The Novel According to Cervantes by Stephen Gilman (review)

Book Reviews101 at by critics of Latin American literature up to now. With grace of style and the ability to discuss a complex topic in terms intelligible to those not expert in the field, Diaz has given us a valuable tool for a more complete understanding of contemporary Latin American fiction. Included are extensive notes and bibliography for those who wish to delve more deeply into the topic. Diaz states in her conclusion that "it is the Magic Realists, finally, who declare that the indigenous cultures have more to offer us than their quaint, exotic, picturesque appearances, and who begin to delve into and to reveal the modes of constructing and perceiving the world that belongs to non-Western mentalities" (102). It might be added here that Nancy Gray Diaz helps those who possess Western mentalities to begin to understand what those cultures have to offer. p . n „ ROGER D. MARTIN Regis College STEPHEN GILMAN. The Novel According to Cervantes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. 204 p. This study by a distinguished Hispanist is a mature work, in the best sense ofthe term. Informed by years ofreading and reflection, The Novel According to Cervantes focuses on the processes, contexts, and theoretical implications of Don Quijote. The ideal reader of the meditations, claims the author, is not the Cervantes specialist but the student of narrative in search of generic peculiarities of the novel. The four essays—entitled "Definition," "Birth," "Invention," and "Discovery"—address the questions ofwhat novels do to their readers and how, and a unifying thread is the dialectic of adventure and experience in the developing narrative form. The result is an authoritative, eloquent, and provocative commentary by a master reader who recognizes that no one can have the final word on the Quijote. Gilman distinguishes three degrees of reception. The first includes epic, ballad, and folktale designed for oral performance or reading aloud. The second is exemplified by printed chivalric and pastoral narratives, "the training pool for silent, communal immersion," while the (quixotic) third category allows consumers of texts to build upon experience "in the act of surrendering to fictional lives far more intensely and significantly alive than we are" (8). The newness of Don Quijote lies in the presentation of the birth, infancy, and maturity of experience within its pages, as part of a structure in which experience complements rather than opposes action. Experience was, for Cervantes, "a dimension of existence that was at once virtually unexplored and pathetically vulnerable. Appealing, comic, and forlorn, it was the conscious precipitate of violent interruption, the rueful result of trying to live meaningfully and not conventionally in a century and a society that revered conventionality and were prone to cut short deviant behavior with a rock, a club, or a torch. The Quijote itself is nothing less than an ironical two-volume interruption of the heroic version of national history that Spaniards were persistently engaged in telling themselves" (57-58). Disjunction in the text serves to unite medium and message. Readers need to maintain a certain detachment from fiction, thereby relishing otherness in order to discover their 102Rocky Mountain Review own uniqueness: "What we call all too facilely the rhetoric ofthe novel really amounts to . . . the fascinating history of all the ways novelists have found to prevent their readers from reading the way Alonso Quijano read" (69-70). In contrast, Lope de Vega's comedia nueva takes its literary vision of life as seriously as the idle gentleman takes Amadis de Gaula, by equating, or confusing , an antiquated code of honor with religious faith and political loyalties. The lengthy essay on invention demonstrates how Cervantes uses ("comes upon") popular generic raw material—the romances of chivalry, the pastoral, the picaresque—to create a different and more comprehensive type of narrative. The novel is rooted in a scrutiny of the Spain of Cervantes' day and of the books into which he escaped. Don Quijote preserves the pleasure of the text while, largely through ironic strategies, endowing it with a critical conscience. When "verisimilitude is transformed from a rhetorical recipe into the central problem for the inhabitants of the fiction" (124), they are truly on their own. A genuine freedom, of speech...