(A)Wry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes, and the Early Picaresque

Chapter Four Don Quixote A Case of Anamorphic Literature

73 Chapter Four Don Quixote A Case of Anamorphic Literature What Do You See? Américo Castro was one of the first critics to focus on Don Quixote’s perspectivism, which he attributed to Cervantes’s understanding of reality as intrinsically problematic (see his 1925 El pensamiento de Cervantes). As he would later put it in the introduction to his edition of Don Quixote in 1960: “parece esto, pero puede ser quién sabe qué. […] El observador y lo observado no coinciden, por lo común, en un vértice válido para otros observadores” (xxxv). For his part, Leo Spitzer (1955) would coin the well-known term “linguistic perspectivism ” to describe Cervantes’s narrative style. According to Spitzer, Don Quixote makes us aware of the fact that reality is always subject to diverse interpretations. A perfect illustration of this idea is of course the neologism “baciyelmo” with which Sancho acknowledges his master’s point of view while simultaneously asserting his own. In the last few decades several scholars have arrived at a similar understanding of the novel as a fundamentally perspectivistic narrative: E. C. Riley notes the constant appearance of “multiple versions” of the same events; Juan Bautista AvalleArce (“Cervantes”) argues that for Don Quixote “truth is but a point of view” (9); Anthony Cascardi (“History”) sees in the novel a “double voice” that “ironizes the rhetoric of self-assertion characteristic of the modern age” (230); John Jay Allen (“Don Quixote”) maintains that Don Quixote is “an exploration of the fertile possibilities in the management and manipulation of point of view” (130); Félix Martínez-Bonati calls it a “pluriregional” narrative; Michael Gerli (Refiguring) speaks of the novel’s “multiple points of view”; and Nicholas Spadaccini 74 Chapter Four and Jenaro Talens favor terms such as “plurality of perspectives ” or “games of perspectives.” Some scholars such as Jean Cassou, Manuel Durán, and Ruth El Saffar (“Cervantes”) have made a point of connecting Don Quixote’s perspectivism with the developments of Renaissance perspective. According to El Saffar, “the perspectivism that Américo Castro and Leo Spitzer find as characteristic of Don Quixote is part of a Renaissance phenomenon which we traditionally see first manifested in the paintings of Giotto in the fourteenth century” (“Cervantes” 142). I intend to pursue this association in order to suggest a connection between Cervantes ’s perspectivistic narrative style and the anamorphic mode of representation. I would like to begin this discussion with yet another quote from Castro: “Cervantes llevó a cabo la máxima proeza de reducir a uno los dos planos del Entierro del conde de Orgaz; los armonizó secularmente de tal forma que la ensoñación ilusoria pareciera incluida en la realidad de este mundo” (Cervantes 107). In this passage, Castro calls attention to two different (and yet interconnected) aspects of Cervantes’s style: (1) His characteristic superimposition of planes; reality and dreams, but also—as I would like to suggest—high and low cultures, ideals and their grotesque and/or carnivalesque inversions , and (2) His representation of illusions and dreams (or nightmares as in the cave of Montesinos) as constitutive elements of reality. This notion may certainly be connected with the visionary work of El Greco, and also—perhaps even more clearly—with the superimposition of images characteristic of anamorphic compositions, whether it be the perspective experiments of Schön or Dalí’s “apparitions” in the twentieth century. Things may look like windmills or ordinary inns, but they are also giants and castles in Don Quixote’s imagination. We know of course that Don Quixote’s judgment has been clouded by the fantasies created by the popular books of chivalry and are initially inclined to trust Sancho’s more “down to earth” views. Eventually, however, we come to realize that Sancho’s perceptions are not much more trustworthy than those of his mad master. The good servant is, for all we know, ready to concede the existence of Mambrino’s helmet as long as he gets to 75 Don Quixote: Anamorphic Literature keep the spoils of the battle with the barber: a harness (“jaez”) that looks suspiciously like a packsaddle (“albarda”). He is also eager to take possession of an island that is amazingly located miles away from the sea. Finally, we cannot but wonder about Sancho’s bizarre account of his fantastic voyage through the heavens in 2.41. If we cannot trust Sancho, and...