Theatrical Aspects of the Novel: A Study of Don Quixote (review)

REVIEWS Syverson-Stork, Jill, Theatrical Aspects of the Novel: A Study of Don Quixote. Valencia: Albarros/Hispanófila Ediciones, 1986. 134pp.«El Quijote es la novela de un hombre de teatro,» asserts Azorin in an essay entitled «El secreto de Miguel.» Syverson-Stork's study depends precisely on the thesis that Cervantes's experience as a playwright is manifest in Don Quijote and that theatrical devices become more marked as the novel progresses. During the composition of Part I and especially of Part II, Cervantes was revising his plays for publication , and he was witnessing the triumph of his rival Lope de Vega's comedia nueva. Hence, the stage was on his mind throughout his narrative performance. He brings this preoccupation to bear on Don Quixote through dramatized narrators, characters who see themselves as actors , a dramatic method of creating scenes, and an increasing use of dialogue. Within this scheme, Lope is a motivating factor and a source of negative exemplarity. If the comedia nueva celebrates a closed social system in which appearance is the ultimate reality, Cervantes's works allow space for reflection, for multiple perspectives, for exposure of false values. The search for the self and the questioning of theatrical illusion distinguish Cervantes's creation from Lope's. Don Quixote is a critique and an ironic rewriting of the deterministic model for the comedia. Syverson-Stork envisions a Cervantes imbued with the spirit of drama yet forced by circumstance to make his major statements on literature and life in the novel. The unconventional features of his later plays make their way into Part II of the Quixote, which presents the dangers of taking roles too seriously or of accepting institutionalized thought without question. In the episode of the Knight of the Mirrors, to cite one case, Sansón Carrasco and Tomé Cecial serve as «flat mirror images of the heroes. The impostors are only the role; Don Quixote and 139 140BCom, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Summer 1987) Sancho, having created their lifestyles out of a dream to restore ideals and beauty in the modern world, are much more. The example of Sansón does represent, 'al vivo,' what role-players who confound truth and illusions can become» (p. 70). Cervantes's experiment in narrative uses and then distances itself from the comedia, in an attempt to«engage a heterogeneous public in self-discovery by allowing them to laugh at, and see through, the deception of appearance» (p. 71). Paradoxically, the frustrated playwright develops his own literary persona in a novel abundant in the recourses of drama. Syverson-Stork's thesis is clearly articulated, and her examples effectively presented. It is interesting to consider Don Quixote from the perspective of drama. Since Cervantes's novel is the multiperspectivist object par excellence, however, one may wish to reflect upon the foregrounding of the written word and the presence of the narrator,«dramatized» or otherwise, as the distinguishing features of the text. One may note, perhaps, that the agents of mediation multiply rather than recede in Part II and that the interplay of the two parts heightens the emphasis on reading and writing, fact and fiction. What is Cervantes able to achieve in the novel that he cannot achieve in his plays? The answer may lie in the (con)fusion of storytelling and storyteller, the selfreferentiality that makes the Quixote a novel and a theory of the novel, a dramatization of the reading process. The stage is pen and paper, and the text never relinquishes its identity as text. Just as devotees of the Quixote may debate Syverson-Stork's approach to the narrative act, students of the comedia may object to the reductive treatment of Lope's theater. The «monster of nature» may not be as much a servant to the social hierarchy or his dramatic system as closed as Syverson-Stork would argue. On the other hand, interpretation of Cervantes's works is not as open as the contrasted worldviews would suggest. These polemical issues are part of the pleasure of the text. The critic cannot be faulted for taking a stand and supporting her thesis. Her sin is one of omission: she has failed to make her study...