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Quixotic Novel from the Point of View of the Narrative

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Quixotic Novel from the Point of View of the Narrative THE QUIXOTIC NOVEL FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE NARRATIVE By JOHN J. CONNOR A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE COUNCIL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1977 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Dr. Alistair Duckworth inspired this study months before it was begun and directed it, with patience and understanding, through the many months it took to write it. I will always be grateful to him for his guidance and support. Dr. Gregory Ulmer read the manuscript in an in- complete version and at the most crucial moment in the enterprise, when I thought I was at a dead end, showed me how to proceed. The better parts of Chapters Four and Five, in particular, I owe to him. I am also grateful to Dr. William Childers, Dr. John Perlette, and Dr. Fernando Ibarra, the other members of my supervisory committee. They were always helpful and encouraging and, although given little time, they read my manuscript with care. Finally, I owe much more than can be expressed here to Jesse, my wife. She has endured some trying times and lent me strength. Of course, I could not have done it without her. ij TABLE OP CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 11 ABSTRACT iv CHAPTER ONE - INTENTIONS, PROBLEMS, AND METHODS 1 NOTES . 20 CHAPTER TV/O - DON QUIXOTE IN LITERARY HTSTORY: A SURVEY 0? INTERPRETATIONS 2 3 NOTES 71 CHAPTER THREE - SANCHO PANZA FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE NARRATIVE 76 NOTES 12 6 CHAPTER FOUR - THE CHARACTER OF DON QUIXOTE AND THE DISCOURSE OF DON QUIXOTE 128 NOTES 196 CHAPTER FIVE - MOBILE FRAGMENTS: ELEMENTS OP THE NARRATIVE SYSTEM OF THE QUIXOTIC NOVEL IN MOBY DICK , MADAME BOVARY , MIDDLEMARCH , AND THE GREAT GATSBY I98 NOTES 2S0 BIBLIOGRAPHY 251 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 255 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Council of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy THE QUIXOTIC NOVEL FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE NARRATIVE By John J. Connor August, 1977 Chairman: Alistair M. Duckworth Major Department: English This study is an examination of the narrative system of the Quixotic Novel. A method of analysis synthesizing Vladimir Propp ' s methods in M orphology Of The Folk Tale and Roland Barthes's methods in S/Z Is proposed, described, and used to investigate narrative structures In Don Quixote and four other Quixotic Novels, Moby Dick , Madame Bo vary , Middlemarch , and The Great Gatsby . The narratives of the later Quixotic Novels seem to be linked to each other and to Don Quixote by their connec- tion to an abstract substratum, a narrative system which is too complex to be fully described but which can be identi- fied. Certain narrative elements found in the narrative system of Don Quixote reappear in each of the later novels. These "mobile fragments" take different configurations in each of the novels, but by studying these configurations we can compare the novels and we can examine how narrative structure engenders meaning in the five novels. CHAPTER ONE INTENTIONS, PROBLEMS, AND METHODS 1. Introduction This study began as an attempt to describe the narrative structure of the Quixotic Novel. I was attracted to the subject for two reasons: first, because I had noticed the term "Quixotic Novel" was used fairly often and rather loosely to characterize a cluster of Interesting novels, but the term had, as far as I could tell, no commonly accepted, author- 1 ized definition; and second, because certain critical texts had inter- ested me in the "structural" analysis of narrative. I hoped I would be able to fine some simple formula to describe the narrative system in Don Quixote and use that formula to analyze other members of the genre of the Quixotic Novel. It seemed to me then, and It does still, that the genre of the Quixotic Novel is not characterized so much by metaphysical, philosophi- cal, or psychological content (as it is often argued) as much as it is characterized by a certain narrative structure. I have found, unfortu- nately, that there seems no simple way of describing that structure. Instead, it seems best to describe the narrative structure of the Quixotic Novel as a "complex of narrative patterns." Another way to describe it is as "an elastic structure": although no single narrative formula generates all the narrative in any single Quixotic Novel, the narratives of Moby Dick , Madame Bovary , MIddlemarch , The Great Gatsby , and, I think, other Quixotic Novels show tendencies to repeat the narrative patterns and forms in Don Quixote . Chapters Three and Four of this study are an investigation of the patterns and forms in the narrative system of Don Quixote . Chapter Three is an argument for the "demystifieation" of the character of Sancho Panza: an examination of Sancho's functions in two kinds of narrative sequence suggests that his character is not an independent, homogeneous entity; it is, instead, a complex of functions generated by the necessities of the narrative discourse. Chapter Four is a qualification and extension of the arguments of Chapter Three: I argue there that by examining the relationship between Don Quixote's character and the discourse of the novel we can make a preliminary sketch of the "model" that generates Don Quixote . Chapter Five is a brief investigation of the other novels named above: I argue there that the analysis in Chapters Three and Four helps us to identify what Roland Barthes would call "the mobile fragments" in the Quixotic Novel— the units "whose differential situation engenders" meanings in Moby 2 Dick, Madame Bovary , Middlemarch , and The Great Gatsby . It seems to me that we can recognize Quixotic Novels Intuitively: reading Moby Dick or Madame Bovary we sense that Melville and Flaubert are repeating and modifying patterns we have read In Don Quixote and in other Quixotic Novels. Of course, neither Melville nor Flaubert nor any novelist has set out to write a novel according to the formulas and diagrams used in this study to describe the patterns in Don Quixote. Nevertheless, Cervantes' s narrative system is repeated and modified in Moby Dick , Madame Bovary , and other novels. The question of how this system is passed from Cervantes down to other authors is an interesting one. Some structuralists would argue that it is not Cervantes who determines the form of the Quixotic Novel; it is a language system that "speaks" Cervantes. Although my own opinion is close to that and in Chapter Pour I suggest a theory about the mechanics of Cervantes 's influence on other authors, I intend to leave the final resolution of this question to better qualified scholars. My intention here is more limited: to describe as best I can elements in Don Quixote which reappear in other, later novels. This study is, then, only a first step toward a fuller understanding of the genre of the Quixotic Novel. I hope it is a useful beginning. I hope my reader will find here a new way of looking at Don Quixote and the cluster of Quixotic Novels. There are methodological problems with a study of this kind. First of all, there is the problem of Cervantine criticism: it is immense (Manuel Duran believes no scholar could read even half of it in a life- tim<g and it contains some of the best work by some of the most learned and brilliant readers of Western literature. Ivan Turgenev, Miguel de Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Jorge Luis Borges, and W. H. Auden have all written about Don Quixote, as have Salvador de Madariaga, Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, Gerald Brenan, E. C. Riley, Harry Levin, Rene Girard, Dorothy Van Ghent, Claudio Guillen, Robert M. Adams, and Robert Alter. Many of the studies of Don Quixote , in fact, deserve full-length studies themselves. In Chapter Two I have examined a few of them in brief detail. My intention In that chapter is not to summarize all that has been written about Don Quixote , but rather to give an example of the kind of approach generally adopted by Cervantine critics. Generally, critics interested in examining Cervantes' s influence on literary history do not focus on what Roland Barthes would call the "implicit system of units and rules" in the narrative of Don Quixote . 1 Barthes *s S/Z (1970, trans. 197 !) , his study of Balzac's "Sarrasine," is one of the texts that interested me in investigating the narrative system of Don Quixote . The other text is Propp's Morphology Of The Folk Tale (1928, trans. 1958, 1968) . Using these two texts as sources creates a second methodological problem: the body of structuralist criticism, although not yet as immense as the body of Cervantine criticism, has become so large that it is now difficult to define exactly what structuralist criticism is. It is for this reason that I have avoided using the terms "structuralist" and "structuralism" to describe the kind of criticism I am doing in the analysis of the narrative of Don Quixote . I have instead adopted a phrase from Propp which characterizes his kind of analysis and, I think, the kind of analysis I am doing here. Prcpp looks at his tales 5 "from the point of view of the narrative." He means that the text must be seen as a self-generating, entity, a system operating by laws which are not apparent to the average reader. Propp compares his ap- proach to that of the grammarian cataloguing the parts of speech of a language: in precise, objective descriptions the analyst finds the "abstract substrata" that determine the form of narrative.
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