dventures in aradox PENN STATE STUDIES in ROMANCE LITERATURES Editors Frederick A. de Armas Norris Lacy Allan Stoekl Refiguring the Hero: Medieval Spanish Epic: From Peasant to Noble in Mythic Roots and Ritual Language Lope de Vega and Calderón by Thomas Montgomery by Dian Fox Unfinished Revolutions: Don Juan and the Point of Honor: Legacies of Upheaval in Seduction, Patriarchal Society, Modern French Culture and Literary Tradition edited by Robert T. Denommé and by James Mandrell Roland H. Simon Narratives of Desire: Nineteenth-Century Spanish Stages of Desire: Fiction by Women The Mythological Tradition in Classical by Lou Charnon-Deutsch and Contemporary Spanish Theater by Michael Kidd Garcilaso de la Vega and the Italian Renaissance Fictions of the Feminine in the by Daniel L. Heiple Nineteenth-Century Spanish Press by Lou Charnon-Deutsch Allegories of Kingship: Calderón and the Anti-Machiavellian Tradition The Novels and Plays of by Stephen Rupp Eduardo Manet: An Adventure in Multiculturalism Acts of Fiction: by Phyllis Zatlin Resistance and Resolution from Sade to Baudelaire Fernando de Rojas and the by Scott Carpenter Renaissance Vision: Phantasm, Melancholy, and Didacticism in Grotesque Purgatory: Celestina by Ricardo Castells A Study of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Part II by Henry W. Sullivan The Poetics of Empire in the Indies: Spanish Comedies and Historical Prophecy and Imitation in Contexts in the 1620s La Araucana and Os Lucíadas by William R. Blue by James Nicolopulos The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel: Literature and the Left in the Mariá de Zayas Tells Baroque Tales of Love Wake of Engagement and the Cruelty of Men by Danielle Marx-Scouras Margaret Greer Madrid 1900: Vision, the Gaze, and the Function of the The Capital as Cradle of Senses in Celestina Literature and Culture James F. Burke by Michael Ugarte Ideologies of History in the Adventures in Paradox: Spanish Golden Age Don Quixote and the Western Tradition by Anthony J. Cascardi Charles D. Presberg dventures inaradox on Quixote and the Western Tradition CHARLES D. PRESBERG The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Education and Culture and United States Universities. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Presberg, Charles D. Adventures in paradox : Don Quixote and the western tradition / Charles D. Presberg. p. cm.—(Penn State studies in Romance literatures) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-271-02039-3 (alk. paper) 1. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 1547–1616. Don Quixote. 2. Paradox in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PQ6353 .P72 2001 863'.3—dc21 99-055297 Copyright © 2001 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper for the first printing of all clothbound books. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992. For Michael, Stephen, and Philip CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Paradoxical Problems 1 PART I Western Paradox and the Spanish Golden Age 1 Paradoxical Discourse from Antiquity to the Renaissance: Plato, Nicolaus Cusanus, and Erasmus 11 2 Paradoxy and the Spanish Renaissance: Fernando de Rojas, Antonio de Guevara, and Pero Mexía 37 PART II Inventing a Tale, Inventing a Self 3 “This Is Not a Prologue”: Paradoxy and the Prologue to Don Quixote, Part I 75 4 Paradoxes of Imitation: The Quest for Origins and Originality 163 5 “I Know Who I Am”: Don Quixote de la Mancha, Don Diego de Miranda, and the Paradox of Self-Knowledge 193 Concluding Remarks 231 Works Cited 237 Index 247 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Mary Gaylord and James Iffland guided me in turning an earlier version of this project into a doctoral dissertation presented at Harvard University, heroically enduring drafts that resembled what Henry James would call “a loose and baggy monster.” I am deeply grateful to both of them, not only for helping me tighten my argument and diction but also for their compelling blend of humanity and professionalism, which I have retained as a model for imitation in my own pro- fessional endeavors. I also owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my friend and colleague Henry Sullivan, who read the entire manuscript, commenting insightfully on almost every page. With thankful enthusiasm, I have incorporated all his suggestions into my text. I thank my colleagues Lucille Kerr, María Cristina Quintero, and Ramón Araluce for commenting on various chapters of the manuscript. I thank Carroll Johnson, Michael McGaha, Harry Sieber, and Luis Murillo for questions, con- versations, and correspondence that have helped refine important parts of my critical argument. I express my thanks to Raúl Galoppe for his diligent assistance in proofreading, research, and editing; to Melinda Howard for her excellent research and proofreading, as well as for preparing a first draft of the index. At Penn State University Press, I wish to thank Frederick de Armas, series edi- tor, for his unflagging support; Romaine Perrin, for her expert copyediting; Peter Potter, Shannon Pennefeather, Cherene Holland, and Patty Mitchell, for their skill and patience in bringing this book to completion. A section of Chapter 3 appeared in MLN (formerly Modern Language Notes) 110 (1995): 215–39; and an earlier version of Chapter 5 appeared in Cervantes 14 (1994): 41–69. I am thankful to the editors of both journals for permission to reproduce that material here. My thanks go, as well, to The Research Board at the University of Missouri for a summer research grant that permitted me to finish x Acknowledgments this project in a timely fashion; and to the Program for Cultural Cooperation for a generous grant. I thank my ex-wife Elizabeth for her support at crucial stages of this book’s preparation. And last, I thank my three children, Michael, Stephen, and Philip, for allowing me to rank happily among those persons who, in blessings and love, owe more than they can repay. Introduction Paradoxical Problems More than twenty years ago, Francisco Márquez Villanueva wrote: “The study of Don Quixote as a masterwork in the genre of paradox has yet to be carried out and remains one of the sizeable gaps in Cervantes scholarship” (El estudio del Quijote en cuanto obra maestra del género paradójico no se ha realizado aún y constituye uno de los grandes huecos en la bibliografía cervantina) (Márquez Villanueva 1975, 214).1 Since then, scholars have generally recognized the per- vasiveness of paradox in Don Quixote, although no one has yet undertaken a sys- tematic investigation of this trope in Cervantes’ masterpiece.2 My purpose in this study is to situate Cervantes’ Don Quixote within the tradition of paradoxical discourse, or paradoxy, in the West. Hence, this book is a response, in part, to 1. Translations from Spanish to English are mine unless otherwise stated. 2. The subject of Cervantes’ use of paradox is explicit in Russell 1969 and latent in an important study of semantic ambiguity and authorial ambivalence in Don Quixote by Durán (1960), both of which 2 Introduction the challenge set forth by Márquez Villanueva, though I recognize that the spe- cific gap to which he refers will remain unfilled and, perhaps, unfillable. In the first place, though I believe that Márquez Villanueva is right in point- ing to Don Quixote as a work of literary paradoxy, my examination of that trope leads me to doubt whether one can properly speak of “paradox” as a “genre” (género paradójico) and, hence, to doubt whether Cervantes’ fiction exemplifies such a genre.3 The tradition of paradoxical writing encompasses works in disci- plines as diverse as philosophy, rhetoric, and literature. And, among the literary works alone, a rhetoric of paradoxy informs a host of poems, dramas, prose nar- ratives, anatomies, and miscellanies, all varying considerably in the selection—as well as the comic or serious treatment—of their subject matter. Paradoxy, in short, represents a particular if broad species of artful discourse. It is a trope of thought, a structuring principle, or a rhetorical strategy that moves freely and playfully across the boundaries that convention assigns to genres, modes, and intellectual disciplines. In the second place, I am aware that my attempt to undertake a systematic investigation of a slippery trope in a slippery text must begin with what Rosalie Colie calls a “defense of the indefensible”; that is, a defense of this “attempt to treat systematically a subject [both the trope and the text] designed to deny and destroy systems” (Colie 1966, vii). Paradoxically enough, the defense and indefen- sibility coincide in that paradoxy both “denies” and “destroys” systems through a rhetorical gesture of self-reference. In other words, paradoxical discourse system- atically uses the categories of language and logic to question and mock the very categories that undergird language and logic as discursive systems. As a conse- quence, paradoxist and public alike must reassess their formerly untested assump- tions about logic and language, even as they realize that the measure of a writer or rhetor’s success in using the system against itself is also a measure of his or her failure to undermine that system. In equal measure, what Colie would call destruction thus becomes a form of validation, denial a form of affirmation. In the present analysis of Cervantine paradoxy, it is therefore necessary to acknowl- edge, at once, the utility and futility of systematic treatment. The categorical limits set forth in these pages stand as only one possible means of arranging a studies predate Márquez Villanueva’s observation quoted above.