Cervantes' Don Quixote

SPAN-300: CERVANTES' DON QUIXOTE Lecture 19 - Don Quixote, Part II: Chapters XXXVI-LIII [November 10, 2009] Chapter 1. Homage to Claude Lévi-Strauss [00:00:00] Professor Roberto González Echevarría: I learned over the weekend of the death of Claude Lévi-Strauss; I don't know if you read it in the paper or if you know who Claude Lévi-Strauss was. Claude Lévi-Strauss, who was a hundred and one years old when he died, was a great French anthropologist, the founder of the School of Structuralism, though he would never admit to that, as truly remarkable intellectual figure of the twentieth century, who traveled through the jungles of Brazil and wrote a number of very important anthropological books, and one, a memoir, called Tristes Tropiques, fifty-four, fifty-five, which is truly a beautiful, beautiful book. And I was very moved reading the obituary in that he said, at one point, that he had learned to pursue the truth doggedly, and also had the idea of reviving something from the past, while reading Don Quixote as a child, in a children's edition, obviously translated into French. So I thought that I would mention that beginning the class, and also as an homage to a really great figure of our day. Chapter 2. Developments in Part II Measured against Part I [00:01:45] I have been insisting in my last few lectures on how Cervantes rewrites episodes from Part I in Part II, and I want to begin today with some general statements of this theme and a few other general statements as we approach the end of the novel. First, I want to make clear that not all episodes in Part II are modeled after others in Part I. There is no antecedent, really, for the cave of Montesinos adventure, which is the highlight of Part II, and perhaps of the whole book; nor is there really an antecedent for the Clavileño flight, so there are a number of important episodes in Part II that are not modeled on episodes from Part I. You will get to see, as I announced, episodes in Part II that repeat or rewrite episodes within Part II itself, which is very interesting. Second, I want to emphasize that the rewritings are expansions of those episodes in Part I; they are like blowups, one could say, of episodes in Part I; they tend to have more characters, and the actions are outrageous in comparison to their predecessors. For instance, there is something of the fight with the Basque in Don Quixote's encounter with Sansón Carrasco disguised as the Knight of the Mirrors, but the second episode is richer. In the first, they are both mounted, armed, and Don Quixote wins. The same occurs in the second, but now his opponent is playing the role of a knight. His outfit reflects Don Quixote, literally and metaphorically, and the whole set up is carefully prepared to resemble a contest between two knights, though none of this is present in the earlier episode. This expansion or enlargement is consonant with the increasingly Baroque aesthetics of Part II, and each instance of a rewriting is like one more proof of it, one more proof of this Baroque aesthetics. Cervantes has not remained the same in the ten years that have elapsed between Parts I and II, and the old Cervantes is his own measure of development, as it were. I don't know if I make myself clear; that is, the Cervantes of Part I is the measure for his new sense of development. In the episodes that I will be discussing today and in subsequent lectures, this process of expansion is itself expanded, reaching the limits of representation, which is, again, also a characteristic of the Baroque. I also want to insist on something that I have only hinted at in previous lectures, and that you may have noticed on your own: the increasing presence of Virgil and his Aeneid as we move towards the end of the second part of the Quixote. I will be more specific about this when we get to meet Altisidora, whom you may have already met if you have read far enough into the book, who is a parody or model after Dido. But I just want to mention it, because the Virgilian background may suggest something important about how Cervantes conceived Don Quixote in his second part. Aeneas is known for his prudence, for his sense of duty from the very beginning, when he carries Anchises on his back as they leave a burning Troy, and when he repeatedly fends off temptations, Dido being the most memorable, so that he can fulfill his destiny, which will be nothing less than the founding of Rome. Aeneas has the greatest excuse for leaving a woman in the whole of Western literature: I've got to go found Rome! Don Quixote cannot aspire to such a grand design, but Cervantes has given him a different, no less serious one, and one that is consonant with the age in which he lives, which is no longer the heroic age of Virgil's characters, and that design is to conquer himself. This is going to be Don Quixote's task. The evolution of the mad Don Quixote towards sanity and self knowledge is the modern equivalent of Aeneas' prudence and task of founding the great city. This, it seems to me, is the overall suggestion in these repeated allusions direct and indirect to Virgil. Before, of course, I spoke of Homer, Ovid and Dante, and about how Cervantes' field of allusions and sources had moved up from the romances of chivalry to the core of the western tradition, without abandoning, of course, the romances of chivalry. I also want to emphasize, and I've already mentioned it, that in these episodes that are rewritings and in these major episodes in Part II there is a strong presence of death, one way or another. Sometimes, as in the pageant in the forest, it is the very figure of death as an allegorical figure of death, that you, I'm sure, remember. This is very much, again, and I will be emphasizing it today in one of the episodes, very much a part of the Baroque. Before I move on to some of the truly outrageous episodes that I want to discuss today, let me say something about Sancho's letter to his wife and about the exchange of letters that takes place in this section of the novel. Cervantes, who anticipated so many things in the novel — I think I've mentioned before that García Márquez, the great Columbian writer said that everything that novelist could possibly want to do is already in Cervantes — but Cervantes in these exchanges of letters is anticipating epistolary fiction, the letters to Teresa, between Teresa and the countess and so forth, there are antecedents in Spanish for epistolary fiction, but here Cervantes, in a modern, already modern novel, is anticipating that kind of fiction. The epistolary novel is one which the whole novel consists of an exchange of letters between the characters. As a genre, it became very popular in the eighteenth century, as I'm sure you know, in the works of authors such as Samuel Richardson, with his immensely successful novels Pamela, 1740, and Clarissa, 1749. In France there was the Lettres persanes by Montesquieu, followed by Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse, by Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Laclos, a novel that I'm sure you have read, if not seen the movie, Le Liaisons Dangereuses. In Germany, Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Hölderlin's Hyperion. So, I mean, what Cervantes is anticipating here was a very popular genre in the next century. This exchange of letters in the Quixote also reflects a society in which writing has become a crucial component of life, and communications — of life and communications, writing from printed documents rival oral exchanges. If you have been reading your Elliott you will have learned that this is a society obsessed with documents, mostly legal documents, which is a class to which some of the letters belong. Letter writing is part of the generation of the production of legal documents, so this is a reflection of that, too. It is also, here in the novel, it is also writing within writing, and the epistles are documents not processed into the fiction, but presented raw, as it were, meaning, it doesn't say Sancho wrote to Teresa saying this, and that, and the other; no, the document, presumably as was dictated by Sancho — of course, he doesn't know how to write — appears in the novel. Modern fiction will expand on this device. I'm thinking here of Joyce, of Dos Passos, of Cortázar, and other writers, whose books contain documents, such as these letters, unabsorbed into the prose of the fiction. Now, Sancho's letter, if we want to also look for the antecedent in Part I, is an echo of the one Don Quixote wrote to Dulcinea and that Sancho, of course, forgot to take with him and then memorized, and we have all of those funny episodes in which he tries to retell it. As in the first instance; that is, as in that episode, or those episodes, the humorous — what is humorous here — is that both Sancho and his wife, presumably, are illiterate, so this is an exchange of letters between characters who don't know how to read and write. The whole issue of the production of the letter and the duchess overseeing it and all of that is part of the humor here, as the production of the letter, for Dulcinea was also part of the humor in that episode.

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