SPAN-300: CERVANTES' DON QUIXOTE Lecture 21 - Don Quixote, Part II: Chapters LIV-LXX [November 17, 2009] Chapter 1. Improvisation, International Dimension and Influence of Art on Reality [00:00:00] Professor Roberto González Echevarría: There are three issues that I want to bring up as I begin today's lecture that will determine my general themes today: improvisation, the international dimension that the fiction of the novel acquires, and the influence of art or of literature on reality; those are the general topics. As we move to the conclusion of the Quixote, the issue of how to bring the novel to a close must have loomed large in Cervantes' mind. The plot of the novel is repetitive, more than sequential, with a vague quest of the protagonist to revive the age of chivalry, concretely, to participate in the jousts in Saragossa as goals, but there is no obvious or impending goal to the characters' wonderings. Although, one could argue, with Williamson, the critic I mentioned in the last lecture, that the disenchantment of Dulcinea is the main purpose of Don Quixote and Sancho set by Merlin's prophecy and involving the three thousand lashes that Sancho must apply to his bottom, and the interplay between the two about accomplishing that goal of disenchanting Dulcinea. Yet, even, this is no clear mission whose accomplishment would bring the novel to an end. What if Dulcinea is disenchanted? How could she be disenchanted? What would that mean? Would she and Don Quixote, then, marry? This is not mentioned by the protagonist, nor is marriage normally a desired end to courtly love. Love itself is the purpose of courtly love: the love of love. It is obvious that the only end possible would be the death of Don Quixote, making his life the shape of the fiction, though, which life, would be the question? Is it the life of Alonso Quijano, the hidalgo who went mad and became Don Quixote, but about whose early life and family we know next to nothing? We only know about his niece; then, later, we learn that the niece was the daughter of a sister, but we really don't know anything about his life. Or is it the life invented by Don Quixote, the would-be knight-errant? Would that be the life that comes to an end, to close the novel? Improvisation, I have been saying all along, seems to rule the plot of the Quixote, the serendipitous actions provoked by chance encounters on the road, and by characters who pop up in the second part, wanting to script the knight's life, or, at least, episodes of the knight's life. What role will improvisation play in the ending of the novel? There is a confluence of — we will be talking about that, or we will be seeing about that in the next few lectures, and as we come to the very end of the novel, and discuss that. There is a confluence of actual geography with current historical events, such as the expulsion of the moriscos, brigandage in Catalonia, and the Turkish and Huguenots menaces in the final episodes of the Quixote. These events return us to the beginning of Part II, and the discussion at Don Quixote's house about some of them, particularly the Turkish threat. This is a form of closure, too, this return to those discussions in the beginning of Part II. The novel acquires an international dimension announced by Don Quixote, the priest, and Sansón Carrasco, talking about the Turkish threat in the early chapters, as if Don Quixote were going after all to try to resolve that issue. But notice the concurrence of real geographical settings. We spoke of the Ebro river, and now we have Barcelona, with historical actions. We have today, Elena Pellús and I, produced a slightly primitive map of Spain, but I think that it is clear enough to give you a notion of what I'm talking about. But, of course, you have a real map of Spain in the website that you can see on your own. I will be alluding to it. So we have seen the Ebro river; Barcelona, we have now, and now we'll see historical actions involving that region. Now, none of the historical actions that appear in the Quixote — by historical I mean current historical events — none is more current and pressing than the expulsion of the moriscos, which is taking place as Cervantes is writing Part II. The topic of the expulsion centers on the character of Ricote and his family. He is one of the principal new characters in Part II. The international dimension of the novel allows Cervantes to introduce fresh kinds of characters who are different from those mainly Castilian ones that he has presented so far. Though, as we know — and I'll talk about it again — not exclusively Castilian. That's the second of the broad topics, and the third is the one about art-influenced reality. In several of these episodes that I will be discussing, particularly the one involving Tosilos, but also in others, there seems to be a decided influence of art on reality, and a coalescence of the two, by which one could say that reality, or the real, is improved by art, as we have already seen in other episodes before, but we have some today where that seems to be the main topic. Chapter 2. The Story of Ricote [00:07:33] Now, let us begin with Ricote. One could say that this story is a rewriting of the captive's tale from Part I with Ricota, whose name is Ana Félix — I'll be talking about this name in a minute — Ricota is the name given to his daughter; her name is Ana Félix. She will be the Zoraida of this rewriting, and Pedro Gregorio, her suitor, would be the captive, but I mean this is — these two episodes are very different at the same time. The one of the captive and the one involving Ricote, or, at least, the Ricote episode, is much richer in some respects, although the captive's episode is quite elaborate. In these last few chapters of the Quixote Cervantes appears to be offering many possible variations of narrative fiction, or some of the narrative modes available to him at that moment. Ricote and his family provide the opportunity for a mini novela morisca, or moorish novel. Anovela morisca is a tale about the love between a Christian young man and a Moorish young woman with all of the predictable obstacles. The best known of these novelas moriscas is called after its protagonists, Ozmín y Daraja, and this novel is embedded in the Guzmán de Alfarache. I won't put the name on the board, because you've had it many, many times during the semester. The other fictional mode in this kind of smorgasbord of narratives is the byzantine romance, the byzantine romance, which entailed drawn out adventures over vast geographical areas, adventures of lovers seeking to find each other and suffering abductions, shipwrecks and being lost in strange lands, only to find, when they finally meet, that unbeknownst to them, they are brother and sister and cannot marry. This is kind of romance written at the time, very convoluted, hence, byzantine. Now, Cervantes was writing such a romance as he raced to finish the Quixote. It's called Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda,The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda. We will be revisiting this when we talk about the prologue to that work, which Cervantes thought would be the culmination of his life's — of his career, but he was wrong. A very interesting idea, that, I don't know if criticism has taken it up, would be to study the influence of the writing of The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda on Part II of the Quixote, as these were books that Cervantes worked on at the same time. Towards the end of his life, he's rushing to finish the Quixote, and rushing to also finish The Trials of Persiles and Sisgismunda, and it would be interesting to see how much one influences the other. But here, as I will mention in a little bit, the influence is obvious. Ana and Pedro's abduction by the Turks, and their sea-journey and rescue, are like a small-scale byzantine romance that is played out in front of the port of Barcelona. This is like a byzantine romance in a nutshell; they are abducted by the Turks, they are taken away, they finally meet, and there is no ending to it, because she's a morisca and she cannot come back to Spain, and all of that, but that is kind of a little byzantine romance. A hilarious tidbit, if you have already read this, in this story, is that Ana, eager to protect Pedro from their abductors, and Pedro is a very beautiful young man, dresses him as a woman to make him less attractive to the Turkish captors. It is a comic dig at the Turks, whose alleged sexual proclivities were notorious, and are even mentioned in good old Sebastián de Covarrubias' Tesoro, in the entry on the Turks, there is a not so veiled allusion to this practice that Cervantes is alluding to in a very, I think, comical way. It is kind of transvestitism to the second power or something like that, it's unbelievable. Now, why Cervantes wanted to provide this smorgasbord of narrative possibilities at the end is a mystery to me.