence (or Anselmo’s empiricial agenda), Arbesú Fernández essentially implies that Lotario’s method—which would have prevented the sin—is the correct approach. It is also linked to the proper way of discerning truth as he then writes that “la verdad del ‘Curioso’ se parece sustancialmente a la verdad divina” (32). His defini-tion of “truth” in Cervantes’s novella implies only truth by revelation, or, in other words, truth according to “authority,” which is Lotario’s methodology. Arbesú Fernández’s argument actually seeks to expand upon what seems to be a com-monly shared belief in scholarly interpretations of “El curioso impertinente.” For example, in his article entitled “El curioso impertinente: Novela clave del Quijote,” Georges Güntert asserts that what the reader learns from the novella is that “el ser (la verdad del alma) no puede conocerse por medio de experiencias, se puede sola-mente creer” (1981 787). The inference held by critics such as Güntert in this case is that because, in retrospect, it was not a good idea for Anselmo to test Camila, that therefore the arguments that Lotario presented in the debate with Anselmo must somehow explain with certainty that such a test would be a fruitless en-deavor because certain knowledge of the human soul cannot be gathered through experience. Yet, when we consider the actual points and nature of the arguments made by Lotario during the debate, we will also notice that Lotario never actually makes this case. Through pages of debate in which he draws many analogies, he does not actually mention the human soul and the degree to which knowledge can be obtained from it empirically. In other words, the preference for Lotario’s ap-proach to truth” with respect to Camila’s virtue seems to be a retrospective assign-ment by critics who, understanding that the story has concluded tragically, seek to determine how that ending could have been prevented. These critics then assume that because Lotario wanted to prevent Anselmo from conducting his test, that Lotario’s arguments presented in the debate must somehow hold the key to the correct epistemological assessment of how Anselmo should have understood and accepted the truth and knowledge of Camila’s virtue. In a sense, too much credit is given to Lotario’s approach to truth and knowledge, not because of the way he argues his case, but simply on the basis that Anselmo’s approach is discredited in the pages of novella.

Volume 29.1 (2009) Cervantes’s Laboratory 119

to me that a precise examination of this point has been thus far overlooked by scholars—even Lotario, when he counters Anselmo’s arguments in the novella’s famous debate, betrays a faulty under-standing of the objective of Anselmo’s test.

Building on the theme of “truth” in “El curioso impertinente,” we should also consider Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce’s description of an important intellectual preoccupation that is pervasive throughout Cervantes’s works: “Cualquier lectura de las obras de Cervantes, por apresurada que sea, evidencia el interés absorbente que tenía para el novelista el tema de la verdad, y las formas del conocimiento para al-canzarla” (17). He later makes note of the three possible cognitive ap-proaches to knowledge or truth: authority, experience, and reason.2 With this consideration, we may see “El curioso impertinente” and its examination of truth as a prism for examining the methods used to assess present situations and for understanding basic assumptions about the different worldviews that we observe among the charac-ters in Don Quijote. Reading Don Quijote, one may notice how dif-ferent characters make sense of their world by delegating primary importance to one of three methodologies: (literary) formulas, ra-tional deliberation, or the “indisputable” empirical evidence of the material world. One might think of Don Quijote, the Canon from Toledo, and Sancho Panza as respectively representing, at least to a significant degree, each of these three options. In my analysis of “El curioso impertinente,” I will discuss how the novella explores these three methodologies and articulate the potential and the problems implicit in the reliance on each in the pursuit of knowledge and truth.” For example, with respect to Anselmo’s empiricist leanings, I will analyze how his method works, the assumptions such a meth-od implies, and the various factors that complicate its realization. Readers and critics may casually assume that Anselmo’s method is plagued by concerns of distinguishing “appearance from reality” or

2 In his analysis of objects in Don Quijote Part I, Avalle-Arce writes: “Esta proyección ideal de los objetos reales bacía y yelmo sintetiza armónicamente las realidades previas y sus apariencias y, dicho sea de paso, está por fuera de las posi-bilidades cognoscitivas de la autoridad, experiencia o razón” (38).


that we can assume a priori that empirical testing (for one reason or another) does not work with human beings. Yet while these gener-alizations may be true, the considerations of empiricism and its in-herent problems in “El curioso impertinente” are far more complex. In fact, such casual generalizations betray a kind of retrospective as-sessment of Anselmo’s empirical project (an assessment that relies on the novella’s tragic conclusion) rather than a detailed account of the epistemological and methodological limitations that present themselves as the experiment unfolds.

Finally, Avalle-Arce also distinguishes another important tri-partite in the interpretation of Cervantes’s works: truth, knowledge, and life.3 A review of critical studies of “El curioso impertinente” demonstrates that the general focus of interpretation has been on the third item listed—“life.” By this, I mean that scholars have in-terpreted the story in terms of the potential “lesson” that it offers as to how one should live in the world. Yet we might instead decide to take a step back from assuming such an overtly constructive and moralizing agenda on the part of Cervantes.4 In fact, I would argue

3 “Conocimiento y verdad aparecen en la obra cervantina indisolublemente unidos a un tercer término: vida. El problema es, pues, trino y uno. Porque Cer-vantes, para su bien o para su mal, no es ningún Montaigne, buscándole solución a los problemas que lo asaltan en el ensimismado aislamiento de la torre de su castillo” (17-8).

4 Leonardo Rossiello discusses another dimension of the novella’s possible explemplarity. In his article “Argumentación, convencimiento y persuasión en ‘El curioso impertinente’ de Cervantes,” he focuses the rhetorical aspects of the debate in the novella: the language, figures of speech, verb tenses, and the overall rhetori-cal structure of the exchange. Rossiello proposes to investigate the problems with Lotario’s arguments, which he considers a “fracaso retórico,” which “contribuye a justificar tanto el desenlace trágico de la historia como la justicia poética” (168). Rossiello’s reading of the novella is similar to Arbesú Fernández’s (discussed in footnote 1) in that both scholars suppose there to be a “moral of the story” that hinges on the relevance of the arguments that Lotario presents in the debate. The difference is that for Arbesú Fernández, Lotario’s methodology of approaching truth is the correct one, and the tragic end of the novella is the result of Anselmo’s disregard for Lotario’s arguments; meanwhile, Rossiello interprets the novella’s tragic ending as resulting from the ineffectiveness of Lotario’s rhetoric. These two reading represent two ways of reading Cervantes’s novella as a negative exemplum


that despite critics’ attempts to find a single and overarching “moral of the story,” Cervantes’s novella simply resists such a clear-cut cat-egorization. Instead, as “El curioso impertinente” is framed as fic-tional and is thus set off from the life of the characters in the novel in which it is included, it may prove fruitful to read the novella’s contrived artificiality as signaling a thought experiment—an inves-tigation into the methods of determining truth and knowledge—rather than as presenting yet another representation of life. In doing so, we also do not need to assume that Cervantes offers us a solution to the problems inherent when each of the three methods (authority, reason, and experience) are implemented in the context of life. In other words, it is unclear as to why we must assume that “El Curioso impertinente” is a “how-to” manual for life or, as Arbesú Fernández posits, an auctoritas,5 and furthermore, it is also perhaps unreason-able to assume that the “urgencia inmediata de esta rigurosa necesi-dad intellectual” that Avalle-Arce observes as Cervantes’s search for truth is methodologically resolved in this novella (17). Ultimately, “El curioso impertinente” may pose revealing questions as to the possibility of using narration, and particularly, the novella as a way to study the relations between truth, knowledge, and life. I would argue, in fact, that though the story reaches a conclusion, the inves-tigation as to the appropriate method for discerning truth and as to how we may understand the relations between truth, knowledge, and

(an example of what not to do). In this sense, both seem to agree that Lotario’s approach to truth is correct (though, perhaps, poorly presented rhetorically).

5 Arbesú Fernández writes: “El hecho de que la novelita se lea de un manu-scrito—y no sea fruto de las experiencias del narrador—permite a Cervantes un guiño sobre la temática del ‘Curioso’ en sí. La historia, como novela ejemplar, se convierte estrictamente en una auctoritas como aquellas en boca de Lotario, aunque las palabras del cura al acabar la narración no deben quedar sin análisis” (28). The fact that the characters come across the novella in manuscript form does not serve as satisfactory evidence that it should be considered an auctoritas: every written manuscript is certainly not an auctoritas, and considering that, alongside the novella of “El curioso impertinente,” the characters also discover a version of “Rinconete y Cortadillo,” it is rather dubious to suggest that the trunk left behind in the inn by a certain stranger (perhaps Cervantes) contains a collection of auc-toritates.


life does not.

Authority and the approach to truth and knowledge according to formulæFor the many pages in Don Quijote dedicated to its narration, Cervantes’s novella receives remarkably little critical attention with-in the novel itself. It has proven to be a good story—although slight-ly inverisimilar because it is not reasonable to expect Anselmo and Camila, as husband and wife, to behave in such a fashion:

— Bien, dijo el cura —me parece esta novela; pero no me pu-edo persuadir que esto sea verdad; y si es fingido, fingió mal el autor, porque no se puede imaginar que haya marido tan necio, que quiera hacer tan costosa experiencia como Anselmo. Si este caso se pusiera entre un galán y una dama, pudiérase llevar; pero entre marido y mujer, algo tiene del imposible. (Cervantes, Don Quijote 371)

The commentary expressed here relates to a formulaic reading of the novella: the “married woman” and “married man” character types can be expected to behave only in certain established ways.6 That formu-laic criticism is, by extension, related to how the priest understands reality: he assumes that “El curioso impertinente” cannot be a true story because it is not verisimilar. After all, his comments suggest that not

6 In his article “El lector defraudado,” Güntert makes a similar observation with respect to the interplay between the priest’s understanding of reality and literary norms. Güntert explains some readers during this period prefer stories considered, or known to be, truthful, and these readers “se acercan a los libros con la convicción de poder encontrar, detrás del texto, algo real que haga de «referente» y garantice la credibilidad de aquél, pero, no se atreven a negar a la literatura el derecho de existir. A ésta le quedaría reservado el escape de verosimilitud, según argumentaban las poéticas de la época, sobre las que el Cura, así como más adel-ante el Canónico, dan muestras de haber meditado” (1986 271). In other words, the priest represents the type of reader “quien busca la verdad de la literatura en la conformidad de ésta con la realidad, más allá del texto, a medida que cree sus-traerse a los engaños de la ficción” (271).


only should married women and men not behave like Camila and Anselmo in the literary world of a novella, but also that married couples in general do not act in that manner. The priest’s interpreta-tion of the inverisimilar aspects of “El curioso impertinente” is based on his belief that reality more or less adheres to literary formulas. His notions of verisimilitude dictate not just his æsthetic reading of the novella, but also his judgment as to whether or not it would even be possible for this story to have happened in reality. For the priest, the best way to interpret reality, and to determine what is possible and impossible in the “real world, “is to see if the account—real or fictional—adheres to the descriptions of the world that authority has fashioned.

In reaction to the priest’s comments, Arbesú Fernández has written that “El ‘Curioso,’ entonces, pasa de ser verdad auctorial a mala ficción artística. Como libro auctorial critica la ‘costosa expe-riencia’ de su protagonista, como historia de ficción es criticada por los personajes vivos de Don Quijote” (41). I question whether such a reading is possible. If, at the end, the novella can be categorized as bad fiction, how can it then also be an auctoritas? It either presents something true and useful (as an autoritas) or it does not. In other words, either it is exemplary or it is not, and “exemplary” implies that it is moral (that it furnishes a “lesson” to be learned) and that it is verisimilar. To posit that authority is the correct cognitive means of approaching truth and knowledge implies that the sources used in this approach are truthful. If “El curioso impertinente” is considered not to be truthful, it cannot act as a source for truth—or serve, as an auctoritas, in arguments invoking authority.

The method of using authority as the approach to dealing with truth and knowledge in “El curioso impertinente” has been more or less the chosen course of critics who have studied this novella. In order to discuss the method of using authority, however, I would first like to make clear that regardless of the authority chosen (from the Holy Scriptures to fanciful poetry), the procedure invoked is essentially the same. With this approach, we would first begin by assuming that there is a general, over-arching “moral of the story”


to be taken out of the novella. In doing so, we would then assume that the story presents us with an exemplary plot and is thus es-sentially crafted according to a conventional model or formula. The story, considered to be the realization of a stock exemplary model, is assumed to be composed of exemplary or stock characters that are placed into their pre-assigned positions within the model. As the priest’s comments at the close of “El curioso impertiente” suggest, certain models require certain characters and preclude the existence of others. Remarking on the author’s shortcomings, he asserts that “si este caso se pusiera entre un galán y una dama, pudiérase llevar; pero entre marido y mujer, algo tiene del imposible” (DQ 371).

The author of an exemplary tale essentially sets up and “runs” the literary model to demonstrate the predictable conclusion of a particular set-up of characters and relationships. I use the expression “run the model” because the mechanical realization of the upshot in a novella functions like an economic model in which one enters the correct numbers or equations into the system and then goes through the proper solving and simplifying methods in order to obtain re-sults. If the reader of the exemplary tale assumes that there is a moral of the story and that the events of the story have been constructed (as a model) to present this moral, he or she will consequently try to determine which, of the various exemplary models, is realized in the story at hand. At this point, the reader will look to the end of the story and the fates of the characters, in order to determine what the moral of the story is and therefore which exemplary model has been represented in the tale. While the literary model is prescrip-tive and thus could be used to predict results in the story, the actual procedure inherent in this approach usually entails a retrospective interpretation that will clarify, once the reader sees how everything concludes, which model the story has illustrated. Both predictive and retrospective readings in this case necessarily assume both that the story is essentially the realization of a model and that the plot of the story is fully explained by an over-arching moral explanation that encompasses every major turn of event.

Probably the two most significant problems with this approach,


especially when it is applied to “El curioso impertinente,” are the interdependency of the various procedural steps outlined above and the fact that, in my opinion, it is not clear, even at the end of the novella, which literary formula can be said to encompass all of the events in the story. With respect to the procedural steps, we should note that determining which exemplary formula is at play in the novella depends on what the reader has seen to be the moral of the story; determining what the moral of the story is depends upon how the reader has decided to deal with the fates of the characters and how he or she has decided to assign blame and responsibility for what happens; yet if we consider how critics have interpreted the fates and the respective blame that corresponds to each character, we might note that these biases have been predetermined according to the exemplary model that they believe is represented in the no-vella. For example, as critics have often assumed that because there must only be one true formula, a correct interpretation of “El curioso impertinente” must more or less pass over or pardon Lotario and/or Camila’s behavior. It is as though we are not supposed to take seri-ously the description of Lotario as “el traidor amigo” (DQ 348).

In my opinion, there are actually three literary formulas, which are present in “El curioso impertinente,” and therefore there are three formulas that may be considered if we are to use authority as the means of interpreting the story. These exemplary formulas are popularly denoted as the two friends, the faith in marriage, and the deceived husband models. As it seems that most critics, consciously or not, gravitate toward the faith in marriage model, I will begin by analyzing that model and how it instructs us to read “El curioso impertinente.”7 In exemplary stories that represent this model (for example the story of Bernabo, Ambrogiuolo, and Ginevra in the ninth story of the second day in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron),

7 Antonio Barbagallo writes: “El tema principal del cuento no es, como se pu-ede pensar en un primer momento, la Amistad, sino la fe dentro del matrimonio” (211). While Barbagallo is explicit in his choice of the literary formula relevant to “El curioso impertinente,” most critics’ interpretations of the novella involve a simi-lar assumption.


the husband, usually due to some type of provocation, agrees to al-low his wife’s fidelity to be tested. Another man offers to participate in the test. He attempts to seduce the first man’s wife. The wife is too chaste to be seduced. Somehow, the husband is exposed for having set up the test; he is then chastised for scheming against his wife. She, in turn, is praised for her steadfast virtue. According to this model, the wife is a model of virtue: the husband and the “other man” are both, to varying extents, morally culpable.

Certainly, “El curioso impertinente” does not conclude in the same way that the traditional faith in marriage exempla do, and so we cannot really read the story as a clear-cut representation of that model, which neatly assigns essentially all the blame to Anselmo. In the case of “El curioso impertinente,” Camila fails the test, and the story ends tragically for all involved (Anselmo and Camila and Lotario). Which character, then, is to blame for all who, and all that is, suffered? Clearly, Anselmo, for the same reason that the husband is chastised when the wife passes the test, is to be blamed for what ensues when she does not. Lotario, as the other man or as “Anselmo’s dear friend,” while not necessarily the one to blame, is morally sus-pect as he does still seduce someone else’s wife—his best friend’s wife. Camila may or may not be the one to blame either, but while the traditional model certifies that the husband is wrong to set up the test, the model does not imply that the wife need not pass it.

The important question, therefore, in addressing this model’s rel-evance to the story seems to be whether Anselmo’s test and Camila’s fall are causally related or simply correlated. From the story, we can only really see that given an opportunity (Anselmo’s test), Camila fell. The fact that she did fall in the context of this opportunity, how-ever, does not necessarily mean that it took the test for her to fall (that it had to be this opportunity—Anselmo’s test—in specific). We know that something about the situation engendered by the test made her fall. The question, which may or may not ever be answered, is what? If Camila’s love for Lotario is sincere, we should in fact as-sume that she would have fallen for him regardless. We might also note here that as soon as Anselmo and Camila were married, Lotario


decreased the extent to which he visited Anselmo in his house,8 and during the first stages of the test, Lotario refused to even speak to, or look at, Camila. Both of these points can be read as though to fore-shadow the problems that may arise in terms of Lotario’s presence in, and complication of, the marriage between Camila and Anselmo. On the other hand, if we think that Camila fell because of the ex-tensive advances on the part of Lotario (which are put into motion because of the test) then we might suppose that another opportunity could present itself in the future—after all, she is not imprisoned like Leonora in “El celoso estremeño,” where even there against much greater odds, the opportunity to fall in love with another man pres-ents itself. Finally, Lotario falls in love with Camila before she falls to his advances; yet, as far as we know, Anselmo did not consciously design the test such that Lotario would actually fall in love with Camila. Hence there is an important step between the set-up of the test and Camila’s eventual fall. Antonio Barbagallo, who asserts that “El curioso impertinente” is a representation of the faith in mar-riage model,9 only blames Anselmo: “Los dos amantes huyen y el marido impertinente sufre las consecuencias de su impertinencia” (210). Such a reading seems to assume that only Anselmo suffers the consequences and that only Anselmo is to blame. Yet, if Camila only falls for Lotario as a result of the test, then Camila and Lotario’s love is not sincere, and in that case the lovers would be morally at fault for betraying Anselmo in the name “love.” And since we see that Camila

8 “Los primeros días, como todos los de boda suelen ser alegres, continuóLo-tario como solía la casa de su amigo Anselmo, procurando honralle, festejalle y regocijalle con todo aquello que a él le fue posible; pero acabadas las bodas y sos-egada ya la frecuencia de las visitas y parabienes, comenzó Lotario a descuidarse con cuidado de las idas en casa de Anselmo, por parecerle a él—como es razón que parezca a todos los que fueren discretos—que no se han de visitar ni continuar las casas de los amigos casados de la misma manera que cuando eran solteros; porque, aunque la buena y verdadera amistad no puede ni debe de ser sospechosa en nada, con todo esto, es tan delicada la honra del casado, que parece que se puede ofender aun de los mesmos hermanos, cuanto más de los amigos” (DQ 328).

9 Barbagallo writes, “El tema principal del cuento no es, como se puede pen-sar en un primer momento, la Amistad, sino la fe dentro del matrimonio” (211).


and Lotario do suffer consequences, we might at least concede that they are partly to blame for their miserable fates and the tragic end-ing of “El curioso impertinente.” After all, Camila and Lotario choose to play games with Anselmo as they secretly ridicule his ignorance of their “love.” Hence, Cervantes’s novella resists categorization as a faith in marriage novella just as it does not fit cleanly into one over-arching moral or lesson that a man should not test his wife.

Now let us consider the relevance of the deceived husband model, which is definitely present in the novella, despite that fact that the husband in this case (Anselmo) more actively opens the door to his own deception than is traditionally seen in novellas categorized by this model.10 The deceived husband model entails the story of a mar-ried couple in which the wife takes a lover. Much of the narration is spent depicting the many ingenious ways in which the wife hides her lover from her husband, and in showing the mutual amusement on the part of wife and the lover over the husband’s ignorance—de-spite the countless “close calls” in which the two are nearly exposed. Regardless of how much the reader blames the husband for his often remarkable stupidity, if the story ends in tragically, the moral blame is usually placed on the wife (and again the lover is usually considered to be morally suspect).

In “El curioso impertinente,” Camila clearly deceives Anselmo, and she and Lotario find a seemingly continuous source of enter-tainment in this deception—until, of course, their exposure is im-minent. The relevance of the deceived husband model to “El curioso impertinente” is actually highlighted by the priest’s comments af-ter characters in the inn have finished listening to the story. The priest notes that “entre marido y mujer, algo tiene del imposible” (DQ 371). He does not limit his comments to how husbands act but

10 In his article, “Truth, Lies, and Representation: the Crux of ‘El curio-so impertinente,’ ” Michael Gerli considers Cervantes’s novella in terms of the deceived husband model: “Cervantes in ‘El curioso’ actually explores the general problem of meaning and authenticity or how intentions may be assigned to things that intrinsically do not possess them, reflecting in the context of the traditional italianate novella of the deceived husband the broader intellectual question of language’s ability to signify truth” (111).


includes an assessment as to the behavior of wives. Perhaps there is something inverisimilar not just in Anselmo’s behavior but also in Camila’s—and perhaps even in Lotario’s as well. Barbagallo writes:

Guillén de Castro, en su adaptación dramática de El curioso impertinente, alteró los acontecimientos y el sentido de la obra, haciendo que los celos de Anselmo surgieran del hecho de que Camila había tenido relaciones amorosas con Lotario antes de casarse con Anselmo. Así los celos de Anselmo se justifican, y el adulterio de Camila con Lotario en cierta manera aparece más explicable. (215)

It is perhaps too easy to focus on the mystifying nature of Anselmo’s behavior—his sudden, strange, and unrelenting curiosity, and his desire to test Camila. Perhaps we should reconsider whether we truly understand Camila’s motivations. Barbagallo suggests that Camila “ingenuamente y sin maligna y traicionera premeditación cedió a las leyes naturales que se pueden aplicar a una mujer que casi seguramente no estaba enamorada locamente de su marido, aunque así lo creyera” (218). First of all, when we witness Camila’s continu-ous and entertaining deception of her husband Anselmo, it is diffi-cult to credit her with not the slightest tendency towards deceit and treachery.11 But more importantly, Barbagallo’s pardoning of Camila

11 Howard Mancing has interpreted “El curioso impertinente” by positing “Camila as the protagonist of the story” (9). He further underscores the agency of Camila by couching his argument in ideas developed by Joanee Frye: “It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Camila’s taking charge of the story she narrates. As Joanne Frye states, ‘Once the female ‘I’ has spoken, the subversion is begun’ (50): ‘When the protagonist of the novel is made her own narrator, she thus achieves a very immediate kind of agency and a capacity to renew our no-tion of plot.’(56)” (16). Mancing then explains: “This is precisely what happens in Camila’s case: she transforms herself from passive object to active agent; she takes control of her life and her story and in the process relegates to secondary status the men who quibble over abstract concepts” (16). I believe Mancing’s ob-servation is important in order to recognize the role of Camila as an active (and perhaps at some points the active) agent in the novella. At the same time, however, I find the idea of Camila’s dramatic transformation to be somewhat questionable.


is based on an explanation that has no real grounds—no more, at least, than what would also be necessary to pardon Anselmo. If we can read Camila’s fall to Lotario as evidence of her not truly loving her husband (even though neither she, nor the reader, had evidence to suggest that), then we must also read Camila’s fall to Lotario as evidence that Anselmo did have reason to be suspicious—or at least curious—of Camila’s ability to be faithful (even though neither he, nor the reader, had evidence to suggest that). The logic is essentially the same. Camila’s fall must be read as predictable in order to par-don Camila as having no agency in the matter, but if Camila’s fall was predictable, Anselmo’s suspicions should be pardoned. Maybe Anselmo intuitively knew that Camila wasn’t madly in love with him and was therefore suspicious of her fidelity (why she was being faithful at the present time and whether she would be faithful in the future). Of course, the last statement is completely hypotheti-cal; I mention it to assert the hypothetical nature of arguments like those made by Barbagallo or by William Clamurro, who claims that Lotatio “soon breaks down the fortress of Camila’s resistence. And understandably so, since an authentic, committed love between Camila and Anselmo was the one thing not yet fully vitalized in the realm of their marriage” (384). But is not Anselmo’s curiosity im-pertinent because he was happily married and had no reason to doubt?

It is unclear whether Mancing interprets Camila’s “transformation” as a change in Camila or as simply a change in the narrative focus. I believe the latter is a more reasonable position. Before Camila took Lotario as her lover and before she was aware of the test that her husband had conceived, she had no reason to be the focus of the narrative or to assert her discursive presence. Furthermore, Camila’s discursive power and her cunning ability to manipulate language, truth, and ap-pearances should not be explained by the fact that she took Lotario as a lover. In other words, it is one thing to consider Camila’s agency with respect to the events of the story (the reason as to why her voice becomes important), but it is quite another to assume that her ability to be an active agent is only possible because of the events of the story. While there is little narrative focus on Camila before she falls to Lotario, it seems rather odd to suggest that a powerful character such as Camila would only become that way because of Anselmo’s schemes. His schemes, in my opinion, only provide her with the opportunity to assert her agency within the main focus of the narrative.


Interpretations of “El curioso impertinente” that have included ef-forts to pardon Camila tend to resort to explanations that are not in the text. More often, critics leave out questions as to the moral-ity Camila’s behavior—as though to disregard it means that it is not important to the moral of the story of the novella. Critics who do address her behavior seem to feel that somehow they must be able to explain it in a way that does not make her actions seem immoral. In my opinion, they do so because they seek to avoid addressing the deceived husband model in the novella: the deceived husband model would complicate a formulaic reading of the novella that singularly posits Anselmo and his curiosity as encompassing all explanations for actions taken in the story—not to mention the moral of the story.

The final model relevant to “El curioso impertinente” is the two friends model, and Barbagallo neatly summarizes the important ele-ments of it: “En todos, la amistad es firmísima, en todos, los amigos se enamoran de la misma mujer, en todos, uno de ellos es condenado a muerte y el otro lo salva, y en todos hay muestras de grandes sac-rificios en nombre y honor de la amistad” (208). Though it is essen-tially impossible to deny the presence of this model in Cervantes’s novella, many critics have chosen not to read the novella according to the moral of the story that this model conveys. The “lesson” of the two friends model is essentially that a man should choose his friend over the woman he loves, and in the end, everything will work out well. In his article asserting that “El curioso impertinente” is a rendition of the faith in marriage model, Barbagallo writes that “El tema principal del cuento no es, como se puede pensar en un primer momento, la Amistad, sino la fe dentro del matrimonio” (211). This statement betrays the idea that “El curioso impertinente” is either a story about faith in marriage or about two friends. The decision to consider the story as categorized by the faith in marriage model as opposed to the two friends model, however, relies entirely upon the interpretation that Anselmo is responsible for all the suffering that occurs in the novella—he is to blame, not his friend. Like the tendency to rule out a reading of the novella as a deceived husband exemplum because the critical consensus would have Camila’s be-


havior pardoned, the tendency not to read the novella according to the norms of the two friends model is also an attempt to excuse or pardon Lotario’s behavior. Barbagallo’s own remarks as to the correct behavior of the two friends in the two friends model exemplify why it is so important for the critics who would like to pardon Lotario’s behavior to dismiss the model’s relevance to the story. Barbagallo states: “Cervantes parece darse cuenta de que aquella llamada «amis-tad ideal» de los cuentos de los amigos no es tan ideal, ni siquiera verosímil. Sabe que el hombre enamorado nunca cedería la amada a su amigo, y si lo hiciese, el último llegado al triángulo, por ser el último llegado, y por ser verdaderamente amigo—si lo fuese—nunca aceptaría” (209). We should first recognize that Barbagallo, like the priest in Don Quijote, measures the degree of verisimilitude of a story according to the degree to which it is morally sound. This approach is quintessentially the procedure in which reality is measured according to authority: a good friend should—and therefore can be expected to—act a certain way. Yet if we consider the depiction of authority as relevant to good friends presented in the two friends model, Lotario’s suffering at the end of “El curioso impertinente” is exactly what he deserves. Lotario, in fact, as Anselmo’s “good friend,” is more to blame for what has occurred than Anselmo: not only has Lotario agreed to participate in a scheme that he suspects will end badly for his friend and his friend’s wife (if we take any of his arguments in the debate seriously), but he has also not given up his beloved to his friend—he has taken his friend’s wife! Yet while critics seek to pardon or ignore Lotario’s suspect behavior,12 the narrator and even Lotario himself do

12 For example, Clamurro writes: “First, Lotario becomes yet another victim of Anselmo’s madness, for Lotario’s trumped-up story of how his approaches to Camila are rebuffed by her is destroyed by Anselmo’s first act of voyeurism (409-10). Soon thereafter, Lotario himself is subtly corrupted or infected with a con-tingent derangement. For, after being caught in the lie of his non-performance, Lotario (now more thoroughly trapped in and contaminated by his friend’s obses-sion) in fact falls in love with Camila” (383-4). Barbagallo writes: “Como ya sabe-mos, Anselmo mismo causa su triste fin, y aunque Cervantes se refiere a Lotario como «el traidor amigo» y hace hincapié en el hecho de que «Rindióse Camila: Camila se rindió», la culpa de todo recae sobre el insensato deseo de Anselmo”


not: Lotario chastises himself for being a bad friend, and the narrator calls him “el traidor amigo” (DQ 348). To read “El curioso imperti-nente” according to the two friends model, we would probably admit that Anselmo is not a very good friend either—after all, he does risk the honor of his best friend by involving him in a ridiculous scheme. Ultimately, the friendship is hardly ideal.

Camila’s role in the story, however, is an interesting adaptation to the traditional two friends model. Typically, the woman in two friends exemplum is passive—with little persuasion, she accepts whichever friend has been assigned to her. Typically, however, she is not the only woman in the story. In fact, it seems that in order for the two friends exemplum to end happily—thus demonstrating the impor-tance of placing the friend above the beloved—another woman (a double who is basically identical to the first) emerges to resolve the love-triangle. The lesson of putting friend before beloved would not be effectively conveyed unless both men remained friends at the end of the story—and both men were, or planned to be, married to their beloved. Cervantes’s two friends narrative in La Galatea reaches a happy conclusion because, while Timbrio and Silerio both originally loved Nísida, Silerio ends up with Blanca, Nísida’s sister. Mentioned in passing throughout the story, Blanca is a beautiful and virtuous maiden, but she is explicitly not the recipient of either Timbrio’s or Silerio’s love.13 As readers of a romance formula, however, we

(213). Barbagallo justifies how he has assigned blame by stating: “Son la belleza, las virtudes, y sobre todo la contemplación de Camila lo que abre el corazón de Lotario rindiéndolo impotente a todo intento de retroceder y de evitar el amor” (217). Finally, we see the same disregard for Lotario’s responsibility in Avalle-Arce’s interpretation of the events of the novella: “Lotario, el encargado del ex-perimento, rehúsa ser ecasillado por el frío apriorismo de Anselmo, con lo que se hace inevitable el adulterio final” (47-8).

13 At one point in his narration Silerio states: “Una cosa se me ha olvidado de deciros: que, en todo el tiempo que con Nísida y su hermana estuve hablando, jamás la menor hermana habló palabra, sino que, con un extraño silencio, estuvo siempre colgada de las mías. Y seos decir, señores, que, si callaba, no era por no saber hablar con toda discreción y donaire, porque en estas dos hermanas mostró Naturaleza todo lo que ella puede y vale; y, con todo esto, no sé si os diga holgara que me hubiera negado el cielo la ventura de haberlas conocido, especialmente


accept the happy ending, in which Silerio transfers his affections from Nísida to Blanca—even though Blanca was once the decoy for Silerio’s true love of Nísida.14 Of course, readers assume that Blanca loves Silerio—and that Nísida would be happy to have Timbrio or Silerio (though perhaps she might be considering that, other than their names, they are almost indistinguishable). Somehow readers will conclude that both friends end up married to their beloved be-cause they will consider Blanca to be more or less Nísida. The happy ending of the two friends story in La Galatea rests on the fact that Timbrio and Silerio are essentially interchangeable and hence it does not really matter which one Nísida marries, and, furthermore, Blanca and Nísida are also more or less the same woman. The model essentially entails the presence of two dashing young men who are the best of friends and two beautiful women.

The complication that Cervantes presents with respect to Camila’s role in “El curioso impertinente” is two-fold. First of all, she is the one and only beautiful woman in the novella. When we read about the “other woman,” Clori, that Lotario later utilizes in his deception of Anselmo,15 we should not see it as a superfluous addi-

a Nísida, principio y fin de toda mi desdicha. Pero ¿qué puedo hacer si lo que los hados tienen ordenado no puede por discursos humanos estorbarse? Yo quise, quiero, y querré bien a Nísida…” (Cervantes, La Galatea 296). Silerio’s comments begin with a generous comparison of the two sisters, and he excuses Blanca in this case for not acting in the same way as Nísida; such remarks might serve to alert the reader to a possible harmonious solution to the love triangle. After seemingly equating the two, however, he distinguishes Nísida as his favorite “especialmente a Nísida,” and he concludes by asserting that fate or fortune, “los hados,” has be-stowed his love, originally and forever, to Nísida.

14 When Timbrio confronts Silerio with the knowledge that the latter is in love with Nísida, Silerio explains that Timbrio has misunderstood the situa-tion. Silerio then misleads Timbrio by convincing him that he, Silerio, is actually in love with Nísida’s sister, Blanca. Silerio is then able to recite a poem dedicated to “Blanca” because, as part of his work as a jester (a “truhán”), he had previously memorized a poem for another Blanca (299-300).

15 Lotario, in love with Camila, writes amorous verses to “Clori” even though the Lotario, Camila, and the reader know that the true addressee of Lotario’s love poetry is Camila. Clearly Lotario has invented Clori, and when Anselmo (who


tion to the story, brought in to mockingly dupe Anselmo, but instead as an ironic choice on the part of Cervantes, or on the part of Camila and Lotario—if we, as readers, choose to credit the two with rather sophisticated literary self-consciousness. Secondly, it seems that the critical consensus is somewhat unclear as to the extent to which to categorize Camila as an active agent in the story. Yet, if she were a passive character like Nísida, would she have betrayed her husband? Normally the two friends or random coincidences decide which of the two friends should have the woman that they both love. Does Anselmo, by setting up the test, decide that Lotario should have his wife? Yet can Anselmo really do this considering that Camila is married to him and therefore cannot really be with Lotario? Or does Camila decide that she would rather abandon her commitment to her husband by entering into relations with Lotario? On the one hand, she might have acted less cunningly and less amused by her and Lotario’s schemes as they hid their relationship from Anselmo. She might also have realized that the choice was made for her before the story began—unlike Nísida or another of the beloveds in two friends narratives, she was already married to Anselmo. We should also recall that in the two friends exemplum in the eighth story on the tenth day of Boccaccio’s Decameron, Sophronia finds herself married, unwittingly, to Titus instead of to Gisippus (to whom she was en-gaged); nevertheless, Sophronia accepts her marriage vows—regard-less of her own personal feelings. But, on the other hand, Camila might have fallen to Lotario because, as he argues, women are weak creatures and will essentially fall to whichever man pursues them. Ultimately, I believe, the story does not provide a conclusive answer.

claims that neither he nor Camila knows this woman) asks Lotario to recite some of his verses, Lotario makes explicit their generic nature: “Aunque la conociera… no encubriera yo nada; porque cuando algún amante loa a su dama de hermosa y la nota de cruel, ningún oprobrio hace a su buen crédito” (DQ 348). Lotario can bare his soul through his poetry not because neither Camila nor Anselmo knows Clori but because, with these conventional amorous verses, it would be impossible to discern who Clori is or whether she even exists. Interestingly, Clori serves the purpose that Blanca originally served in the two friends narrative in La Galatea—though Clori does not actually exist.


What I have intended to demonstrate by interpreting “El cu-rioso impertinente” according to the three obvious models which present themselves as important elements of the novella, is that it is difficult (impossible?) to assess, without a priori interpretive preju-dice toward any character in specific, which model can be said to be the model that adequately characterizes the story. To read “El cu-rioso impertinente” and to assume that it implies that authority is the best approach toward interpreting the world and toward seeking truth and knowledge implies a particular procedure that I outlined at the beginning of this section. It implies a clear distribution of blame—highlighted by a clear distribution of suffering witnessed at the end of the story—in order to demonstrate a singular effect of one wrong action or character flaw. It is one thing to say that several individual lessons can be gleaned from the story (do not test your wife, do not deceive your husband, do not deceive your friend and steal his wife), but the story itself does not punish only one character at the end, nor does it suggest that only one character is morally at fault. Arbesú Fernández has attempted to equate curiosity with sin in his assessment of Anselmo’s flaw;16 and whether or not one agrees with his argument, is there any question as to whether or not that adultery was officially considered a sin? The interpretive steps neces-sary to place moral blame on Anselmo are not even necessary when considering Camila and Lotario’s actions. To achieve the tragic end of “El curioso impertinente” all the above individual lessons (do not test your wife, do not deceive your husband, do not deceive your friend and steal his wife) were learned—or taught—the hard way. Anselmo’s curiosity might have set off a chain reaction, but the story, as it is written, clearly does not make Lotario and Camila passive characters moved at each moment by Anselmo’s mastermind.

Those who seek to interpret reality according to authority re-

16 Arbesú Fernández writes: “Igualando experiencia a pecado, pues, se expli-caría el terrible fin de Anselmo … El castigo de Anselmo se explica entonces de una manera más convincente en el esquema medieval en el que la auctoritas refleja la palabra divina y la figura de Dios, y la experiencia se contrapone representando el pecado” (31-2).


quire an easily-traceable chain reaction. Then the story can be fit-ted into a particular model—or a particular model will inform the reader as to what type of chain reaction is at play—and hence what the tipping point of the chain reaction is. Authority prescribes the assumptions as to which actions are actions and which are reactions. My analysis of the three models demonstrates that it is not clear that there is one single tipping point or action by one of the three main characters that causes the fallout of the rest of the events in the story and marks the point when all the characters are seen to be reacting instead of acting. After all, with respect to the actual plot of the novella, the event that precipitates the story’s final narrative unraveling is when Anselmo spies Leonela’s lover escaping from her window. In the end, Camila, Lotario, and Anselmo all suffer, and they have all acted in morally suspect ways. The literary formula that a reader uses to interpret “El curioso impertinente” will depend on which character he or she chooses to blame—which wrong action he or she chooses as the tipping point. In this sense, Cervantes’s novella may be read according to any of the three literary formulas—faith in marriage, deceived husband, two friends. Yet in each case, the reader is not accounting for, or is patently excusing, other aspects of the story. If one approaches truth and knowledge according to authority and the procedure that that choice implies, one is left with a partial or inconclusive—and hence insufficiently authoritative—interpretation of the reality of “El curioso impertinente.” Consequently, we may conclude that, as a methodology for distinguishing truth in our in-terpretation of Cervantes’s novella, authority is not the best critical tool for understanding how one approaches any definite, objective, or over-arching sense of truth and knowledge in the world of “El curioso impertinente.”

Yet, scholars, and the priest in Don Quijote, are not the only ad-vocates of authority in the context of the discussion of truth and knowledge as presented in Cervantes’s novella. Arbesú Fernández has noted that “occurre además que la historia del ‘Curioso’ responde per-fectamente al esquema de un debate dialogado medieval en el que estos términos [auctoritas y experiencia] se contraponen” (24). He then


asserts that “La historia del ‘Curioso,’ no obstante, representaría una dualidad entre el afán de experimentación renacentista (Anselmo) y la búsqueda de conocimiento en las auctoritas (Lotario)” (29). I believe that Arbesú Fernández is correct in assessing the two categorical sides, experience and authority, as represented in the novella’s great debate by Anselmo and Lotario respectively.17 On the other hand, while Arbesú

17 Mancing’s assessment of the novella involves emphasizing the similarity between Anselmo and Lotario’s methodologies, while contrasting both of these with that of Camila. Mancing cites Jerome Bruner in characterizing “the modes of epistemology available in human thought” (9), and asserts that they are “‘a good story’ and a ‘well-formed argument’” (10). He describes the logico-scientific well-formed argument in the following manner (citing Bruner in the process): “The ‘the paradigmatic or logico-scientific one, attempts to fulfill the ideal of a formal, mathematical system of description and explanation’ (12). It is this form—logic, argument, abstraction, theory—that has traditionally (at least since the days of the ancient Greeks) been privileged: human beings are reasoning entities (as opposed to brute animals, which are guided by instinct and sensation); the culminating and distinguishing cognitive achievement of homo sapiens is the ability to think logically, argue coherently, and convince by means of abstraction” (10). His description of a “well-formed argument,” which he attributes to the dominate modes of thought of both Anselmo and Lotario is not quite accurate, in my opinion, when it comes to addressing Anselmo’s epistemological leanings. In fact, Mancing never discusses the role of skepticism and empiricism, which do not fit neatly into the way that he has defined the “logico-scientific,” “well-formed argument” (10). It is true, as I will explain, that the “rational method” of approaching knowledge is defined by the ability to argue coherently and logically, and it is characterized by “intellectual inquiry” presented in “a conscious rhetorical structure” (12). Yet I do not believe that it necessarily entails the use of abstraction to the extent where the situation is stripped of any particulars and converted into an abstract mathematical proof. Fur-thermore, as I will demonstrate in my analysis of the debate, Anselmo and Lotario’s arguments are fundamentally different because of the characters’ distinct episte-mological leanings. In fact, I believe that grouping Lotario and Anselmo together with respect to their epistemological leanings and approach to knowledge allows for the potential to misread the text, or assume that something is there that is not. For example, Mancing claims that “Anselmo argues back that although Lotario is logically correct, he is determined to carry the project out,” but I see no evidence of Anselmo’s concession that his friend’s argument is superior (12). Instead, as I will argue, Anselmo and Lotario talk past each other; their respective approaches to knowledge and to assessing the situation at hand are so distinct that neither char-acter adequately responds to the points presented in the other’s arguments.


Fernández interprets the entire novella as wrestling between these two methodologies (authority and experience), I would argue that the de-bate itself—its outcome and its dynamic—constitutes the inclusion of the novella’s third methodology, reason, which also constitutes the third cognitive approach to truth and knowledge that Avalle-Arce at-tributes to Cervantes’s writing (see footnote 3).

Reason and the Approach to Truth and Knowledge Through DebateIn order to consider the validity of the approach to truth and knowl-edge according to reason, it will be helpful to first articulate ex-actly what the methodological procedure of this approach is. If we consider the definition of razón, we find that it does not imply a strict methodological process in itself. Covarrubias’ defines the word “razón” as the following: “Razón en otra significación, vale el concep-to declarado por palabras. Tener uno razón en lo que dize es justifi-carse” (893). He then goes on to define “razonar” as “hablar concerta-damente” (894). To consider how razón forms a methodology used in the pursuit of knowledge or truth in the context of “El curioso impertinente,” we might then say that the debate more or less is the methodology. In this sense, the representatives for each side will present arguments or justifications for their respective opinions and respond to the arguments introduced by the other side. Whichever side poses arguments that are more persuasive—or not rebutted by the other side—will be considered the winner of the debate, the side that has best justified its stance, the side that has razón.

Recognizing that I agree with the critical consensus that has de-fined the arguments of the two sides of the debate (authority and experience), I believe it is difficult to discuss the place of reason as an approach to truth and knowledge in “El curioso impertinente” without including the arguments made in favor of empiricism and authority within the debate. As a result, I will discuss the problems that Lotario and the critics who praise his arguments have in articu-lating and fitting authority to the specific case study that the debate is meant to illuminate. I will then discuss the problems articulated


in Anselmo’s manner of arguing on behalf of an empirical approach throughout the debate. I will then address the conclusion of the de-bate and its effectiveness in assessing knowledge and truth and in dealing with reality within the world of “El curioso impertinente.” In other words, I will demonstrate how each side fails to make its case and then demonstrate how the praxis of a debate (or the ratio-nalist method itself ) is rejected as a proper approach to truth and knowledge in Cervantes’s novella.

Lotario’s objective in the debate is to persuade Anselmo to have faith in Camila’s virtue rather than to initiate a test that will empiri-cally demonstrate it. As Lotario represents the side of authority in the debate, one might notice that the evident general approach in his arguments is essentially a form of geometric reasoning—at least at first glance. Lotario’s course involves searching for a universal rule and then applying it to the particular case of Anselmo’s wavering faith. Lotario opens his rebuttal of Anselmo’s call for empiricism with the following statement:

— Paréceme, ¡oh Anselmo!, que tienes tú ahora el ingenio como el que siempre tienen los moros, a los cuales no se les puede dar a entender el error de su secta con las acotaciones de la Santa Escritura, ni con razones que consistan en especulación del en-tendimiento, ni que vayan fundadas en artículos de fe, sino que les han de traer ejemplos palpables, fáciles, intelegibles, demon-strativos, indubitables, con demonstraciones matemáticas que no se pueden negar. (DQ 332)

The rationale behind his argument is as follows:

Rule: Everyone is supposed to have faith in the Holy Scriptures without seeking empirical or mathematical demonstrations jus-tifying that faith.

Assumption: Anselmo is a member of the set of Everyone.Therefore: Anselmo is supposed to have faith in the Holy

Scriptures without seeking empirical or mathematical demon-


strations justifying that faith.Therefore: Anselmo is supposed to have faith in Camila’s virtue

without seeking empirical or mathematical demonstrations jus-tifying that faith.

When we see his argument outlined in this fashion, it is clear that something is a bit “off ” in Lotario’s process of logical deduc-tion here. Lotario’s introductory argument only follows logically if we stipulate another assumption: to interpret faith in Camila ac-cording to the rule that he has cited, we must posit, between steps two and three, that Camila is, or is a member of the set of, Holy Scriptures. Of course it would be difficult to argue for this equation, or to argue logically even on behalf of an analogy, Camila ~ Holy Scriptures, because Camila is not in any clear way a member of the set of Holy Scriptures: Camila is a wife, a human being (as consid-ered from within the world of “El curioso impertinente”) but not a Holy Scripture (a scripture, infallible, eternal, and unchanging). Lotario never cites a rule (such as one that might be written in Holy Scripture) that suggests that the analogy of faith in Holy Scripture ~ faith in Camila is apt.

We notice right away, then, that Lotario’s process of presenting a rule and connecting it to the case at hand is plagued by the problem that whichever rule he mentions may not necessarily apply to the case—or imply, therefore, that Lotario’s particular thesis is correct. Lotario may cite unquestionable authority, but what good is it if he links it so sloppily to the case of Anselmo’s curiosity and desire to test Camila? His opening statements may be marked by some sort of rhetorical persuasiveness, but they are not logically persuasive. Furthermore, even his embellishment of the rule itself is not logi-cally sound. Lotario claims that Anselmo seeks not just empirical evidence, but also the confirmation, by mathematical demonstra-tion, of this evidence (“ejemplos palpables, fáciles, intelegibles, de-monstrativos, indubitables, con demonstraciones matemáticas que no se pueden negar”). Yet it was precisely the divide between the mathematical derivation of natural laws and the results of empirical


study that characterized the initiatives of the early empiricists and set them apart from Galileo and others who would seek to combine these two approaches (Haydn 200). In his study entitled The Counter Renaissance, Hiram Haydn asserts: “it was their neglect of math-ematics, their failure to recognize the necessity for the formulation of scientific natural laws, and their lack of method which recognized the importance of hypothesis and deduction, which proved fatal to the efforts of the Counter-Renaissance empiricists” (201).18 While Lotario might be correct in attempting to temper Anselmo’s relent-less appeal to the empirical (as we will later consider the various problems with the early empiricists’ methods of study), his rhetoric combines fields of study yet to be brought together. His rhetoric is reminiscent of the pejorative connotations of the term: his ar-guments might sound forceful and convincing but they are logically

18 In The Counter Renaissance, Haydn devotes a chapter of summary and analysis to the rise of empiricism in the sixteenth century. Generally, the rise of empiricism can be understood as a reaction to Scholastic science in which the senses were so subordinate to the intellect so as to hardly factor into the study of things in the world (190). The rise in popularity of empiricism pertained to two groups of counter Renaissance thinkers: the “renovators” and the “innovators.” The “renovators” “turned to occult means of bringing to light the virtues hidden in nature, and particularly the alchemists who dreamed of renovating and restoring to nature her pristine vigor, lost since the Fall”; and the “innovators,” more in line with skeptical doubt than occult leanings simply “demanded the right to inves-tigate ‘brute fact’ for themselves” (191). These groups were not mutually exclu-sive with respect to their adherents, though both emerged as a reaction to Scho-lasticism. The presentation of empiricism in “El curioso impertinente” is clearly along the lines of the “pure” or “radical” empiricism—the path of the “innovators.” Hayden explains that the beliefs of the “pure empiricists” date back to the late Middle Ages and the “followers of Ockham who moved on from his skeptical position to a scientific empiricism” (200). Haydn notes that the famous writers and philosophers of the counter Renaissance may be considered to be predominantly “pure empiricists”: “If they were ‘tainted’ with natural magic or astrology or one of various contemporary mystical or occult influences, [they] nevertheless followed with considerable fidelity, in some one department of knowledge, the pragmatic path of naturalistic empiricism” (197). As representatives of counter Renaissance empiricism across many fields of study, Haydn cites Vives, Telesio, Vesalius, Ma-chiavelli, Guicciardini, Bodin, Le Roy, and Montaigne (197).


unsound. As a methodological approach, they might, at best bring us closer to the appearance of truth—but not to truth itself.

While it would be easy to continue to undermine the relevance of many other analogies that Lotario draws throughout the debate, I will address only one more, which implicates additional prob-lems inherent in Lotario’s method of “authority.” With this analogy Lotario compares Anselmo’s scheme to test Camila and the schemes that hunters use to capture their prey:

Cuentan los naturales que el arminio es un animalejo que tiene una piel blanquísima, y que cuando quieren cazarle, los caza-dores usan deste artificio: que, sabiendo las partes por donde suele pasar y acudir, las atajan con lodo, y después, ojeándole, le encaminan hacia aquel lugar, y así como el arminio llega al lodo, se está quedo y se deja prender y cautivar […] La honesta y casta mujer es arminio, y es más que nieve blanca y limpia la virtud de la honestidad; y el que quisiere que no la pierda, antes la guarde y conserve, ha de usar de otro estilo diferente que con el arminio se tiene, porque no le han de poner delante el cieno de los rega-los y servicios de los importunos amantes, porque quizá, y aun sin quizá, no tiene tanta virtud y fuerza natural que pueda por sí mesma atropellar y pasar por aquellos embarazos. (DQ 335-6)

The analogy implies what many scholars have implicitly accept-ed, that Camila ~ ermine.19 I believe such an assumption is rather na-ïve. In fact, Camila belongs to the set of Women, an ermine belongs to the set of Animals. Animals were not considered to have rational souls, and since animals lacked rational capabilities, men assumed that they could learn to manipulate them mechanically. Perhaps the jury was out, so to speak, as to just how in touch women (in com-

19 For example, Avalle-Arce writes: “Para su desgracia, Camila es muy de carne y hueso, y ante la encrucijada vital que le plantea su incauto marido su re-acción será dictada, no por el cálculo de probablidades, sino por la imprevisible autonomía de la mente humana” (47). In other words, Camila, “muy de carne y hueso,” has the same lack of agency as an “arminio.”


parison with men) were with their rational souls, but nevertheless, when we recall the categories of being relevant to the worldview of Cervantes’s time, numbers of the set of Women are not simply Animals, which, it was believed and as the Lotario’s quote infers, could be mechanically manipulated. It is also relevant to point out that accounts of the “naturales” are now being recognized a source of authority—a submission that I consider somewhat suspect. Who are these “naturales”? What constitutes their authority? Finally, while Avalle-Arce does note that Cervantes believed that experience could demonstrate truth, though only in an a posteriori manner,20 the fact that Camila did fail the test (the fact that she did fall to Lotario’s ad-vances) does not prove, a posteriori, that the original analogy was apt.

As a final point of critique of Lotario’s case—introduced with rhetoric reminiscent of a sermon and supported by his shoddy use of analogies—I would also argue that with his zest for rhetorical persuasion, Lotario fails to understand what exactly Anselmo even means to test. Anselmo had presented the test’s objective as follows:

¿Qué mucho que esté recogida y temerosa la que no le dan oca-sión para que se suelte, y la que sabe que tiene marido que, en cogiéndola en la primera desenvoltura, la ha de quitar la vida? Ansí que la que es buena por temor, o por falta de lugar, yo no la quiero tener en aquella estima en que tendré a la solicitada y perseguida, que salió con la corona del vencimiento. (DQ 330)

Lotario remarks that the test will serve no purpose:

Si [Camila] es tan buena como crees, impertinente cosa será hacer experiencia de la mesma verdad, pues, después de hecha, se ha de quedar con la estimación que primero tenía. Así que es razón concluyente que el intentar las cosas de las cuales antes

20 Avalle-Arce writes: “La experiencia es válida como elemento de juicio a posteriori en la esfera de los acontecimientos humanos, que luego se podrá proyec-tar en el futuro con ciertos visos de probabilidad, eso sí, pero no es válida como forma cognoscitiva independiente” (24).


nos puede suceder daño que provecho es de juicios sin discurso y temerarios, y más cuando quieren intentar aquellas a que no son forzados ni compelidos, y que de muy lejos traen descubierto que el intentarlas es manifiesta locura. (333)

Yet, contrary to Lotario’s understanding of the matter, a careful examination of Anselmo’s plan (as cited above) demonstrates that his objective is not actually constructive: he does not seek to increase the estimation of Camila’s virtue. In the first quote, Anselmo asserts that a woman might act in a virtuous way for reasons that are not in fact due to her virtue (e.g. her behavior might be due to fear). With this line of argumentation, Anselmo suggests that the test would be responsible for determining whether one or several other variables are truly the ones accountable for the perceived status quo. While it is possible that Camila is both virtuous and lacking in opportu-nity, the lack of opportunity in this situation serves as the variable that will determine her behavior regardless of whether or not she is virtuous—the inference is that the variable representing the lack of opportunity has the strongest correlation to the findings of a lack of dishonorable behavior. Anselmo is witness to Camila’s virtuous conduct; his plan is to isolate for the variable of her virtue and to de-termine whether that alone is the primary or sufficient cause for her virtuous behavior. Nevertheless, Lotario assumes that were Camila to demonstrate virtue when tested, she would seem more virtuous to Anselmo, yet Anselmo is not interested in examining the degree of virtue that Camila may or may not have, but rather whether Camila is or is not virtuous. According to Anselmo’s logic, if Camila resists, she is virtuous; if she fails, her previously virtuous behavior must have been caused by a factor other than her virtue.

We should now consider, on the whole, Lotario’s general method of authority—his tendency to argue his points via analogies—in the context of its qualities and effectiveness as an approach to truth and knowledge. Let us consider two of Avalle-Arce’s astute observations of “El curioso impertinente”: “En el instante mismo en que el indi-viduo deja de clavar su vista en la realidad actual, lo que observa no es


más la vida sino una abstracción, no se entiende ya con la circunstan-cia vital, sino con su concepto. Este peligro, que en Cervantes adqui-ere las proporciones casi de un pecado, se ve ilustrado profusamente en su obra” (46). Naturally, when one reads this quote, one thinks of Anselmo and his obsession with empiricism. As Avalle-Arce writes:

El gran crimen de Anselmo es el haber hecho una abstracción de la vida; la ha ignorado, o mejor dicho, la ha desnudado de todos sus aspectos problemáticos, y encara la cuestión vital de la honra de su mujer, Camila, como si fuese un acertijo de ín-dole matemática. Anselmo se niega a aceptar la existencia de incógnitas en la vida, incógnitas que se resolverán, en la vida, de acuerdo con las circunstancias que las rodeen. Actúa, en cambio, llevado de un apriorismo de aplicación perfectamente legítima en la ciencia, pero de una inadecuación dramática en lo concerni-ente a la vida. (47)

While I will later attend to the problems inherent in Anselmo’s appeal to empiricism in the pursuit of truth and knowledge, I firmly believe that in the context of “El curioso impertinente,” Avalle-Arce’s critiques of Anselmo’s approach are just as relevant to Lotario’s. In truth, if one of the characters is not attentive to the specific, real-life aspects of Anselmo’s curiosity and Camila’s fidelity, it seems that that character is Lotario: with hardly any gesturing toward Camila, he concentrates his arguments on the purity of diamonds, the cap-ture of beautiful white ermines, the skepticism of Moors, and all the while he dances around the actual objective of Anselmo’s test and side steps any specific assessment of Anselmo and Camila’s marriage (though he will speak about “Marriage”—as in, the relationship be-tween Adam and Eve!). Furthermore, while Anselmo’s empirical method can be considered “scientific,” it is not—as early empiricism was not—mathematic. In fact, at least with his empiricism, Anselmo addresses the knowledge of Camila’s virtue as a matter of practi-cal knowledge. Lotario’s method of authority actually implies that Camila can be thought of as an idealized (rather than a concrete)


entity, and that her virtue is atemporal, unchanging.21,22 If either char-acter’s discursive method is abstractly mathematic, I would suggest it is Lotario’s use of authority, or the geometric approach, which implies that knowledge of Camila’s virtue can be dealt with theoreti-cally—through the application of axioms to the case of Camila and Anselmo.23

21 For differences between methods of Theoretical and Practical knowledge see pages 26-28 of Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin’s The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning.

22 Güntert describes Lotario’s method in a similar fashion: “Lotario acepta las creencias generales proponiendo, de Camila, una lectura ejemplar” (1986 278).

23 As we have seen with the analogy of testing Camila ~ hunting an ermine, Lotario does not always apply axioms to the specific situation, but instead adopts a kind of casuistry by applying another case to the case of Camila and Anselmo. Yet we have already discussed the problems inherent in applying this case to the particulars of the case of Camila and Anselmo. It is also worth pointing out that casuistry, as a discipline, is not employed to determine truth or correct knowledge about a given situation; as a result, this type of argument can be seen to run parallel to a search of the truth of, or the knowledge of, Camila’s virtue. The argument of the casuist is only persuasive to suggest that testing Camila might not be a good idea; it does nothing to determine or demonstrate whether or not Camila is virtu-ous. Lotario makes a similar argument with the inapt analogy that testing Camila ~ testing a diamond, that the risk tis hat both will shatter:

Dime, Anselmo, si el cielo, o la suerte buena, te hubiera hecho señor y legí-timo posesor de un finísimo diamante, de cuya bondad y quilates estuviesen satisfechos cuantos lapidarios le viesen, y que todos a una voz y de común parecer dijesen que llegaba en quilates, bondad y fineza a cuanto se podía este-nder la naturaleza de tal piedra, y tú mesmo lo creyeses así, sin saber otra cosa en contrario, ¿sería justo que te viniese en deseo de tomar aquel diamante, y ponerle entre un yunque y un martillo, y allí, a pura fuerza de golpes y brazos, probar si es tan duro y tan fino como dicen? Y más, si lo pusieses por obra; que, puesto caso que la piedra hiciese resistencia a tan necia prueba, no por eso se le añadiría más valor ni más fama; y si se rompiese, cosa que podría ser, ¿no se perdía todo? Sí, por cierto, dejando a su dueño en estimación de que todos le tengan por simple. (DQ 335)

From this argument, Avalle-Arce concludes: “Con estas palabras Lotario de-muestra lo fútil, más aún, lo erróneo de entrometer la experiencia en materias vitales” (26). While Avalle-Arce might be correct in asserting that there is an


Unlike Lotario’s discursive approach to presenting his case in the debate, Anselmo does not introduce a series of arguments that are idealized and atemporal and in which the order of those arguments may be changed without altering the case itself. Instead, Anselmo seeks to justify his stance (tener razón) by discussing his predicament as a matter of practical knowledge: knowledge relevant to a concrete and specific case that occurs within a specific period of time. As a result, Anselmo seeks to win the debate by essentially narrating, step by step, why he himself has become persuaded by the idea that empirical testing is the only possible approach of ascertaining proper knowledge of Camila’s virtue.

Anselmo, therefore, is not solely an empiricist, and in fact he arrives at empiricism through the cultivation of the a skepticist ap-proach to reality. As we will see, he represents a very typical trend of late sixteenth and early seventeenth century thought. He describes his initial curiosity in terms of an anxious and incontrollable doubt: “No sé qué días a esta parte me fatiga y aprieta un deseo tan es-traño y tan fuera del uso común de otros, que yo me maravillo de mí mismo, y me culpo y me riño a solas, y procuro callarlo y encubrirlo de mis propios pensamientos; y así me ha sido posible salir con este secreto como si de industria procurara decillo a todo el mundo” (DQ 330). Anselmo’s tone is reflective of predicament described by the fa-mous skeptic, Francisco Sánchez (1550-1623); in the aptly titled Qvod Nihil Scitvr (That Nothing is Known), Sánchez writes: “As it is, I am tortured incessantly by grief, in despair of being able to know any-thing completely” (233). Sánchez later provides justification for this skeptical anxiety: “For how am I to avoid doubt if I cannot grasp the natures of things, from which true scientific knowledge has to come? For it is easy to see a magnet, but what is its nature? Why does it attract iron? It would be scientific knowledge (scientia) if we were able to gain cognitive understanding (cognition) of this phe-nomenon” (285). Likewise, Anselmo sees that Camila is faithful to

inherent problem with testing “materias vitales,” Lotario does not actually make that point, and, since a diamond is not a “materia vital” (and the analogy Camila ~ diamond is not sound), we therefore cannot properly conclude that he has.


him, but just by observing that fact, he is not able to understand why it is that she is faithful. In the debate in “El curioso imper-tinente,” Anslemo argues against the arguments of authority that Lotario presents. Likewise, Sánchez argues against the authority of the canonical treatises and of Scholastic demonstrations; instead, he appeals to a study of the facts as the best method for seeking truth:

For knowledge emerges from one who does not know yet is ready and eager to learn; all demonstration does is to point to the thing that has to be known; indeed, this is indicated by the very word ‘de-monstration’…. but I was stimulated by their remarks into preparing myself to examine any and every thing; and when I observed their contradictions and difficulties, in order to avoid falling into these myself I dismissed those authors and fled for refuge in the facts, with the intention of seeking in them a basis for judgment. (187)

Sánchez’s empirical turn, therefore, is couched as the only pos-sible solution to his skeptical dilemma and rejection of the uncor-roborated acceptance of authority. Similarly, Anselmo recognizes that Camila has been faithful, but he cannot simply accept that her choices reflect the power of her virtue:

Porque yo tengo para mí, ¡oh amigo!, que no es una mujer más buena de cuanto es o no es solicitada, y que aquella sola es fuerte que no se dobla a las promesas, a las dádivas, a las lágrimas y a las continuas importunidades de los solícitos amantes. Porque ¿qué hay que agradecer —decía él— que una mujer sea buena, si nadie le dice que sea mala? ¿Qué mucho que esté recogida y temerosa la que no le dan ocasión para que se suelte, y la que sabe que tiene marido que, en cogiéndola en la primera desenvoltura, la ha de quitar la vida? Ansí que la que es buena por temor, o por falta de lugar, yo no la quiero tener en aquella estima en que tendré a la solicitada y perseguida, que salió con la corona del vencimiento. (DQ 330)


We have already discussed Lotario’s responses to Anselmo’s em-piricist claims, and on the whole Lotario’s counter-arguments were irrelevant to Anselmo, and therefore ineffective as points of persua-sion because they extracted the question of Camila’s virtue from the particulars of the situation. Anselmo is looking for a “real time” solu-tion to his doubts with respect to Camila, and his friend presents a lofty speech about many unrelated entities.

One of Lotario’s faulty analogies, however, is relevant to Anselmo’s own discursive method of justifying the test of Camila’s virtue in real time. While we have considered the philosophical doctrines and ideas that support Anselmo’s desire for confirmation through ob-servation and the isolation and testing of individual variables, we have not considered the potential problems with these goals (though many proponents of these new methods were themselves aware of these obstacles). Lotario explains the technique that hunters use to capture ermines: knowing that the ermine avoids mud, they ma-nipulate the movements of the ermine by throwing mud in its path (335-6) (this passage is quoted earlier). At first, it may appear quite contradictory to mention the example of the ermine as a valid argu-ment. It is not: the analogy of Camila ~ ermine is faulty, and we cer-tainly cannot make the a posteriori claim that the example was cor-rect simply because Camila did fall to Lotario. The merit of Lotario’s point with respect to the ermine is not that it is a conclusive analogy (as it is presented in the argument scheme of authority), but in-stead because it speaks to the question of process—to the particulars that may affect Anselmo’s project that Anselmo himself has failed to take into account. Lotario alludes to a similar, though more general, line of reasoning in a feature of present-day quantum physics—the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (hup,). This principle states that by measuring the momentum of an object, the scientist skews the measurement of that object’s position, and consequently, as knowl-edge of momentum is required to predict position and vice versa, the experimenter’s taking of measurements ultimately precludes ob-


jectivity in the calculations of his predictions.24 The scientist can-not truly isolate for either variable because the intent to isolate for one variable entails false assumptions about the other—the one that should act as a neutral control. Sánchez’s skepticism with respect to the ability to accurately measure and interpret empirical data is, while not conclusive in its determination like the hup, at least an implicit allowance for the need to consider problems like those ex-plained by the hup,. Sánchez proposes that it is impossible to gain true knowledge about any particular entity because true knowledge entails understanding the efficient cause of the entity, and in the search to establish the ultimate efficient cause, we are left with an infinite series of regressions.25 Sánchez may then consequently as-sert that “one thing cannot be fully understood apart from all other things” (211). As a result, the experimenter will have to establish limits—or make assumptions—in order to begin to test any indi-vidual thing. Sánchez later writes: “It is inevitable that alteration in the arrangement of the external medium should cause the alteration in the images conveyed through it” (249). Similarly, if Camila’s virtue is to be tested as Anselmo designs, it will be done by altering the medium or essentially creating an artificial environment—much like how the ermine’s environment is altered according to the purposes of the hunters. While Anselmo attempts to isolate for the variable of Camila’s virtue, any measurement or objective recognition of this virtue is precluded by the fact that while the test set up is necessary to empirically demonstrate her virtue, the test modifies her environ-

24 Greg Bothun writes: “In the Quantum Mechanical world, the idea that we can locate objects exactly breaks down. Let me state this idea more precisely. Suppose a particle has momentum p and position x. In a Quantum Mechanical world, I would not be able to measure p and x precisely. There would be an un-certainty associated with each measurement that I could never get rid of, even in a perfect experiment!… A consequence of the Uncertainty Principle is that if an object’s position x is defined precisely, then the momentum of the object will be only weakly constrained, and vice versa. One cannot simultaneously find both the position and momentum of an object to arbitrary accuracy.” <http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~imamura/208/jan27/hup.html>

25 See Sánchez’s That Nothing is Known, pages 195-6.


ment. What Anselmo will in fact observe is Camila’s relative vir-tue—the test does not measure the virtue she has in her ordinary reality, but rather the virtue she would have if she lived in Anselmo’s alternate, experimental reality.

Lotario’s analogy also implicitly questions Anselmo’s true mo-tives. Whether Lotario is conscious of the nuance of the comparison or not, Anselmo later proves to be exactly like the hunter in the example: he continues to reinforce and modify the experiment in order to test—but perhaps really to catch—Camila. In other words, the analogy suggests that Anselmo’s role is essentially biased and antagonistic rather than neutrally skeptical and scientific. Lotario’s comments seem to echo the observations of skeptics like Sánchez who believe that the observer, being a man, is himself fundamentally flawed, and, due to his many imperfections, lacks the ability to make accurate judgments with respect to the sensory data obtained in an experiment.26 The implication that Anselmo, the designer and per-former of the experiment, lacks objective neutrality only further sup-ports the appropriate inclusion of Lotario’s warnings which criticize Anselmo’s blind faith in empirical study.27

Anselmo never responds to the possible problems inherent in the design of his empirical test. In other words, Anselmo has yet to really consider how he will actually conduct his experiment so that he can really be sure that its results will not be contaminated by other factors. He has not thought through the design of his experiment

26 See Sánchez’s That Nothing is Known, pages 238 and 283.27 The initiatives of the early or “pure” empiricists that Haydn describes

in The Counter Renaissance “failed to see that experience and observation were wholly dependable and accurate measuring rods only when supported by a sci-entific mathematical method (200). Nevertheless, Haydn cites Randall in order to emphasize the tempered implications that empirical study actually had in the quest for truth”: “But the return to experience is not for the sake of certain proof: for throughout the seventeenth century it is almost impossible to find any natural scientist maintaining that a mere fact can prove any certain truth”(qtd. in Haydn 201-2). Unlike Anselmo, the early empiricists did not seek to prove anything for certain with their observations—they merely focused on the need to question tra-ditional assumptions and the importance of gathering facts.


such that it will actually demonstrate truth and accurate knowledge. While Lotario fails to win the debate by justifying his stance via authority (because this line of reasoning deals with the idealized and atemporal rather than the situation of Camila at this point in time), Anselmo has also failed to justify the validity of empirical testing because he cannot follow through on the justification as to how his empirical project, conducted in time, will be accurately set up and performed.

In considering the entire debate of rational arguments and infer-ences presented to justify either the merit of empiricism or author-ity as the correct approach to knowledge and truth, it is perhaps surprising to discover that by the end of the debate, both sides seem to have abandoned their alliances to their respective methodologies. The justifications for authority and empiricism—or the praxis of the debate, the so-to-speak “rational method” for determining truth—all turn out to be vaguely irrelevant to how the debate is settled. Both Lotario and Anselmo turn to modes of thinking that reflect a pro-cess of rationalization rather than reasoning: unable to justify their stances according to arguments in favor of them, they both essen-tially construct cost-benefit analyses in order to decide not whether it would be epistemologically fruitful for Anselmo to test Camila’s virtue, but whether Anselmo will or will not do it.

First Anselmo explains that if Lotario does not choose to take part in the test, he will have to find another man to fill the role:

Estás obligado a hacer esto por una razón sola; y es que, estando yo, como estoy, determinado de poner en plática esta prueba, no has tú de consentir que yo dé cuenta de mi desatino a otra perso-na, con que pondría en aventura el honor que tú procuras que no pierda; y cuando el tuyo no esté en el punto que debe en la inten-ción de Camila en tanto que la solicitares, importa poco o nada, pues con brevedad, viendo en ella la entereza que esperamos, le podrás decir la pura verdad de nuestro artificio, con que volverá tu crédito al ser primero. Y pues tan poco aventuras y tanto con-tento me puedes dar aventurándote, no lo dejes de hacer, aunque


más inconvenientes se te pongan delante. (DQ 339)

Of course, it is easy to recognize the flaws in Anselmo’s analysis: the entire projection hinges on Camila’s resisting Lotario’s advances, and one might infer (as does actually happen in the story) that the flipside of this projection would represent the worst possible out-come—a loss of honor and happiness to all. Furthermore, the idea that Lotario and Camila will be as happy as before the experiment rests on the assumption that Camila will not take offense to her hus-band’s doubts with respect to her virtue and love for him.

Barbagallo has written that “si Lotario no hubiese existido, Anselmo no habría llamado a un desconocido para hacer la corte a su mujer” (211). Yet how can we possibly make that assumption when we consider that Anselmo is potentially crazy and Lotario never calls his friend’s bluff? Anselmo has made a convincing case as to why the test’s participant should be Lotario, but he certainly does not suggest that it had to be Lotario. Anselmo argues that the partici-pant should be Lotario because, in that case, Anselmo thinks he will be able to maximize his benefit (the satisfaction of Camila choosing him over his best friend) and minimizing his risk. If Lotario decided not to participate, we do not know that for Anselmo the benefit of conducting the test (relieving his curiosity) would not have still out-weighed a slightly higher risk (having a lesser-known entity court his wife). At the end of the debate, Lotario concedes:

Viendo Lotario la resoluta voluntad de Anselmo, y no sabiendo qué más ejemplos traerle ni qué más razones mostrarle para que no la siguiese, y viendo que le amenazaba que daría a otro cuenta de su mal deseo, por evitar mayor mal, determinó de contentarle y hacer lo que le pedía, con propósito e intención de guiar aquel negocio de modo que, sin alterar los pensamientos de Camila, quedase Anselmo satisfecho. (DQ 339)

The first sentence of the quote betrays the frustration of Lotario’s attempts to use arguments of authority in considering the matter


and in arguing his case to Anselmo. Instead, Lotario begins this final process of deliberation by first considering “la resoluta voluntad de Anselmo,” and all of Lotario’s final points follow from this obser-vation. Lotario also chooses what he sees as the risk-minimizing option: if he courts Camila, he will not let Camila be seduced by his advances, and he will keep the whole nasty affair secret (though ironically, he does not know what affair he will actually want to keep secret). Just as Anselmo’s cost-benefit analysis is faulty and incom-plete, so is Lotario’s: if he is truly convinced by any of the arguments that he made in attempt to dissuade Anselmo from testing Camila, he would recognize the myopic nature of his decision to please Anselmo’s curiosity in the short term while subjecting his friend, himself, and Camila to broken marriage, strained friendship, and loss of honor to all in the long term.

The debate, set up as a rational disputatio between the merits of authority and empiricism as methods for approaching truth and knowledge, has become a mere contest of wills. As both Anselmo and Lotario present rational arguments to support their respective beliefs and desires, the debate as a whole demonstrates the subser-vience of reason to the will. The rational arguments—or points of justification—on each side both ignore the vitality of the situation: Lotario, speaking only of analogies derived from theoretical rules, fails to effectively connect his points to the situation at hand, and Anselmo, meanwhile, has yet to consider how he can be sure that his test will provide accurate results when implemented in the context of real time. Furthermore, as we witness the dynamics of the debate, we see how each side seems to talk past the other because neither agrees on the type of knowledge (theoretical or practical) relevant to the question of Camila’s virtue. In other words, not only can we observe that neither side has adequately justified its stance (neither side can be said to tener razón), but the actual set up of the debate—the interweaving of the arguments from both sides—essentially prohibits any progress toward establishing which side is right. The rational method, which posits that one will arrive at truth or proper knowledge through the discursive interchange of arguments meant


to justify one side or another, proves to be completely inadequate as a method for interpreting reality.

Empiricism and the approach to truth and “knowledge” through test and observationAs Camila is a unique individual and not representative of a class of individuals, the experiment designed to test her virtue cannot be re-peated and therefore must be conducted with particular detail given to the test’s controls. Anselmo, however, is not able to pre-establish all of the necessary controls from the outset, and he therefore finds himself testing the controls mid-experiment in order to be able to proceed with his initial plans. The most obvious example of this dif-ficulty is that while Lotario agreed to play the role of Camila’s suitor, it is not clear what that responsibility actually entails or whether or not Lotario is playing the role as Anselmo designed it:

—¡Ah—dijo Anselmo—Lotario, Lotario, y cuán mal corre-spondes a lo que me debes y a lo mucho que de ti confío! Ahora te he estado mirando por el lugar que concede la entrada desta llave, y he visto que no has dicho palabra a Camila; por donde me doy a entender que aun las primeras le tienes por decir; y si esto es así, como sin duda lo es, ¿para qué me engañas, o por qué quieres quitarme con tu industria los medios que yo podría hallar para conseguir mi deseo? (342)

We may infer from Anselmo’s statements that he doubted Lotario’s ability to play the role to which he was assigned. Anselmo’s doubts with respect to Lotario consequently mirror his doubts with respect to Camila: he doubts their behavior when left to their own devises and so he must observe—in effect test—them both. At this early juncture, we are already alerted to the potential problems of the authenticity of the experiment—is Lotario a control in the test of Camila, or also an object to be tested? If Anselmo is testing the controls of his experiment, can he still be testing the initial object


of observation with the same degree of attention and objectivity?28 Anselmo’s test of his wife’s fidelity is simultaneously conducted alongside the test of his friend’s fidelity. In fact, at this point in the story it seems that Anselmo is more interested in his test of Lotario than in observing Camila.

Lotario, observed by Anselmo and converted into a new object of testing, serves as an interesting foil for examining the testing of Camila. In fact, in the tests of both Camila and Lotario, a problem of the nature of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle begins to fig-ure as a fundamental hindrance of Anselmo’s project. That Camila’s natural choices might change when her natural environment is modified is, perhaps, strikingly predictable—as such an outcome was already forecast by Lotario in his debate with Anselmo. Yet, the observation of Lotario, who is now a primary object of study, is also affected by the problem of the nature of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. When Anselmo confronts Lotario about his failure to effectively play the role of the suitor, Lotario may either engage Anselmo in a debate similar to the one presented at the beginning of the story or, as Lotario already conceded defeat in that instance, he may take Anselmo’s desires to heart and actually delve into the real role of the suitor. Lotario, however, is not accustomed to making amorous advances (as we learn at the beginning of the story), and so, in fulfilling this new role, he must change his very nature. The experiment, therefore, does not test Lotario’s courting of Camila, but the courtship of Camila by Lotario converted into an Anselmo-like character. Nevertheless, Lotario eventually does fall in love with Camila and entreats her with genuine amorous advances. In his role in Anselmo’s test of Camila, Lotario is also tested, and like Camila, Lotario demonstrates or proves to have qualities that we may sup-pose might not have existed were the tests not conducted.

28 Sánchez observes the problem inherent this situation: “Knowledge is only of each individual thing, taken by itself, not of many things at once, just as a single act of seeing relates only to one particular object; for as it is not possible to focus perfectly on two objects at once, so too it is impossible to have complete under-standing of two things at once” (190).


A further hindrance to the ascertainment of knowledge to be derived from Anselmo’s test is the flipside of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: the fact that at various stages of the experi-ment the observer is, in effect, changed by the observed. This second problem (of the observer changed by the observed) betrays a deeper epistemological concern as to whether the scientist can remain out-side of, and unchanged by, his own experiment. In conducting the test of Camila alongside Anselmo, Lotario, like his friend, is cast as an observer of Camila. Yet when we see Lotario change from the man introduced as Lotario at the beginning of the story to Lotario, the lover of Camila, we should recognize that the pivotal moment of this change is due to Lotario’s observation of Camila. In other words, though Lotario’s character is modified as a result of being the object of observation of Anselmo on the whole (as previously discussed), the specific moment of his change occurs when he is in the role of the observer:

Mirábala Lotario en el lugar y espacio que había de hablarla, y consideraba cuán digna era de ser amada; y esta consider-ación comenzó poco a poco a dar asaltos a los respectos que a Anselmo tenía, y mil veces quiso ausentarse de la ciudad y irse donde jamás Anselmo le viese a él, ni él viese a Camila; mas ya le hacía impedimento y detenía el gusto que hallaba en mirarla. Hacía fuerza y peleaba consigo mismo por desechar y no sentir el contento que le llevaba a mirar a Camila. Culpábase a solas de su desatino; llamábase mal amigo, y aun mal cristiano; hacía dis-cursos y comparaciones entre él y Anselmo, y todos paraban en decir que más había sido la locura y confianza de Anselmo que su poca fidelidad, y que si así tuviera disculpa para con Dios como para con los hombres de lo que pensaba hacer, que no temiera pena por su culpa. (DQ 344)

At the moment in which Lotario stops playing his role in the experiment and actually steps back to observe its subject, he becomes virtually the opposite of what he has proven to be thus far in the


story. He reasons with himself and even draws on the same types of arguments that he introduced in this attempts to dissuade Anselmo of his “locura,” and yet he is immune to his previous beliefs and becomes the bad friend, the bad Christian, in effect, the man who places his desire over his sense of honor. Lotario’s observation, as though made of an objective fact, that Camila “digna era de ser ama-da” is what causes Lotario’s personal feelings with respect to Camila to change—which, in turn, transform him into someone his previ-ous self would scarcely recognize. The comparison with Anselmo that Lotario draws at this moment is also apt: both he and Anselmo have been driven beyond the boundaries of reason by Camila. Yet Camila has not actually done anything at this point to provoke the madness of either one; rather, the observation of Camila provoked both Anselmo’s “impertinent curiosity” and Lotario’s inappropriate, yet all-consuming desire.

When we recognize that the moment in which Lotario ceases to be Anselmo’s true friend and becomes, instead, Camila’s ardent suitor occurs while Lotario is the observer of Camila, we may there-fore better understand why Camila falls in love with Lotario so soon afterwards. In an interesting play between observer and observed, we see Camila’s world transformed: “[Camila] habiendo visto en Lotario lo que jamás pensara, no sabía qué hacerse. Y, pareciéndole no ser cosa segura ni bien hecha darle ocasión ni lugar a que otra vez la hablase, determinó de enviar aquella mesma noche, como lo hizo, a un criado suyo con un billete a Anselmo” (344-5). Camila’s observa-tion of Lotario’s transformation sparks a new sense of urgency for Anselmo to return. Like the ermine, it is as though she senses her entrapment and her eventual surrender.

When Anselmo eventually does arrive home to survey the prog-ress of his experiment, as the observer, he also falls prey to the ob-served. In Anselmo’s case, this problem implies a more deep-seated epistemological issue. By the time Anselmo arrives home, his experi-ment has been effectively performed—Lotario has acted the role of Camila’s suitor, and she has dishonorably accepted his advances. Yet Anselmo, in the role of the scientist who conceived of, and developed


the experiment, is unable to accurately witness the results. As he is obsessed with seeing the evidence of his wife’s fidelity or infidelity with his own eyes, he is forced to make judgments from what he sees before him—Camila and Lotario’s deceptive and staged illusions.

The experiment is also plagued with concerns in the area that one might expect to be the only stable control in its realization: the sup-posedly “fixed” laboratory space of the house. While Anselmo feels the need to test Lotario, he never stops to think of any environmen-tal modifications that his experiment might engender. Nevertheless, we witness a transformation of the space:

No pudo hacer otra cosa Camila sino rogar a Leonela no dijese nada de su hecho al que decía ser su amante, y que tratase sus cosas con secreto, porque no viniesen a noticia de Anselmo ni de Lotario. Leonela respondió que así lo haría; mas cumpliólo de manera, que hizo cierto el temor de Camila de que por ella había de perder su crédito. Porque la deshonesta y atrevida Leonela, después que vio que el proceder de su ama no era el que solía, atrevióse a entrar y poner dentro de casa a su amante, confiada que, aunque su señora le viese, no había de osar descubrille; que este daño acarrean, entre otros, los pecados de las señoras: que se hacen esclavas de sus mesmas criadas, y se obligan a encubrirles sus deshonestidades y vilezas, como aconteció con Camila; que, aunque vio una y muchas veces que su Leonela estaba con su galán en un aposento de su casa, no sólo no la osaba reñir, mas dábale lugar a que lo encerrase, y quitábale todos los estorbos, para que no fuese visto de su marido. (351-2)

What is permitted in Camila and Anselmo’s home is quite differ-ent now that Camila has failed Anselmo’s test yet must hide that real-ity from him. In the new and unstable testing ground, the number and identity of the people in the home as well as basic assumptions about visitors and guests and their relationships with those in the home have all been subject to change as a result of Anselmo’s project.

Yet, not only are the changes in the “laboratory space” a direct re-


sult of the performance of the experiment, but also, and more strik-ing, those changes serve as the specific catalyst to the fall-out of the story, and eventually to Anselmo’s final realizations about the nature and results of his experiment. When Lotario sees a young man leav-ing the house at dawn, the narrator explains: “Pensó Lotario que aquel hombre que había visto salir tan a deshora de casa de Anselmo no había entrado en ella por Leonela, ni aun se acordó si Leonela era en el mundo: sólo creyó que Camila, de la misma manera que había sido fácil y ligera con él, lo era para otro” (352). Drawing these con-clusions, Lotario then goes straight to where Anselmo is sleeping; he wakes his friend and confesses to his successful seduction of Camila so that the two men will find a way to deal appropriately with her. Lotario sets up a new experiment: Anselmo is to pretend to leave for a few days while really hiding in his antechamber so that he may spy on Camila. After conversing with Anselmo, Lotario instantly regrets his hasty decision to confess his affair to his friend—it would have been better, he realizes, to have dealt with Camila without involving Anselmo. He confesses then to Camila, and Camila begins to plan how she will stage the results of Anselmo’s second experiment.

Yet the evidence to be presented in Camila and Lotario’s scene is not entirely false. Camila is able to stage a mock death scene without Lotario’s previous understanding of her plans. Lotario doesn’t act in a prepared role, he acts like himself—and so can respond to Camila’s words in an impromptu and more genuine fashion. In fact Lotario cannot entirely assume a role because he is in doubt of Camila’s intentions and plans: “Y diciendo estas razones, con una increíble fuerza y ligereza arremetió a Lotario con la daga desenvainada, con tales muestras de querer enclavársela en el pecho, que casi él estuvo en duda si aquellas demonstraciones eran falsas o verdaderas, porque le fue forozoso valerse de su industria y de su fuerza para estorbar que Camila no le diese” (360). Anselmo, therefore, witnesses a scene that is somewhere in between a fully staged illusion and the real-ity of what is actually going on—just as Camila’s words are in part truthful and in part deceitful. What Anselmo sees then, is an alter-nate reality that has been created by the experiment itself: in her


scene, Camila gives Anselmo both the truth of her feelings (she is indignant that Anselmo would suspect, and test, her faith), a decep-tive description of her relationship with Lotario, and the exact evi-dence that she knows Anselmo hopes to obtain in order to feel his experiment has yielded conclusive results. Had Camila not fallen to Lotario, Anselmo might have continued the experiment and raised the stakes indefinitely, and so: “[Camila] tan vivamente fingía aquel estraño embuste y fealdad, que, por dalle color de verdad, la quiso matizar con su misma sangre” (360). In effect, the evidence that sug-gests that Camila’s virtue outweighs her estimation of her own life would be the definitive end to the experiment. The manifestation of this very idea is, however, an illusion (though one produced in part by the truth); and from it, Anselmo draws inaccurate conclusions (that she is a chaste heroine like Portia, Lucretia, or even a Christian martyr type). We should recognize, however, that his conclusions are not entirely wrong, as the evidence isn’t entirely deceitful: at the end of the story, Anselmo’s realization that he should not have tested Camila does, in part, come from what he witnesses her saying in this scene (Camila compares herself to martyrs and archetypical hero-ines, and Anselmo finally realizes that he was expecting Camila to perform miracles).

As this scene serves to reconcile Camila and Lotario and rees-tablish their joint deception of Anselmo, Leonela is again free to contaminate the testing environment for similar purposes as before. Finally, Anselmo, like Lotario, notices Leonela’s lover leaping out of the window of her room. He demands the truth, and Leonela implies that she has more interesting facts to relate to him. When Anselmo tells Camila that her maid has secrets to share, Camila immediately escapes, runs to Lotario’s home, and then is taken to a convent to ait for him.29 Anselmo awakes to find his home entirely empty and his

29 Gerli interprets this event as a question of chance: “Ironically, as through a glass darkly, the dénouement of ‘El curioso’ and the discovery of all the falsifica-tions in it are set in motion not by Anselmo’s vehement labors to know and grasp the truth but by accident, by his fortuitous discovery of Leonela’s lover in her room one night” (119). Yet, as I have demonstrated, this discovery is not really fortuitous


best friend nowhere to be found. The fallout of Anselmo’s experi-ment—his lack of understanding of what has happened—leads to his descent into anxious depression and despair. He only becomes resigned when he learns of Camila and Lotario’s plights from a fel-low citizen. In his final words, Anselmo writes: “porque no estaba ella [Camila] obligada a hacer milagros, ni yo tenía necesidad de querer que ella los hiciese; y pues yo fui el fabricador de mi deshonra, no hay para qué…” (DQ 370). Anselmo recognizes the arbitrary and antagonistic aspects of his experiment, though far too late.

Despite its remarkable narrative complexities and intrigue (which keep the reader in a state of dizzying anticipation), the story of “El curioso impertinente” dissolves in a peculiarly anticlimactic fashion. Furthermore, aside from the brief remarks made by the priest, the characters of Don Quijote don’t seem to react to the novella at all. Where are the passionate outcries and reactions to this “tragedy”? I believe that the story does not receive or merit such remarks because there are no tragic heroes or heroines—and no truly innocent vic-tims. As a genre, the novella does not favor the rich development of characters, and in “El curioso impertinente,” it takes a good deal of personal projection and willful disregard of certain actions in order to interpret Anselmo, Lotario, or Camila sympathetically. The lack of discussion of Cervantes’s novella in Don Quijote may also be due to the fact that the story has not taught us anything particularly unique or constructive: the lessons (do not test your wife, do not steal your best friend’s wife, and do not cheat on your husband) are certainly not ground-breaking concepts in the evolving doctrines of morality, and the novella has sorted through the different cognitive approaches of interpreting reality (authority, reason, and experience) only to discredit all three. As each of the three possible approaches to truth and knowledge” is examined and rejected, the gap between

in some senses because it has been caused by Anselmo’s experiment, which when put into effect, has altered the “laboratory” space of the house. As I have noted, Leonela’s lover would never be in the house in the first place if, thanks to the im-petus of Anselmo’s test, Camila had not taken up with Lotario, and thus opened herself to exploitation and blackmail from Leonela.


the world and man’s powers of understand ing is increasingly pro-nounced. “El curioso impertinente” can thus be read as Cervantes’s exemplum of un-exemplarity, and when we recognize the cold and calculated nature of the thought experiment constructed in “El cu-rioso impertinente,” we find ourselves submerged in probably the most nihilistic literary world that Cervantes ever presented.

Columbia [email protected]

Works Cited

Arbesú Fernández, David. “Auctoritas y experiencia en ‘El curioso impertinente.’ ” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 25.1 (2005 [2006]): 23-43.

Avalle-Arce, Juan Bautista. “Conocimiento y vida en Cervantes.” Nuevos deslindes cervantinos. Barcelona: Ariel, 1975. 15-72.

Barbagallo, Antonio. “‘Los dos amigos,’ ‘El curioso impertinente’ y la literatura italiana.” Anales Cervantinos 32 (1994): 207-19.

Boccaccio, Giovanni. Ed. and Trans. G. H. McWilliam. London: Penguin Books, 2003.

Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quijote de la Mancha. Ed. Martín de Riquer. Barcelona: Juventud, S. A., 2003.

———. La Galatea. Ed. Francisco López Estrada and María Teresa López García-Berdoy. Madrid: Cátedra, 1995.

Clamurro, William H. “The Quijote, the ‘Curioso,’ and the Diseases of Telling.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 28 (1994): 379-93.

Gerli, Michael E. “Truth, Lies, and Representation: the Crux of ‘El curioso imper-tinente.’” Cervantes for the 21rst Century: Studies in Honor of Edward Dudley. Newark, DL: Juan de la Cuesta (2000): 107-22.

Güntert, Georges. “El curioso impertinente, novela clave del Quijote.” Cervantes. Su obra y su mundo, Actas del I Congreso Internacional sobre Cervantes. ed. M Criado de Val. Madrid: EDI—6, S. A., 1981: 783-8.

———. “El lector defraudado: Conocer y creer en ‘El curioso impertinente.’ ” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 37 (1986): 264-81.

Haydn, Hiram. The Counter Renaissance. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1950.

Jonsen, Albert R. and Stephen Toulmin. The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

Mancing, Howard. “Camila’s Story.” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 25.1 (2005 [2006]): 9-22.

Rossiello, Leonardo. “Argumentación, convencimiento y persuasion en ‘El curioso impertinente’ de Cervantes.” Romansk Forum 16.2 (2002): 167-75. 9 November


2008 <http://www.duo.uio.no/roman/Art/Rf-16-02-2/esp/Rossiello.pdf>.Sanches, Francisco. That Nothing is Known. Ed. Elaine Limbrick. Trans. Douglas

F.S. Thomson. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1988.The Electronic Universe: an educational outreach server. 19 Nov. 2007. Dr. Greg

Bothun, University of Oregon. 23 June 2008. http://zebu.uoregon.edu/. Specific link: http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~imamura/208/jan27/hup.html

167

Societal change and language history in Cervantes’ entremeses:

The status of the Golden Age vos

___________________________________________________ Jeremy King

1. Introduction

It is commonly recognized in modern scholarship that the period in which the Spanish language as a whole experienced the greatest amount of change and variation was the Golden

Age.1 It is in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that we see not only a grand and expansive literary blossoming in Spain, but also the geographical expansion of the Spanish language to a new continent, where it begins to grow and flourish in a fashion parallel to the evolution taking place in the Peninsula. Because of the drastic changes that are seen in the language during this period, it is also in the Golden Age that the issue of appropriate levels of formality and deference in speech come to the forefront of the sociolinguistic arena.

One of the most recognizable ways in which the Spanish lan-guage showed evidence of increased variation in the post-medieval period was in its system of pronominal address. Historical docu-ments bear witness to the fact that, during Spain’s Renaissance, its inhabitants arrived at the collective realization that the forms of pro-

1 For example, see Spaulding (167), among others. Note that I use the term ‘Golden Age’ (as well as ‘Renaissance’) to refer to the period often discussed by modern scholars as the ‘Early Modern Period’ in Spain’s literary history. This pe-riod spanned from approximately 1554 to 1680.

168 Jeremy King Cervantes

nominal address used since the times of the Roman Empire were no longer adequate to express the increasingly complex social relation-ships that had developed by this time. In particular, the strengthen-ing of a significant middle class2, in contrast with the relatively weak and diminutive middle class in medieval Spain ( Johnson Primorac 89), necessitated an expansion of the linguistic means by which one could address an interlocutor. As will be seen in subsequent sec-tions, both modern and Renaissance scholars disagree widely on the distribution and uses of the distinct forms of address used in the Golden Age, particularly regarding the pronominal form vos. The large amount of variation among scholarly opinions in the literature calls for an increased number of comprehensive sociohistorical stud-ies on this topic.

In the present paper, I will lay out a detailed analysis of Cervantes’ entremeses found in the (1615) collection Ocho comedias y ocho entreme-ses nuevos, nunca representados with a threefold purpose: (i) to exam-ine the use of different pronominal forms of address attested to in these works; (ii) to analyze the pragmatic and sociolinguistic moti-vations behind the employment of each address pronoun within the context of Golden Age society; and (iii) to discuss the results of this study in relation to other similar investigations and their implica-tions for sociological studies dealing with Renaissance Spain.

2. The early stages of Spanish address through the Golden Age2.1. Address in medieval SpanishThe Spanish language, having inherited its first and second person pronominal forms directly from Latin with few phonetic changes,

2 I use this term loosely, and it should not necessarily be understood in terms of its modern connotations. As Cooley notes (15-17), it is difficult to speak of specific classes or social statuses in Golden Age Spain, as these were constantly shifting based on Spaniards’ negotiation of ancient customs of personal honor and blood purity during this time period. Thus, for the purposes of this study, what I refer to as the “middle class,” Moreno refers to as the “urban middle classes” (22) and Habermas refers to as the “bourgeoisie” were, in fact, working class citizens (i.e., neither nobility nor servants).

Volume 29.1 (2009) The Golden Age vos 169

initially displayed the same simplicity in its system of pronominal address which had been seen in its predecessor: tú was used to ad-dress a single person with whom one was familiar, while vos con-tinued to be used whenever addressing more than one person, and also when addressing a single individual with deference (Bentivoglio 178-79; Penny 123).

The straightforward nature of the pronominal address system of medieval Spanish is exemplified in the Cantar de Mio Cid, the great Spanish epic poem of the twelfth century. In large part, the address system in the Cantar conforms to the societal norms already in place. In any case in which more than one person is addressed, the long-standing plural vos is used. Rodrigo also uses this form when indi-vidually addressing his cavalleros and other Christian nobles, includ-ing royalty. In fact, whenever a speaker directs him/herself toward a single interlocutor, vos appears to be the unmarked address form in the poem, being used most commonly as a form of respect between nobles and spouses. Ribas calls this the “reciprocal vos between Christian nobles” and explains that it is “an affirmation of shared power or class” (iv). For example, King Alfonse in the Cantar is al-ways addressed as vos. Rodrigo, likewise, is nearly always addressed with the deferential vos, even by the king and other nobles, likely in respect of his stature. The relationship between Rodrigo and his wife, Ximena, is also marked by a mutual vos, which Brown and Gilman refer to as an address pattern indicating solidarity. Interestingly, the form vos in the Cantar, as in other medieval works, is not only a form that indicates respect and reverence, but affection and tenderness among spouses and loved ones as well.

On the other hand, the address pronoun tú is much more marked in the Cantar and in nearly all cases is used to address those considered inferior in some way. For example, Rodrigo always calls all of his family members vos, with one exception: he uses tú with his nephew, Félez Muñoz. Both Rodrigo and the King use tú with Muño Gustioz, the Rodrigo’s criado. It is generally believed ( Johnson Primorac 273) that the reason these two receive less formal treatment


is a result of their age; they appear to be considerably younger than Rodrigo, and this would result in their being seen as having lower status in society.3

Though the Cantar de mio Cid does show occasional irregular-ity in address forms, it is clear that the bipartite tú-vos system that existed in Old Spanish is strongly exhibited in the epic work. Thus, at the time of the Cid, the second person Spanish address system is the same as it had been in Late Latin, and the same as the system of modern French:

non-deferential deferentialsingular tú vosplural vos vos

Over time, however, the social usage of these pronouns became more and more complex. The distinction between tú and vos ceased to be determined solely by social status; as Spain edged out of its medieval period and into its Renaissance, the choice of which ad-dress term to use with an interlocutor came to involve a variety of factors such as age, sex, the desire to display politeness and even the particular message one wished to convey. Penny notes that in later Old Spanish, the singular vos had widened its range of reference and was not used to express deference as often. By the fifteenth century, he posits, the reference intended by this form had become so close to the informal value of tú that Spaniards began to experiment with new deferential forms of address (124).

Eberenz, however, disagrees with this conclusion. The deprecia-tion of vos to near semantic equality with tú, he maintains, did not occur until 1600; the address form continued to be received well throughout the sixteenth century (114-15). Based on a literary analy-sis of the period, the author asserts that, throughout fifteenth cen-

3 One interesting exception to this general rule occurs when medieval per-sonages address deities and saints. In these cases, tú is used nearly invariably. In opposition to the cases cited above, it would seem that these are cases that point out the intimate nature of tú.


tury Spain, tú and vos are the two fundamental forms of address used by both the common people and the nobility (90-112). People of the estado llano, he argues, used vos as an almost exclusive singular vocative form; the only situations in which one consistently heard tú were in dialogues involving servants, when parents spoke to chil-dren, and when one addressed him/herself to an animal or an inani-mate object (90-94). The nobility, on the other hand, used tú more often, as they frequently addressed those of inferior status; in most other circumstances, including with their spouses, nobles commonly continued to utilize vos as well (95-96).

Regardless of which version of these events we choose to ac-cept, new forms of address that expressed deference began to be seen more and more in the language of the late Middle Ages. Eberenz propounds that various nominative expressions were used as voca-tives in the late Middle Ages; among these we find señor (often in combination with other terms delineating office or profession, such as cura, alcayde, and arzobispo), Vuestra Realeza, Vuestra Majestad (both used to address royalty), Vuestra Paternidad, Vuestra Reverencia, and Vuestra Señoría (102-05). Less formal forms such as Tu Merced are found in extant historical and literary documents, Penny main-tains, but the form that found favor to express a higher degree of respect and formality was Vuestra Merced4 (and its analogical plu-ral, Vuestras Mercedes) (124). These address forms all required third person verb forms (in both singular and plural), as well as the pos-sessive su(s) (Eberenz 86). The singular vos, then, became used pri-marily as a second person singular pronoun with a certain degree of courteous or deferential quality, but one that was clearly inferior to that implied by V.M. In the plural, vos passed through a differ-ent type of evolution: although this form continued to be used as the sole plural pronoun of address throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it had been all but replaced by vosotros, a result of the synthesis of the analytic vos otros, well before the end of the medieval period (Candau de Cevallos 139; Lapesa, 259; Rini 209). According to Eberenz, these ‘readjustments’ of the scope and refer-

4 Hereafter, V.M.


ence of vos represented the single most important circumstance that led to the complete overhaul of the address system in the Spanish of the Middle Ages (83).

By the beginning of the Golden Age, then, the second person pronominal forms of address had developed into the following:

non-deferential deferentialsingular tú vos / V.M.plural vosotros/as Vuestras Mercedes

2.2. Address in Golden Age SpainResnick remarks that, beginning in the fifteenth century and con-tinuing through the Golden Age, there was much indecision and vacillation in the selection of address pronouns and their corre-sponding verb forms (90). Much of the confusion that seems to have taken place during this period resulted from sociolinguistic changes in the manners and contexts in which the different second person pronouns were used. As was discussed in the previous section, vos was used in medieval Spain as a singular address form implying a certain level of deference; according to Resnick, it continued being used mainly in rural areas among family members and those who were considered inferior following this period (90). Tú, on the other hand, continued being used in urban areas and in upper-class soci-ety among family members and in intimate relationships, and also with servants and the like (Lapesa, 392; Resnick 91). There is general agreement in the literature that tú continued to be used much as it had been in the Middle Ages, as a form of address used to speak with individuals with whom one shared intimacy or familiarity, as well as with social inferiors. The singular address term that had be-gun to evolve during the late Middle Ages, V.M., emerged as a full-fledged address form around the beginning of the sixteenth century, and was adopted from the beginning of its existence as the standard form of deferential address.

Although an exact date is not agreed upon in the literature, most scholars concur that, during the Golden Age in Spain, vos continued


to be a more and more marked address form in the singular. Porto Dapena holds that in the sixteenth century, vos was largely displaced by the polite form V.M., which was still in transition (24). Spaulding adds that this slow exclusion of vos from the standard address sys-tem is clearly exhibited in Cervantes’ Golden Age masterpiece Don Quixote. According to this author, the work demonstrates that by this point, vos had come to sound like “a slap on the cheek” and was reserved for servants and others considered inferior (167-68). Likewise, Pla Cárceles argues that as early as the beginning of the Golden Age, addressing someone as vos implied either an insult, an intimate familiarity with one’s interlocutor or a social standing superior to that of the listener (245).

Castillo Mathieu, in an article on the usage of the principal ad-dress forms in the Golden Age in America, maintains that, despite the near-insulting nature of vos in the sixteenth century to which he attests in his study, this form still held a somewhat more lofty posi-tion in the social address hierarchy than tú. The author holds that later, in the seventeenth century, vos descended even further to the “más baja sima del desprestigio” (604-05). Lapesa agrees with this estimation, adding that in the Golden Age, vos had been so gravely devalued by the other singular forms that it was impolite to address someone using the form unless the person was considered inferior (392).

If these appraisals of pronominal usage in the Golden Age were accurate, one would expect to find very few examples of tú and even fewer of vos in the literature of the time, unless an author wished to portray the specific social circumstances of power and/or superior-ity through non-standard pronoun usage. In light of these strongly conclusive statements regarding the status of the Golden Age vos in particular, it is appropriate to add to the existing philological lit-erature a close examination of a largely ignored genre of literature, namely the Golden Age’s género menor par excellence, the short farce. It is my intention to examine the claims of both Renaissance gram-marians, as well as those of modern linguists and philologists, in relation to the Renaissance system of address in Spanish, as well


as the societal implications of the address patterns observed. I will begin the following section with a brief discussion of the rationale behind the selection of the present corpus and its place in the exist-ing philological literature.

3. Pronominal address in Cervantes’ entremeses3.1. Corpus for the Present StudyWithin the field of historical philology, much recent discussion and debate has taken place regarding the appropriateness of use of dis-tinct types of primary sources in diachronic investigations of lan-guage. The conclusion of many, if not most, scholars working in this field of study has been the recommendation of the employment of literary sources, and dramatic texts in particular. Culpeper and Kytö argue, for example, that the language utilized in dramatic texts ap-proximates spoken registers more closely than any other type of historical document. Salmon agrees with this estimation, remark-ing that dramatic works are the only reliable source of authentic historical varieties of language, as the dialogue included in them is composed with the express purpose of appearing spontaneous when it is performed before an audience (265)5. Although some authors, such as Fontanella de Weinberg, present the opposing viewpoint that collections of letters and other types of non-literary documents represent more accurate accounts of historical varieties of language resembling speech due to the fact that their prototypes are not “rec-reaciones literarias” (8), it is clear that dramatic texts remain the pre-ferred source of information for diachronic studies of language.

The reasons behind this preference become even more evident when one delves into the case of Golden Age primary sources. Although there has been a relative lack of studies analyzing the language of Renaissance Spain6, scholars appear to be in agreement

5 Although it is commonly acknowledged that the short farces in the cur-rent corpus were not performed prior to Cervantes’ death, this detail carries no relevance for the purposes of this study, as the language itself and not the actual on-stage performance is what is discussed here.

6 Two of the more remarkable studies of which I am aware are those by


that Golden Age literary texts provide a rich source of information for the evaluation of authentic language. In an article dealing with Cervantes’ entremeses, Rozenblat notes, for example, that “los críticos se han detenido en el arte con que Cervantes hace vivir a tipos y per-sonajes de su tiempo, la imitación tan precisa del lenguaje hablado, el humorismo…” (129). The Renaissance short farce, in fact, and those composed by Cervantes in particular, is often credited with being the literary genre of its day which was most concerned with the ac-curate display of everyday language used by the lower classes of the time (Moreno 21-22; Pedroviejo Esteruelas par. 3). It would seem that Cervantes’ interludes would be of great interest to scholars con-sidering the varieties of language employed in Golden Age Spain.

Thus, although this genre has been all but ignored in linguistics studies, it is my belief that the short farce represents the ideal starting point for a study on Golden Age pronominal address. In this section I will examine the forms of address attested to in the entremeses of Cervantes found in the 1615 collection Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos, nunca representados. In the following discussion, the examples introduced will be discussed in their conversational context within the larger context of the work in which they are found; in particular, I focus on the presence or absence of symmetry in address forms between two interlocutors, as well as their personal characteristics and the nature of their relationship, as the social implications of the address form patterns witnessed in these works is of primary interest for the present study. Finally, I discuss the results of the present in-vestigation in comparison to those of other scholars and make sug-gestions for future study on this topic.

3.2. Uses of túAs is acknowledged in most studies on interpersonal address in six-teenth and seventeenth century Spain, the pronominal form tú ap-pears in fairly predictable contexts in Golden Age primary sources. As was mentioned in the previous section, the Golden Age tú was

Larson (“Visible”) and Moreno (“Address”), both of which involve commentary on different aspects of Cervantes’ entremeses.


directed, in general, to those the speaker considered to be either clearly inferior or intimately tied to him/her. The most obvious case of a power differential between two characters found in the present collection is that between master and servant. This type of relation-ship is found in several works in the corpus, and in nearly 100% of these cases, masters speak to their servants using tú. Consider the following example from “La guarda cuidadosa”:7

(1) Amo. ¿Tienes desseo de casarte, Cristinica?Cristina. Si tengo.Amo. Pues, escoge, destos dos que se te ofrecen, el que mas tea-

gradare.Cristina. Tengo verguença.Ella. No la tengas; porque el comer y el casar ha de ser a gust0

proprio, y no a voluntad agena.Cristina. Vuessas mercedes, que me han criado, me daran marido

como me conuenga; aunque todavia quisiera escoger.

In this dialogue, Cristina is speaking with her master and mis-tress (referred to as ‘ella’ in the original text) regarding the possibility of Cristina marrying one of the two suitors who have been pursuing her. This scene takes place in front of several onlookers, including the two suitors themselves, and thus it is clear that both the mas-ter and mistress considered it to be socially appropriate to address Cristina as tú. It is also evident, however, that no disrespect is in-tended by the use of this address form: in the first line, the master uses the diminutive form of his criada’s name, Cristinica, as a voca-tive, which would indicate to a modern audience that theirs was a relationship involving significant affection. From the context of the conversation, it would appear that this use of the diminutive car-ried the same social connotation in Cervantes’ time that it does in

7 All corpus citations are taken from the (1948) edition of the entremeses by Griswold Morley. Note that all italicized lexical items within these citations serve to highlight the address pronoun used by a speaker. As Spanish is a null-subject language, many lexical forms appear without an overt corresponding pronoun.


modern dialects of the language. This dialogue also shows the only instance in “La guarda cuidadosa” in which Cristina addresses either of her amos with a pronominal address form; it is seen in the last line that she uses the plural Vuessas Mercedes8 to demonstrate respect to both of her interlocutors simultaneously. Although she does not use individual pronouns of address when speaking with either her master or mistress at any point in the play, it can be conjectured on the basis of this example that the form she would use with both her master and mistress would be V.M., the analogical singular variant of the form she actually does use here.

This hypothesis is confirmed when additional cases of address in the corpus are examined. For instance, in “El rufián viudo, llamado Trampagos,” the servant of the title character addresses his master in exactly this fashion:

(2) Vademecum. Ya està en el antesala el jarro.Trampagos. Trayle.Vademecum. No tengo taça.Trampagos. Ni Dios te la depare. ¿El cuerno de orinar no estàestrenado? Traele. ¡Que te maldiga el cielo santo! Que eres bas-

tante a deshonrar vn duque.

8 The form Vuessas Mercedes used by Cristina in (1) is a variant of the stan-dardized Vuestra(s) Merced(es) that came into widespread use during the Gold-en Age, as discussed in section 2. During the Golden Age, this compound ad-dress form passed through what Lathrop calls “una evolución desgastada” (155). Spaulding maintains that, because of frequency of use, V.M. went through some twenty transformations, which were all in existence during the Golden Age; most of these forms, often exhibiting only minor phonetic differences, spanned from the barely altered vuesa erced to the nearly unrecognizable océ (167). As is well known, the changes in this form eventually led through the intermediate stages voacé, vucé, vuced, and vusted, and, with the loss of the initial v (which is retained in the abbreviation Vd.), gave birth to the modern form usted around the beginning of the seventeenth century (Lapesa 392; Resnick 90). Spaulding observes that the modern usted was not seen in any text before 1620 and had its second appearance in 1635 (167). The modern plural form, ustedes, came into use in this period as well as an analogy of its singular counterpart (Lathrop 155).


Vademecum. Sossieguese, que no ha falta de faltar copa, y aun copas, aunque sean de sombreros.

The nonreciprocal tú—V.M. address pattern between master and servant seen above in La guarda cuidadosa is repeated here, and in the rest of the corpus; it appears that, for the purpose of interper-sonal address form selection, the sex of a servant was irrelevant in Renaissance Spain, as this pattern was held to universally. There are a number of difficulties with this analysis, however. First, the pres-ent corpus itself provides data contrary to this conclusion. The short farce “La cueva de Salamanca” shows an address pattern that does not conform to this general rule:

(3) Cristina.¡O espejo del matrimonio! A fe que si todas las casadas quisiessen tanto a sus maridos como mi señora Leonarda quiere al suyo, que otro gallo les cantasse.

Leonarda. Entra, Cristinica, y saca mi manto, que quiero acom-pañar a tu señor hasta dexarle en el coche.

Pancracio. No, por mi amor; abraçadme, y quedaos, por vida mia. Cristinica, ten cuenta de regalar a tu señora, que yo te mando vn calçado quando buelua, como tu le quisieres.

Cristina. Vaya, señor, y no lleve pena de mi señora, porque la pienso persuadir de manera a que nos holguemos, que no imagine en la falta que vuessa merced le ha de hazer.

Leonarda. ¿Holgar yo? ¡Que bien estàs en la cuenta, niña! Porque, ausente de mi gusto, no se hizieron los plazeres ni las glorias para mi; penas y dolores, si.

Pancracio. Ya no lo puedo sufrir. Quedad en paz, lumbre destos ojos, los quales no veran cosa que les de plazer, hasta bolueros a ver.

[Entrase Pancracio.]

Leonarda. ¡Allà daras, rayo, en casa de Ana Diaz! ¡Vayas y no bueluas! La yda del humo. ¡Por Dios, que esta vez no os han de valer vuestras valentias ni vuestros recatos!


Cristina. Mil vezes temi que con tus estremos auias de estoruar su partida y nuestros contentos.

This lengthy dialogue shows a pattern distinct from that of the previous examples discussed here; although Cristina is always ad-dressed as tú by both her master and mistress, she clearly speaks to her master, Pancracio, using V.M., but returns a reciprocal tú to her mistress, Leonarda. These patterns continue throughout “La cueva de Salamanca” without variation. Upon an initial consideration of example (3), it might occur to the reader that Cristina feels free to address her mistress with a distinctly informal pronominal form due to the fact that her master has left the building, and that there is no longer any need for formality, as it is well-established in the play that the two women are confidantes. This pattern of the use of more formal variants of language in public situations than are normally witnessed in the private sphere is commonly seen in many situations of linguistic interaction in literary texts; King (Formality), for ex-ample, refers to this phenomenon as the public façade, and Habermas discusses at length the differences between the public and private spheres of life. In this case, however, this hypothesis is proven to be inaccurate when, later in the entremés, the reader finds Cristina and Leonarda together in their home not only with Pancracio, but also with an outsider, the student to whom Leonarda offers assistance, and Cristina continues to address her mistress as tú in a more public setting.

The possible distinction between public and private settings is not the only concern that arises as a result of the interaction in (3). The issue of class standing also comes to the forefront of the analysis of this example due to the fact that the address situations involv-ing servants in the entremeses in the present corpus provide a dif-ferent picture of Golden Age society than do other types of literary sources. For example, King (“Ceremonia”) demonstrates that the co-medias of the time bear witness to the nearly universal mutual use of tú between upper class masters and their servants in Golden Age society. It can be postulated, then, that situations of address involv-ing servants in this time period exhibit an example of what Labov


terms linguistic insecurity. In this case, it is clear that the upper-class citizens portrayed in the comedias are unconcerned with the forms of address their servants use with them, and thus allow intimate forms of address. This type of interactional situation would fall under the umbrella of Brown and Levinson’s positive politeness, referring to a linguistic strategy designed to stimulate one’s interlocutor to feel good by exhibiting areas of common ground and solidarity with him/her. On the other hand, the middle class masters portrayed in Cervantes’ entremeses show their linguistic insecurity through their insistence on receiving deferential address forms. Although Cervantes clearly understood the distinction between social classes and what these differences implied for patterns of address in his time, it remains unclear why Cristina in example (3) is allowed to speak so informally with her mistress while the rest of the servants in the author’s short farces use the standardized polite forms, even in cases such as (1) where there are clear indications of intimacy be-tween these characters.

The second case in which a standardized use of tú is witnessed in the present corpus is in situations involving children. In the eight entremeses studied, only one example of a parent and child relation-ship is noted, that between Juan Castrado and Juana Castrada in “El retablo de las maravillas”:

(4) Juan. Señor autor, si puede, que no salgan figuras que nos alboroten. Y no lo digo por mi, sino por estas mochachas, que no les ha quedado gota de sangre en el cuerpo, de la ferozidad del toro.

Castrada. ¡Y como, padre! No pienso boluer en mi en tres dias. Ya me vi en sus cuernos, que los tiene agudos como vna lesna.

Juan. No fueras tu mi hija, y no lo vieras. […]Castrada.¿Oyes, amiga? Descubre el rostro, pues ves lo que te

importa. ¡O, licor tan sabroso! Cubrase, padre; no se moje.Juan. Todos nos cubrimos, hija.

As is suggested by this example, the address situation between


these two personages is easily characterized: Juan always addresses his daughter as tú, and Juana always addresses her father as V.M. These results are at odds with those obtained by King (Formality) and Pedroviejo Esteruelas (“Análisis”) in studies on Lope de Rueda’s pasos: these authors find that, although V.M. is used by children to address their parents in some cases, vos appears quite frequently in parent-child dialogues in the pasos. One possible reason for the dis-crepancy between the two authors’ depictions of this type of ad-dress pattern could be the ages of the different children involved: in Rueda’s “Las Aceitunas,” it is noted that Mencigüela is clearly an older child, of a sufficient age to help her parents with business matters, while Juana in “El retablo de las maravillas” appears to be a younger child from the dialogue she utters. Additionally, Lope de Rueda’s pasos were composed some five decades prior to Cervantes’ works discussed here, a significant enough lapse so as to allow for the evolution of this element of the language which had been in transi-tion in this time period.

It must be kept in mind as well that the standard address pattern in each parent-child relationship is likely characterized by the level of intimacy the parent and child share. In “Las Aceitunas,” Mencigüela is addressed by her mother as tú, while her father uses vos to speak to her (King, Formality 168). In the present entremés, Juan Castrado clearly prefers using tú with his daughter. In either case, the address found between parents and children in the lower strata of society is generally nonreciprocal. Moreno concurs with this analysis, and states that the lack of mutual address in the parent-child relation-ship seen in “El retablo de las maravillas” has to do with the setting of the play (“the rural world”) as well as the social status of the char-acters involved (“Fathers in this play are rich countrymen and town authorities”) (28). While this may be true, it is potentially problem-atic to jump to such a conclusion, given that this is the only address situation between a parent and child in the collection of entremeses analyzed in the present study, as well as in Moreno’s, in addition to the fact that this pattern does not emerge in a sister genre from roughly the same time period, the paso.


The final case of the standardized use of tú noted in Cervantes’ entremeses is that seen in conversations between female friends. There are a number of pairs of such friends found in the present corpus, all of which exhibit a reciprocal tú-tú address pattern. Cristina and Brígida in “El vizcaíno fingido,” for example, exhibit a typical mu-tual tú:

(5) Cristina. ¡Iesus! ¿Que es lo que traes, amiga doña Brigida, que parece que quieres dar el alma a su Hazedor?

Brigída. ¡Doña Cristina amiga, hazme ayre, roziame con vn poco de agua este rostro, que me muero, que me fino, que se me arranca el alma! ¡Dios sea conmigo! ¡Confession a toda priessa!

Cristina. ¿Que es esto? ¡Desdichada de mi! ¿No me diras, amiga, lo que te ha sucedido? ¿Has visto alguna mala vision? ¿Hante dado alguna mala nueua de que es muerta tu madre, o de que viene tu marido, ò hante robado tus joyas?

In addition to their standard use of tú, it should also be noted that Cristina and Brígida repeatedly use the nominal title doña when speaking to one another. This use of this title in such circumstances would seem strange in modern Spanish, as it appears to defeat the intimate purpose of the tuteo. On this issue, Moreno argues that “in the 16th century, the title {don/doña} was an attribute given by birth to a person from a particular social group, so it became part of the name whenever the interlocutors are interested in pointing out the social group to which the speaker belongs” (36). She later adds that Cristina and Brígida are prostitutes; if this is in fact the case, it seems quite odd that the two women address one another with the form doña + first name, as do the male characters in the play, if this title truly has to do with the womens’ social standing and their place in the Court that Moreno posits (38).

The use of a mutual tú is also seen among pairs of younger fe-male characters. Juana Castrada and Teresa Repolla in “El Retablo de las maravillas” exchange this familiar form as well:


(6) Castrada: Aqui te puedes sentar, Teresa Repolla amiga, que tendremos el retablo enfrente; y pues sabes las condiciones que han de tener los miradores del retablo, no te descuydes, que seria vna gran desgracia.

Teresa: Ya sabes, Iuana Castrada, que soy tu prima, y no digo mas. Tan cierto tuuiera yo el cielo como tengo cierto ver todo aquello que el retablo mostrare. Por el siglo de mi madre, que me sacasse los mismos ojos de mi cara si alguna desgracia me aconteciesse. ¡Bonita soy yo para esso!

Castrada: Sossiegate, prima, que toda la gente viene.

A reciprocal tú-tú pattern is also witnessed between the three women depicted in “El rufián viudo” (called La Repulida, La Pizpita and La Mostrenca in the play). Although these women appear in the short farce for the sole purpose of serving as possible love interests for the title character, Trampagos, the exact nature of the relation-ship between them is unclear. At one point in the play, Mostrenca calls Pizpita amiga, which leads the reader to believe that the women are more than casual acquaintances.

It is evident from the cases presented here that, in Golden Age society, it was more important for female friends to mutually ex-press intimacy through their use of tú rather than to show deference through the use of more formal address formulas. In Brown and Levinson’s terms, the female characters’ standardized reciprocal use of tú in Cervantes’ interludes constitute a strategy of positive polite-ness. As will be seen in section 3.4, the same cannot be said of the relationships between the men of Renaissance Spain.

3.3. Uses of V. m.In addition to the cases discussed in section 3.2 (those of servants addressing their masters and children addressing their parents), there are a small number of additional situations in which the form V.M. appears to be generalized in Cervantes’ entremeses. The first of these is seen in any dialogue in which a character speaks with an interlocutor of significantly higher power, normally by virtue of the


position that the interlocutor holds. In this type of situation, V.M. is used nearly without exception. The most obvious example of this type of address situation is seen in “El juez de los divorcios”; the judge who presides over divorce cases in this short farce holds power over his litigants, a fact his litigants recognize when addressing him:

(7) Cirujano. Por quatro causas bien bastantes vengo a pedir a vuessa merced, señor juez, haga diuorcio entre mi y la señora Aldonça de Minjaca, mi muger, que està presente.

Juez. ¡Resoluto venis! Dezid las quatro causas.

In this dialogue, a man known only as ‘the surgeon’ explains to the judge that he is seeking a divorce from his wife, doña Minjaca. It is evident from this conversation that, even though the doctor, be-cause of his level of education and experience in a professional field, would likely receive the respectful V.M. under most circumstances, in the courtroom he uses this form and receives vos from the judge in recognition of the judge’s status. This pattern is seen throughout “El juez de los divorcios:” all of the litigants in this play address the judge as V.M., and regardless of their status, he returns the form vos to them.

A somewhat different scenario involving power relationships is presented in “El retablo de las maravillas,” however: in this short play, a number of characters of differing levels of power, including a governor, a mayor and a town alderman all take part in the dialogue. The governor in this entremés uses V.M. to speak to Juan Castrado, the alderman, which seems understandable, as Castrado holds a po-sition of some power himself:

(8) Gobernador. Señor regidor Iuan Castro, yo determino, de-baxo de su buen parecer, que esta noche se despose la señora Juana Castrada, su hija, de quien yo soy padrino, y, en regozijo de la fiesta, quiero que el señor Montiel muestre en vues-tra casa su retablo. Juan. Esso tengo yo por seruir al señor gouernador, con cuyo parecer me conuengo, entablo y arrimo,


aunque aya otra cosa en contrario. Moreno makes note of the patterns of address between the

town authorities in “El retablo de las maravillas” and comments that there appears to be a hierarchy among those in power. Her ba-sis for this judgment is the fact that, after addressing the alderman Juan Castrado as V.M., the governor then switches to vos in the dia-logue seen above in example (8) (30). There are two difficulties with Moreno’s analysis, however: first, the governor’s switch from V.M. to vos in (8) does not take place “at some point,” as she puts it, but rath-er it takes place in the same sentence as two uses of V.M. Although her estimation that the governor changes the form with which he addresses the alderman mid-sentence is a feasible explanation for what we see in the above dialogue, it is also grammatically possible that when the governor speaks of vuestra casa, he is referring to the house which Juan and his daughter Juana share. In other words, it is possible that the governor here switches from V.M. to the plural vosotros and not to the singular vos, thus speaking by implication to both Juan and his daughter. This interpretation is strengthened by the fact that the possessive vuestra is used directly after the governor mentions Juana. Of course, this explanation also has its difficulties; since it is seen in (8) that the governor normally addresses Juan as V.M., we would expect him to use the respectful plural address form Vuestras Mercedes when speaking to a group of which Juan Castrado is a member instead of the more informal vosotros. Still, it seems more logical to conclude that, instead of changing address forms mid-sentence, the governor simply changes the grammatical person to whom he is referring, particularly since both Juan and Juana are directly or indirectly addressed in his utterance.

The second issue that arises with Moreno’s analysis is that the above quoted dialogue is the only instance in “El retablo de las mara-villas” in which the governor directly addresses the alderman; the three examples of direct address in this citation constitute the only dialogue between the two men. We cannot know whether or not Moreno’s contention regarding a hierarchy of power is actually the


case strictly based on their address forms because, although the gov-ernor directly addresses Juan Castrado as well as some of the other authority figures in the entremés, none of the other power figures directly address him at any point. In fact, the only other character who does employ a form of direct address with the governor is the quartermaster (el furrier de compañías); in their very brief interaction, he and the governor exchange a mutual V.M.:

(9) Furrier. ¿Quien es aqui el señor gouernador? Gobernador. Yo soy. ¿Que manda vuessa merced?Furrier. Que luego al punto mande hazer aloxamiento para

treynta hombres de armas que llegaran aqui dentro de media hora, y aun antes, que ya suena la trompeta. Y a Dios.

This example serves to demonstrate that V.M. was not only used in Golden Age Spain to speak to those in positions of significant power, but was also used in many cases between those who were not previously acquainted. This type of address situation arises in several of the plays in the present collection, and V.M. is used in the major-ity of the cases studied. A typical case of two strangers addressing one another for the first time is seen in “La guarda cuidadosa”:

(10) Amo. Galan, ¿que quiere o que busca a esta puerta?Soldado. Quiero mas de lo que seria bueno, y busco lo que no

hallo. Pero ¿quien es vuessa merced que me lo pregunta?Amo. Soy el dueño desta casa.Soldado. ¿El amo de Cristinica?Amo. El mismo.Soldado. Pues lleguese vuessa merced a esta parte, y tome este

emboltorio de papeles, y aduierta que ay dentro van las infor-maciones de mis seruicios, con veynte y dos fees de veynte y dos generales debaxo de cuyos estandartes he seruido, amen de otras treynta y quatro de otros tantos maestres de campo que se han dignado de honrarme con ellas.


From this dialogue, it is evident that these two men have never met prior to this moment, and it is also clear that both instinctually feel that it is appropriate, and possibly even required by societal obli-gations, for them to exchange a mutual V.M. This reasoning partially explains the mutual V.M. seen in (9) as well. This pattern of address is common in many modern dialects of Spanish as well; a mutual usted is often used between two interlocutors who have just met and know little about the other’s social status. This is the case in (10) even though the amo addresses the soldier as galán, which might sound odd to modern speakers of the language, as it appears to negate the formality implied by usted. In Golden Age Spain, however, this was clearly an acceptable combination of pronominal and nominal ad-dress forms. In (10), it is also seen that, even after each interlocutor has identified himself, the employment of V.M. continues, which implies that this was not only an address form to use when meeting someone for the first time, but also in situations requiring increased levels of formality.

3.4. Uses of VosAs has been discussed in previous sections, the pronominal form of address from this time period which has received the most attention in the scholarly literature is vos. Given that so many studies have ar-rived at conflicting conclusions regarding this pronoun, an in-depth discussion of the contribution the current corpus can make to the determination of the status of the Golden Age vos is thus warranted.

Possibly the most notable use of vos in the present corpus is that between spouses. This form is used by wives when speaking to their husbands nearly without exception, and it is also the preferred form used by husbands as well. Consider the following example from “El juez de los divorcios”:

(11) D.a Guiomar. ¡Pues no! ¿Y por que no me aueys vos de guar-dar a mi decoro y respeto, siendo tan buena como soy?

Soldado. Oýd, señora doña Guiomar. Aqui, delante destos se-


ñores, os quiero dezir esto: ¿porque me hazeis cargo de que sois buena, estando vos obligada a serlo, por ser de tan buenos padres nacida, por ser christiana, y por lo que deueys a vos misma?

In this interaction, Doña Guiomar and her husband (“the Soldier”) argue about their reasons for wanting a divorce. As is the case with the rest of the couples in this play, these two characters exchange a mutual vos. It was noted earlier that some scholars posit that public communication is often more formal than that which takes place behind closed doors; since the dialogue in (11) takes place in a courtroom in front of a judge and several other witnesses, it is thus possibly subject to the effects of the public façade noted in sec-tion 3.2. It is therefore prudent to seek additional examples to con-firm this finding. In (12), a partial restatement of (3) above, a further example of dialogue between spouses is seen, this time from “La cueva de Salamanca”:

(12) Pancracio. Mi angel, si gustas que me quede, no me mouerè de aqui mas que vna estatua.

Leonarda. No, no, descanso mio; que mi gusto està en el vuestro, y por agora mas que os vays que no os quedeys, pues es vuestra honra la mia. […] Entra, Cristinica, y saca mi manto, que quiero acompañar a tu señor hasta dexarle en el coche.

Pancracio. No, por mi amor; abraçadme, y quedaos, por vida mia.

The address pattern seen here is slightly different than that noted in “El juez de los divorcios”: in (12), Pancracio addresses his wife as tú but subsequently switches to vos, while Leonarda consistently re-sponds with vos. A number of authors (Blas Arroyo 239-40; Brown and Gilman 273-76; Moreno 38-41; Placencia 171) have noted that, in situations involving heightened emotion or irony, address patterns in many languages shift and forms that are not normally used with a given interlocutor come into play. As Pancracio is preparing to leave on a trip in (12) and is comforting his wife, whom he believes to be


distraught over his departure, it is possible that his use of tú in this conversation is justified on these grounds.

However, it is seen that Pancracio continues to switch between tú and vos when speaking to Leonarda throughout “La cueva de Salamanca,” while Leonarda uses vos with her husband without ex-ception. This pattern is repeated in the entremés “El viejo celoso”: the elderly Cañizares switches between tú and vos with his wife Lorenza throughout this play, while the latter uses vos nearly exclu-sively with her husband. King (Formality 192) and Moreno (26-27) have previously argued that social status and/or socioeconomic class are of particular importance when considering the forms of address used between spouses in the Golden Age, as different social classes have different semantic rules for their usage. These authors conclude that a reciprocal tú-tú address pattern is common among the nobil-ity, while middle-class couples tend to prefer a mutual vos, again demonstrating their linguistic insecurity. Notwithstanding these findings, it has been seen that the current corpus manifests a strong tendency for middle-class husbands to waver between these two ad-dress forms, even though middle-class wives appear to be resolute in their use of vos. As Cervantes’ husbands do not appear to have any specific pragmatic motivation behind their employment of one pro-noun or the other, it can be concluded that the patterns witnessed in the entremeses are the result of the author’s awareness of a shifting paradigm in his time, to which the husband-wife relationship was particularly vulnerable.

A second widespread use of vos in the entremeses is that seen be-tween male friends. This type of situation is perhaps best exemplified in the dialogues between Solórzano and his friend Quiñones in “El vizcaíno fingido”:

(13) Quiñones. Alto. Pues vos lo quereys, sea assi. Digo que yo os ayudare en todo quanto me aueys dicho, y sabre fingir tam-bién como vos, que no lo puedo mas encarecer. ¿Adonde vays agora?

Solórzano. Derecho en casa de la ninfa; y vos no salgays de casa,


que yo os llamarè a su tiempo.Quiñones. Alli estarè clauado esperando.

The reciprocal vos seen in (13) continues throughout the entire play; these male characters, although they make use of both tú and V.M. with other interlocutors, address one another exclusively with vos. Neither Cervantes nor his contemporaries vary from this pat-tern in many cases; a mutual vos between male friends has been witnessed in several different genres of Golden Age literature (King, “Ceremonia”).

It is evident from the entremeses, however, that the reciprocal vos was not only the standard form of address for use between two male friends in Golden Age society, but also between two men in general. In the short play “La elección de los alcaldes de Daganzo,” the town authorities and candidates for alderman address one another as vos nearly exclusively, even in the midst of business dealings:

(14) Panduro. Mil setencias ha dicho censorinas.Algarroba. De Caton Censorino: bien ha dicho el regidor

Panduro.Panduro. Reprochadme.Algarroba. Su tiempo se vendra.Estornudo. Nunca acà venga. ¡Terrible inclinacion es,

Algarroua, la vuestra en reprochar!

The only character in “La elección de los alcaldes de Daganzo” that makes use of V.M. in business situations is the nitpicking mayor Algarroba. Speaking strictly of issues of characterization, it would be logical for Algarroba, who constantly reproaches and corrects the improper speech of others, to use ultra-polite forms of address in business situations. The address norm for the rest of the businessmen is a reciprocal vos.

The dialogue in examples (11)-(14), as well as the situation dis-cussed in section 3.3 above in relation to “El retablo de las maravil-las,” serve to highlight the multifaceted nature of vos in the Golden


Age. It is evident that this address pronoun served multiple purposes and was used in a wide variety of social and private situations, a number of which are witnessed in Cervantes’ short farces.

4. ConclusionsThe direct address system of the Spanish Golden Age, far from be-ing straightforward, was a complicated sociological system involving multiple levels of complexity. By the beginning of this period, the appropriate determination of which address form to use in a given situation had become an increasingly complex task due to the exis-tence of numerous confounding factors involving social change and development.

It can be deduced from the present corpus that, in some cases, the reasoning behind the choice of certain pronouns was nearly au-tomatic. Tú, for instance, continued to be used much as it had been throughout the nation’s medieval period, namely, with inferiors. The use of this form with children and servants in Cervantes’ entremeses, then, should be no surprise to any scholar of Peninsular history. On the flip side, servants’ employment of V.M. with their masters and children’s use of this form with their parents are expected as well, given that this form came into being just prior to the Golden Age to express a sense of formality and deference that the previously exist-ing forms had lost.

The Golden Age vos clearly presents us with the most socio-logically intriguing case of pronominal address in the present corpus. Spouses’ mutual employment of this form has inspired some confu-sion on the part of modern philologists, particularly considering the widespread view regarding the denigrating value of this pronoun in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.9 However, this confusion is easily resolved if we take into consideration that this form had been used between spouses for centuries in Spain and implied not only mutual respect but also affection for one’s partner.10 It is tempting,

9 See section 2 for a detailed discussion of these scholarly opinions. 10 See section 2.1 regarding the use of this pronoun in medieval Spanish

literature.


from a modern point of view, to associate the occasional use of tú on the part of husbands in the present corpus with increased levels of affection for their wives; among the working classes, however, this practice was not common, especially when we keep in mind that vos was the address form chosen to fulfill this function, not tú. It is more likely that this use of tú, as has been seen in its use with children, was intended to communicate a specific social structure to middle-class wives. This interpretation is much more in line with historians’ view of Golden Age Spain as a male-dominated society in which women were significantly constrained and constantly reminded that their salvation depended upon their obedience and performance in the home (Barnes-Karol and Spadaccini 234-35).

In addition to the nearly exclusive use of vos between spouses, the reciprocal use of this form between men in business dealings during this period has been alternatively ignored or denied in mod-ern criticism. Nevertheless, the present corpus bears witness to its standard employment in this type of social situation. As has been seen, Cervantes’ entremeses also testify to a mutual use of this form in informal conversations between male friends in the Renaissance period. The distinction between the pronominal forms used by men and women with same-sex friends reflects an important theoretical point discussed in the pioneering study of Brown and Levinson on linguistic politeness: from these data, it is clear that in Golden Age Spain, it was more important for female friends to mutually express intimacy through their use of tú, whereas male friends used vos to show respect for one another as equals. In Brown and Levinson’s terms, women’s mutual use of tú in Cervantes’ interludes was a strat-egy of positive politeness, while men’s use of vos shows more at-tention to the negative face of their interlocutors. Once again, the factor of the sex of both speaker and interlocutor shows itself to be a significant determiner of the linguistic form that is employed.

From the preceding discussion, it is evident that the popu-larly expressed opinion that vos was an address form that, during the Golden Age, descended to “la más baja sima del desprestigio” (Castillo Mathieu 605), is not confirmed by Cervantes’ entremeses.


Far from being a form that was used to insult, this pronoun was clearly well-received by a variety of interlocutors in nearly all social situations until at least the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Considering the specific and situationally required uses of tú and V.M. evidenced by this corpus, it is my contention that vos was the standard, unmarked form of pronominal address in Golden Age Spain and was appropriate for use whenever a significant power dif-ferential between two interlocutors was not at play. Moreover, vos appears to be a sort of neutral form of address between men during this time period, both in personal and professional relationships. The conclusion of Brown and Gilman that what they term the “power semantic” which required the use of nonreciprocal patterns of ad-dress was predominant in all of Europe until “well into the nine-teenth century” (259) is therefore also shown to be inaccurate on the basis of these data. It is possible that the inapplicability of Brown and Gilman’s generalizations to Golden Age Spanish is related to the tripartite system of pronominal address that existed in Spain at this time (i.e., tú-vos-V.M.), rather than a bipartite system used by other European languages (tu-vous in French, for instance), al-though a discussion of this issue falls outside the scope of this paper.

Although the results of the present study must be confirmed by further research into the language of Golden Age Spain, particularly from the vantage point of distinct literary and non-literary corpora, it has been seen that Cervantes’ entremeses provide a rich source of naturalistic dialogue for use in studies on Renaissance Spanish. As a master of his art, Cervantes provided us with a unique view of the language used in his time. Although his short farces have been neglected in philological studies of language,

Cervantes’ diligence and attention to the minute details of in-terpersonal communication hold particular significance for modern theories of linguistics.

Louisiana State [email protected]


Works Cited

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Bentivoglio, Paola. “Spanish forms of address in the sixteenth century.” Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems. Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 107. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2003.

Blas Arroyo, José Luis. “Un ejercicio de sociolingüística interaccional: el caso de los pronombres de tratamiento en el español actual.” Verba: Anuario Galego de Filología 22 (1995): 229-52.

Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.

Brown, Roger W. and Albert Gilman. “The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity.” Style in Language. Ed. Thomas A. Sebok. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960. 253-77.

Candau de Cevallos, María del C. Historia de la Lengua Española. Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1985.

Castillo Mathieu, Nicolás. “Testimonios del uso de ‘Vuestra Merced’, ‘Vos’, y ‘Tú’ en América (1500-1650).” Thesaurus 37 (1982): 602-44.

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King, Jeremy. “Ceremonia y cortesía en la literatura del Siglo de Oro: un estudio de las formas de tratamiento en español.” Formas y fórmulas de tratamiento en el mundo hispánico. Ed. Martin Hummel, Bettina Kluge and María Eugenia Vázquez Laslop. Mexico City: Colegio de México, 2008.

———. “Formality and Politeness in the Golden Age: A Study of Direct AddressPatterns in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Spain.” Diss. UC Santa Barbara,

2006.Labov, William. Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania, 1972.


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197

La oralidad y su aplicación al Quijote han sido objeto de una nutrida atención crítica en los últimos años. Técnicas como la del cuento de nunca acabar, los refranes, las oportunas in-

terrupciones que dejan al espectador deseoso de escuchar el resto de la historia o los capítulos que no coinciden con lo narrado apuntan a técnicas procedentes de la tradición oral, y que contribuyen a hacer que el texto efectúe, según Mikhael Bakhtin, “all the artistic possi-bilities of heteroglot and internally dialogized novelistic discourse” (324). En cuanto a sus protagonistas, la crítica ha puesto de relieve las dispares matrices culturales de la inmortal pareja. James A. Parr señala que, a pesar de que en Don Quijote Cervantes privilegie la es-critura, la oralidad “is quite literally there from the outset, informing writing, reading it aloud, invading its domain, parodying it” (171). Elias L. Rivers destaca como el diálogo, epicentro de la novela, des-cansa en la dialéctica fraguada entre un “intense reader of literature, who talks in a bookish style, and an illiterate rustic, who speaks the substandar Spanish of a rich oral culture (113). En suma, el caballero es un hidalgo altamente alfabetizado, un “texto en sí mismo,” mien-tras que su escudero es un campesino carente de educación formal. Este dialogismo cultural es lógico en una obra publicada cuando todavía la nueva tecnología de la imprenta “no había suplido por completo a la oralidad como principal medio de difusión cultural” (Martín Morán 338).

El presente trabajo se divide en tres partes que comparten un

Don Quijote, Felipe II y la tecnología de la escritura

__________________________________________________ Jesús Botello

198 JesÚs Botello Cervantes

tema común: la (difícil) convivencia de la oralidad y la escritura en Don Quijote. Primero, examina la narración infinita de la pastora Torralba y la re-creación de la carta de Dulcinea desde la perspec-tiva de las técnicas juglarescas. Segundo, estudia algunas interrup-ciones atendiendo a las peculiares circunstancias de la performance oral, como una técnica retórica del juglar oral para captar y mantener atención del círculo de oyentes. Como conclusión, interpreta la in-capacidad de don Quijote para adecuarse a las circunstancias como una velada crítica a la fuerte burocratización llevada a cabo durante el reinado de Felipe II.

En la Primera Parte de la novela, tras la aventura del cuerpo muerto, don Quijote y Sancho llegan de noche a un recóndito prado. Un ruido incesante que “hiere y lastima los oídos” -los batanes- atri-bula al escudero. Para su horror, don Quijote le anuncia su preten-sión de ir a averiguar la causa del ruido. Mediante algunos lloriqueos y súplicas, Sancho consigue retener a su amo. Con el fin de entre-tenerlo, comienza el cuento “sin fin” de la pastora Torralba. Hasta cierto punto, se puede decir que Sancho actúa como un juglar que va a realizar una “performance” ante su receptor, don Quijote. En pri-mer lugar, Sancho comienza con preparativos laudatorios análogos a los que Paul Zumthor registra en la vasta mayoría de poemas épicos medievales (241): reclamando la atención de su auditorio, y preten-diendo -en este caso de forma socarrona- que va a narrar un suceso extraordinario: “yo me esforzaré a decir una historia que, si la acierto a contar y no me van a la mano, es la mejor de las historias; y estéme vuestra merced atento, que ya comienzo” (212).

No obstante, como sugiere Michel Moner, en las narraciones orales “la mirada y el gesto importan tanto como el manejo del ver-bo” (121). De aquí la magistral presentación que hace Sancho de la pastora de su cuentecillo mediante una técnica visual que -anacróni-camente- podría calificarse de “cinematográfica”: “[Torralba] era una moza rolliza, zahareña, y tiraba algo a hombruna, porque tenía unos pocos de bigotes, que parece que ahora la veo” (213). Es sabido que en las narraciones orales como esta, el enunciador se sitúa como “testi-go” de la historia, para conferirle a esta mayor credibilidad frente al

Volume 29.1 (2009) La tecnología de la escritura 199

receptor (Zumthor 31). La respuesta de don Quijote deja claro que ha caído presa de la estrategia retórica urdida por Sancho: “—Luego ¿conocístela tú? —dijo don Quijote. “—No la conocí yo —respon-dió Sancho—, pero quien me contó este cuento me dijo que era tan cierto y verdadero, que podía bien, cuando lo contase a otro, afirmar y jurar que lo había visto todo” (213). Sancho emplea un mecanismo típico de las sociedades orales, donde los individuos aprenden es-cuchando y repitiendo el material oral legado por las generaciones que les precedieron, y si recuerda la historia de Torralba es porque lo que le contaron tiene relevancia para él, ya que tiene una aplicación práctica inmediata en un marco referencial concreto -en este caso, retener a don Quijote a su lado. A esta característica, típica delos pueblos orales, se le ha dado el nombre de “homeostasis”1 (Ong 46).

Por otra parte, sabemos que, idealmente, el producto verbal de Sancho es una historia infinita. Esta hiperabundancia de la palabra hablada se relaciona con lo que Marcel Jousse (1925) denominó “cul-turas verbomotoras,” que son aquellas en las que las acciones y las actitudes hacia el mundo están fuertemente asociadas a la palabra hablada y a la interacción humana. Para que esto suceda, el juglar/Sancho debe contar con la participación de su interlocutor: debe invocar la atención de su audiencia, excitar su curiosidad y confron-tar su horizonte de expectativas. En este caso, don Quijote requiere originalidad y Sancho rehúye la innovación: ambos se comportan de acuerdo a las estructuras cognitivas condicionadas por la expo-sición o no a la nueva tecnología de la escritura2. Pero la estructura

1 “Oral societies live very much in a present which keeps itself in equilib-rium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance” (Ong 46).

2 Afirma Jack Goody que una característica de las culturas letradas que las distingue de las tradicionales es “its enormous bulk and its vast historical depth” (57). Ya se tenía esa percepción en la época de Cervantes; Covarrubias afirma que “hanse dado tantos a escribir que ya no hay donde quepan los libros […] ni hay cabeza que pueda comprender ni aun los títulos de ellos” (817). Este enorme y variado caudal de conocimientos -que sólo pueden poseer las culturas alfabetiza-das- podría aclarar el afán de innovación de don Quijote, actitud impensable en sociedades como la de Sancho que viven en un eterno presente.


tradicional que vertebra este episodio exige la estrecha colaboración de ambos. Es decir, que tanto emisor (Sancho) como receptor (don Quijote) realizan dialógicamente la performance, o historia vocaliza-da. No obstante, la premisa de Sancho -contar las cabras- nació con una intención burlesca que no podía cumplirse de ningún modo. De aquí la interrupción de Sancho y el subsiguiente enojo de don Quijote: “¿De modo —dijo don Quijote— que ya la historia es aca-bada?—Tan acabada es como mi madre —dijo Sancho” (215). La in-terrupción -en este caso asociada con la muerte- se debe a la falta de colaboración del receptor, que no ha respetado el pacto narrativo acordado previamente. Al mismo tiempo, Cervantes parece criticar quizá la impericia de don Quijote, convertido aquí en un “desocupa-do oidor” que no sabe interpretar los signos postulados por Sancho.

En el capítulo XXVI, Sancho Panza vuelve a actuar como un juglar en su estupenda recreación de la carta de amores que don Quijote le manda a Dulcinea. El escudero no encuentra el libro de memoria donde iban la carta de amores y la cédula comercial de li-branza. El cura y el barbero le piden que intente recordarla, y Sancho les tranquiliza diciendo que “él la sabía casi de memoria, de la cual se podría trasladar donde y cuando quisiesen” (296). Como es sabi-do desde el estudio de las prevaricaciones idiomáticas por Amado Alonso, Sancho actúa a golpe de etimología popular, acomodando las palabras desconocidas a su repertorio personal tradicional (10). Pero Sancho aquí se revela además como un artista potencial, meta-morfoseando la ya de por sí paródica carta de su amo en un nuevo texto mucho más “realista.” Supone, si se quiere, un segundo grado de parodia que, irónicamente, parece más cercana al referente objeti-vo, Dulcinea. Y lo que le permite esto es su absoluto analfabetismo. A este respecto, Albert Lord subraya en The Singer of Tales que los modernos bardos yugoslavos no recuerdan sus poemas “palabra por palabra.” La idea de texto estable “does not include the wording, which to him has never been fixed […] He builds his performan-ce […] on the stable skeleton of narrative” (99). Es decir, para es-tos juglares ágrafos cada recitación se convierte en una re-creación, aunque la historia siga siendo esencialmente la misma. Sancho usa


un procedimiento análogo con una intención paródica, pues subs-tituye “soberana” por “sobajada”; “llagado de las telas del corazón” por “lego falto de sueño” y “amada enemiga mía” por “ingrata y muy desconocida hermosa,” estableciendo así un texto hablado a partir de otro escrito3. Sancho se comporta aquí como un juglar que obtiene cierto reconocimiento por parte de su improvisada audiencia, el cura y el barbero, que incluso solicitan que repita la actuación: “No poco gustaron los dos de ver la buena memoria de Sancho Panza, y ala-báronsela mucho y le pidieron que dijese la carta otras dos veces.” Se dice que Sancho/juglar dice “otros tres mil disparates” (296), lo que equivale a afirmar que reformula de nuevo la carta y produce nuevas versiones o “textos” de la versión escrita por don Quijote, que, en términos filológicos vendría a ser el texto alfa.

Por otra parte, debe mencionarse un factor que apunta sin amba-ges a la naturaleza performativa de esta producción oral: su elemento somático. Ong incide en este aspecto al ocuparse de los procesos mnemotécnicos en las culturas orales: “[O]ral memory has a high somatic componente […] Spoken words are always modifications of a total, existential situation, which always engages the body” (énfasis mío 67) Es otras palabras: para Sancho lo corpóreo y lo cinético ope-ran como prolongación de la palabra hablada:

Paróse Sancho Panza a rascar la cabeza para traer a la memoria la carta, y ya se ponía sobre un pie y ya sobre otro, unas veces miraba al suelo, otras al cielo, y al cabo de haberse roído la mitad de la yema de un dedo, teniendo suspensos a los que esperaban que ya la dijese, dijo al cabo de grandísimo rato. (296 énfasis mío)

Los movimientos del cuerpo evidencian el componente somáti-co mencionado por Ong. Además, mediante esa mirada móvil reple-ta de sentido, dirigida unas veces “al suelo” y otras “al cielo,” el juglar/

3 Podría aquí citarse el fenómeno de la transposición, “accidente cotidi-ano en el oficio de los recitadores,” según Jousse. Esta se hace a menudo “por la inserción inconsciente de elementos parásitos” (221). En el caso de Sancho, obvia-mente, con intención burlesca.


Sancho anuncia que un objeto de deseo idealizado, Dulcinea, va a trocarse en un objeto del mundo de los bajos sentidos. No obstante, la continua oscilación entre la “cabeza” (alto) y el “pie” (bajo) sugiere que Dulcinea participa de ambas naturalezas, la ideal y la real. Esto remite al inherente carácter proteico de la tradición oral, en la que no existe, por definición, forma única de un texto sino un continuo hacerse de estas historias vocalizadas.

Por otra parte, la principal función de la interrupción en Don Quijote es despertar la curiosidad del lector y/o confundirle, señalar la pericia o no del enunciador en el arte de narrar, y la del receptor en adaptarse a las circunstancias de la enunciación. Hay que recordar que para resolver el problema de que la gente no se les vaya durante los descansos, las interrupciones del juglar en el momento oportuno servían para mantener la atención del círculo de oyentes, que paga-rían así para saber el final de la historia. Sabido es que estas técnicas se utilizan en las novelas de caballerías y en Las mil y una noches, pero Moner recuerda el entronque de este tipo de obras con la tra-dición oral. Por otra parte, la estrofa del género épico era una forma poética extremadamente moldeable, adaptada a las condiciones de su producción oral y nacida en ese contexto comunicativo (Rychner 69). Los juglares podían cortar bruscamente su narración si lo juzga-ban conveniente, con lo que la duración de las sesiones podía variar mucho según las circunstancias, ya que “[N]o importa quién puede interrumpir al juglar o forzarlo a irse sin haber terminado su canto” (Rychner 48).

Así, antes de comenzar su historia, Cardenio pide no ser in-terrumpido, condición que prometen todos y que se conecta en la imaginación de don Quijote con la historia truncada de la pasto-ra Torralba: “Estas razones del Roto trujeron a la memoria a don Quijote el cuento que le había contado su escudero, cuando no acer-tó el número de las cabras que habían pasado el río, y se quedó la his-toria pendiente” (262). Además de su desaliñado aspecto, el nombre “Roto” alude a la “rotura” o la “interrupción” de su historia, tanto a nivel vital (abandono, huida a Sierra Morena) como a nivel ficcional (interrupción). Pero además su historia de amor con Luscinda puede


leerse como un paralelo de la de Torralba y Lope, y su final feliz como un hipotético desenlace que habría podido tener el cuento “sin fin” de Sancho. No obstante, al equiparar Cervantes ambos episodios (uno con final y otro sin él) puede pensarse que el mismo texto proble-matizase el “final feliz” que se propone para la historia de Cardenio y, de igual modo, cuestionase el “final truncado” de Torralba. Este jugueteo expansivo de reflejos infinitos provoca que el lector sienta “curiosidad” por estas convergencias y/o disonancias que pululan en Don Quijote, y que tanto recuerdan al estilo logocéntrico típico de las culturas orales. Mas es precisamente la brusca interrupción del relato del Roto la que dispara la curiosidad de don Quijote, que pregunta al cabrero “si sería posible hallar a Cardenio, porque quedaba con grandísimo deseo de saber el fin de su historia” (270).

Cabe preguntarse porqué don Quijote está envuelto en varias de estas interrupciones. Su incapacidad para contar las cabras hace que Sancho interrumpa la historia de la pastora Torralba. Además, no mantiene la promesa que hace a Cardenio de no interrumpir el hilo de su historia, lo que provoca ipso facto que el Astroso termine el relato que estaba contando. Asimismo, su discurso de las armas y las letras viene a ser una interrupción de la historia del cautivo. Incluso su temeraria liberación de los galeotes viene a “interrumpir” en cierto modo el decurso normal de la justicia. Este comportamiento denota la característica principal de don Quijote a lo largo de la novela: su incapacidad para adecuarse a las circunstancias del momento, y nos lleva a la sección final del presente trabajo.

La crítica cervantina ha tendido a buscar paralelismos entre Carlos V y don Quijote. El interés del Emperador por las nove-las de caballería, la política imperialista de ambos o el sobrenombre “Quijote,” en alusión quizá a la prominente quijada del rey Aubsburgo, han motivado esta plausible comparación4. No obstante, se obvia que la misma quijada tenía su hijo y la misma su nieto. También, que a pesar de no ostentar el título de Emperador -y quizá más por eso- El

4 Frederick de Armas alude a la relación entre el apelativo “Quijote” y la quijada de los Aubsburgo, y menciona que uno de los soldados favoritos del Em-perador se llamaba precisamente Luis Quijada (118).


Rey Prudente (o el Demonio del Mediodía como fue rebautizado en los Países Bajos)- fue percibido por el resto de potencias europeas como un monarca peligrosamente expansionista. Asimismo, que la vida de Cervantes (1547-1616) coincidió en el tiempo con el reinado de Felipe (1556-1598), y mucho menos con el de su padre (1516-1556). En cuanto a la literatura de caballerías, Henry Kamen recuerda que Felipe sintió -como su padre, y como don Quijote- una profunda devoción por los libros de este género, y en especial, por el Amadís de Gaula, obra que el rey aprobó como parte de las lecturas obligatorias para su hijo—el futuro Felipe III—cuando éste comenzó a aprender francés. El hispanista británico recalca que “Whenever possible, he [Felipe] presided over tournaments at court” (196), llegando a veces a asumir el rol de caballero andante, como en la fantasía caballeresca que el monarca celebró inspirada en el Amadís, que incluía comba-tes a caballo, rescates de doncellas en apuros y banquetes servidos por hermosas ninfas (42). Eran además vox pupuli las reclusiones filipinas en el Escorial, sobre todo al declinar de su vida, rodeado de documentos, lo que se puede asociar a los encierros quijotescos en casa leyendo. Parece lógico, pues, conjeturar a un don Quijote como producto del contexto sociocultural del reinado de Felipe II.

Don Quijote no es capaz de adaptarse a las circunstancias, de-bido a su excesiva fidelidad a la norma escrita. Sus interrupciones se deben a que no es capaz de contenerse cuando su interlocutor ha dicho algo que le recuerda a algo que ha leído. Es decir, los libros son para don Quijote una rémora: ellos hacen que no actúe de acuerdo a la conveniencia del momento. “Modos hay de composición en la orden de caballería para todo” le dice en cierta ocasión a Sancho. Pero semejante aserto en política es inexacto, como bien recuerda Maquiavelo en El Príncipe, donde el tratadista florentino repite hasta la saciedad que los gobernantes deben actuar “según que las circuns-tancias lo exijan” (65). Don Quijote soslaya de continuo esta norma debido a su incondicional fe -“fanatismo” diríamos hoy- por seguir la ley escrita.

En su autoritativo estudio The Grand Strategy of Philip the Second, Geoffery Parker señala que uno de los principales problemas que


Felipe II tuvo para ser “eficiente” en su toma de decisiones fue su ob-sesión con la escritura. En lugar de delegar responsabilidades en sus consejeros, éstos tenían que esperar que el monarca escribiese y en-viase por correo sus órdenes, lo que provocaba, según Parker, que en muchas ocasiones se perdiese la coyuntura adecuada. El desastre de la Armada (1588) o la mala gestión de la rebelión de los Países Bajos (1555-1577) son ejemplos que muestran que las dilaciones filipinas a la hora de actuar se debieron en parte a que Felipe II no “escuchaba” a sus ministros, antes bien prefería usar la escritura para comunicarse con ellos, con lo que el retraso era muchas veces fatal. Parker co-menta con cierta sorna que: “Long before the typewriter, the Xerox machine and the word-processor, Philip was drowning in a sea of paper” (29). En Philip of Spain Henry Kamen destaca también la fascinación real con la escritura. Según este historiador, el monarca estaba literalmente “Surrounded by papers from every corner of the universal monarchy.” La siguiente anécdota es reveladora. Un cor-tesano flamenco llegó a afirmar que muchos creían que el rey buró-crata “must have during his life written more than four mule-loads of paper.” Para Kamen, “It was an underestimate” (217). Gestionar eficientemente la información mediante la escritura se convirtió para Felipe II en una tarea difícil y extenuante, sino imposible. La letra escrita, en lugar de traer el esperado orden, en exceso provocaba un caos informativo. Hasta tal punto de que en cierta ocasión el rey pidió ayuda a su ministro Mateo Vázquez, argumentando que sus archivos se encontraban “en un estado de confusión total” (cit. en Kamen 230). En 1565, Felipe se queja amargamente en una carta a uno de sus ministros de tener que pasarse las noches en vela, ocupa-do en revisar documentos, regalándonos una imagen íntima del rey no demasiado conocida:

“Estoy tan ocupado y tan falto de sueño, debido a que tengo que pasarme la mayor parte de la noche leyendo y revisando docu-mentos, que otros negocios me impiden veros en el día. Así que acabo de comenzar con sus documentos —los de hoy y los de ayer—ahora, que es después de medianoche, porque no lo pude


hacer antes.” (cit. en Parker 42)

Esta situación guarda un sorprendente paralelismo con la de nuestro hidalgo al principio de la novela, cuando se dice de él que “se le pasaban las noches leyendo de claro en claro, y los días de turbio en turbio” (39). Parker y Kamen ofrecen otros ejemplos reveladores de esta obsesión enfermiza -e improductiva- del monarca hispano con leer, escribir y regular hasta el último recoveco de la Monarquía mediante la escritura. Fernando Bouza resume el asunto con esta elocuente frase: “El monarca ha pasado a la historia como un ejem-plo máximo de escritofilia y su reinado como el momento de la de-finitiva implantación de la consulta escrita en el modus gubernandi de la Monarquía Hispánica” (29). Este sistema de comunicaciones, basado en la ingente difusión de la letra escrita, permitió gestionar los diseminados territorios de la Monarquía, pero a costa de una excesiva burocratización de las instituciones, particularmente la jus-ticia, algo que ciertamente preocupó al Manco de Lepanto.

En conclusión, mediante la glorificación de la cultura oral de Sancho, contrapuesta al conocimiento alfabetizado de don Quijote, Cervantes equipara la tradición oral con la Edad de Oro, no sin un cierto tinte conservador. Expone a don Quijote a un rotundo fracaso, pensando quizá en este monarca español de penetrante mirada, que adoptó como lema de vida “Yo con el tiempo” y que egoístamente fir-maba su correspondencia secreta con el seudónimo de “Fabio,” pues creía tener, como aquel legendario general romano, todo el tiempo del mundo.

University of [email protected]

Bibliografía citada

Armas, Frederick Alfred de. Quixotic Frescoes: Cervantes and Italian Renaissance Art . Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2006.

Alonso, Amado. “Las prevaricaciones idiomáticas de Sancho.” Nueva Revista de Filologia Hispánica, 2, (1948): 1-20.


Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Bouza Alvarez, Fernando J. Imagen y Propaganda: Capítulos De Historia Cultural Del Reinado De Felipe II. Madrid, España: Akal, 1998.

Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quijote de la Mancha. Ed. Francisco Rico. 2ª ed. 2 vols + CD. Barcelona: Crítica, 1998.

Castro, Américo. El pensamiento de Cervantes. Madrid: Revista de Filología Hispánica, 1925.

Covarrubias Horozco, Sebastián de. Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española. Ed. Ignacio Arellano. Madrid: Editorial Iberoamericana, 2006.

Goody, Jack. Literacy in Traditional Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968.

Jousse, Marcel. Études De Psychologie Linguistique. Le Style Oral Rythmique Et mné-motechnique Chez Les Verbo-Moteurs. Paris: G. Beauchesne, 1924.

Kamen Henry. Philip of Spain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.Lord, Albert. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1960.Machiavelli, Niccolò, Quentin Skinner, and Russell Price. Machiavelli: The Prince.

Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.Martín Morán, José. “Don Quijote En La Encrucijada: Oralidad Escritura.”

Nueva revista de filología hispánica 45.2 (1997): 33-70.Moner, Michel. “Técnicas Del Arte Verbal y Oralidad Residual En Los Textos

Cervantinos.” Edad de Oro 7 (1988): 119-28.Parker, Geoffrey. The Grand Strategy of Philip II. New Haven Conn.: Yale University

Press, 1998.Parr James A. “Plato, Cervantes, Derrida: Framing Speaking and Writing in Don

Quixote.” On Cervantes: Essays for L. A. Murillo. Ed. James A. Parr. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 1991. 163-87.

Rivers, Elias. Quixotic Scriptures: Essays on the Textuality of Hispanic Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1983.

Rychner, Jean. La Chanson de geste, Essai sur l ’art épique des jongleurs. Vol. 53. Genève: E. Droz, 1955.

209

The exquisite pain of being able to select a word, to think it, to be able to spell it in your head, to be able to imagine yourself saying it, but then finding it impossible to actually say it is exactly the pain of stuttering.

Glen Fuller

The connection between written literature and its oral forms has long interested scholars. Literary scholars, howev-er, have paid little attention to stuttering and its relationship

to literature. The stutterer is keenly aware of the difficult world be-tween the written and the spoken word; between the word on paper and speech itself.1 The stutterer accords his own speech an extraor-dinary degree of attention and the stutterer’s way of thinking about language differs remarkably from that of a non-stutterer. Indeed, the difficulty that stutterers have in speaking can cause them to focus on written language and inspire literary brilliance.

A few scholars write that Miguel de Cervantes was a stutter-er. Cervantes’ biographer Luis Astrana Marín (I: 332) briefly ex-plains that Cervantes stuttered as did Aristotle. George Shipley and Adrienne Laskier Martín make passing mention to Cervantes as a stutterer. Recently, the medical historian Angel Rodríguez Cabezas asserts that Cervantes stuttered, but his conclusion has not inspired significant study from literary circles. Biographers generally do not treat the question and no literary scholar has dedicated a full-length study to the question. The following article examines the current state

1 For the general information about stuttering and stutterers in this article, see Shell.

Did Cervantes Stutter?_____________________________________________John Beusterien

210 John Beusterien Cervantes

of the question. While I believe that Miguel de Cervantes stuttered, the evidence is scanty. My conclusion is based more on intuition than solid textual evidence. Despite the lack of clear, conclusive evidence, the argument put forth here seeks to establish both the relevance of the condition to his writing and the need for further inquiry.

Perhaps the principal reason that scholars have not given more attention to the question of Cervantes as a stutterer is because of the negative popular stereotypes with stutterers. Stutterers are often connected with the idea of being tontos. To cite one recent example, take the Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy’s definition of gallego. The primary definition of gallego is a person from Galicia a region in the northwest corner of Spain. But the dictionary lists as a secondary meaning of gallego: “tonto y tartamudo.” A 2007 debate in academic circles in Spain began as to whether or not eliminate the dictionary entry (see “Ser”). Negative prejudice against the condi-tion has been both a conscious and unconscious reason that more have not studied the condition as it connects to Cervantes.

Establishing whether or not Cervantes stuttered requires over-coming two major obstacles. First, the meaning of stuttering has never been clear. In addition to negative prejudice, little is known about the condition and, because of that, little has been written on it.2 Indeed, even today scientists and speech therapists are unsure about the causes and exact meaning of the condition. Scholars can only agree that stuttering is a mysterious condition that straddles the hypothetical line between the physiological and psychological and between the voluntary and involuntary. Second, no systematic descriptions of stutterers exist from the sixteenth and seventeenth century and the literary historian must reconstruct the meaning of stuttering from scratch.

Cervantes suggests that he is a stutterer on three occasions. In the relatively obscure letter from 1577, the Epístola a Miguel Vázquez, Cervantes writes:

2 Very few scholars have studied stuttering in the context of Hispanic stud-ies. For further reading on the unique perception of stutterer in the context of reading Federico García Lorca, see Bonaddio.

Volume 29.1 (2009) Did Cervantes Stutter? 211

si vuestra intercesión, señor, me ayudaa verme ante Filipo arrodillado,mi lengua balbuciente y casi mudapienso mover en la real presencia. (221; l. 199)

The poem repeats many verses, with trivial variations, from the first act of El trato de Argel (Stagg 204). This case is no exception as the semi-autobiographical character Saavedra from Cervantes’ play El trato de Argel also describes himself with a “lengua balbuciente y casi muda” in the same situation:

si la suerte o si el favor me ayudaa verme ante Filipo arrodillado,mi lengua balbuciente y casi muda,pienso mover en la real presencia… (Cervantes, El trato)

Admittedly, reasons exist that support dismissing the descrip-tion as an autobiographical reference to stuttering. Even if we ignore the problematic critical practice of connecting literary reference with real autobiography, the two passages might not suggest a stutterer, but that Cervantes is befuddled and awestricken in the royal pres-ence. Indeed, the reference has a literary (not an auto-biographical) source. Cervantes borrows the self-description from Garcilaso de la Vega. In “Eglogue III” Garcilaso writes: “mas con la lengua muerta y fría en la boca / pienso mover la voz a ti debida” (v. 11-12; 120).

No critic makes the case, though, that these arguments prevent us from reading the two passages as references to stuttering. Despite the fact that Cervantes makes a literary reference, there is room to read the passage as auto-biographical. Balbuciente derives from the Latin balbus and it is the term meaning stuttering that appears in Nebrija’s late fifteenth-century lexicon. When Cervantes uses the term he does not refer to a specific moment when he is trying to speak before the king. Cervantes describes a hypothetical moment. If he were before the king, he would speak, even though his tongue is stuttering and


mute. To describe his tongue, Cervantes replaces Garcilaso’s adjective muerta with balbuciente. While balbucear can refer to a momentary type of stammering, balbuciente in the context of the passages suggests the permanent condition. In other words, “la lengua es balbuciente y muda,” rather than “la lengua está balbuciente y muda.”

The third time that Cervantes refers to himself as a stutterer, instead of balbucear, he uses an adjectival form of tartamudear, the preferred popular term to describe the condition. Cervantes states to the reader of the prologue of Las novelas ejemplares: “Será forzoso valerme por mi pico, aunque tartamudo…” (51). Cervantes begins the prologue saying that the prologue is not necessary. Cervantes wishes that an unnamed old friend would have painted his portrait. He also wishes that his friend would have placed a biographical description below the portrait. But that friend did not do it, and the opportunity was lost. So Cervantes tells his reader that he is going to simply have to tell the reader himself the prologue. When Cervantes says this, he writes that he will have to take recourse to his own tongue. Upon mentioning his tongue (he literally uses the word “beak” which in Spanish is often synonymous one with a long beak, or wordy), he writes aunque tartamudo [although it is a stuttering beak].

With respect to this reference one may argue that the reference to stuttering is a reference to old age. The reference to his condition as stutterer then may suggest that he has become a stammering old man, not one who has always suffered from the condition. But the reference to the condition in the context of sentence where it ap-pears does not suggest a momentary stammering that accompanies old age, but a self-reference to a condition that Cervantes would have suffered his entire life. Cervantes, again, uses the word “to stut-ter” for a general, not momentary, description of himself.

Through the slippery auto-biographical references in Cervantes’ work, the prologue to the Novelas ejemplares gives the most reli-able description of Cervantes. Cervantes uses a new, precise word in Spanish that means stuttering and since stutterers stuttered in the similar way today as they did in the seventeenth century, the word probably referred to the condition, not a temporary moment.


Stuttering is trans-historic and trans-cultural and it is one of the few conditions where the symptom equals the sign equals the dis-ease. Sebastián de Covarrubias mentions the existence of the vari-ant tartamudear under the entry tartajear and the first appearance of tartamudo in literature in the Spanish language appears in Cervantes’ prologue. The more standard popular word for stuttering from the period then was tartajear and tartamudear, the newer popular form of the word, had begun to replace tartajear at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century. Tartamudear is a combination of the notion of muteness (mudo) with tata (the added “r” to tata, tarta, is normal linguistic evolution in Spanish). Although muteness has nothing to do with the condition of stutter-ing, it is a decision that stutterers typically make.

While they mention his maimed hand, authors from the period do not mention Cervantes’ condition of stuttering. But the lack of evidence may be because he did a good job at his efforts of hiding it (as many stutterers do). One reference, in particular, from a writer from the period could suggest his stuttering was not completely un-known. In the early 1600s, Lope wrote a sonatada, an invective poem used to insult and make fun of others, dedicated to Cervantes. In Lope’s sonetada to Cervantes, he makes a mention to his injured hand and then writes: “Hablaste, buey: pero dijiste mú” (Laskier Martín 232). A popular Gallician joke from the period goes: “falou o boi e dixo mu” [habló el buey y dijo mu]. The joke implies that one talks and talks, but does not really say much at all. Lope might be criticizing Cervantes to say that he writes a lot but does not say any-thing at all. Lope may also be using the pun on mu (moo and silence) to make fun of a stuttering Cervantes. Cervantes opens his mouth to say something, but nothing comes out.

I do not think that the contemporary self-references from Cervantes and the one probably from Lope (the authorship of the son-etada is questionable) solidly confirm that Cervantes was a stutterer. Nonetheless, the question “did Cervantes stutter?” needs to be asked and examined. It invites an investigation into stuttering and it might force a reconsideration of aspects of Cervantes literary production.


With respect an investigation into stuttering, the question of whether Cervantes stuttered opens up onto a series of important questions related to linguistics and literary and cultural studies. A study of stuttering in the Spanish context could influence how schol-ars understand historical linguistics. Ever since Roman Jackobson’s conclusions on the arbitrariness of the sign, scholars generally do not accept that signifier, the sound of the word, has anything to do with the signified. Jakobson exhaustively showed that any association that one makes between the sound and the word and the object it repre-sents, even in the case of onomatopoeias, is arbitrary.

But words for stuttering seem to fly in the face of Jackobon’s conclusions. In what seems to have been an onomatopoeic move to imitate the sounds made by stutterers, words for stuttering often consist of the reduplication of a consonant followed by an “a” sound. For example, in Korean stuttering is dada, a dental followed by an “a” sound. Spanish uses a similar dental followed by an “a” sound. Tata forms the base word of the most prevalent lexical item for to stutter, tartamudear (with the variation tartajear). During Cervantes’ time (and today) a series of other words could suggest the phenomenon of stuttering. Those words also consist of the reduplication of a conso-nant followed by an “a” sound. Gaga, baba, and zaza were associated with stutterers. Gaga gives the old verb to stutter gagadear.3 Baba, meaning drool, takes the verbal form babear. The word is related to the Latin-based balbucir and balbucear. These words are connected to the infantile tendency to repeat the syllable ba. Zaza took the form çaçabilloso in early Spanish and exists in modern Spanish in two ad-jectival forms, zazo and zazoso. Zaza never formed into any standard verb forms (because of the preference for lexical variations derived from tata). These examples suggest that the signifier, the word for stuttering, curiously imitates the signified, the sound that stutterers

3 Gagadear is found in a fifteenth century poem by Rodrigo Cota (Cota 113). Its modern form gaguear generally refers to one who can not articulate consonants. Gaga is also associated with the common form to stutter in Portuguese, gaguejar. As an adjective in modern colloquial Spanish, to be gaga not only means someone who cannot articulate consonants, but means to be speechless over something.


make. The connection does not just occur within the Spanish lan-guage, but may occur in a similar fashion in other languages, reflect-ing the condition of stuttering as a trans-cultural condition.

Aside from its linguistic implications, studying Cervantes and stuttering can contribute to the field of cultural studies, specifically, in aiding historians, speech therapists, and literary scholars to under-stand the phenomenon and representation of stuttering in the past. Aristotle is considered a stutterer from antiquity and Demosthenes overcoming his speech impairment by putting pebbles in his mouth is a commonly cited past example. But neither example has been contextualized within a cultural context. Studying Cervantes will help explain the role that stuttering played in early Spanish society and culture.

Take one understudied example that may open a window on to attitudes both in the past and present with respect to the reconstruc-tion of a history of stuttering. The medieval Cid text might make the first reference to a stutterer, associating the condition with muteness. The text records the Cid making fun of Pedro Bermúdez because he is unable to speak:

Pero Vemuéz conpeço de fablar, detiénes la lengua, no puede delibrar, mas quando enpieça, sabed no’da vagar: ¡Dirévos, Cid, costubres avedes tales, siempre en las cortes ‘Pero Mudo’ me llamades! Bien lo sabedes que yo non puedo más”

[Pedro Bermúdez spoke in his turn, a little tongue-tied at first, but once he started there was no stopping him. “I declare, Cid, you have got into the habit in every assembly of calling me Pedro Mudo! You know very well that I cannot help my defect of speech…”] (192-93; l. 3307-3311).


In her eulogizing of Pedro Bermúdez, Dian Fox argues that these lines do not indicate that he suffered from the condition of stutter-ing (325 n.18). Many stutterers, however, do consider it a reference to a stutterer. The question of whether Bermúdez stuttered depends on one’s interpretaton of no puedo más. Was Bermúdez unable to speak only at that moment or did he suffer from the permanent condition of a speech impediment? Significantly, when Cervantes was writ-ing, Bermúdez was popularly considered a stutterer. In the Historia y romancero del Cid (Lisbon, 1605), Juan de Escobar uses the common denomination of tartajoso to describe Bermúdez (190).

A cultural history of stuttering in the early Spanish context still has to be written. Studying Cervantes and stuttering will help un-derstand how the stutterer has been the object of ridicule, particular-ly in the Spanish-speaking context. If he was a stutterer, what degree did his speech stigma affect the trajectory of Cervantes’ perambula-tions in the sixteenth century? With late sixteenth-century Spain’s rigid hierarchies, often determined on spoken rhetoric (how you sell yourself orally to others, especially in the court), stuttering would have affected Cervantes’ reputation and social position.

Finally, and most importantly with respect to questions of the literary and Cervantes, the study of stuttering and Cervantes will help elucidate a connection that exists between stuttering and writ-ing. The brains of stutterers are different from non-stutterers and the mental effort to deal with stuttering, the compensation for the difficulties of the tongue, can be a trigger for creative literary genius. One writer-stutterer has written that “being in these vocal handcuffs made me a desperate, devoted writer” (qtd. in Shell 40). Cervantes may have used writing as a prosthetic means of communication to substitute for speaking although the condition that he would have had to struggle with since boyhood is not overtly represented in his fiction. His prose is not like Charles Dickens’ realism in which a character’s stammer is represented in the prose. But Cervantes, like the singing stutterer (stutterers typically do not stutter when they sing) produces a seamless imitation of orality that never misses a


beat (or misses a beat with calculated brilliance).Although counterintuitive for many, the lack of an overt imita-

tion of a person that stutters in his work may be a sign of a stuttering Cervantes. Indeed, the question of whether he stuttered can affect how we read Cervantes on other levels. If Cervantes stuttered, then, our readings of important works, such as El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, “El licienciado vidriera,” and “El coloquio de los perros,” can be altered in significant ways.

A linguistic trip up exists in the first paragraph of the first part of the El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Quijote’s origi-nal name might be “Quijada, o Quesada.” Cervantes states that the multiple versions of the proper name occur because previous authors had written different versions of the name. Literary critics, like E.C. Riley, argue that the different proper names indicate a reflection on the problem of identity as related to the epistemological status of the proper name (114). But might Cervantes also be making a nod to stuttering? Zazo or zaza is often used to describe one who mix-es sibilants and in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century when standard Spanish had more sibilants than today, the phenom-enon of the zazo speech defect would have been more prevalent. In the case of Quijada and Quesada, the affricate sh sound stutters into a sibilant s sound. Moreover, Quijote constantly is thinking about elocution and prides himself on his elocution. When Quijote adopts his carefully selected, archaic speech patterns, I not only hear a crazy man speaking a dead, literary dialect, but a stutterer who like ac-tors or other stutterers adopts a new persona, enabling him to speak without a stutter.

The novella, “El licenciado vidriera,” roughly, the “Glass Graduate Student,” is about a young man who believes he is made of glass and who will not approach anyone for fear that they might break him. His condition of insanity and its connection to the character Quijote has often been made. But the condition of being made of glass and suffering from a speech impediment has been largely overlooked. As Cervantes in the prologue describes his speech impediment, so the character Vidriera also stutters, stating he has a “lengua turbada y tar-tamuda” (I: 53) [an inhibited and stuttering tongue]. George Shipley


posits that Vidriera, like Cervantes, had to overcome the condition of stuttering. Shipley goes so far as to suggest that the Hieronymite friar in the novella, who helps restore the graduate’s speech, is first representation of an early modern speech pathologist (115).

An internet forum known as “Social Anxiety Support” has taken up the theme of “Going Blank and Stuttering” (Social). Supporting the fact that the examples from the Epístola a Miguel Vázquez and El trato de Argel are references to stuttering, one contributor to the fo-rum writes that he goes blank and stutters when he talks to figures of authority. That same contributor suggests that the condition makes one feel vulnerable and fragile. The contributor quotes the following from a song: “When your house is see-through, learn to close your eyes in case the glass shatters.” Might the condition of stuttering have had something to do with the graduate’s belief that he too was made of glass? Could Cervantes have felt that he was made of glass because he was a stutterer?

Even though Cervantes creates a character that also stutters and he himself writes that he is a stutterer, the way that I came to believe that Cervantes was a stutterer was based on an intuition rather than something I read. While researching the origin of the talking dogs, I came upon the writings of Marc Shell, a professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, who described that as a child he always loved to imagine that all the talking animals from Æsop must have come from a person who stuttered like himself.

Could Cervantes’ creation of talking dogs have paralleled Æsop’s interest in creating talking animal? Cervantes read Æsop when he was a child and adult. He, like many of his contemporaries, would have read not only the fables, but the biography of Æsop, a text that typically accompanied the fables. Paul Carranza has written on how influential the biography of Æsop had been on the creation of “El coloquio de los perros.” But Carranza does not mention the pos-sible affinity Cervantes as stutterer could have felt with Æsop when reading the biography. The opening paragraph of one early Spanish Æsop biography calls him a stutterer twice: Æsop had a tongue that was tata and zaza (tartamuda and çaçabillosa) (Esopete 2).


These intuitions about Cervantes as stutterer in creating talk-ing dogs lead to other questions that might open new readings of El coloquio de los perros. Might Cervantes’ interest in the tongue in the dialogue not be a figurative interest, but a literal one?4 When Cipión cautions his comrade to restrain his tongue because “en ella consisten los mayores daños de la humana vida” (304), could it refer to a tongue that caused Cervantes innumerable nightmares?

Scholars have long been interested in one of Cervantes’ physical disabilities, his maimed hand, an injury sustained from the battle of Lepanto. “El manco de Lepanto” [maimed from Lepanto] has been an inseparable part of Cervantine identity and numerous critics have dwelled on literal and figurative “hands” in Cervantes’ literary production. As opposed to the maimed hand, an injury sustained in adulthood, an impaired tongue would have been a disability that Cervantes would have lived with since he began to talk. The tongue, as opposed to the hand, is inside the man and, because of its profound psychological and physiological effects, the possibility of Cervantes’ stuttering tongue needs discussion. Did Cervantes compensate bro-ken everyday oral language into some of the most luscious and finest flowing prose in Spanish?

Texas Tech [email protected]

Works Cited

Astrana Marín, Luis. Vida ejemplar y heroica de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. vol. 1, Madrid: Reus, 1948.

Bonaddio, Federico. “Sensing the Stutter: A Stammerer’s Perception of Lorca.” Neophilologus 82 (1998): 53-62.

Carranza, Paul. “Cipión, Berganza, and the Æsopic Tradition.” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 23.1 (2003): 141-63.

“Cervantes fue tartamudo y murió de diabetes.” ABC. 10 November 2005. http://www.abc.es/hemeroteca/historico-10-11-2005/abc/Ultima/cervantes-fue-tar-tamudo-y-murio-de-diabetes_612195033527.html. 20 December 2007.

Cervantes, Miguel de. El trato de Argel. http://www.trinity.edu/org/comedia/cer-

4 For a discussion of the tongue as used figuratively, see Forcione 187-236.

220 Rafael Barroso Cabrera y Jorge Morín de Pablos Cervantes

vantes/tratar.html Association for Classical Hispanic Theater.———. “Epístola a Miguel Vázquez.” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of

America 23.1 (2003): 215-22.———. Novelas ejemplares, 2 vols. Ed. Harry Sieber. Madrid: Cátedra, 1989.Cota, Rodrigo. La letteratura spagnola dalle origini a Cervantes. Ed. Gianni

Ferracuti. Trieste: U of Trieste, 2004. http://www.ilbolerodiravel.org/ferracu-ti/ferra-antologiaLetteratura_1.pdf

Covarrubias, Sebastián de. Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española. Ed. Felipe Maldonado. Castalia: Madrid, 1994.

Esopete ystoriado (Toulouse 1488). Eds. Vicotria A. Burrus and Harriet Goldberg. Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1990.

Forcione, Alban K. Cervantes and the Mystery of Lawlessness: A Study of El casa-miento engañoso y “El coloquio de los perros.” Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984.

Escobar, Juan de. Historia y romancero del Cid (Lisboa, 1605). Ed. Antonio Rodríguez-Moñino. Madrid: Castalia, 1973.

Fox, Dian. “Pero Vermúez and the Politics of the Cid’s Exile.” The Modern Language Review 78. (1983): 319-327.

Fuller, Glen. “The Paradox of the Inexpressible Incorporal Event of Stuttering.” 18 January 2006. http://eventmechanics.net.au/?p=112. 20 December 2007.

Laskier Martín, Adrienne. Cervantes and the Burlesque Sonnet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991.

The Poem of the Cid. A Bilingual Edition with Parallel Text. Ed. Ian Michael. Trans. Rita Hamilton and Janet Perry. London: Penguin, 1984.

Riley, E. C. “Who’s Who in Don Quixote? Or an Approach to the Problem of Identity.” MLN, 81.2, (1966), 113-130.

“Ser gallego no es ser tonto o tartamudo.” Atún tun tun. Manuels Weblog. 27 March 2007. http://manuls.inopia.net/2007/03/27/ser-gallego-no-es-ser-tonto-o-tar-tamudo/. 20 December 2007.

Shell, Marc. Stutter. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005.Shipley, George. “Vidriera’s Blather.” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of

America 22.2 (2002): 47-124. Social Anxiety Support. “Going Blank and Stuttering.” 6 March 2008. http://www.

socialanxietysupport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=77979. 10 June 2008.Stagg, Geoffrey. “The Curious Case of the Suspect Epistle.” Cervantes: Bulletin of

the Cervantes Society of America 23.1 (2003): 201-14.Vega, Garcilaso de la. Poesía castellana completa. Ed. Consuelo Burell. Madrid:

Cátedra, 1986.

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Como es lógico tratándose de una obra escrita hace cuatro siglos—y más aún tratándose de una novela tan universal como es la obra de Cervantes—, el Quijote continúa sus-

citando innumerables problemas de interpretación. Sin duda, uno de los más llamativos “descuidos” cervantinos tiene que ver con la alternancia entre yangüeses y gallegos que se encuentra en el capí-tulo xv en relación con el famoso pasaje de los arrieros con cuyas yeguas trató de solazarse el desgraciado Rocinante. Curiosamente, en la edición de 1605, Cervantes utilizó en dos de sus epígrafes—los referidos a los capítulos x: De lo que mas le auino a don Quixote con el Vizcayno, y del peligro en que se vio con una turba de Iangueses, que en realidad no tiene que ver con el tema que desarrolla el ca-pítulo, y xv: Donde se cuenta la desgraciada auentura que se topó don Quixote, en topar con unos desalmados Iangueses—el término “yangüeses” para señalar el origen de estos arrieros, mientras que en el cuerpo del capítulo mantenía, de forma incoherente con la titula-ción, el gentilicio “gallegos.”

Sin embargo, ya desde la segunda edición de 1605, debida tam-bién a Juan de la Cuesta, el error aparece corregido en el texto del capítulo por “yangüeses,” corrección que haría fortuna y que en ade-lante será la que figure en el resto de las ediciones de la novela1.

1 Como se sabe, hasta 1776 la primera y segunda ediciones de J. de la Cuesta fueron consideradas como una misma. En ese año, una carta de John Bowle a Thomas Percy señalaba la existencia de dos ediciones diferentes (Rico, 1998: n.

A propósito de un “descuido cervantino”: la alternancia yangüeses/gallegos en el Quijote__________________Rafael Barroso Cabrera y Jorge Morín De Pablos


Como tal se encuentra recogida en la edición de Bruselas de 1607 debida a Roger Velpius y, lógicamente, en la siguiente, debida al pro-pio Juan de la Cuesta, que vio la luz en Madrid un año después. A pesar de ello, en algunas citas posteriores dentro del texto continúan las alusiones a los arrieros gallegos, tal como al parecer había sido concebido originalmente por el autor.

Yanguas de Soria vs. Yanguas de SegoviaLos autores que se han ocupado del tema se han contentado con con-signar la identidad de estos yangüeses como “naturales de Yanguas,” sin decidirse abiertamente por identificar esta población con la villa soriana de este nombre o con su homónima Yanguas de Eresma, si-tuada en la provincia de Segovia. Todo lo más han señalado la fama que los yangüeses sorianos tenían como arrieros en la Rioja, Aragón y la Mancha (Rico, 1998: nt.159.1). De este modo, ambas poblaciones pujan por pretender la gloria de aparecer en las páginas de la inmor-tal obra de Cervantes.

No obstante, existen razones más que sobradas para defender a la villa soriana como la verdadera patria de los arrieros cervantinos. Yanguas, en efecto, es una población situada a orillas del río Cidacos, en el norte de la provincia de Soria, perteneciente a la comarca que actualmente se conoce como Tierras Altas, una amplia comarca si-tuada en los límites con La Rioja. Durante la época medieval este territorio estuvo bajo la soberanía de los reyes de Pamplona-Nájera hasta que, perteneciente ya a la corona castellana, pasó a formar parte del señorío de los Cameros de las poderosas familias de los Haro y los Ramírez de Arellano. La vinculación de esta población y su terri-torio con el vecino de la Rioja durante las edades antigua y medieval fue muy intensa. Durante la época romana, las Tierras Altas sorianas estuvieron adscritas a Calagurris probablemente mediante adtributio o cualquier otro tipo de dependencia, tal como se aprecia en la am-plia nómina onomástica conservada en el grupo de estelas del alto

Portada). Aprovechamos estas líneas para agradecer al profesor J. J. Allen las útiles sugerencias e indicaciones bibliográficas que nos ha prestado para la elaboración de este artículo.

Volume 29.1 (2009) La alternancia yangüeses/gallegos 223

Cidacos, cuya relación con las magistraturas municipales calagurrita-nas es innegable (U. Espinosa - L. M. Usero, 1988: 493).

Por lo que se refiere ya a la Edad Media, el primer documento escrito de la historia de Yanguas es la escritura de arras del rey don García de Nájera por la que el monarca otorga a su esposa Estefanía la villa de Bechera cum ambobus Camberibus, cum Val de Arneto y cum omnibus villis Cantabriensis (“Viguera con ambos Cameros, con el Valle de Arnedo y con todas las villas cántabras”). Los dos Cameros a los que alude la escritura son el llamado Camero Nuevo, corres-pondiente al valle de Leza, y el Camero Viejo, que englobaría el valle del Iregua y el alto Cidacos (Toledo y Toledo, 1995: 28). Del mismo modo, Yanguas, verdadera capital del Camero Viejo, perteneció has-ta fechas muy recientes a la diócesis de Calahorra, no así en la actua-lidad, como figura en la última edición del Quijote (Rico, 1998: n. 1), puesto que hoy día se halla dentro de la jurisdicción de la diócesis de Soria-Osma. Todavía el lema que orla el escudo dieciochesco que campea sobre su Casa Consistorial (Yanguas puertas de val de Arnedo) recuerda su primitiva posición como baluarte adelantado del reino de Castilla y salvaguarda del valle de Arnedo, de ahí que bien pudo ser calificada en su día de puerta (lat. ianuas) de la tierra riojana.

En la Edad Media Yanguas se constituyó centro de la Comunidad de Villa y Tierra de su nombre, una institución que englobaba a las distintas poblaciones del Camero Viejo que actualmente pertenecen a la provincia de Soria. En 1144 la villa pasó de manos del emperador Alfonso VII a las de Gonzalo Núñez por vía de permuta a cambio de la villa de Hinojosa. Por esa misma época, en 1146, tenía lugar la con-sagración del monasterio de San Miguel, cenobio que será centro de una pequeña población y del que sólo se conserva como único vesti-gio mudo una solitaria torre románica que presenta ciertas analogías con el primer románico catalán. Algunos años más tarde, los señores de Yanguas Íñigo Jiménez y su esposa María Beltrán concedieron a la villa un fuero que regulaba la vida civil y económica del nuevo núcleo nacido al amparo repoblador (Delgado Martínez, 1981: 29-41;


Toledo y Toledo, 1995: 29-44)2.Durante el reinado de Alfonso XI (1312-1350) la Comunidad y

Villa de Yanguas, como otros muchos territorios de la corona caste-llana, entró en un proceso de profunda crisis económica que obligó al monarca a adoptar medidas excepcionales con objeto de evitar el despoblamiento de la zona. Fue precisamente este monarca el que otorgó a los yangüeses el privilegio de portazgos de 1347 por el que conseguirían gran notoriedad en toda la corona castellana. Por mer-ced de dicho privilegio los habitantes de la tierra de Yanguas estaban exentos de pagar ese oneroso impuesto sobre mercaderías—prece-dente del nuestro IVA actual—en todas las ciudades del reino a ex-cepción de las ciudades de Toledo, Sevilla y Murcia. El privilegio, pe-riódicamente renovado por los sucesores de Alfonso XI3, constituyó, junto a la pujanza de la cría de ganado ovino impulsada por la Mesta y el comercio atlántico, el inicio de un nuevo despegue económico de la comarca.

Gracias al privilegio de portazgos y al desarrollo de la ganadería ovina, Yanguas entró en la Edad Moderna con un renovado optimis-mo, que se vio reflejado en la acometida de importantes empresas edilicias como la construcción de un imponente puente sobre el río Cidacos a finales del siglo xiv—obra relacionada precisamente con la importancia de la cabaña ganadera yangüesa—y el levantamiento de la gran fábrica de la iglesia de Santa María a partir de 1497. Como en otras partes de Castilla, durante los siglos xvi y xvii el auge del comercio de la lana con la Europa atlántica debió proporcionar

2 La fecha del fuero es dudosa porque hay error en la datación del docu-mento y, aunque los dos autores citados dan por buena la fecha de 1145, ésta nos parece poco probable. En el pie del documento consta facta carta era millessima octuagessima tertia, correspondiente al año 1083, que ambos corrigen por 1183, corrección que podría aceptarse a condición de que se refiera a la era cristiana y no a la hispánica.

3 El privilegio está fechado en Madrid, el 18 de diciembre de la era 1385 (año 1347 d.C.). En el Archivo de Yanguas no se conserva el documento original, sino una copia de tiempos de Enrique III con las confirmaciones de Enrique II (en las cortes de Medina del Campo, 1370 y Toro, 1371), Juan I (Burgos, 1379) y el citado Enrique III (Madrid, 1393).


pingües beneficios a los propietarios de los rebaños mesteños que anualmente realizaban su transhumancia hacia tierras extremeñas y del sur de Castilla. La montaña soriana, rica en pastos de verano, poseía además una considerable cabaña ganadera en estos siglos, y de su importancia real nos hablan la arquitectura y el arte de la zona. Ciertamente, es en esta época cuando tuvo lugar la construcción de la mayoría de las iglesias y retablos de los pueblos que componen la Comunidad de Villa y Tierra. En la propia villa de Yanguas se levantó en 1604, un año antes de la aparición del Quijote, una torre campanario de fábrica de sillería a los pies de la antigua iglesia de Santa María.

La pujanza económica de la comarca hacia comienzos del siglo xvi se advierte también en el ámbito cultural. La villa soriana es la patria del dramaturgo Hernán López de Yanguas, autor de nume-rosas obras de carácter moralista y humorístico y precursor de los Autos Sacramentales. Entre sus principales obras figuran la Farsa Turquesana, la Farsa del Santísimo Sacramento, el Diálogo del Mosquito, unas Sentencias de los Siete Sabios de Grecia y una Farsa del Mundo y de la Moral. Asimismo, la villa tiene otro ilustre hijo, don Antonio de Oncala, contemporáneo al anterior y que como él se dedicó tam-bién al cultivo de las letras. Nacido en 1484, Antonio de Oncala fue discípulo de Nebrija y autor de unos Comentarios al Génesis y de un tratado destinado a la instrucción del príncipe Felipe, hijo de Carlos I (Toledo y Toledo, 1995: 78).

Los yangüeses del QuijoteGracias al privilegio de portazgos, la visión de arrieros y ganaderos yangüeses desplazándose con sus caballerías a lo largo de los caminos y veredas del reino debió ser una imagen muy habitual en la Castilla de los siglos xiv-xvii y de ahí, como insinúa Rico (1998: n. 160.3), la sustitución durante la composición del Quijote de los gallegos por aquéllos. A buen seguro la celebridad de los yangüeses aumentaría en buena manera gracias a la larga lista de pleitos que durante años sostuvieron contra los perceptores de portazgos que insistían en in-cumplir el mandato regio. Las arcas del archivo local están llenas de


sentencias de las Chancillerías de Valladolid o Granada favorables a las demandas de los yangüeses, algunas de ellas frente a persona-lidades tan poderosas como el arzobispo de Toledo, el Condestable de Castilla, el Almirante de Castilla o la Orden de Calatrava. Entre 1500 y 1660 son innumerables los pleitos de este tipo en los que se vieron envueltos los yangüeses en demanda de hacer cumplir su pri-vilegio, aumentando de esta forma su fama de litigantes.

Vistas así las cosas, resulta lógica la sustitución de los originales arrieros gallegos por los mucho más famosos arrieros yangüeses en el texto del Quijote, si bien cabe plantearse el problema de si esta sus-titución fue realmente una feliz ocurrencia de Cervantes o si, por el contrario, la idea se debe a una mano diferente a la del ilustre escritor. Dada la incongruencia que existe entre epígrafe y narración, cuesta trabajo creer que el autor tuviera tan llamativo descuido. En realidad, como señala su último editor a propósito de un error tan evidente, resulta inimaginable que los títulos con la mención de “yangüeses” se hubieran redactado inmediatamente antes que el texto. Así, pues, para comprender cómo pudo llevarse a cabo este error y la sustitu-ción del origen de los arrieros en el Quijote debemos volver nuestros ojos al sistema de impresión de los libros en la época que nos ocupa.

En realidad, creemos que la clave de todo este asunto descan-sa precisamente en el método de composición del Quijote. En los últimos años la visión romántica de una redacción del texto debida exclusivamente a Cervantes ha dejado paso a una visión más com-pleja del proceso de redacción que abre nuevas vías para una correcta comprensión de la obra literaria. Así, a diferencia de lo que sucede en la narrativa actual, donde la elaboración de la obra literaria es tarea que atañe prácticamente en exclusiva al autor, en tiempos de Cervantes el escritor no era el único que desempeñaba un activo papel en la confección del texto. Las modificaciones, sugerencias e interpolaciones al texto original por parte de personas ajenas a la pura creación literaria (desde el escribano que copiaba el original, al impresor que distribuía los capítulos y ordenaba cómo encajar el texto o el corrector de pruebas y los tipógrafos que regularizaban la puntuación y ortografía, así hasta un sinfín de manos) eran materia


frecuente en los libros del Siglo de Oro y un hecho consumado tá-citamente aceptado por los diferentes autores (Rico, 2005). Como comenta F. Rico a propósito de esta cuestión que tan puntualmente ha tratado “‘El primor del oficio’ otorgaba entonces al editor y al impre-sor un espacio de libertad y una capacidad de decisión que en la actualidad puede chocar” (Rico, 2005: 150).

En este sentido, el papel que jugaba el impresor en la confección de la obra final parece haber sido de suma importancia, sobre todo en aspectos tales como la división en capítulos y la titulación de los mis-mos. Ello plantea la posibilidad de que el cambio que motiva nuestro artículo no se debiera a Cervantes, sino que fuera el impresor, Juan de la Cuesta, o en todo caso alguien de su círculo inmediato, quien decidió sustituir a los arrieros gallegos originales por los mucho más famosos arrieros yangüeses. Así, resulta cuando menos significativo que en la edición A del Quijote el término “yangüeses” figurara no en el texto, sino sólo en el epígrafe del capítulo (Rico, 2005: 233, n. 58). Como es notorio, en la edición B Cervantes debió aceptar ya el cambio introducido por su impresor por el motivo aducido anterior-mente: la fama de arrieros de los yangüeses en el reino de Castilla, un cambio que hizo fortuna y pasó a incorporarse al resto de las ediciones.

De ser cierta nuestra hipótesis podemos sospechar quién intro-dujo el cambio que dio origen a la errata, pero no los motivos que le indujeron a hacerlo. Podría pensarse en esa notoriedad alcanzada por los arrieros yangüeses en toda Castilla a la que antes hemos hecho mención, pero, aparte de esta fama de arrieros y litigantes, creemos que existió, sin embargo, una segunda razón de tipo personal que pudo impulsar al impresor a titular de esta forma su famoso capítulo xv. Una razón que apunta directamente al editor de la novela más celebrada de la lengua castellana.

La patria de Juan de la CuestaSon escasos los datos biográficos que conocemos de Juan de la Cuesta. Se sabe que era yerno de María Rodríguez de Rivalde, viuda de Pedro Madrigal, y que actuó como regente de la imprenta que


ésta tenía en propiedad entre los años 1599 y 1607. Para nuestro caso es importante reparar en el apellido del impresor porque es un dato a tener en cuenta dada la costumbre frecuente en la época de adoptar el lugar de origen como apellido. De este modo, y a falta de otras re-ferencias biográficas de nuestro impresor, su apellido parece indicio de un posible origen yangüés o al menos oriundo de aquellas tierras. Y es que, en efecto, La Cuesta es una pequeña población situada en plenas Tierras Altas sorianas que pertenecía a la Tierra de Yanguas (de hecho marca el límite oriental de la misma, justo en el lugar donde ésta rebasa el cauce del Cidacos). Aunque hoy día se halla casi deshabitada, La Cuesta fue en tiempos uno de los principales centros ganaderos de la comarca. Como muestra de ello hemos de recordar que de esta población eran oriundos los Rico, una familia de hidal-gos de cierta importancia en la vida económica y social yangüesa, de quienes se sabe que mandaron construir un gran caserón capaz de albergar más de 5000 ovejas (Toledo y Toledo, 1995: 19).

Así, pues, dada la costumbre en la época de emplear apellidos referidos a la localidad de origen, no parece arriesgado suponer que haya que buscar aquí los orígenes familiares del impresor del Quijote, lo que permitiría aventurar también una notable familia-ridad de Juan de la Cuesta con ese universo de arrieros y ganaderos que ha impregnado la vida de las Tierras Altas sorianas hasta fechas muy recientes. En tal caso no parece descabellado achacar a Juan de la Cuesta la responsabilidad del cambio de protagonistas en el fa-moso episodio de los arrieros. Un cambio que, como se ha dicho en líneas precedentes, sería aceptado como bueno por Cervantes hasta el punto de dar origen a uno de los más célebres y, creemos que hasta ahora, inexplicables “descuidos cervantinos.”

Departamento de Arqueología,Paleontología y Recursos Culturales;

Auditores de Energía y Medio [email protected]

[email protected]


Obras citadas

Delgado Martínez, Mª. Consuelo (1981). Apuntes sobre la vida rural de la Villa y Tierra de Yanguas (Soria). Siglos xii-xVi. Centro de Estudios Sorianos. CSIC 1981.

Espinosa U. y L. M. Usero. “Eine Hirtenkultur im Umbruch. Untersuchungen zu einer Gruppe von Inschriften aus dem conventus Cæsaraugustanus (Hispania Citerior).” Chiron 18 (1988) 477-504

Rico, Francisco (dir.) (1998). D. Quijote de la Mancha. Miguel de Cervantes. Madrid, Instituto Cervantes. 1998.

———. El texto del Quijote. Preliminares de una ecdótica del Siglo de Oro. Barcelona, Destino, 2005.

Toledo, Manuel. Historia de la Villa y Tierra de Yanguas (Soria, 1995).

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Reviews _____________________________________________________

Friedman, Edward H. Cervantes in the Middle: Realism and Reality in the Spanish Novel from Lazarillo de Tormes to Niebla. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, 2006. 327 pp. ISBN: 1-58871-091-2

As is often the case with major celebrations, the 400th anniversary of Don Quixote, Part I got the better of the celebrants. Many of the assorted enterprises held dur-ing 2005 merely served to commercialize the novel and its protagonist, from the fabrication of a “Ruta del Quijote” that takes the knight’s incautious fan to places never mentioned in the book, to the marketing of overpriced sandals etched with Don Quixote’s doleful countenance, which, I confess, I couldn’t resist buying. Yet the occasion was also marked by academic activities of a far more productive sort, among them, various excellent conferences attended by distinguished cervantistas and a number of publications that have brought renewed attention to the central-ity of Cervantes’ novel within the Western European literary tradition. One such publication is the book under review, which rescues Don Quixote from a superfi-cially iconic status by tracing its theoretical interconnections with the realist novel and its antecedents.

Situating Don Quixote at the center of a long tradition of realist fiction, Edward Friedman juxtaposes a series of canonical novels both diachronically and synchronically to stress the metafictionality of the texts that precede and follow Don Quixote in its comprehension (and apprehension) of idealist litera-ture. Looking backward from the seventeenth century, the picaresque novel is seen to combine realism and self-reflexivity, attributes that create a radically new paradigm for the novel. In his first chapter “The Picaresque, Don Quijote, and the Design of the Novel,” Friedman explains just how advantageous the model is for the modern novel, as not only the three infamous pícaros, Lazarillo, Guzmán, and Pablos, but Lozana, Justina, and other recalcitrant pícaras, each in his or her own way and for different social, moral, and narrative purposes, mediate the author’s voice through their own. This chapter exhaustively details the picaresque novel’s textuality, what Friedman calls its “interplay among the genetic, generic, and func-tional principles” (94). Although the chapter reiterates much of what is already known to us about the picaresque (untrustworthy narrator, ironic discourse, social

232 Reviews Cervantes

determinism, Baroque excess, etc.), it expertly directs our attention to the ways in which Cervantes reworks these characteristics in Don Quixote, exhibiting in the process his greater consciousness of the creative process. Friedman underscores particularly well how picaresque fiction instructs Cervantes in the use of metafic-tion when dealing with the historical coincidence of his and Mateo Alemán’s victimization by plagiarism.

Although numerous citations from other critical studies are footnoted in the text, it is at times difficult to ascertain Friedman’s explicit reactions, whether posi-tive or negative, to particular critical interpretations or literary theories. However, he obviously (and rightly, it seems to me) opposes both a unifying narrative per-spective in the picaresque and the privileging of a different type of realism in Cervantes. What holds true for what he calls the narrative realism of picaresque novels (and of earlier texts such as La lozana andaluza), if in a “minor key,” holds equally true, if intensified, for Don Quixote and for the later novels’ redefinition of the genre, thanks to Cervantes’ role as mediator. Among the many significant and perceptive contributions of Friedman’s study is his view that any interpretation of the modern novel must contend with the author’s play with language and with literary conventions, no matter how de-emphasized by realism. Thus, the second chapter “The Metafictional Imperative: Realism and the Case of El amigo Manso” elaborates on Galdós’s mediating fiction, as the non-existent narrator arbitrates between realism and idealism, with Don Quixote as its primary intertext.

This intercessionary role is one that Friedman attributes as well to Unamuno’s novels. For Friedman, Unamuno’s nivola mixes the mimetic with the anti-mimet-ic; his third chapter “The Birth of the Nivola and the Rebirth of the Novel: Amor y pedagogía” stresses the novel’s experimentation as well as its ties to Don Quixote as it moves away from realism. (I would have wished for a clearer differentiation between this term and naturalism, as the former runs the risk of becoming overde-termined.) Unamuno’s fictions, especially Niebla, comment on both art and life, as Friedman points out in his fourth and last chapter, “Quixotic Inscription: Niebla and the Theory of the Novel.” The chapter thoroughly revisits Cervantes’ concerns with the written word and its wordliness and with literature and reality in com-parison to Unamuno’s own anxieties. Arriving at the conclusion that the latter au-thor offers a “metafictional alternative to conventional realism” (244), the chapter convincingly proffers the argument that Unamuno’s modernist self-consciousness indeed harks back to early picaresque fiction and anticipates postmodernism.

Friedman’s richly intertextual study of canonical exemplars of the Spanish novel, from its early picaresque beginnings through Unamuno’s radical antinar-ratives by way of Don Quixote, enjoins us to reflect on how reading Cervantes may also be undertaken from the perspective of later works. As Juan Goytisolo (and Harold Bloom, in another context) once commented, literary influence is a two-way affair: “El influjo, la relación y coincidencias entre obras distintas en el tiempo no opera de modo unilateral sino recíproco, en la medida en que la obra

Volume 29.1 (2009) Reviews 233

posterior inyecta nueva savia en la lectura de las obras que la han precedido, en-tablando diálogo con ellas, y con un nuevo texto general, común y más vasto: el de la totalidad del museo imaginario” [The influences, relations, and coincidences between works from different periods do not occur unilaterally, but reciprocally, to the degree that the later work injects new blood in the reading of the works that precede it, opening a dialogue with them and with a new, collective, general text, vastly more extensive: that of the totality of the imaginary library].1 By asserting the metafictionality of the texts discussed, Cervantes in the Middle proffers a long-needed crosscurrent of critical dialogue from both ends of the historical spectrum.

Anne J. [email protected]

Anthony Close. A Companion to Don Quixote. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2008. 287 pp. ISBN: 978-1-855-66170-7.

Anthony Close’s new book is an updated version of his Cervantes: Don Quixote (“Landmarks of world literature,” 1990), bearing the refinements of considerable scholarly activity in the interim. Meant as an introduction to Don Quijote for the English-speaking non-specialist, it contains a brief overview of Cervantes’ life and times, a discussion of the novel’s sources, narrative structure and strategies, the development of its protagonists, analysis of key episodes in parts I and II, an account of Don Quijote’s reception by critics and novelists, and a guide to further reading along with informative bibliography. Close has long been a prominent and occasionally magisterial voice admonishing critics who would anachronistically imbue Cervantes’ novel with meanings—political, epistemological, religious, psy-chological—that the author could never have intended. Some feathers have likely been ruffled along the way, and Close’s “intentionalism” is susceptible, amidst the leaps and bounds of critical inquiry, to the charge of antiquation. When, in the present study, Close partly attributes a lack of overt political dissent in Cervantes to “innate good taste” (13), some readers may wince. There are those of us who may feel let down by someone who defers to the staid canon of Toledo (rather than the zealously imaginative don Quijote) in questions of literary theory, and who insists on the decency of the caballero del verde gabán, and on Cervantes’ detached approval of the entertainments of the Duke and Duchess. But instead of strident polemics or aloof dismissals, this book offers a good deal of clear, well-informed, subtle and, not least, accommodating discussion of Don Quijote and its legacy.

Two fundamental and related aspects of Cervantes’ art receive fine treatment

1 Juan Goytisolo, Disidencias (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1997), p. 312.


in this study: the nature of Don Quijote’s realism and comedy. With regard to realism, Close sorts out the generic messiness of the novel, and accounts for the beguiling vitality of knight and squire. More than an affirmation of Aristotelian verisimilitude and unity of action, the canon of Toledo as authorial surrogate sets forth a deceptively innovative aesthetic of “common nature,” a foregrounding of “homely ordinariness” (46). Close discusses how Cervantes’ attention to the do-mestic routine of unremarkable characters and the humble imperatives of the body (eating, clothing, sleeping) inspired the likes of Fielding, Sterne and Smollett, and anticipated the great reorientations of the nineteenth-century novel. But he also cautions against conflating Cervantes’ representation with the sociological preoc-cupations and rigor of Flaubert or Galdós. The inn-scenes, for example, are drawn as much from previous literature and folklore as from journalistic observation, and Cervantes modifies the archetypes and stereotypes to his own ends—most notably the parody of idealizing romance. We thus have a “realism of the second degree” (48). Close likewise comments on the narrator’s frequent declarations of “la verdad de la historia,” which should be understood as a principle of narrative relevance, not a serious or mocking claim to objective veracity (65). This is related to Cervantes’ inclination to compromise verisimilitude in favor of functionalism, “function being understood as any feature of the story determined by artistic ne-cessity or convenience rather than by considerations of truth-to-life” (113).

Close maintains that a sort of functionalism is also at play in the representa-tion of don Quijote and Sancho, whose behavior is sometimes determined more by the artistic possibilities of a particular situation than by a strict notion of con-sistency of character. Here Close pours some cold water on critics who might get carried away with psychoanalysis, despite the appeal such an approach has for certain episodes. Yet he does acknowledge, and helps us appreciate, how the protagonists, drawn from numerous literary and folkloric types, do in fact de-velop and gain dimension as the narrative proceeds, in part through accumulation of experiences, in part through their conversations and mutual influence, in part through the exigencies of circumstance. He also recognizes that the interactions of knight and squire represent a “radical shift in the development of narrative fiction from incident to dialogue and from action to character” (90). And while he does not accept the idea that the characters’ perspectives pose serious epistemological problems, he does show how Cervantes creates a “graduated approach” to truth, as in the piecing together of Cardenio’s story (58). In other words, Close keeps his grip on the reigns of modern critical exuberance while illuminating many ways in which Don Quijote forms a foundational part of a trajectory that goes through Dickens, Kafka, and Joyce.

The question of Don Quijote’s realism is inextricably bound to its comedy, an area to which Close has dedicated considerable thought and ink (most notably, Cervantes and the Comic Mind of His Age, 2000). The present book includes some cataloging of types of wit in Don Quijote—while the least fluid sequence in the


study, it provides a useful resource and contextualization (126-58). Our critic is best when dealing with entire episodes. Taking us through adventures such as the galeotes (I, 22) and the Cueva de Montesinos, he deploys an exhaustive knowledge of source materials and a fine ear to modulations of linguistic register and echoes of style, theme and image from previous scenes. By such means he succeeds in dem-onstrating how Don Quijote is, indeed, a “funny book,” and how such a designation does not limit its influence and implication. Close has contributed to our un-derstanding of the “empathetic parody” of Cervantes, “his ambivalently intimate relationship to the target texts” (55). As Close illuminates the fugal quality of Don Quijote, the “compositional principle of repetition with variation and transference of motifs” (127), he also shows how such principles are at work in Cervantes’ entire oeuvre, in which quest narratives, underworld journeys, ennobling love, country and court are sometimes explored with a festive or mischievous levity, sometimes with sincere pathos. Despite a predominance of the comic mode, Don Quijote’s unprecedented mixture of what is normally kept separate makes it difficult some-times to distinguish between the ridiculous and the dignified.

The following inventory and comments regarding don Quijote’s preparations for his penitencia (I, 25) indicate the attention to nuance, reference and register in this study:

an elegant exposition of the Renaissance doctrine of literary imitation; Aristotle’s concept of poetic universality; rehearsal of the precedents of his pen-ance in Amadís and Orlando furioso; echoes of Albanio’s farewell to the natural world in Garcilaso’s Second Eclogue; satire of the indecipherable script of scribes, the affectations of love-poets, the faking of lineages; the amusingly vulgar an-ecdote of the merry widow and her lover; an edifying maxim about the nature of true love, adduced to justify the choice of low-born Aldonza as mistress; the drafting of two letters, one to Dulcinea couched in the archaic convolutions of chivalric novels, the other authorising the gift of three donkey-foals to Sancho in the wooden jargon of commercial bills of sale. Though the effect is absurd, the range of reference is dazzling in its scope, and latent seriousness is perceptible in the absurdity. (56 my italics)

Close’s subtle and spirited reading of the galeotes episode provides another illustration of how such varied sources and styles produce rich comedy, a ridicu-lousness with a residue of gravity (79-89). After surveying the literary, social and religious backgrounds of the figures and references, he exercises restraint in judg-ing whether don Quijote’s freeing of the prisoners is meant to convey a conserva-tive cría cuervos example, or a transgressive Christian affirmation of charity and human freedom. While casting light on how such opposing interpretations can be (and have been) made, Close reminds us of the curious detachment of the narrator, offering that, in the silent aftermath of the imprecations and violent clamor of the episode’s disastrous desenlace, it is the continued twitching of the traumatized ass’s ears that provides “the nearest thing to a comment on the moral


of the affair” (85). Such observations reveal how Cervantes was more interested in complex ironies, and delightful effects of image and tone, than in heavy-handed didacticism. Throughout, Close places Cervantes’ singularity in context. He traces the connections to Aristotelian notions of laughter and Spanish Baroque ingenio y agudeza, the serio-comical counterpoint in Lope’s comedia, the grotesque inver-sions of the picaresque, while delineating Cervantes’ particular disposition and hu-morous mode. In contrast to the frequently humiliating and divisive humor of the picaresque, Close argues that Cervantes “insists on the therapeutic and restorative power of laughter, and presents a world in which it momentarily dissolves social barriers, creates affable relations between sane and insane, and makes the latter objects of sympathy rather than contempt” (158-59).

In A Companion to Don Quixote we find an affable Anthony Close who, dur-ing his concise account of the trajectory of critical views of Don Quijote from the seventeenth century, through Enlightenment Classicism and the Romantics, to modern and postmodern derivations (227-53), even has encouraging words for Bakhtin and Milan Kundera. While he convincingly insists that Cervantes was “a man of his Age,” and that the history of Don Quijote criticism is rife with spectacu-lar examples of the novel being made to conform to a disparate array of “prevailing ideologies,” elements of Close’s own historicist readings frequently come to mind during accounts of some rather modern interpretation: for example, the discussion of Bakhtinian “competition amongst languages,” identified in Salman Rushdie by Fuentes (251), recalls Close’s teasing out of diverse linguistic registers in Sancho, don Quijote, the galeotes and the narrator himself. And while he tempers them, he does not close off the potential social and political implications of Cervantes’ ironies. As an audience member at a conference a few years ago, I observed Prof. Close as he was invited to comment on the disquisitions delivered by a panel of specialists gathered upon the stage. Exhibiting a range of facial expressions that endorsed his authority as a scholar of the comic, he stated his critical criteria: “¿es verdad, o no es verdad? Y si es verdad, ¿qué más da?” Then, like a new embodi-ment of governor Sancho, he proceeded to apply this elementary code to the cases before him. Regarding the first question, I would say of A Companion to Don Quixote: yes, it rings true. Y ¿qué más da? Well, there is nothing particularly new here, no provocative theory or revelation that could provide grist to a skyrocketing academic career. But for generalists—or specialists—interested in an informed and genuine work of appreciation, it is a study of not inconsiderable import.

Michael [email protected]


José Manuel Lucía Megías. Leer el Quijote en imágenes. Hacia una teoría de los modelos iconográficos. Madrid: Calambur, 2006. ISBN 84-96049-99-X

As he himself notes, José Manuel Lucía Megías brings to the vast field of Cervantine iconography the conceptual tools and practices of the philologist. The sheer number of illustrated editions of Don Quixote from the seventeenth and eigh-teenth centuries poses a daunting task for the researcher interested in tracing and examining the Cervantine images according to the patterns of philological textual criticism. Whereas preparing a stemmata of a text for which there might be 5 or 6 versions is manageable, sifting through the literally thousands of book illustra-tions and other visual images related to Cervantes’ masterpiece involves a meth-odological challenge of another degree. In general, the results of his research are both highly informative and illuminating. In theoretical terms, the most innovative feature of his thought is the notion of the iconographic program (programa or jer-arquía iconográfica), according to which certain episodes of the novel are depicted in similar manners across various editions and by various artists. He rightly proposes this concept as a way to categorize and analyze the strikingly similar cast of de-picted episodes across editions. Moreover, he also rightly states that these programs were often the choice of the publisher rather than the artist. In short, the model of the iconographic program allows for the analysis of coexisting approaches to the illustration of Don Quixote. It is a useful tool for capturing both the similarities and the contrasts between different general interpretive stances toward the novel.

Lucía Megías associates these different iconographic programs with specific national traditions: the French, the Dutch, the English, and the Spanish. Whereas it is helpful to contextualize the first and/or the most dominant representatives of each program in their sociopolitical context (take, for example, Coypel as represen-tative of the French and Vanderbank as representative of the English), it is also the case that visual images in general, and prints in particular, circulated much more freely across national and linguistic boundaries than would a text. Subsequently, Lucía Megías himself expands the notion of the Dutch iconographic program, for example, to include the illustrations of Spanish artists such as Diego de Obregón and José de Camarón. Given the general validity of the categories he has identified in their capacity to characterize specific iconographies, perhaps it would be more useful to label them according to their interpretive stance toward Don Quixote rather than their origins in a given nation.

Considerable advances in our knowledge of the material in question have occurred in the last decade. Drawings, prints, and other previously unknown ar-chival material have surfaced in a variety of archives. Lucía Megías brings us up


to date on much of this new information within the text itself. Nonetheless, given the acceleration of research in the field of Cervantine iconography, the presenta-tion of a complete bibliography would have been most useful. References to other studies in the text and its footnotes are often incomplete, and at times even al-lusive. Although the author avoids direct refutation or argumentation with other scholars in the field, I, for one, would have preferred that he directly address is-sues on which we disagree. As the field of Cervantine iconography matures, it becomes ever more incumbent on all of us that issues of controversy (such as the carnivalesque elements of certain images or lack thereof ) be openly and honestly debated. Although reference to the Calvinistic beliefs of 17th-century Dutch print-ers is helpful contextual material, it still does not explain nor does it obviate the representation of bawdy corporeal humor in the most graphic of terms.

If there is a limitation to this study (in addition to its lack of bibliographical citation of other scholars), it is the tendency to view the illustrations in relation to each other rather than in relation to the editions in which they appeared. That is to say, by tracing iconographic programs that transcend the edition, the author bypasses the messy but interesting question as to how the illustrations contributed to the reader’s experience and interpretation of the text. It also sidesteps the issue of how the visual iconography contributed to the historical reception of the novel and its eventual (and I still maintain surprising) canonization. By the same token, the strength of this study is its capacity to arrange and order the overwhelm-ing mass of visual material produced in relation to and with Cervantes’ text. José Manuel Lucía Megías has provided an invaluable tool for classifying and study-ing the development of 17th- and 18th-century Cervantine iconography through his innovative notion of iconographic programs. There is no doubt that it will be much easier for the next generation of scholars to wade into this compelling and fascinating wave of visual imagery.

Rachel [email protected]

José R. Cartagena Calderón, Masculinidades en obras: El drama de la hombría en la España imperial, Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2008. 382pp.

Cuando terminaba de escribir esta reseña, mi mujer y yo decidimos alquilar un bote de remos en el Guadalquivir un domingo por la tarde soleada en Sevilla. Siendo una mujer del mar, mi mujer tomó los remos y nos guiaba. Los bares re-pletos de sevillanos en sus trajes de domingo nos vieron y empezaron a abuchear el espectáculo de la mujer remando y el señorito descansando en el barco. En el


momento de pasarlos, todos pensamos en mi masculinidad y, en vez de tomar los remos, decidí cambiar de un lado del barco al otro. Los sevillanos empezaron a aplaudir pensando que iba a tomar los remos. Pero, no, sólo cambié de lado y los sonidos de desaprobación de los espectadores aumentaron más. Seguimos de pa-seo por el río y a la vuelta tomé los remos y esta vez, al estar remando, salieron los pañuelos blancos de los sevillanos en gran aplauso como si hubiera sido un gran torero que había hecho un pase bonito.

Esto subrayó para mí la necesidad de estudios como los de José R. Cartagena Calderón en cuestionar el gran espectáculo de la masculinidad. En la academia norteamericana es normal encontrar un programa de estudios dedicado al gé-nero sexual. Muchas veces estos programas (como los del Harvard, Princeton, la Universidad de California, la Universidad de Michigan, la Universidad de Texas, Yale) utilizan la palabra “mujer” [woman] de alguna forma en el título de su pro-grama. Sin embargo, el estudio de José R. Cartagena Calderón, Masculinidades en obras: El drama de la hombría en la España imperial, forma parte de un movimiento dentro de la academia norteamericana en los últimos 15 años en que los estudios del género sexual van más allá de los programas del estudio de la mujer acuñados durante la década de los 1970. Evaluando el mito de la ahistoricidad del supuesto estable cuerpo masculino, un propósito principal del libro es desvincular el discur-so de la hombría con la heterosexualidad para no reproducir un discurso normati-vo de la heterosexualidad. Tal acercamiento rompe la postura crítica que establece una sencilla dicotomía tradicional, en la que, entre otros binomios, lo occidental se conecta con lo masculino y lo oriental con lo femenino.

Al examinar dos representaciones de la masculinidad, la caballeresco-militar y la urbano-cortesana, el estudio de Cartagena Calderón ilumina una España pro-fundamente obsesionada por la masculinidad. El estudio traza los dos tipos de masculinidad a través de textos escritos en la España del siglo XVII (principal-mente las comedias) y culmina con un análisis innovador y agudo sobre El vergon-zoso en palacio de Tirso de Molina donde Cartagena Calderón une su lectura de las dos representaciones de la masculinidad.

Cartagena Calderón establece el trasfondo del primer tipo de masculinidad en los primeros dos capítulos dedicados a Lope de Vega y a la representación del moro e indiano respectivamente. El estudio comienza enfocándose en la primera pieza conocida de Lope de Vega, Los hechos de Garcilaso de la Vega y moro Tarfe, para destacar la masculinidad en su faceta caballeresco-militar, que en este caso está cargada con superioridad bélica y que es hispano-cristiana procedente de la volun-tad de Dios. Con este trasfondo Cartagena Calderón muestra que Lope, al mascu-linizar el cristiano, desmasculiniza al moro. Cartagena Calderón conecta Los hechos de Garcilaso de la Vega al conocidísimo romance en el cual la madre del rey Boabdil, al haber perdido Granada, le riñe a su hijo con: “Bien es que como mujer llore con grande agonía / el que como caballero su estado no defendía.” Cartagena Calderón lleva el argumento más allá que uno en que la masculinidad caballeresco-militar


depende del afemenimiento del moro. Evalúa como este argumento sigue en pie en representaciones donde el moro se representa como caballero en textos como El Abencerraje y la hermosa Jarifa en la tradición supuestamente maurófila. También, ve que cómo el afemenimiento del moro funciona de manera semejante en la re-presentación del rey godo don Rodrigo, el personaje clave en el mítico momento nacionalista-cristiano de perder la península.

Cartagena Calderón sigue la trayectoria de su hipótesis de la masculinidad como motivo más general que sólo el tropo del moro afeminado al dedicar el segundo capítulo a la representación de América en dos obras de Lope, El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón y Arauco domado. La primera obra teatral en que figura Colón como personaje dramático, El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón, realiza una representación del deseo masculino para enfatizar el carácter colonial femenizante y erótico cuando se transforman datos de las cróni-cas de la época al llamar la isla que encuentra en su primer viaje “La Deseada” (“La Deseada” era la segunda isla). Para seguir matizando la cuestión de lo viril en Lope, Cartagena Calderón analiza la figura de la madre castradora en Arauco domado que Lope emplea para mostrar la falta de masculinidad de los araucanos.

A diferencia del primer tipo de masculinidad que tiene nostalgia por la hom-bría en la guerra, el segundo tipo se asocia con la vida pacífica de la corte. Mientras que el Duque en El vergonzoso en palacio de Tirso de Molina se hace portavoz de la masculinidad caballeresco-militar, el Conde se hace portavoz de la masculinidad urbano-cortesana. En el último capítulo, aparte de discutir esta obra, Cartagena Calderón analiza el auge de este segundo tipo de masculinidad a través de la suges-tiva crítica de la falta de masculinidad en el personaje del lindo. Incluye un comen-tario de como este personaje cortesano está tildado de sodomita, resume críticas del popular personaje Juan Rana, y da un breve contexto histórico. Aunque no se toca el tema en este estudio, este capítulo inspira una investigación en la conexión entre España y la hipermasculinidad. ¿Podría ser que por la crisis de masculinidad surgió el tipo del Don Juan que tiene que mostrarse a través de conquistas feme-ninas, una tras otra?

En el tercer capítulo Cartagena Calderón discute la escritura de Cervantes. El capítulo sirve como puente entre los primeros dos capítulos sobre Lope y el último sobre la masculinidad urbano-cortesana. Las conclusiones de Cervantes hacen eco a la tesis principal del libro. Cartagena Calderón escribe que Cervantes “seguirá invitándonos a meditar en torno a la masculinidad, desenmascarando otras gran-des ficciones culturales” (234). Cervantes, con su entremés El retablo de la maravi-llas, parodia no sólo la tarea masculinizadora del personaje labrador en el teatro de Lope, sino también el espacio mismo del teatro como un espacio poco masculino. Las conclusiones de los moralistas del teatro como espacio femenizante se conec-tan con una crítica común de la época que caracterizaba España como un lugar que faltaba masculinidad.

La existencia de esa crisis de masculinidad se vinculaba ya en la historiografía


del siglo XVII al momento de incorporar el producto material imperial en España. Como subraya Calderón Cartagena, se lamentan los tiempos perdidos de una ver-dadera nación española de cuando el chocolate no afeminaba a sus hombres. La existencia de una noción de una España emasculada no sólo surge por la creciente clase de nobles con su demanda por esos productos (una clase que se veía cada vez más alienada de los poderes jurídicos y militares por la centralización del poder en el estado), sino también por su demanda por el capital cultural como el teatro.

Después de leer este estudio, me pregunto si existe un paralelismo entre la evolución de los tipos de masculinidad populares en el teatro y el auge y el declive de la comedia como producto cultural en España. Es más, para ampliar esta pre-gunta al nivel europeo, ¿cuál es la conexión histórico-social entre al personaje del lindo (y figurón) y la llegada del personaje del fop y el petimetre, especialmente en el teatro francés del mismo siglo XVII y el del inglés del XVIII?

El estudio de Cartagena Calderón es una contribución a los estudios del siglo de oro español que incluye no sólo una base teórica innovadora, sino muchas ob-servaciones particulares que merecen destacarse. Se presentan por ejemplo obser-vaciones contundentes y evocadoras con respecto al homoeroticismo del episodio del soldado paje (II.24) en la discusión del Quijote (uno de los textos discutidos no teatrales, pero sin embargo, dramático en opinión de Cartagena Calderón).

Cada vez más se encuentran en la crítica española estudios sobre la cues-tión de la masculinidad, como los de Angels Carabí, Juan Carlos Hidalgo, Rafael Montesinos, Jose Olavarría, Carolina Sánchez Palencia, Marta Segarra y Teresa Valdés, nutridos en su mayor parte por la academia norteamericana con estudios iniciados de Rachel Adams, Frank Barrettt, Maruice Berger, Harry Brod, R.W. Connell, Michael Debel, Jeff Hearn, Michael S. Kimmel, Katherien O´Donnell, Andrew Pechuk, Helaine Posner, Michael O´Rourke, David Sarran, Harry Stecopoulos, Bryce Traister, Brian Wallis, Simon Watson, y Stephen Whitehead. De todas formas, afuera de la academia norteamericana, pocos han llevado la cues-tión de la masculinidad al campo del siglo de oro español. Así que el estudio de Cartagena Calderón enriquece éstos, comenzados por Sidney Donnell, Mar Martínez Góngora, Daniel Heiple, Matthew Stroud, Peter Thompson, Harry Vélez Quiñones, y Sherry Velasco.

¿Por qué el campo del siglo de oro del hispanismo estadounidense introduce una riqueza de preguntas relacionadas con lo sociológico, es decir, relacionadas a la cuestión del género sexual conectada a la historia del afecto sexual, mientras que el campo del siglo de oro del hispanismo español sigue amarrado en su mayor parte a cuestiones estructuralistas? Es más, ¿por qué ese campo norteamericano señala con sensatez los matices homoeróticos de estos textos, pero, sin embargo, en el nivel socio-político estas cuestiones se enfrentan en la sociedad norteamericana a una actitud retrógrada? Por otro lado, ¿por qué el campo de estudios del hispanis-mo en España se ha quedado mucho más reaccionario que el estadounidense, pero en el nivel socio-político, la sociedad española ha hecho grandes avances con res-


pecto a la cuestión homosexual que están todavía por verse en los Estados Unidos? Para este lector, otra contribución importante de este libro es que estimula tales preguntas que tocan la configuración geopolítica de nuestro campo de estudios.

John [email protected]

Emilio Martínez Mata. Cervantes comenta el Quijote. Madrid: Cátedra, 2008. 156 pp. ISBN: 978-84-376-2435-8.

In this unusual and deceptively simple little book, Emilio Martínez Mata gives an account of authorial intention in Don Quijote. An introductory citation of Alejandro Malaspina describes his goal: “Despojar al «Quijote» de unas bellezas imaginarias es dar nuevo realce a las muchas que le son propias.” The imaginary beauties, according to Martínez Mata, include post-Romantic claims regarding perspectivism and don Quijote as an advocate of the creative imagination, as set forth by the likes of Ortega, Castro, Spitzer, and Forcione (a brief and enthusi-astic prologue to the study is provided by Anthony Close). The fruits of paring away such embellishments? A refined appreciation of some basic concerns of Don Quijote criticism: the novels accommodating representation of literature and ex-perience, the narrative designs which draw the complicit reader into an elaborate game of interpretation, the centrality of dialogue, the development of don Quijote and Sancho. The study is unusual in its lack of any imposing theoretical apparatus. It breezes along in sections ranging from five to fifteen pages, with parenthetical and short footnote references to the pertinent secondary literature. Concentrating on the prologue to Part I and the opening dialogues of Part II as the nuclei of Cervantes’ expressions of purpose, Martínez Mata favors substantial textual cita-tions followed by commentary. He thereby reinforces the importance of the pri-mary context of key utterances (e.g., the stated aim of destroying the libros de caballerías, the meaning of “la verdad de la historia”), and he inserts bracketed clarifications of certain archaic usages (one of the most central and slippery being the permutations of curiosidad). The interpretative frame is occasionally expanded to include other Cervantine writings, some biographical information, as well as Cervantes’ literary and conceptual horizon, including La Celestina, Lazarillo de Tormes, Garcilaso, Lope, and El Pinciano.

A major contention is that the fixation of critics on chivalric romance—whether we should take at face value authorial assertions that the principle aim of the book is to do away with the genre, or whether Cervantes in fact sets out to redeem it within a contemporary aesthetic—has been a limiting distraction. In this sense, Martínez Mata’s treatment is broader than Daniel Eisenberg’s heftier


and more exhaustive study (1987), which is based on similar premises regarding authorial intent. Martínez Mata asserts that, especially in Part II, Cervantes is less engaged with knight-errantry novels than with his own literary production (Part I, his own novelas), contemporary Spanish theater, Guzmán de Alfarache, Avellanedas spurious continuation. He discusses some of Cervantes’ main aesthetic concerns—unpretentious style, verisimilitude, variety—and how they serve a relatively novel, un-Horatian emphasis on pleasure over didacticism (123-27).

Particularly good is the discussion of Cervantes’ nuanced sense of a varied readership (75-81), and of how he cultivates a dynamic relationship with a reader who is both independent and complicit. Martínez Mata traces this relationship through the address to the reader in the prologue and the famous narrative in-terventions regarding the precision and plausibility of the material at hand. He repeatedly refers to a “juego con el lector,” and the ludic elements range from the fairly superficial playfulness of making it clear to the reader that the proclama-tions regarding sources and precise names are not to be taken seriously, to the more complicated game of enlisting the reader’s active role in interpretation (e.g., 118). There is a dialogic principle at work here, and Martínez Mata shows how the relationship between author and reader is in certain ways analogous to the interactions between characters. His comments on concessive expressions, such as con todo, provide an illustration of an underlying flexibility and collaboration in the determination of meaning: “si mi examen no es erróneo, hay ciento cincuenta y tres casos con valor concesivo. De ellos, una buena parte corresponde al narrador o a un personaje matizando su razonamiento, pero en nada menos que treinta y nueve ocasiones es utilizado por un interlocutor admitiendo de algún modo el razonamiento del otro, generalmente para iniciar la exposición de sus razones, es decir, presentando los argumentos propios sobre la base de que lo afirmado por el interlocutor, pese a las discrepancias, puede tener algún fundamento” (111).

It is in his attempts to delineate precisely what is and is not at play in Cervantes novel where Martínez Mata’s discussion becomes most interesting, and tenuous. As mentioned above, he rejects the notion that Don Quijote contains an authentic perspectivism, any serious questioning of reality or setting forth of epistemological quandaries. Nor does he accept the related claim that Cervantes ambivalently endorses don Quijote’s enthusiasm for knight-errantry narratives. A reasonable reading of the baciyelmo episode (I, 21) reminds us that, despite Spitzer’s attractive formulation, there is no “hybrid reality,” never any real doubt regarding the ontology of the barbers basin (105-08). Similarly, a review of the “contexto burlesco” in which don Quijote delivers his impassioned narrative of the knight and the boiling lake (I, 50) reveals that Cervantes considers it an artistically flawed and ethically perilous transgression of the sage Canon’s neo-Aristotelian precepts. I grant the first point more readily than the second, although they are, as men-tioned, not unrelated. But before I complain too loudly that Martínez Mata is out to deprive me of my reading fun, let us examine what he does allow. Rather


than a Faulknerian perspectivism, Martínez Mata discusses the “haz y envés” in Don Quijote, which he characterizes as Cervantes’ non-dogmatic appreciation of the good and the bad in people and situations. He speculates that this empathy and complex view, evidenced in his depictions of characters such as Maritornes, Zoraida’s father, and Teresa Panza, is the product of Cervantes’ experiences in captivity in Algiers (99-113). If reality is not hybrid in Cervantes, Martínez Mata suggests that people are, as he speaks of the “doble condición de los personajes” (103). There is more to them than initially meets the eye, and their conduct must be seen in the context of their circumstances (100). He is walking a fine line here, and occasionally resorts to hazy generalizations: “la vida es compleja” (100), “un com-portamiento complejo” (103), “la ambigüedad del juego entablado con el lector” (105). I do not necessarily claim that he is inconsistent, and his attempts to avoid anachronistic excess while still allowing for a good deal of range and implication are commendable: “Cervantes no plantea ninguna duda sobre la naturaleza de la realidad, aunque, al mismo tiempo, nos muestra cómo los hombres por interés o, incluso, por diversión están dispuestos a falsearla” (105). Still, I am also not sure whether the distinctions that he is at pains to establish, with his intriguing por-trayals of an attenuated perspectivism and relativity in Cervantes, always hold up. On the one hand, Cervantes should not be seen in light of Ortega’s absence of “una verdad absoluta” (106); on the other, Cervantes tends, with some excep-tions, to not represent “personajes que representan absolutos” (102). And while Cervantes does not seriously present epistemological problems (e.g., 107), he does offer “diálogos en los que un interlocutor, sin necesidad de modificar por completo su enfoque, acaba admitiendo una parte de verdad en el razonamiento del otro” (110). Martínez Mata himself seems to admit some truth in the reasoning of the views he critiques—in this case, Castro and Spitzer. I suspect he might agree that, despite the liberty taken with the implications of baciyelmo, Spitzers analysis of the relationship between characters life experience, language and perception of the world is valid and insightful.

As for Martínez Mata’s disallowance of don Quijote as a persuasive spokes-man for imaginative literature, I remain partially convinced. Yes, don Quijote’s rhapsodic boiling lake narrative lacks the verisimilitude that could legitimize the marvelous (Martínez Mata holds up the Capitán cautivo story from Part I as a positive example), he hopelessly confuses historical, legendary and fictional char-acters, is unable to retain a critical distance to his material, and is naively swayed by the authority of the printed word. But the vivid and varied detail of don Quijote’s narrative, and the beauty of the wish-fulfillment dream, bespeak more than re-gressive dementia. While of course we should not forget the irony and “burlesque context” of the knights utterances, much of the pastoral imagery he deploys recalls Garcilaso more than the “razón de la sin razón” of Feliciano de Silva (I, 1), and his claims regarding the effects of chivalric fantasy (“verá cómo le destierran la mel-ancolía que tuviere”; “después que soy caballero andante soy valiente […] sufridor


de trabajos, de prisiones”) contain clear echoes of authorial sentiments and values. Again, much of what don Quijote says is contradicted by his behavior and the sor-did reality of his “adventures,” but Cervantes’ insistent combining of the ridiculous and the dignified, the absurd and authoritative throughout Don Quijote (take for example, don Quijote’s reference to biblical and archeological evidence of giants in the beginning of Part II), make authorial positions seem ambiguous indeed. This is partly due to the way Cervantes cultivates in the reader a critical sensibility and also an affection for don Quijote and Sancho. The squire himself becomes a pri-mary “banisher of melancholy” in Part II, in no small part due to his adoption of the imaginative literary values of his master. As for the notion that such a reaction to don Quijote is necessarily mired in the concerns of Romanticism, it should be noted that a predisposition toward seeing fools as ambiguous, and a susceptibility to the pleasures of fantasy and implausible adventure can also result from reading Erasmus and Burton, Ariosto, Martorell, and Spenser. As Martínez Mata himself observes with regard to Cervantes’ self-portrait in the prologue to Don Quijote (I): “Al retratarse de esta forma, Cervantes se muestra sin duda influido por la positiva consideración renacentista de la melancolía como don divino, propia del hombre del genio” (37). The “Romantic approach” has certainly produced anachro-nistic distortions, to which Cervantes comenta el Quijote proposes a clear-sighted counterweight. Thankfully, Martínez Mata does not throw out the baby with the bathwater. This illuminating, amiable study can be read with pleasure and profit for beginners and specialists alike.

Michael Scham

[email protected]

Juan Carlos González Faraco. Il cavaliere errante. La poetica educativa di Don Chisciotte. Edizione a cura di Anita Gramigna. Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2008. 124 pp. ISBN: 978-88-464-9256-2.

Durante casi dos siglos, el Quijote ha sido una de las columnas ideológicas sobre la que se han sostenido, al menos en los países de habla hispana, buena parte de los ideales concebidos en torno a la educación. La lengua, la moral, el pensamiento, todo –al parecer– venía embutido en un libro que se entregaba a niños y a jóvenes fragmentado en píldoras y, a veces, incluso de un solo trago. Lo cierto es que, si algunos lo leían, otros hacían cuanto estaba en sus manos para esquivarlo.

Por suerte o por desgracia, en nuestros días ni siquiera creo que exista la po-sibilidad de sortear esa lectura, pues el Quijote ha pasado a ser un libro más en los estantes de una librería invisible, una referencia lejana y fantasmal para los adoles-centes. Por eso resulta profundamente interesante y sugestiva la propuesta de Juan


Carlos González Faraco, que, de un lado, traza una revisión de las relaciones que la pedagogía ha ido estableciendo con el libro de Cervantes y, de otro, se plantea otro modo de recuperar esa lectura como parte de un nuevo proyecto educativo. Desde las inercias de la investigación cervantina, no pocas veces olvidamos que, más allá de las disquisiciones eruditas, la vida real de un libro está en sus lectores y que, cuando no los haya, el cervantismo no tendrá sentido: se convertirá poco menos que en la disección de un cadáver inexistente.

En Il cavaliere errante. La poetica educativa di Don Chisciotte se suma el es-fuerzo intelectual de explicar la historia del Quijote como instrumento pedagógico y la voluntad de construir un discurso gozoso en torno a la lectura. Así lo indica el propio autor: “Il mio proposito è di fare un’analisi comparata di questi testi all’interno di un percorso narrativo che ci conduce a porci delle domande sul ca-polavoro di Cervantes e le sue letture pedagogiche all’inizio del secolo XXI. Ma anche ad immaginare altre possibili letture educative per il nostro tempo della cosiddetta tarda modernità che, a mio giudizio, dovranno essere preferibilmente antipedagogiche” (p. 43).

Esta perspectiva renovada y fresca en torno al libro se inicia con unas páginas sobre los modos de lectura en la escuela, bajo el epígrafe de “De Lectione: un lettore appassionato.” La idea última a la que González Faraco quiere llevarnos es la de que no cabe distinción –al menos, no debe haberla– entre la lectura educativa y la libre, pues, en cuestiones de amor, de poco o nada vale la imposición. De ahí que acuda a la sabia pregunta que George Steiner ponía sobre la mesa en Extraterritorial: “Per quanti lettori italiani, inglesi o tedeschi, opere come la Divina Commedia, Il paradiso perduto o la seconda parte del Faust costituiscono un’esperienza personale e non un’esperienza di comune riferimento?.” Desde luego, para pocos. Por eso hay que tratar de poner al lector joven –el más frágil, pero el más imprescindible– en la tensión de experimentar una pasión radical frente al libro mismo, dejando de lado las construcciones teóricas y eruditas: “Il buon maestro di lettura deve liberare il libro dall’orpello ‘teologico’ che lo assedia, lo imbavaglia e lo ‘spiega’, deve lasciarlo nella sua primitiva testualità, nell’intemperie nella quale fu composto, per favorire il rincontro del lettore con l’atto poetico primordiale, perché la sua avventura come lettore si alimenti non di quel tempo, che già non è, ma dell’alito, dell’emozione e del coraggio che accompagnarono lo scrittore” (p. 27).

Es en esta sección donde comienza a establecerse una interesantísima co-nexión que se irá plasmando a lo largo de todo el libro. Me refiero a los lazos que González Faraco tiende entre Cervantes y el escritor cubano Reinaldo Arenas y su concepción de la literatura, que hace de cada uno de nosotros seres potencial-mente literarios: “Siamo quello che Omero narrò, siamo le buffe battaglie di Don Chisciotte, i sogni e gli incubi di Shakespeare” (p. 30). Esos vínculos se materiali-zan, sobre todo, en la novela El mundo alucinante (1965), donde Arenas narra las peripecias quijotescas de fray Servando Teresa de Mier y sus persecuciones por parte de la Inquisición.


La segunda sección del libro atiende a sus envolturas: a los fervores que ha despertado, a las máscaras que lo envuelven, quiero decir, a todo aquello en que jamás pudo ni quiso pensar Miguel de Cervantes; porque estoy convencido de que por su mente jamás pasó la posibilidad de que su libro fuera un símbolo de nada. Aun así, la historia del Quijote es la historia de una sacralización; hasta el punto de que el mismísimo don Marcelino –Menéndez Pelayo, en persona– tuvo razones sobradas para quejarse de los que habían convertido un libro de ficción en todo un evangelio. Sin comerlo ni beberlo, por obra de mágicos encantadores, Cervantes se vio repentinamente trocado en arma arrojadiza de conservadores contra liberales, de regeneracionistas contra conservadores y de todos contra todos. Estamos ante la España del centenario de 1905, que tan certeramente describe González Faraco, en la que dominan dos Quijote pedagógicos: uno que entendió el libro como un emblema de las esencias nacionales y otro que lo convirtió en arsenal de toda sabi-duría y en vademécum para los problemas de la humanidad.

Hubo incluso quien desde la reverencia, como Ramiro de Maeztu, advertía que la lectura de ese complejo y ambiguo texto no era una lectura recomendable para “los jóvenes de la nueva España.” Y tenía razón, porque no es el de Cervantes, como el autor de este Il cavaliere errante subraya, un libro reducible a los paráme-tros de la pedagogía: “E dunque, nonostante la complessità della sua trama e dei suoi personaggi, che consentono tante letture, si parla del Don Chisciotte in modo tanto uniforme, lo si risolve con discorsi che non recano traccia di alcun dubbio? Come è possibile interpretare una narrazione che si regge su tanti mutamenti, cambiamenti di luogo e giochi di specchio, come un elementare catalogo di arche-tipi umani o indiscutibili imperativi morali?” (p. 58).

En la tercera parte del ensayo, González Faraco hace un recorrido por la his-toria de una recepción singular del Quijote, la del libro como instrumento pe-dagógico. Es el Quijote de las “dos Españas,” la del modelo para una educación católica, la que convirtió a Cervantes y a su libro, sucesiva o simultáneamente, en pauta moral, en revolucionario, en divisa de lo hispánico o en pedagogo experto para niños y jóvenes. Nos encontramos con la crónica de obras singulares, como el Cervantes educador de Ezequiel Solana (1905); el libro al que Acisclo Muñiz tuvo el valor de llamar Catecismo de Cervantes, en su primera edición (1905), para luego convertirlo en Cervantes en la escuela en 1925; los Comentarios sobre las frases de El Quijote que tienen relación con la educación y la instrucción públicas de Antonio Cremades y Berna (1906); los Estudios Didácticos. Cervantes, Rector de Colegio. Pedagogía del Quijote de Julio Ballesteros Curiel (1919); el “Cervantes y los niños,” de Manuel Siurot, de 1916, que siete años más tarde retomó el asunto en La emo-ción de España; o del número especial que la Revista Nacional de Educación, en 1947 y en pleno franquismo, dedicó al Quijote.

Toda esa ensalada de alardes, ideada al margen de lo que escribió Cervantes, se condensa aquí en tres recetas. La primera es la del Quijote moral, que comenzó a cuajarse a finales del siglo XVIII, con obras como La moral de don Quijote (1789)


y La moral del más famoso escudero Sancho Panza (1792) del bachiller Pedro Gatell. El trayecto de un siglo largo nos lleva hasta el ya citado Ezequiel Solana, que pudo afirmar sin empacho que “la dottrina cristiana, la grammatica, la letteratura, il diritto, la geografia e la storia, l’economia domestica, la musica, tutte le materie scolastiche possono essere trattate attraverso il semplice commento dei brani di questo libro immortale” (p. 92). La segunda hizo del Quijote el símbolo egregio de todo lo español, transformándolo en una basa sobre la que construir una idea de España y de lo hispánico. Por arte de magia política, un simple libro devino en un «simbolo che illumini la Spagna, una nazione scelta dalla Provvidenza per compiere un destino immortale. Quasi tutti i topici del nazional-cattolicesimo più agguerrito sono presenti nella sua retorica patriottica, farcita di argomenti storici» (p. 94). La tercera y última opción –y acaso la más sensata– fue la que utilizó la narración cervantina como recurso didáctico en la escuela, esto es, como instru-mento para enseñar lengua y literatura, aunque, eso sí, dejando a un lado el libro como objeto de lectura.

La conclusión es clara: la pedagogía ha reducido el libro a instrumento, ob-viando lo mejor que ofrecía a sus lectores. “Un’opera d’arte ridotta ad oggetto pe-dagógico” –puede leerse en la página 101– “condanna l’immaginazione in nome di un principio morale trascendentale, prima di avere fatto svaporare e sparire del tutto l’incanto della lettura.” Con una enorme inteligencia, el autor pone el dedo en la llaga de esta epidemia didáctica, desvelando cómo los pedagogos han venido hurtando algo consustancial al libro: nada menos que la risa. Y es que la risa, la burla, la ironía, el matiz o el placer, cosas tan esencialmente cervantinas, son difí-cilmente plasmables en un aula; por eso las lecturas pedagógicas aspiran a poner vallas al campo y pretenden negar la libertad del lector.

En respuesta a ese intento, el último capítulo del libro tiene como título el de “Invitati ad una festa,” en referencia al banquete que Cervantes nos ofrece como catadores potenciales de su libro. Aunque, eso sí, como quería monsieur Barthes, se trataba de una invitación a degustar sosegadamente, palabra tras palabra y con el ocio atento de las lecturas antiguas. Es ésa la idea última de este ensayo: la opción por una lectura antipedagógica, en la que no ha de reinar la instrucción, sino el gozo, que recupere las palabras mismas y, en ellas, “il senso profondamente narra-tivo e misterioso dell’esperienza, non sempre facile, del vivere” (p. 106). Según esto, la mejor posibilidad que el Quijote puede aportar a la pedagogía es la de convertir a los jóvenes en lectores conscientes de sí mismos y de la importancia que el arte para la sociedad, como catalizador de lo que somos. Juan Carlos González Faraco resume su invitación con un cita de Reinaldo Arenas, que merece la pena releer: “Non ci rassegniamo a vivere senza bellezza, perché essa è il senso trascendente della nostra vita, la trasfigurazione di tanti momenti magici e fugaci in qualcosa di eterno... Chiediamo agli dei la grazia di poter partecipare al mistero della bellezza, ingrandendolo” (p. 114). No es poco. Il cavaliere errante no es sólo un inteligente repaso a través de la recepción pedagógica del libro que escribió Cervantes, sino un


lúcido aviso que viene a recordarnos que la verdadera educación sólo puede ejer-cerse desde la libertad y que el mejor Quijote siempre será el que un lector tenga, libre y gozosamente, entre sus manos.

Luis Gómez [email protected]

Collectors!Offered for sale

A rare Quijote in six volumes set in italics.[Imprenta particular de C. Gorchs, 6 vols. 4º

Portada en rojo y negro.Rius, t. 1 Addenda 1ª, p, 383, Nº 1069, dice 1892-1895]

Inquire: Albina Velasco [email protected] is in Bogotá.

Premio Internacional deInvestigación Científica y Crítica

“Miguel de Cervantes”

InstItucIones PatrocInadoras

Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Cátedra Cervantes Texas A&M University, Proyecto Cervantes Grupo

Santander, Editorial Academia del Hispanismo

Convocatoria

Este premio tiene una dotación económica de 3.000,00 euros, destinados a la publicación de la obra, en la colección Biblioteca Miguel de Cervantes de Editorial Academia, aneja a la publicación del Anuario de Estudios Cervantinos. Serán considerados por el Jurado del Premio Internacional de Investigación Científica y Crítica “Miguel de Cervantes” los manuscritos presentados con arreglo a las bases que se verán en este enlace:

http://academiaeditorial.com/cms/index.php?page=premio-cervantes

edward j. dudleyusers.ipfw.edu/jehle/cervante/csa/artics09/csa2009-1_text.pdf · rafael barroso...

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