IMPROVISATION IN THE GENESIS AND STRUCTURE OF THE QUIJOTE

7 0 Y I M P R O V I S A T I O N I N T H E G E N E S I S A N D S T R U C T U R E O F T H E Q U I J O T E R O B E R T O G O N Z Á L E Z E C H E V A R R Í A The concept of ‘‘definitive text’’ is based on religion or on exhaustion. – Jorge Luis Borges I wish to propose a relatively new idea about the Quijote: that the book’s genesis and structure depend on improvisation, with improvisation also being one of its main themes because it is at the root of self-reflexivity, one of the most discussed features of the Quijote and the novelistic genre that Cervantes’s work seems to have initiated. By self-reflexivity I mean how the novel came to be written, the various stages of its creation, and the identity and role of the author. Although traditionally bound as one volume, the Quijote is not one but two novels (Parts One and Two, as they are known), so I will then take them up in the order that they appeared , in 1605 and 1615, because each has a separate genesis and a di√erent structure. Cervantes did not set out to write the Quijote as we know it – a long narrative, with a loose and repetitive plot involving two protagonists , protracted multiple and varied journeys, and adventures which lead up to the hero’s return home and his death. Although 7 1 R there are lingering debates about his intentions, it seems clear to me and others that what Cervantes wrote at first was a novella, in the Italian style of Boccaccio and Matteo Bandello; it was roughly the same length as those that he published later as novelas ejemplares , as well as the ones that he inserted in Part One, like the ‘‘Curioso impertinente’’ (‘‘The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious’’ in Edith Grossman’s translation, which is the one I am using). The original story of what became the Quijote centered on a petty country nobleman who went mad because he read too many chivalric romances and decided to become a knight-errant himself. It took up the first five or six chapters of Part One in its final form, from the time Alonso Quijano decides to turn himself into Don Quijote until he is brought back home by his neighbor Pedro Alonso, battered and beaten, after the misadventure with the merchants from Toledo. The conclusion of this primitive tale might have been the scrutiny of Quijano’s library by the barber and the priest, who were gleefully assisted by Quijano’s niece and his housekeeper. It is possible that in those early chapters Cervantes followed the plot of a minor one-act play involving a fellow whose madness consisted of trying to become one of the heroes in the Spanish ballads. These were very popular in the sixteenth century because many rekindled the memory of the wars against the Moors. But some critics have argued that the play came after the Quijote and imitated it instead. Be that as it may, the point is that Cervantes ’s narrative model when he conceived the Quijote was the novella, a lengthy short story or a short novel centered on a single protagonist – a mature man not unlike other older protagonists found, for example, in his play El viejo celoso (The Jealous Old Man) or his novella El celoso extremeño (The Jealous Man from Extremadura). Older protagonists are not common in fiction, and one of the unique features of the character Don Quijote is precisely that, because of his age, he is beyond what Freud would call the ‘‘family romance’’: the reader learns next to nothing about Don Quijote’s family and very little about his background. His personality and his decision to become a knight are not determined by the past; they are the product of choices not governed by necessity, which is consistent with the aura of improvisation that we find in the novel...