Rinconete y Cortadillo in Don Quijote: A Cervantine Reconstruction

For Bruce W. Wardropper:

        

Epictetus (Arrian) ¹

The pursuit of interpretive mysteries in Don Quijote is one of the supreme pleasures of a cervantista. By that we do not mean the artificially created mysteries of interpretation often tendentiously induced from outside the text through opaquely verbalized, philosophically sanctioned "misreadings," or post-modern "indeterminacies" that have lamentably gripped (or "colonized"?) a large sector of literary scholarship in recent years. We are referring instead to those genuine textual mysteries left behind by Cervantes himself, that have outlived generations of critics and endured like bedrock, simple but impactful mysteries, or, to vary a Spanish saying, "misterios como puños." ²

One of the most enduring mysteries of the Quijote has been the exact status of the interpolated stories, i.e., what did Cervantes himself intend to communicate by these stories, so interesting and valuable on their own, but so seemingly irrelevant to the cause of the main plot? Chief among these was, of course, El curioso impertinente and to a lesser extent El capitán cautivo, and the Marcela-Grisóstomo-episode, which have, in the Cervantine scheme of things, only comparatively recently given up the secret of their raison d'être. All of these episodes have now been proven to be firmly anchored in Cervantes' conceptual universe. ³

The Problem of the Rinconete

There remains however one more mystery to be explained, that of Rinconete and Cortadillo. It stands out from the preceding by its most striking phenomenological conundrum: Although it is mentioned as present in the context of the Quijote, it is not there, simply missing, mentioned only by its title. ⁴ The purpose of this mention has, for the most part, historically been glossed over by critics and editors. Only comparatively few critics have ventured to voice an opinion on this subject. Luis Astrana Marín, for example, has surmised that Cervantes intended by this mention to lay authorial claim to his story before its actual publication eight years later. ⁵

That claim in itself would have in hindsight proven to be prudent. For the issue of the Rinconete's authorship has been a sensitive one ever since the serendipitous finding in 1788 by the compiler Bosarte of a manuscript version of it, together with one of El celoso extremeño and the still controversial La tía fingida, now known as the Porras manuscript, due to their attribution to the Licenciado Porras de la Cámara, a contemporary and possible friend of Cervantes. For two centuries this version of the Rinconete has haunted the 1613 version like a Jungian shadow, and accompanied it into the editions of such renowned scholars as Rodríguez Marín, Schevill-Bonilla, and Avalle-Arce, who have simply treated it as an early version by Cervantes himself, precisely on the basis of its early announcement in the Quijote. This assumption neatly served to avoid the knotty problem of having to choose between the two versions and quite possibly having to declare one of them to be less authentic than the other.

The precariousness of this situation was ingeniously exploited by E.T. Aylward who not only questioned the authorship by Cervantes, but most radically and daringly, declared the latter to be a plagiarist. ⁶ This declaration was designed to explode all previous comfortable assumptions, and it foregrounded the question of authorship for good. Such a provocative assertion, however, was not likely to go long unanswered, and brought on the scene Geoffrey Stagg, who with the deft hand of an experienced philological detective, not only debunked Aylward's radical arguments, but also declared the entire Porras-manuscript to be invalid as a Cervantine creation, and only useful perhaps as a historical curiosity item. ⁷ Henceforth scholars will no longer feel comfortable about invoking Porras again. For the purpose of our essay therefore we too will adhere to the 1613 version.

There remains then the impression that Cervantes had a well-defined purpose in mind...