The humble story of Don Quixote: reflections on the birth of the modern novel

XI. Juan Palomeque’s Inn

c h a p t e r x i Juan Palomeque’s Inn They all gazed at one another in silence, Dorotea at Don Fernando, Don Fernando at Cardenio, Cardenio at Luscinda, Luscinda at Cardenio. But the first to break the silence was Luscinda, who addressed Don Fernando: “Leave me, Don Fernando, out of regard for yourself if for no other reason....... See how Heaven, by ways strange and mysterious to us, has brought me to my true husband.......” Then...... Dorotea summoned up all the strength she could, got up, and threw herself on her knees at his feet....... “Think, my lord,...... you cannot be the fair Luscinda’s, because you are mine; nor can she be yours, because she is Cardenio’s. It will be easier, if you will think for a moment, to make your heart love the woman who loves you, than to force into loving you a woman who loathes you.”...... They begged him to reflect that it was not by chance, as it appeared, but by a special providence of Heaven, that they had all come together in such an unexpected place. (1.36.327–330) Providential Coincidences We We W have already alluded to the functional similarity—first noticed years ago by J. B. Avalle Arce—between the magical solutions that occur at sage Fe252 licia’s palace in the pastoral Dianas, especially Montemayor’s Diana, and the accumulation of providential coincidences that occur in Juan Palomeque’s inn in the Quixote. These coincidences will provide the opportunity for the happy resolution of the problems in which Cervantes’s lovers Cardenio, Luscinda , Don Fernando, and Dorotea have become entangled. It could even be said that we are dealing with a deliberate response by Cervantes to that part of Montemayor’s Diana that he did not like. For, as the priest says of Montemayor ’s novel during the scrutiny of Don Quixote’s library, “I am of the opinion that it should not be burnt, but all the part dealing with sage Felicia and the enchanted water should be taken out.” The problem with the priest’s opinion is that if you take out “all the part dealing with sage Felicia and the enchanted water,” you leave Montemayor ’s perennially frustrated lovers without a solution to their problems. And we must assume that Cervantes, the novelist, would not like that either. He would not leave his own lovers going nowhere, endlessly repeating the same mistakes back and forth—especially since he has also shown us that such endless repetition is not realistic, that what eventually happens in the absence of a solution is complete disaster: lives broken, unbearable anguish, madness, and suicide. Cervantes must have thought that such terrible consequences from such entanglements required a more credible and trustworthy solution than the power of a magic potion. He trusts in God’s providence, in those “ways strange and mysterious to us.” This is neither magic nor a miracle. The most obvious difference between a magical solution and God’s providence at the inn is that the latter does not impinge at all on the individual responsibility and freedom of the people involved . Quite the contrary, God’s providence is a call for them to return to and to acknowledge such freedom and responsibility. God’s “mysterious ways” offer them a second chance. It is both a warning and a sign of hope: not everything is lost. There is still hope because there is still freedom. The four lovers have not reached yet the suicidal stage of a Grisóstomo, for example. And it is not a miracle either. God’s mysterious ways are an integral part of an external and historical reality disenchanted, desacralized, just recently discovered or rediscovered in Cervantes’s age to be far richer and more complex than anybody had previously imagined. This modern reality was open to unlimited scientific exploration without fear of sacred taboos. But it was also a reality that was always bigger and extended further than the rational reach of science—hence its mysterious quality. This modern reality and sciJuan Palomeque’s Inn 253 entific (or philosophical) reason still did not coincide completely. Divine providence was more than the ground that sustained reason, contrary to what Hegel came to think, for whom trust in reason was the same as trust in Providence.1 Cervantes’s conception of providential reality, at least in this instance, is closer...