MicroQuijotes 2 by Juan Armando Epple (review)

Don Quijote is clearly a gift that keeps on giving. Miguel de Cervantes’s narrative is inspirational, in multiple senses of the term. Consumers of many ilks take pleasure in the reading process itself, which, more likely than not, will lead one to ponder the literary, philosophical, socio-historical, and ideological strains of a text that seems to point in infinite directions. From the publication of the two parts in 1605 and 1615, respectively, Don Quijote has been a bestseller and a critical sensation. Part 2 acknowledges the impact of Part 1, which became popular throughout Europe and, as of around 1608, began to be circulated in the New World. In this case, success comes with a price, for an intruder who adopts the pseudonym of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda writes a spurious and mean-spirited sequel, perhaps to avenge the eminent playwright Lope de Vega, maligned by the priest Pero Pérez and the canon from Toledo—probable mouthpieces of the frustrated dramatist Cervantes—in chapter 48 of Part 1. The mocking presence of the Avellaneda continuation in the “legitimate” Part 2 demonstrates Cervantes’s skill at dealing with adversity, something that marks his biography as well as his creative trajectory. The writers included in this anthology of microtexts draw upon a broad array of motifs introduced in Don Quijote, and their re-creations—often of Cervantine re-creations—are entertaining, rich, and, appropriately, ingenious in their own right.

MicroQuijotes 2 is a second and expanded version of a 2005 publication. The majority of the new entries are published here for the first time. The editor, Juan Armando Epple, opens the prologue with quotations by Alejo Carpentier, Juan Carlos Onetti, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa, in which the renowned authors render homage to Cervantes and to Don Quijote as stimuli of fiction-making in its most intricate and sophisticated forms. As a prelude to the anthology itself, Epple comments on suggested contacts and distinctions among the microtexto, the microcuento, and minificción as subgenres. Semantics aside, he emphasizes condensation, fragmentation, open structure, intertextuality, transgeneric qualities, irony, and parody as hallmarks of the various brands of short fiction. Cervantes is the guide, but the individual writers are motivated in diverse manners, and their products venerate Don Quijote as, simultaneously, the anxiety of influence—to use Harold Bloom’s familiar phrase—pushes them to seek unique signatures within the abbreviated models. The anthology showcases the works of 47 writers, who share the meta-label, a commitment to brevity, and an implicit, if not explicit, devotion to the original text and its author.

Epple notes, in the content of the selections, a tendency of the writers to focus on secondary characters, a vindication of the Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengeli, an interest in the female characters (those who appear and those who do not), the theme of idealism, and readings of Cervantes based on the mediation of other towering figures, most prominently among them Jorge Luis Borges. One could add to the list the topics of identity, self-image, love, loyalty, dreams, realism and reality, the thoughts of the protagonists, alterity, truth, continuity, doublings, the power of words, the content of libraries, fame, attitudes on the mysteries of life and death, immortality, and so forth. The writings are proof that Cervantes, so brilliantly resourceful in integrating the intertext into Don Quijote, writes a narrative that never ceases to become the intertext for subsequent artistic enterprises. Reinscription represents a certain type of writing, and a certain type of reading, because the objective is not, à la “Pierre Menard,” an imitation, but rather an homage to—and a dialectical encounter with—the original. The primary example, Don Quijote, is and is not a romance of chivalry. As with poststructuralism versus structuralism, similitude is key, but difference wins out. The anthology accentuates the ways in which writers engage Don Quijote, but by its very nature Cervantes’s opus would seem to encourage...