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Don Quixote Part One, Cervantes and the Nature of Fiction Spanish novelist, playwright and poet, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, is best known nowadays as the creator of Don Quixote, a chivalric romance that gives a panoramic view of the 17 th-century Spanish society and seems to abound in philosophical insights. The most influential personality in the Spanish literature led a nomadic life at permanently subsistence level. Born into a family of the minor nobility, Cervantes was haunted by financial difficulties during his lifetime. Apart from this, he hand his hand wounded in the sea battle at Lepanto, he was captured by pirates and was enslaved in Algiers until his friendly family paid ransom for him in 1577. Working as a purchasing agent and a tax collector, he was at least twice imprisoned due to fiscal irregularities. With a childless marriage, Cervantes had an illegitimate daughter out of an affair with an actress.
Nevertheless, he never turned into despair, and demonstrated amusing satisfaction in predicaments, for example, he was extremely proud to have earned the nickname of the cripple of Lepanto after the battle. It is startling, indeed, how in the tight schedule of his graphically unsettled life the writer managed the time for creating his remarkable fiction. Tradition maintains, and the first lines of his picaresque romance Don Quixote were evidently scribbled by Cervantes in 1597 at Argamasilla in La Mancha when the writer was in prison for debt. In 1605 he issued Part I of his book, formally named as El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha).
Part II had not been published until 1615. Between the two parts of the same book there are other creative pieces written by Cervantes. They are Novelas Ejemplares (The Exemplary Novels), a collection of twelve short stories on love, idealism, gypsy life, madmen, and talking dogs, that were published in 1613, , and Ocho Comedias y Ocho Entremeses Nuevos Nunca Representias, that came out in 1615. The book gained its author international recognition but did not bring to en end his financial problems.
Apparently Cervantes must have applied some literary techniques and tactics that provided him public acclamation of his prose. Primarily, the writer expressed himself in plain Spanish, and, as he stated in the prologue to Part I, in simple, honest, and well-measured words. (Spadaccini) Thus, the intrusion of everyday speech into a literary contest of the romance can be ranked among his major gimmicks. To continue the list, Thomas Mann loved Don Quixote for its ironies, Irony of ironies, all is irony. (Quint) The vast scripture by Cervantes was initially intended as a satire on medieval tales about chivalry. His idealism, however, shaped as insanity, has incited the majority of readers to consider Don Quixote rather a tragedy than a comedy despite its telling satirical style and many comic episodes. Besides, it is necessary to point out the crucial significance of the authors commitment to the interpolative structure of his romance. Subsequently, as Dudley claims, Cervantes fiction is like mannerist painting, holds up the mirror, not to nature, but to art and to the ability of art to reflect nature. (Spadaccini) In keeping with the metaphor of the mirror, it may be also noted that the mirror is most likely to be constructed with the fragments of a shattered glass, which is multicoloured and, as if in a kaleidoscope, tends to change its hues in a mobile and controversial way.
There is one more way to define these fragments of a shattered glass as extraneous and interpolated tales within the context of the romance. Cervantes thus formally shapes his creative piece as a picaresque narrative, a collection of interspersed episodes that seem to lack the pivotal meaning. Some scholars agree to this point, especially the first critics who treated the novels tales individually rather than in terms of integrity when mirroring relationships of the parts form a larger whole. Another scholar, Claudio Guillen, finds the novel as loosely episodic, strung together like a freight train and apparently with no other common link than the hero. (Quint) It is possible and undeniably interesting to deduct from the interpolated story of Leandra in Chapter 51 the essence clues given by the author himself on how to read Don Quixote. Cervantes suggests reading his book as an entity, as a whole piece and not as the sum of its parts. All the tales are connected with the major event line of the romance.
Moreover, they amplify the overall message and fortify the moral issues, in particular. To be more accurate, the concept of an endless text may be applied only to Part I, while the reverse principles are discovered in Part II, in which the author pursued the ultimate point to present novel as genre in terms of a discourse constructed from the end. Cervantes seems to have applied the salient literary techniques of interpolated tales to make his whole romance to be inter-echoed, inter-connected within one laboratory case. Neuschafers study also underlines the important connection between the main narrative of Don Quixote and Sancho Past and the disparate tales interpolated into the context and often labelled as inessential. (Kartchner) The scholar consider these episodes as exempla, alongside his parallel independent collections Novelas Ejemplares and Ocho Comedias y Ocho Entremeses Nuevos Nunca Representias, that reiterate Don Quixote's chief ethical principle: he was yearning to adjust others to his idealistic, absurd view of life.
The interpolated tales play a crucial role in unmasking the true moral issues that the main hero, in his delusion, is unable to resolve (the defaming of Marcelas reputation, the disturbances of Don Fernando regarding Dorotea and Lucinda). Although Don Quixote's outrageous actions may be considered comic, the interpolated events contain an element of tragedy: Lotario, Anselmo, Camila, Grisostomo, they all die, and readers tend to switch their original idealistic perception of the main hero over to comprehension of his actual by-standing position, that is absolutely ineffective, and even harmful. The heroes of the tales set negative examples in terms of moral standards, but their experiences are acute nowadays. Thus, when regarded within the main story, these supposedly extraneous tales cast new light when it comes to interpretation of the central narrative, and at the same time, they obviously cannot be regarded separately from the main plot of the romance. The scholars, who deny the intrinsic integrity of the romance, refer to the inexplicable appearance of narrative fault lines which are manifested in countless schisms in the text of the discourse. Although they recognize interlacement, that is playing one episode of the novel off against another, as the organizing principle in the narrative development, they emphasize the striking mismatches in the context, spotted even by the first readers.
The episode Curioso impertinent (Chapters 33 - 35) is found particularly detachable from the rest of the text. Different incongruities found in the text admit of numerous explanations and are the object of constant comments. It is important to trace back the republishing history of Don Quixote in order to explain some incongruities that are frequent in the text, for example, concerning the helmet of Marina that was broken into pieces in Chapter 22 and was found intact in Chapter 25, the mysterious disappearance of Sancho Pass donkey in Chapter 25 and its unexpected appearance in Chapter 46. The latter disparity, the most remarkable one, was evidently noticed by the author himself, who made two insets into Chapters 23 and 30, telling how Honest de Pasamonte had stolen Sancho donkey and how the animal had been given back to its owner, in the second edition of Part I carried out in Madrid printing-office that published editio princeps. Other publishers of Part I were the least concerned with the correspondence of the lost manuscript and took as the basis for their re-publications other editions.
In the case of necessity, they removed misprints and interpreted obscure lines without the authors permission. As a result, it is quite a challenging task nowadays to differentiate the incongruities in the episodes that were done on purpose, within the literary technique, from those that became the consequences of the negligence on the part of publishers. (Kartchner) Some scholars tend to favour the view that Cervantes on purpose adopted the technique of narrative interlace from the great medieval chivalric romances, such as Lancelot. The novel presents stories of several questing knights, telling a part of one knights story before taking an abrupt turn to a part of another knights story, and thus the prose Lancelot keeps a few plots developing simultaneously. Though multiple, the plots share common motifs and inspire the reader to come to realize that the meaning can be grasped not from the ends of these stories, that are rather vague and remote, but from the very juxtaposition of the episodes and their reflection, or mirroring, upon each other.
For the purpose of making such connections, Cervantes implemented his own version of this writing method the composition of his romance. Chapter 29 gives a direct evidence of the presumption and proves the clear-cut adaptation of the technique, when Dorotea, deserted by the Curate and Barber in the role of princess Micomicona, made an attempt to kiss Don Quixote's hands as a sign of gratitude fro his promise to defend her against the giant. Earlier on, however, Dorotea tried to kiss the feet of Cardenio who had given his word to protect her honour against the seducer Don Fernando. The attentive reader becomes conscious of the parallel the heroines real-life situation and the chivalric scenario especially invented to cater for the idealistic needs of Don Quixote who would not hesitate to combat with a wicked giant Don Fernando to safeguard a genuine damsel-in-distress.
Moreover, Chapter 30 shows that Dorotea was aware of the parallel and her role of an exotic princess. Cervantes thus gives the narrative juxtaposition like this in different interpolated tales to lead the reader into meditations and inspire them to assume that the fantastic chivalric stories may contain camouflaged versions of real human experiences in the first place. Consequently, the writer prefers jumping from one extraneous story to another in place of concocting a series of concurrent tales with the aim of making the most of the interpolated stories of other characters and of the interpolated tale itself. Furthermore, by doing this, he expects the reader not only understand a given tale of Don Quixote but also to track down the established connections between them, that is to juxtapose the given episode with others that may seem unrelated on the surface. A motif pivotal in one tale may be revealed by the attentive reader displaced in a secondary position in another story and may at first evoke the out-of-place feeling, as the entire extraneous tale of the Curioso impertinent. To resist this feeling the reader should not necessarily support the notion of the organic unity of the literary work of art, he would come to accepting the novel as the unity in the course of careful reading and analysis, and finally the practical experience of reading prose would help to fit a seemingly digressive episode, a vague subplot, an obscure story-within-the-story into a larger web of meaning, and thus the reader will live up to the authors expectations and the prolific cooperation will be ensued.
In Part I of Don Quixote the insanity and heroic projects of the wandering knight reveal their full implications in the extraneous tales of the other characters that compete for narrative space in the romance alongside the central narrative. Their stories are deepened by parallels between themselves, as well, and they contribute to the motifs, ideas, and behaviour of the mad hidalgo, and the subtle irony of the writer suggests the other heroes are as insane as the principal one. Considering all the above drawn implications and inferences, the legitimate conclusion is that the so-called extraneous or interpolated tales are closely connected with the central narrative of the story forming an ideological and architectonic unity. Whats more, Don Quixote brings to the unified idea the novels written between Part I and Part II, as the mighty tree collects together its brunches stuck out in seemingly different directions. Reference Eric J. Kartchner, review of La etc del Quijote: function de las novela's intercalates, by Hans-Jorg Neuschafer, Madrid: Grades, 1999, Cervantes [Publicaciones periodicals]: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, Vol. 12, No 1, Spring 2002. 27 Dec. 2005. < web > Nicholas Spadaccini, review of The Endless Text.
Don Quijote and the Hermeneutics of Romance, by Edward Dudley, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997, Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 18 Feb. 1998. 27 Dec. 2005. < web > Quint, David. Cervantes's Novel of Modern Times: A New Reading of Don Quijote. Cervantes Method and Meaning. Princeton University Press. 10 Oct. 2003. 27 Dec. 2005. < web > Cervantes. Don Quixote.
Translated by Rutherford, John. Penguin Classics, 2003.
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