The Novel according to Cervantes (review)

REVIEWS 75 "J'ai souhaité simplement illustrer la flexibilité et la 'porosité' de genres et de thèmes voisins" (p. 107). "Flexibility" might well be üie word to sum up this collection of papers, which will serve as a useful tool to future investigators; they will not, however, thank die editor or the Casa de Velazquez for omitting an index, an oversight that makes cross-reference and consultation virtually impossible. Gethin Hughes University of Toronto Stephen Gilman. The Novel according to Cervantes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. xvii + 204pp. A posthumous publication by Üie late eminent American Hispanist Stephen Gilman, this volume is a welcome addition to Üie already compendious list of treatments of Üie Quijote as the great progenitor of Üie European novel. What organizes Üie study is the idea of discovery or invention, dramatically evoked by the book's closing image of Cervantes, like some literary Columbus, setting "foot on a new continent later to be called üie novel" (p. 184). The four main chapter headings—Definition, Birth, Invention, and Discovery— are variants of Üie même, all focusing on different ways of thinking about Üie origins or first principles of something, of the coming into being of what was not there before. The ambiguity of inventio as something made or something found reflects Üie double focus of Üie book. Gilman's main attention is to the elaborate formal and intertextual complexity of Üie Quijote, its artistic construction; but at the same time he remains fully alert to its unique historical context, what it prophetically reveals or discloses about the shift in human consciousness üiat introduces the modern epoch in literature. Elegantly written and imaginatively conceived, the book is particularly suggestive in the scope of its allusions to later texts Üiat are most closely affiliated with tiiis grotesque child of Cervantes' brain: notably, the works of Fielding, Stendhal, and Twain. It is hard to know why a version of the first chapter, when presented at üie English Institute, should have met with such hostility that it was excluded (as a footnote informs us) from the published proceedings. This chapter introduces üie cornerstone of Gilman's argument: that Üie novel can be defined by Üie emergence of historical time—Üie time of personal (or collective) experience—which disintegrates me naïve and unremembering episodic rhythm found in romance. Gilman's view, doubtless not new, Üiat novelistic time reflects a totalizing structure of experience and knowledge bears specific comparison with Bakhtin's understanding of the modern chronotope or "time-space." Like Bakhtin, Gilman reflects on the use of the picaresque road as a powerful spatial image that accommodates the idea of a progressive growth in knowledge through the direct experience of reality. Having defined the novel in terms of its rupture with die adventure time of romance, Gilman turns to the question of its birth: how mis fruitful monster ever came to be delivered "from die womb of comic romance. That is to say, we shall try to comprehend and describe exactly how the hermetic frontiers of adventure were first perforated by what we now call experience" (p. 49). Here Gilman introduces üie interesting notion of "interruption ," which may be either vertical or horizontal. The vertical interruptions occur whenever Cervantes' narrator cheerfully breaks the innocent flow of the story and reveals its artificiality, uius creating in Üie reader an ironic detachment from Üie fiction. This first novel, men, inasmuch as narrativity is quite knowingly and self-consciously thematized throughout, is also an extremely precocious work of metafiction. The horizontal interruptions occur when adventure time becomes "infiltrated by experience" (p. 76 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 4:1 68). The complex deception which Quijote and Sancho undergo in the fulling mills episode is the prototypical instance. From this point on the representation of subjective experience takes on a peculiar role hitherto unencountered in fiction. Gilman evokes anotiier birth image to convey the inaugural significance of Cervantes' work: "The novel has just been born. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the fledgling is pecking its way out of the hermetic egg of adventure into die vast time-space of personal experience" (p. 64). In the third chapter Gilman celebrates Cervantes...