Don Quixote: : Kind Reconsidered

DON QUIXOTE: K I N D R E C O N S I D E R E D James A. Parr University of California, Riverside It may be time, after twelve years, to sally forth once again on the quixotic quest to reorient the Cervantine establishment regarding the dominant genre of the Quijote. Knowing full well that success is beyond the pale, our intrepid critic is nevertheless armed with the assurance that one can still meet defeat with equanimity and a certainje ne sais quoi. When I published my 'Don Quixote': An Anatomy of Subversive Discourse in 1988, it was my impression that it was a book primarily about genre. The title was meant to suggest that focus, at least to those who might recognize that "anatomy" is a synonym of "satire," the structure was meant to reinforce that perspective, by showing how the subversion of narrative authority combines with point of view and characterization to form a satiric structure, and finally by the two concluding chapters, which were devoted unequivocally to the question of genre. "Kind," by theway, is thebest English rendering of its unpronounceable French counterpart , as Alastair Fowler makes clear in his likewise significantly titled Kinds ofLiterature. Ithas perplexed and amazed me during these several years that readers of my Anatomy have chosen to focus on the first two chapters (on narrative voices and presences) rather than on the last two (on kind), in conjunction with the overall thrust. It may be that some did not read beyond those first two chapters; itmay be that others remain unconvinced of the larger thesis, or merely find greater value in the narratological issues than the generic ones. Since the main purpose of the book—now out of print—has been ignored, it may be time to reiterate portions of it, while updating others. That is my purpose here. Perhaps the largest obstacle to acceptance of my "satiric" thesis is the self-satisfaction we seem to enjoy in being the doorkeepers to the first modern novel. The apparent importance of this self-assumed assignment has generally escaped me, because my assumption has been, and continues to be, that the novel, of whatever variety, is only one narrative form among many. Nor is narrative per se inherently superior to any other kind of literature, for instance drama or lyric verse. But putting that consideration aside, just why the novel should be privileged over romance, satire, the short story, and even narrative verse (epic) is not at all clear. In Cervantes's day, it was felt that lengthy prose narrative, such as the books of chivalry, was a degenerate form of the epic and greatly inferior to it. A CALIOPE Vol. 6, Nos. 1-2 (2000): pages 139-148 140 «5 James A. Parr lengthy picaresque narrative, say Guzman de Alfarache, is more than a decadent epic; it is a full-blown anti-epic as surely as it is an anti-romance. Perhaps we could do more to recover perspective on the historical importance of genres, along with an enhanced awareness of the inherent arbitrariness of privileging one over another. It might also be remarked that the privileged narrative form today, to judge by popular consumption , is that curious hybrid, the romance novel, which is neither a modern , realistic novel nor yet a post-modem, self-conscious one. It might also be ventured that the bulk of so-called post-modern novels are more properly satires, at least insofar as the form manifests itself in Latin America and Spain. Romance and satire have reasserted themselves, it would seem. We now have the post-modern or post-realistic novel, of course, and considerable effort has been expended to demonstrate that the Quijote also anticipates that paradigm (see Alter, Paz Gago, Friedman). I have succumbed to this temptation myself on occasion, although my main interest has been to show how the Quijote anticipates in actual practice any number of theoretical formulations of today, avant la lettre. These include Derrida's notion of the illusory frame, certain related concepts of deconstruction, illustrated for instance in the 1605 title and in the niise en abime involving orality and literacy, as well as Prince's disnarration, Genette...