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  • “This Is Not a Prologue”: Paradoxes of Historical and Poetic Discourse in the Prologue of Don Quixote, Part I
  • Charles Presberg

I

In his essay about both prologues to Don Quixote, Américo Castro was surely right to observe:

En realidad se trata de epílogos, redactados después de conclusa la obra; y no precisamente porque los prólogos suelan escribirse “a posteriori,” sino porque en este caso su sentido no se revela sino a quien posea noticia muy cabal del libro.

(262)

My limited examination of the Prologue of 1605 likewise follows from the conviction that it is inseparable from the rest of Cervantes’ narrative. Indeed, though it was written some ten years before the publication of Part II, the Prologue of 1605 can also be read as a summation of the entire narrative’s purpose, design and rhetorical method. In particular, it encapsulates the literary issues that Cervantes both dramatizes and thematizes throughout the rest of the text, within the frame of his tale about the putative “history” of Don Quixote and Sancho. 1 [End Page 215]

Nonetheless, the rest of this study will focus on how the Prologue of 1605 is not only a fitting preface—especially from the standpoint of its form—but also an integral part of Cervantes’ fiction. Indeed, that Prologue differs from conventional prologues, including the Prologue to Don Quixote, Part II, in that it is not an extrafictional statement which the author addresses to his potential readership, but a wholly fictional work. As such, it is inextricably linked to that aspect of Cervantes’ fictional tale which concerns, not so much the exploits of the knight and his squire, but the process of both constructing and construing their putative “history,” the “historia verdadera.”

II

Before one can justly assess either the content or the form of the Prologue of 1605, it is necessary to settle the question of “Who is speaking?” At first, that question seems easy enough to answer: “Miguel de Cervantes, in his capacity as author of Don Quixote.” Indeed, in reference to the Prologue, the answer strikes one as so obvious that the question seems hardly worth asking. Thus, it is less than surprising that critics have generally identified the narrative voice in the Prologue with that of the author. Aptly summarizing a view that has held sway among virtually all Cervantes’ readers, Howard Mancing writes:

No one, to my knowledge, doubts that the yo of the prologue who relates himself to the character and text by claiming to be not the “padre” (“father,” that is, the original author) but the “padrastro” (“stepfather,” that is, the editor), and who tells the story of being visited by a friend while pondering the problem of writing a prologue for his book is anyone other than the person referred to on the title page where it says “compuesto por . . . Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.”

(192–193) 2

To be sure, it runs contrary to convention, and especially to seventeenth-century readers’ expectations, that a prologue should be written as a fiction, and narrated by a fictional narrator. Furthermore, if an author intends his prologue to be taken as a fiction, we [End Page 216] would expect some such indication at the start of the work—one that would lead us to infer that our imagination is being transported to an imaginary, fictional realm. Instead, the Prologue of 1605 begins with the voice of a “yo,” which one would naturally assume, in the context of a prologue, is that of the author, addressing a “tú,” whom one would expect is the potential reader, in reference to what seems to be the book we now have in our possession:

Desocupado lector: sin juramento me podrás [tú] creer que quisiera [yo] que este libro, como hijo del entendimiento, fuera el más hermoso, el más gallardo y más discreto que pudiera imaginarse (emphasis added).

(DQ I, Prologue; [page] 50)

In fact, we receive no specific reason to doubt that the Prologue we are reading represents a statement issued to the reader in the voice of the historical author until we reach what seems a casual remark. That pivotal remark, which I believe effectively...

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