MADNESS and LAUGHTER: CERVANTES's COMIC VISION in DON QUIXOTE by Rachel Noël Bauer Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of T
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MADNESS AND LAUGHTER: CERVANTES’S COMIC VISION IN DON QUIXOTE By Rachel Noël Bauer Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Spanish December, 2007 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Edward H. Friedman Earl Fitz Andrés Zamora William Franke Copyright @ 2007 by Rachel Noël Bauer All Rights Reserved To: my committee members, Drs. Earl Fitz, Andrés Zamora, and William Franke, whose invigorating support and excited encouragement motivated me to do better. my advisor and the head of my committee, Dr. Edward H. Friedman, whose dream-like efficiency and continual availability made this whole process a lot less painful. Thank you for all of your support these past four years. Dr. Todd Hughes, who always had time to listen and who always offered good advice. my McTyeirites at the McTyeire International House, who happily put up with two years worth of over-exuberant ravings about Don Quixote. You helped me keep in perspective why I was doing all of this learning. mis buenos amigos madrileños, cuya paciencia burlesca con una guiri perdida pero decidida me ayudó no sólo a mejorar mi castellano, sino que también me enseñó otra capa de la risa, si se puede decir, española. my Mom and Dad and siblings, I could not have done this without you. Thank you for your unending support, for reading Don Quixote and my manuscripts, and for urging me to not give up. Alberto, my ‘well’ of support and laughter, without whom I surely would have thrown in the towel years ago and fled back to my non-academic life in Madrid. I love you. And lastly, to all of you out there struggling through your degrees who toil honestly in your intellectual pursuits: ¡ánimo y al toro! iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION …………………………………………………………………………. iii INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter I. READING DON QUIXOTE IN THE MENIPPEAN TRADITION ……………10 II. DISTURBING DEVICES: JOURNEY AND HUMOR IN DON QUIXOTE….. 54 III. HUMOR IN CERVANTES AND AVELLANEDA: UN SENDERO QUE SE BIFURCA ………………………………………………………………….. 92 IV. MADNESS AND LAUGHTER: INGENIOUS INTERPRETATION……….. 163 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………... 202 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………... 205 iv INTRODUCTION People who never laugh cannot be taken seriously. — Seneca Wisdom at times is found in folly. — Horace If you wish to avoid seeing a fool you must first break your looking glass. — François Rabelais When I first began to think about writing my dissertation, I knew that my topic would have to be one that I was very passionate about, in order to keep me motivated through the long and arduous roller coaster ride that I had heard writing a thesis would be. My love of literature and history, but most of all my enthusiasm for comedy and for all things that fill life with laughter, made my decision easy. Don Quixote encompasses a wide variety of laughter-provoking artifices. This, in addition to its wealth of historical references as well as its place in literary history, has provided me with the necessary fodder to not only craft my thesis but moreover to keep me excited about the subject matter. Although other critics have focused separately on the Menippean satire, on the role of journey in all of Cervantes’s works, on the importance of the Avellaneda sequel, and on madness in literature, I believe the analysis that I provide here, with regard to Don Quixote specifically, offers a fresh perspective on a four hundred year old creation. 1 Chapter 1, “Reading Don Quixote in the Menippean Tradition,” looks at the manner in which Menippean satire appears in Cervantes’s novel. In his prologues, Cervantes posits that Don Quixote is a parody of books of chivalry, but this seems to be only a piece of the puzzle towards fully understanding his creation. A parody is an imitation of a particular form, generally made in jest. While Don Quixote does attempt to follow the books of chivalry in his actions, Don Quixote itself is not a parody of form, strictly speaking, since it varies in plot and composition from the traditional chivalric romances. In other words, to some degree it parodies the actions of chivalric romances but it is not written in the same format.1 The parody in Don Quixote provides humor through which an experimentation of various ideas and beliefs often occurs. Although the readers are not provided with a moral or message concerning the ideas explored in the text, they are often times offered the opportunity to reflect on the plausibility of a particular philosophy or social convention. Menippean satire is the genre whose purpose is the testing of a truth or an idea, and humor is one of its defining features. Corresponding to the analysis of this genre and its representation within Don Quixote, I primarily make reference to Northrop Frye and Mikhail Bakhtin, two critics who have studied the Menippean satire independently of each other but who concur on several basic points regarding the genre. I also examine interpretations of Cervantine humor and comic genres by Anthony Close and Laura Gorfkle. In order to comprehend the multiple layers and techniques of comicality employed by Cervantes in this novel, I 1 Books of chivalry, such as Amadís de Gaula, Lisuarte de Grecia, or Le Morte d’Arthur, tend to be very lengthy, but they do not play with prose and verse in the way that Cervantes does in Don Quixote, nor focus as heavily on dialogue between the characters. Their plots are also highly fantastical, where character types such as superhuman knights undergo dangerous quests to restore honor or to rescue beautiful maidens. Don Quixote, in contrast, does not set off to avenge anyone but rather seeks fame and glory under the guise of rekindling the chivalric tradition. As a result, in my opinion, Don Quixote does not faithfully parody the normal trajectory of chivalric romance because its protagonist is not given a mission but rather makes his own. 2 look at Menippean satire in texts such as Lucian’s A Trip to the Moon, Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, Petronius’s The Satyricon, and Cristóbal de Villalón’s El crotalón. I believe Menippean satire such as these influenced both Cervantes’s writing and the evolution of the novel itself, as can be seen in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, to name just a few examples. Briefly, Menippean satire is a protean genre. This flexibility of form not only allows it to mix freely with various other genres, but also injects instability into otherwise stable narratives. The principal ingredients of this genre include dialogue, laughter, a variety of voices within the text, as well as movement either through journey or a transitioning of space. It also combines verse and prose. All these elements, in their own way, add to a subversion of narrative control. It is only natural that laughter, one of the most destabilizing tools in literature, serves as the key ingredient. Laughter, just like Menippean satire, creates a subversion of some kind, whether it be of the absolute position of the author or of a socio-historical construct. The readers, in interpreting this subversion, are offered the opportunity to react via laughter. Menippean satire serves as a vehicle through which dissimilar ideas or unusual events can collide. Within predictable elements of time and space, the readers interpret that specific actions will have a particular outcome. When these time-space elements become unpredictable, the actions no longer achieve their customary result. Thus, in La historia del Abencerraje y de la hermosa Jarifa, when Abindarraez gives his word to Rodrigo de Narváez that he will return as prisoner after delivering his message to Jarifa, there is no element of surprise when he does follow through, because keeping one’s word is what is expected of knights. 3 In Part I, chapter 3 of Don Quixote, Andrés’s master, Juan Haldudo, also promises Don Quixote that he will pay Andrés for the work he has done as shepherd. But what Don Quixote fails to recognize is that Juan is not a knight and therefore does not subscribe to the same social laws. It is easy for Juan to lie and then punish Andrés even further after Don Quixote leaves. The realization that the honor code that Don Quixote believes in does not apply here allows for an unexpected twist in interpretation, which thereby is capable of provoking laughter on the part of the readers. Through the characters’ conversations and actions, the social construct of honesty and keeping one’s word is brought into question, with the outcome of a deceitful master and a duped Don Quixote serving to flesh out the problematic of a chivalric-social philosophy. This examination of a social construct through dialogue, humor, and distance is what lies at the heart of Menippean satire. Through the textual examples I analyze in this chapter, I show where this genre surfaces in Don Quixote and how Menippean satire affects an overall understanding of Cervantes’s novel. In the second chapter, “Disturbing Devices: Journey and Humor in Don Quixote,” I draw a parallel between the narrative devices of travel and comicality, and how their employment destabilizes a text. Especially in Don Quixote, the storyline contains multiple concepts of journey. In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin discusses the chronotope, or a point in the text where temporal and spatial objects intersect. Every intersection offers a distinctive point within the narrative that influences the storyline. In other words, this junction creates an atmosphere of possibilities that, as the character passes through, can have an effect on the direction of the text.