Otra manera de leer el "Quijote": historia, tradiciones culturales y literatura

The chapters of this book consist of 23 slightly revised articles published in many different places over a period of nearly twenty years (1978–1997). All specialists in Cervantes are familiar with at least some of these articles; but they now make even better sense when read, or re-read, within the context of this well-organized and convenient collection. In his prologue Professor Redondo of the Sorbonne Nouvelle, one of France’s most distinguished Hispanists, explains what he means by “another way of reading Don Quixote.” In his approach he emphasizes, more than élite learned culture, popular oral culture: what the great mass of illiterate Spaniards, Cervantes’s contemporaries, knew or believed from their immersion in oral-aural communication. Within this popular culture he emphasizes particularly the festive rites of Carnival, as studied by Claude Gaignebet, Julio Caro Baroja, and Mikhail Bakhtin. At the same time Redondo is fully aware of the ways in which popular and élite cultures frequently influence or reinforce one another. He tries to capture in a global way, as a cultural whole, the different “mentalités,” or diffuse ideologies, of a particular historical period, and how they were represented. As he says (p. 13):

Desde este punto de vista, los fenómenos literarios, parte integrante de un sistema de representación históricamente definido, no pueden apreciarse si no se toman plenamente en cuenta, más allá de las exigencias genéricas, los factores evocados.

Cervantes, says Redondo, wrote his masterpiece during a period of unique tensions and contradictions: Spain, as we can see in Cervantes’s burlesque poems, was undergoing a crisis of national identity while, following the death of somber Philip II, a festive atmosphere of pomp and circumstance set the tone for the court of the youthful king Philip III. The novel, says Redondo, with its persistent parodies, provoked a liberating laughter, and the innovative narrative devices gave the reader a new sense of individual autonomy. The critic, seeing Don Quixote primarily as a work of entertainment, emphasizes its historical profundity from many points of view: social, anthropological, literary.

Redondo’s book is divided into four sets of essays:

I. “Texto y contexto: problemas de intertextualidad” (6 chapters); II. “Personajes cervantinos bajo nueva luz” (5 chapters); III. “Episodios cervantinos: un replanteamiento” (11 chapters); and IV. “A modo de conclusión” (a single chapter). His approach, tying all of the essays together, is the importance he gives to specific social and historical data, always fully documented, for understanding many different details of Cervantes’s text. There is, as the author recognizes, some inevitable repetition, especially with respect to carnivalesque practices as revived in festivities at the court of Philip III, who encouraged a social atmosphere quite different from that of his much more repressed, and repressive, father.

In I.1 (“Texto literario y contexto histórico-social: del Lazarillo al Quijote”) Redondo poses the problem of how to define literature (oral, hand-written, printed?) and of how it functions socially: the economics of its circulation, its representation of social classes. I.2 applies this approach, with an emphasis on “mentalités,” to Don Quixote: the national crisis, bankruptcies, declining productivity, and poverty, leading to arbitrios and escapist festivities at court in Valladolid. The Mancha is characterized as a social space, with different classes gathering at the inns and with superstitious practices observable on the highways. I.3 concentrates on an ancient and widespread Germanic superstition, that of the “estantigua” or diabolical nocturnal processions found in the Second Part of Don Quixote. I.4 is a study of melancholy as a medical and psychological affliction; it was a familiar learned and popular concept, based on the four humors, elements, planets, seasons, and was often associated with being in love. The protagonist of the novel was of course recognized as melancholic, as well as choleric; Rocinante too has his melancholy moments. I.5 is concerned with love and carnal desire as understood at the time and represented...