Cervantes’ by Roberto González Echevarría (review)

The present volume is an anomaly: a transcript of the lectures for a semester-long course in English for students of comparative literature and Spanish, given at Yale by Sterling Professor Roberto González Echevarría. There is also a highly unusual redundancy: several of these lectures can be viewed on You Tube. John Rutherford’s excellent translation is supplemented by selections from the exemplary novellas, John Elliott’s Imperial Spain, and some classic essays on the Quixote.

Topics that claimed my attention are history, law, perspectivism, intertextuality, Freud, grand themes, etymologies, characters and their interactions, Renaissance and Baroque (shades of Geistesgeschichteand the Zeitgeist!), close reading, and how part 2 rewrites part 1. The author illustrates beautifully and repeatedly that literature is made from other literature. His focus is on mimesis rather than diegesis, characters rather than characterization, novel and romance rather than satire, and perspectivism rather than point of view. There are remarkable insights along the way. There are also noteworthy oversights, errors, or misreadings. For instance, on pages 31 and 50: “no quiero acordarme” means simply “I don’t recall”; it is formulaic, not volitional. For page 36, compare Martín de Riquer’s devastating commentary on the knighting farce. On page 45, the defense of Don Quixote’s illogic concerning the disappearance of his library ignores the fact that he is always misguided in part 1 in his assessments of reality, as the narrator, Sancho, or another character will make clear. Perspectivists sometimes quote a more ample statement by Don Quixote that what seems to you, Sancho, to be one thing may seem to me another, and to a third person something else, but they never quote the words preceding his foundational assumption that there are loose amongst us evil enchanters who transform things before our eyes. Therefore, we see different things. On page 50, it becomes clear that our author’s concept of “the narrator” is a global one, encompassing any and all. On page 218, the sentence “Notice that Dulcinea here is Casildea de Vandalia” seems to blend Don Quixote’s lady into Sansón’s. On page 221, regarding the lion episode, foolhardiness and reckless endangerment of others can hardly be dignified as courage. On page 270, Cárcel de amormight be mentioned as a precursor to Cervantes’s epistolary experiments. Page 286 does not make clear that fablais a factor only in part 1. On page 314, it is indecorous to describe British scholars of the hard funny book school as being hard mainly “in their brain arteries.”

Focusing now on three issues of greater import. First, it puzzles me that someone who has such a keen analytical mind and eye for detail—who repeatedly reminds students to be alert to details—would choose to ignore aspects of how the story is assembled, told, and transmitted. Three early instances include: the obvious differences in motivation and attitude toward Don Quixote that characterize the first and second pseudo authors; the first is ironic, dismissive, and negative; the second is naive, gushing, and highly motivated, but he appears too late in the game to reorient the reader to his Romantic perspective in the few pages he is allotted; his witless reference to aged maidens who went to their grave as intact as the mothers who bore them is priceless. The narrative metalepsis or transgression of narrative level or frame at the end of part 1, chapter 8, goes without mention, despite the fact that George Haley’s classic article is required reading. This is the first appearance of the editorial voice of the text, and it represents a changing of horses in mid-stream, the quite remarkable replacement of one extradiegetic-heterodiegetic (frame) narrator by another.

Perhaps more important, however, is the contrast, within the first nine chapters!, of hard and soft readings, with implicit criticism of the soft or Romantic approach avant la lettre. One searches in vain here for illustrations of focalization or the disnarrated. Second, there...