Punctuating Silence: Music, Words, and the Modern Novel

Language is speech-less speaking.

—Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics 77

His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

—J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace 4 [Professor David Lurie]

El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha has long been considered a book about books, a book about reading, a book constantly taunting its readers with its awareness of its own status as a text. The fact that it was supposedly found as a partial manuscript, that Don Quijote's madness that stems from his addictive reading of and over identification with chivalric novels, Cardenio's "librillo de memoria," and the surprising twist in Part Two where Don Quijote comes face to face with the reality of his own fictionality are all proof of how this early novel is struggling to define itself and to work out its own anxieties over the novelty implied by the new literary order it inaugurates.

And yet, for all its emphasis on textuality and its obsession with its own textual and material reality, Don Quijote is also a book about storytelling and orality, a book mourning the loss of the voice it has helped silence. This is, of course, a self-evident observation: Don Quijote and the characters he encounters spend their time telling each other stories. Indeed, as Margit Frenk has observed, the verb leer, which permeates the novel, is not opposed to the idea of orality and storytelling but is in fact often used to describe the activity of reading out loud and in the company of others. The most notable exception to this observation is, to be sure, Don Quijote himself. However, it is, for me, too tempting to blame his insanity, the insanity of the novel, on his custom of reading alone and in silence. Literature for Don Quijote is not what happens outside and out there. Literature happens within the reading subject.

But beyond the use of the human voice as the repressed material support for the dissemination of textuality, the novel seems painfully aware of another voice, one it has excluded in order to come into existence, that is, the voice not as a carrier of linguistic meaning, but the voice as pure sound, or the voice before or beyond meaning.

In this early modern novel can thus be read the struggle between the order of inscription and writing and that of orality and storytelling, or what Elias L. Rivers describes as the tension between "the charms and limitations of oral culture," represented by Sancho Panza, and "an abstract literary culture" propelled by Don Quijote's out-of-control humanist tendencies (140). Or, as Joan Ramón Resina explains, "El contraste entre oralidad y escritura atraviesa la obra de Cervantes y define a sus personajes. Don Quijote es un ávido lector, y su locura procede de una insuficiente adaptación a las condiciones impuestas por una cultura progresivamente escrituraria" (288). Don Quijote, according to Resina, transgresses the autonomy of the text—an autonomy that comes into being when orality is transformed into inscription and becomes an increasingly decontextualized experience that exists further and further from the reader's immediate surrounding reality—and in this way "se sitúa dentro de la oralidad con la actitud propia del lector" (288).

The material support behind the written or printed word is constantly made evident not only with the multiple metaliterary moments included in the novel, but, in fact, with the reader's every turn of the page. Yet how do we begin to approach the material support necessary for the orality that traverses Don Quijote? Any attempt to apprehend the materiality of the oral/aural process in the novel leads us back to the printed word. Orality is only described, even if the description is a constant and fundamental part of Cervantes' novel. Voice, the material support necessary for the storyteller and orality, for language itself, appears to be the impossible-to-represent other...