Cervantes [Publicaciones periódicas] : Bulletin of the

Cervantes Society of America. Volume III, Number 2, Fall

1983

Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of

America
Volume III, Number 2, Fall 1983

THE CERVANTES SOCIETY OF AMERICA

President

BRUCE W. WARDROPPER (1985)

Vice President

ALAN S. TRUEBLOOD (1985)

Secretary-Treasurer

HOWARD MANCING (1985)

 Executive Council

DANIEL EISENBERG FRANCISCO MÁRQUEZ VILLANUEVA

RUTH EL SAFFAR LUIS A. MURILLO

LEO J. HOAR, JR. HELENA PERCAS DE PONSETI

HAROLD G. JONES ELIAS L. RIVERS

MICHAEL MCGAHA ALAN S. TRUEBLOOD

Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America

Editor: JOHN J. ALLEN

Assistant to the Editor: THOMAS A. LATHROP

Editor's Advisory Council

JUAN BAUTISTA AVALLE-ARCE EDWARD C. RILEY

JEAN CANAVAGGIO ALBERTO SÁNCHEZ

Associate Editors

DANA B. DRAKE FRANCISCO MÁRQUEZ VILLANUEVA

PETER DUNN LOWRY NELSON, JR.

RUTH EL SAFFAR HELENA PERCAS DE PONSETI

ROBERT M. FLORES GEOFFREY L. STAGG

CARROLL B. JOHNSON BRUCE W. WARDROPPER

Cervantes, official organ of the Cervantes Society of America, publishes scholarly articles
in English and Spanish on Cervantes' life and works, reviews, and notes of interest to
cervantistas. Twice yearly. Subscription to Cervantes is a part of membership in the
Cervantes Society of America, which also publishes a Newsletter. $15.00 a year for
individuals and institutions, $25.00 a year for husband and wife, and $8.00 for students.
Membership is open to all persons interested in Cervantes. For membership and
subscription, send check in dollars to Professor HOWARD MANCING, Secretary-
Treasurer, The Cervantes Society of America, Department of Romance Languages,
University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri 65211. Manuscripts (submitted in accordance
with Cervantes, 2 [1982], 107) and books for review should be sent to Professor JOHN J.
ALLEN, Editor, Cervantes, Department of Spanish and Italian, University of Kentucky,
Lexington, Kentucky 40506.
Copyright © 1983 by the Cervantes Society of America.

-83-

Articles

Cervantes' Portrait of the Artist1

Mary Gaylord Randel

Cornell University

Los lectores de Cervantes, tantalizados por la presencia en todas sus obras de alusiones
autobiográficas, tienden a valorar éstas principalmente por lo que revelan acerca del autor
histórico. Por otra parte, los estudios de la voz narrativa en el Quijote subrayan
precisamente la elusividad del autor, quien parece presidir su relato desde lejos. En esta
visión (conocida como perspectivismo), el novelista se transforma en creador casi divino,
omnipotente; en aquélla, asciende a la categoría de ejemplar héroe cristiano. Ambas
visiones logran la mitificación del escritor. El presente estudio enfoca los pasajes
autorreferenciales y otras figuras de creadores literarios en el Quijote, en busca de
constantes textuales. Vincula la semiótica de estos retratos y autorretratos del artista al
coloquio teórico sobre el artífice y la anatomía de la fábula que leyera Cervantes en la
Philosophía antigua poética de Alonso López Pinciano.

In virtually every work of Cervantes, the critic confronts what Jean Canavaggio has
described as «una contaminación sistemática del espacio textual por el vivir cervantino».2
So striking is the presence of autobiographical references that readers have often
succumbed to the temptation to peer through the veil of fiction for glimpses of the
historical Cervantes: wounded but victorious in Lepanto, captive in Algiers, moving
through the picaresque underworld and jails of Seville, struggling to make his living as a
writer. Whole generations of scholars devoted themselves exclusively to this kind of
«cervantismo» which so exasperated Unamuno, making masterpieces into documents of
the author's real-life frustrations.3 The figure of Don Quixote in particular -middle-aged
nobody, impoverished hidalgo, nostalgic dreamer of an obsolete heroism, incorrigible
reader- has been conflated repeatedly with that of his author. Conspicuously in the
tradition of the great biographies of Cervantes, the mad knight of La Mancha merges with
the hero of Lepanto. Pursuing fame, like Don Quixote, along the twin routes of arms and
letters, Cervantes becomes the authentic sacrificial hero his -84- protagonist aspired to
be. Titles like El ingenioso hidalgo Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra,4 Vida heroica de
Miguel de Cervantes,5 and Vida ejemplar y heroica de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra,6
suggest the desire of the biographers to write chivalresque history anew, «enderezando los
tuertos», and naturally purging it of parody. Even the recent biography of William Byron
follows in the footsteps of its antecedents, moving freely from the works to the man and
back again, finding in the life and the books of Cervantes abundant suggestions for
reciprocal illumination.7

Textual criticism, on the other hand, tends to stress the absence of Cervantes from
his texts. If we find ourselves tantalized in the Quixote by the shadow of an «historical»
Cervantes, we are most often faced with the insistent, intrusive presence of a narrator. It
has generally been recognized that this personified author is not interchangeable with the
historical Cervantes, but rather another character within the author's fiction, one who
serves as another reminder of the distance between the real author and his subject. As the
voice closest to the reader in Cervantes' novel, this narrator is also another reader who
filters the «original» text of the Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengeli and the one
produced by his Moorish translator. If the narrator promises to transmit faithfully the
contents of these documents, we find him in fact interrupting at will, ordering his material
to suit himself, shifting abruptly from scholarly deference to outright parody. The critical
mainstream of our day, in one way or another, applauds Cervantes' use of the fictitious
authorship device. If, however, under the impetus of the New Criticism, we have
succeeded in distinguishing Cide Hamete from the narrator and the narrator from the real-
life Cervantes, we have come paradoxically to see the author's non-presence in his text as
a kind of proof negative of his authorial power, as the key to the control over his fiction,
to his very authority. His distance, in Ruth El Saffar's formulation, is control. The text
continually calls attention to -85- its many lesser authors, leaving the Author -Miguel
de Cervantes Saavedra- most remote of all. Aloof from his work, unlocatable within its
boundaries, the «real author» nonetheless pulls all of the strings.8

A history of interpretations of Miguel de Cervantes would surely trace a changing

view of the authorial figure just as suggestive as the readings of Don Quixote recently
surveyed by Anthony J. Close.9 That book's extraordinary popular success, which appears
already legendary in the 1615 text, and the homage of subsequent European prose fiction,
provided fertile ground for legends about its author. From recognition of a masterwork, it
is but a short step first to acknowledge, then to revere, a master. Literary criticism in the
twentieth century, while granting a new measure of autonomy to the fictional world of the
book, particularly that of the novel, nonetheless retains the concept of the book as
creation and the author as creator. The image, of course, occupies a venerable place in the
history of Christian thought, where God is the Author, and the world is his book.
Although the creature, from the moment of creation, lives apart from his Creator, still the
latter's guiding Providence informs and unifies his work. Unamuno borrowed the conceit
to dramatize the freedom of the creature, first in Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, later in
Niebla. But over against Unamuno's vision of the hero who, as spirit of a national
yearning, dwarfs both Cervantes and «cervantismos», other readers rose to the defense of
authorial power. From an understandably awed sense of the writer's ultimate
responsibility for what appears on the pages of his book, partisans of the author go on to
postulate a Cervantes who plays God to his creation, a Cervantes whose omniscience and
absolute power render him almost divine. Leo Spitzer, one of the most eloquent
exponents of authorial authority in the Quixote, associated this view with the name of -
86- perspectivismo. Beyond the shifting viewpoints of Cervantes' fictional world, he
says,

We sense the presence of something which is not subject

to fluctuation: the immovable, immutable principle of the
divine -which, perhaps, to some extent, is reflected in the
earthly artifex himself: the novelist who assumes a near-
divine power in his mastery of his material and in his own
unshaken attitude toward the phenomena of his world.10

This concept has prospered alongside ideas about the figure of the poet in the Italian
Renaissance epic. Croce's view of Ariosto as omniscient author-God continues to appear
in readings of the Orlando furioso, the most important recent example being Robert
Durling's study, which characterizes the intrusive figure of the poet in the Furioso as
demiurge.11

Spitzer repeatedly cautions that neither Cervantes nor he (Spitzer) means actually to
confuse the author with God himself. Yet rhetoric seems often to soar beyond that caveat:

Let us not be mistaken: the real protagonist of the novel is not

Quixote, with his continual misrepresentation of reality, or
Sancho with his skeptical half-endorsement of quixotism -and
surely not any of the central figures of the illusionistic by-
stories: the hero is Cervantes, the artist himself, who
combines a critical and illusionistic art according to his free
will. From the moment we open the book to the moment we
put it down, we are given to understand that an almighty
overlord is directing us, who leads us where he pleases.

(p. 69)

High above the world-wide cosmos of his making, in which

hundreds of characters, situations, vistas, themes, plots and
subplots are merged, Cervantes' artistic self is enthroned, an
all-embracing creative self, Nature-like, God-like, almighty,
all-wise, all-good -and benign: this visibly omnipresent
Maker reveals to us the secrets of his creation, he shows us
the work of art in the making, and the laws to which it is
necessarily subjected.

(pp. 72-73)

This heady vision of artistic exemplarity clearly reflects urgent concerns of Spitzer's own
historical circumstance. Inextricably bound -87- up with an ideal of free will joined
with quasi-divine goodness of spirit, this perspectivismo shows how readily a concept
becomes a creed, how easily the image into which an idea crystallizes ascends to the
status of myth.

Without wishing to disparage in any way the seriousness of the issues to which
Spitzer was speaking -for criticism like literature is always written from an existential
context-, I suggest that we find ourselves in the presence of another myth of Cervantes. In
addition to the fables of lived heroism, of the sufferings and strivings of the impoverished
writer, we have here the myth of Cervantes, quasi-divine artist, «almighty, all-wise, all-
good». To these we must add still another construct of literary history, a myth of literary
origins, or more exactly of Cervantes as originator of the modern novel. Italianists are
acutely sensitive to the mythical or fictional status of this idea, perhaps because they
would propose a candidate of their own. Many studies of the European novel nonetheless
confidently locate in Don Quixote the genesis of modern prose fiction as self-conscious
literature. Cervantes criticism has questioned the extent to which the author perceived his
own originality or the implications of his innovations. The Novelas ejemplares and Los
trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda suggest to some that Cervantes did not wholly embrace
the brave new novelistic world of his own making.12 He could not in any case have
imagined the significance of his work for unborn generations of writers. Still, the
perception of Cervantes as some kind of important beginning continues to condition a
wide spectrum of readings.

To what extent can Cervantes be held accountable for the myth-making that centers
around his figure? Perhaps by looking at those passages in his works which call attention
to Cervantes himself we can discover a relationship between the author's self-portraiture
and the mythical portraiture of a heroic Cervantes or of a God-like, originating genius.
This project, we realize at once, faces the initial difficulty of defining its object of inquiry.
Even if we restrict ourselves for the moment to Don Quixote, we face the problem of
deciding which passages can be called autobiographical or which can be thought of as
self-portraits. By perusing the footnotes of virtually -88- any edition, one discovers
what its editor took for material from the author's life; but such allusions are scattered
throughout the book. Some references, however, are more readily identified: the
prologues of 1605 and 1615, the 1615 Dedicatoria to the Conde de Lemos, the scrutiny of
Don Quixote's library (I, 6), the famous interruption between Chapters 8 and 9 of the first
part, the story of the Capitán cautivo. It is to these that we now turn.

The 1605 Prologue introduces Cervantes' book-child -«como quien se engendró en

una cárcel»- as the predictable offspring -«un hijo seco, avellanado, antojadizo y lleno de
pensamientos varios y nunca imaginados de otro alguno»- of his own «estéril y mal
cultivado ingenio».13 Cervantes reminds his reader of his fifty-eight years and the
improbability of his present reappearance on the literary scene: «al cabo de tantos años
como ha que duermo en el silencio del olvido, salgo ahora, con todos mis años a cuestas»
(p. 20). Self-portrayed as deficient in both natural talent and learning («mi insuficiencia y
mis pocas letras» [p. 21]), the author seeks to please, yet he is unwilling to beg public
indulgence or the literary insurance of prefatory sonnets for the ugly child he has
begotten. His «suspensión y elevamiento» poise him in an imaginative and literal
contortion -«suspenso con el papel delante, la pluma en la oreja, el codo en el bufete y la
mano en la mejilla, pensando lo que diría» (p. 20)- between pride and self-deprecation.
His seesawing between assurance and doubt is dramatized by the arrival of the friendly
other, whose ironic enthusiasm sees him through the chore of producing a prologue.

Although the vehement opinions of the self-appointed literary censors of Part One,
Chapter 6, lead us to suspect that we may be hearing a thinly veiled authorial voice, we
find there no visual portrait. When considering La Galatea, the Curate claims its author as
his friend of many years: «y sé que es más versado en desdichas que en versos» (p. 75).
The volume in question seems to share its author's shortcomings as a poet and the
abundance of his misfortunes: «Su libro algo tiene de buena invención; propone algo, y
no concluye nada: es menester esperar la segunda parte que promete» (Ibid.). In the
meantime, La Galatea deserves neither mercy nor condemnation; its -89- provisional
sentence mandates a sort of detention: «entre tanto que esto se ve, tenedle recluso en
vuestra posada, señor compadre». The Barber's laconic reply -«Que me place»- suggests
that the pastoral novel will not go unread for the length of its probation.

Chapter 9 introduces a personified author who is less transparently Cervantes, but

whose state of suspense mimics not only the upraised swords of Don Quixote and his
Biscayan adversary left hanging in mid-flight, but the suspended sentence of La Galatea
and the head-in-hand suspension of the Prologue. Here suspense belongs to the writer
who is first a reader, left dangling when the thriving tree of his story is so abruptly
«destroncada» (p. 91). The joy of reading gives way to the pain of interruption and
incompleteness:

Causóme esto mucha pesadumbre, porque el gusto de

haber leído tan poco se volvía en disgusto, de pensar el mal
camino que se ofrecía para hallar lo mucho que, a mi parecer,
faltaba de tan sabroso cuento.

(Ibid.)

Yet it is precisely this sense of what is lacking in Don Quixote's history, the instinct for
completion nurtured apparently by avid reading of chivalresque fiction, that serves to
bridge the gap. «Confuso y deseoso de saber real y verdaderamente toda la vida y
milagros de nuestro famoso español Don Quijote de la Mancha» (p. 92), the author
submits not only to this urgent curiosity but to his voracious appetite for the written word
in general («como yo soy aficionado a leer aunque sean los papeles rotos de la calle» [p.
93]). Two providential encounters -first with the peddlar boy, then with the Moorish
translator- leave him again «atónito y suspenso», hoping and doubting, near bursting with
curiosity yet all the while wary lest any show of interest should raise the price of his
coveted treasure. Bent on wresting the «truth» about Don Quixote from ignorant hands,
the author does not scruple to deceive his unwitting benefactors. At the same time, the
desire to know wrestles with the prickings of prejudice, the uneasy sense that the
historian, on whom he has pinned his hopes, as an Arab, may also be a liar who would be
capable of deceiving him. In a flowery tribute to history (Mother of Truth) and to
historians, the «author» once more submerges in the text, giving himself up to the
pleasure of narration.

When next the author surfaces, in the story-within-a-story of the Capitán cautivo (I,
39-41), he has donned military dress. The central section of this tale traces the itinerary
which leads Ruy Pérez de -90- Viedma from Spain to Algerian captivity. So closely
does it dovetail events of the writer's life, that it is difficult not to accord it virtually
documentary status.14 Yet Ruy Pérez is not Cervantes. The soldier's career they share sits
as though in the center of a triptych, offset by the folktale-like account of the three
brothers and the legend-like story of Zoraida's conversion and rescue of the Captive.15
Moreover, as J. J. Allen observes, Ruy Pérez served not as common soldier but as captain,
and met with a different fate at Lepanto. Unlike Cervantes, whose wounds cost him the
use of one hand, the officer suffered the loss of his liberty. The Captain's authority
paradoxically makes him an easy captive on this day of glory for Christendom, when
many Christians who have been slaves are restored to their freedom. As he leads his men
on board Uchalí's vessel, that ship swerves away from the attack, cutting the Captain off
from his men: «solo fui el triste entre tantos alegres y el cautivo entre tantos libres» (p.
399). He travels to Algiers as a slave, and there his story rejoins that of Cervantes. The
Captain even tells of meeting «un soldado español llamado tal de Saavedra» (p. 409),
famed for his heroic struggles to escape from servitude. The name clearly conjures up the
author's figure, and it is tempting to see in this Saavedra the historical Cervantes. Yet if
we are inclined to see the Captain's tale as literature shadowing the «real» life of
Saavedra-Cervantes, we are also bound to notice that the exploits of this «tal de
Saavedra» appear on the horizon of heroism as the promise above all of another tale,
surpassingly entertaining, full of wonder. Even the Captain's brief hints paint his
circumstances as little short of miraculous: despite apparently tireless attempts to escape,
he enjoys with his jailer a prestige which makes him immune from the standard
punishments. Saavedra («por la menor cosa que hizo temíamos todos que había de ser
empalado») functions as a limit in this fiction, perhaps that point -91- where art spills
into life, but in the first instance as a literary figure of hyperbole:

Y si no fuera porque el tiempo no da lugar, yo dijera ahora

algo de lo que este soldado hizo, que fuera parte para
entreteneros y admiraros harto mejor que con el cuento de mi
historia.

(Ibid.)

His likeness to Ruy Pérez de Viedma allows the untold story to reach beyond the one the
Captain has just unfolded, speaking to the same insatiable appetite for stories of «novedad
y estrañeza» that makes Fernando wish aloud that the telling would begin all over again.
The stories of Ruy Pérez, Saavedra and Cervantes (the latter available from outside the
text) clearly function as mirror stories, substitute portraits on the heroic medallion. If the
faces change, however, what remains consistent is the pattern of paradox which the
military narratives reveal: authority linked to loss of liberty, servitude joined with the
struggle for freedom, moral victory accompanied by crippling physical loss, Christian
triumph paired with personal defeat.

We might read the Dedicatoria and Prologue of the 1615 Quixote as readings of his
earlier self-portraits by an author now well established in public esteem. Theirs is a
doubly reflexive gesture -the scrutiny of self-scrutiny. Cervantes' own words echo
uncannily, as Elias Rivers has shown, both in the contours of its anecdotes and the nature
of its recurring themes, the Aprobación of the Licenciado Márquez Torres (pp. 530-31).16
The picture of an author who is «viejo, soldado, hidalgo y pobre» seems derived from
earlier self-portraits, both in the Quixote and in the Prologue to the Novelas ejemplares.
Yet the new context makes the familiar string of traits into the stuff of contrast. An
unlikely candidate for success has in fact been acclaimed, yet the taste of triumph has
been tinged with bitterness by the publication of a rival Segunda parte. The author of this
apocryphal version appears to have read Cervantes' self-portraits as carefully as the rest of
his work. His challenge is not only literary, but personal and moral, pointing a derisive
finger at Cervantes' age and his lifeless hand, accusing him of envy and even hostility to
the Church in his references to Lope de Vega (I, 48). Beyond this, the matter of age has
taken on a different cast for Cervantes himself, in 1615 nearly sixty-eight. In the
Dedicatoria's fictional audience with an emissary from the -92- Emperor of China, the
author excuses himself from that ruler's call to found in his kingdom an academy for the
study of the Castilian tongue on grounds of ill health: «porque yo no estoy con salud para
ponerme en tan largo viaje» (p. 534). In the Prologue he laments that his competitor
should have faulted him for his years, «como si hubiera sido en mi mano haber detenido
el tiempo, que no pasase por mí» (p. 535). Time, moreover, has not only taken its toll; in
some sense it is the writer's ally: «y hase de advertir que no se escribe con las canas, sino
con el entendimiento, el cual suele mejorarse con los años» (p. 536).

Paradoxes continue to proliferate on these pages: Lepanto's triumphant scars (far

better than any inglorious wholeness); the absurdity that so beloved an author should
struggle with poverty («Pues ¿a tal hombre no le tiene España muy rico y sustentado del
erario público?» asks a visiting French gentleman in the Aprobación [p. 530]); the true
honor of decent poverty. Although Cervantes in effect reinforces the image of himself as
«viejo, soldado, hidalgo y pobre», he sounds a bit like the successful politician who
continues to protest that he is just a country boy. There is evidence of his strategy in the
effusive whitewash of Lope («del tal adoro el ingenio, admiro las obras, y la ocupación
continua y virtuosa» [p. 536]) and in his careful posturing vis-à-vis the Conde de Lemos
and the Archbishop of Toledo, for whose consumption he must mention but not whine
about his straightened circumstances. At the moment when he confidently puts down his
challenger and reasserts the fueros of his authorship, any claim of incapacity inevitably
becomes part of a calculation. Yet to recognize the workings of guile is not necessarily to
conclude that authorial alchemy here simply turns wretchedness into power. It is in the
play between the portrait and its exploitation that Cervantes' characterization of the artist
emerges. Criticism of his rival fosters at the same time an ironic self-indictment:

bien sé lo que son tentaciones del demonio, y que una de las

mayores es ponerle a un hombre en el entendimiento que
puede componer y imprimir un libro con que gane tanta fama
como dineros, y tantos dineros como fama.

(Ibid.)

Not only ridicule but self-mockery is at work in these jibes at the writer's vanity.
Avellaneda does not stand alone in facing the failure of his inflated ambitions.
 -93-

Looking back -like Cervantes- over these sketches of the author, we conclude first
that we have found in them nothing like a full-blown autobiography. Still, though
physically dispersed and teasing in their brevity, the passages turn on a series of
recognizable themes: 1) advancing age, 2) poverty, 3) the soldier's calling, 4) battle scars,
particularly the crippled left hand, 5) imprisonment, in both African and Spanish jails, 6)
strong moral conviction, 7) love of literature, and 8) a desire to write which invariably
exceeds his ability. In every case, the gesture of self-contemplation is dramatized by a
form of doubling: the author's friend in the first Prologue; the Curate who claims long
acquaintance with Cervantes in the scrutiny; the manuscript peddlar, the translator and the
Arab historian; the mirror tales of the Captain and Saavedra; the Emperor of China and
the scurrilous Avellaneda. The form of the dialogue seems always to hold the portraits
suspended -and images of the most literal sort of suspension abound- between apology
and self-deprecation.

Even the New Criticism, in its insistence on severing writing from writers, left
largely unexplored as aesthetic objects these islands of concrete self-reference in
Cervantes' texts. While it has been recognized that figures of the historical author are
somehow mediated by literature, the dominant notion has been that of «aesthetic
distance». That is to say, the writer, in an act of creative purification, converts life, his
own life, into art. Yet these most «transparent» figures of self, it bears repeating, are no
less fictions than Don Quixote or Cide Hamete. A supposed verisimilitude, or some
likeness to a picture we have grown accustomed to identifying as that of Cervantes, tends
to interfere with our ability to perceive the semiotic function of self-portraits within his
works. All of these sketches, either explicitly or implicitly, fuse physical characteristics
(age, crippling) and historical circumstance (military career, imprisonment, poverty) with
qualities of intellect and spirit. When Cervantes calls our attention to his authorial self, he
asks us in effect to see the writer in the shape of human anatomy, of human life history,
of human desire. The fusion of the physical, historical, intellectual and spiritual makes
any one of these qualities a potential metaphor for the other, paving the way for a rich
chain of metonymic substitutions. Nor is this economy restricted to Don Quixote: we find
the same system at work in virtually all of Cervantes' -94- prologues and in the Viaje
del Parnaso, to mention only the most obvious examples.17 It becomes clear that when he
chooses to intrude into his texts, Cervantes cuts an authorial figure that is anything but
authoritarian: aging, impoverished, imprisoned, maimed, he struggles with unfulfilled
desires.

If portraits of Cervantes are read as portraits of the artist, then it makes sense to look
for their relation to other artists and authors within the same texts. In the Quixote, authors
-storytellers and writers- abound. It is difficult to identify a character in the book who is
not in some sense a writer. The categories of character, reader, author, turn out to be
virtually reversible, as one narrative's characters become another's reader-listeners or
writer-tellers.18 Cervantes casts even himself in all three roles. To be sure, the most
conspicuous authorial figures of the Quixote are the segundo autor, Cide Hamete, the
Moorish translator and the imaginary sabio encantador. But it is hard to stop here: we
find Grisóstomo, Antonio the goatherd, Marcela, Ginés de Pasamonte (Maese Pedro),
Cardenio and Dorotea, the Captive, Vicente de la Rosa, the goatherd Eugenio,
Avellaneda, the son of the Caballero del Verde Gabán, the crafty Basilio and his pedantic
cousin, Sansón Carrasco, the Duke and Duchess, and so on -not to mention the principals,
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza themselves. Although not entirely lacking in redeeming
qualities, these authors are madmen and misfits, both literary purloiners and literal
criminals, sinners and infidels, liars and tricksters, artists in deception and victims of self-
deception.19 They dream and scheme, but rarely succeed in converting their desires into
reality. They are not only figures of creation, but of destruction and self-destruction. Don
Quixote himself suggests quite often the literally dismembering aspect of the creative
impulse.

The idea of authorial distance sets Cervantes the master above and aloof from the
multitude of artistic forms represented by these -95- tellers and their tales. In this view,
the book taken as a whole scrutinizes and implicitly judges the partial perspectives
embodied in the narratives which go into its making: the bombastic romances of chivalry,
Sancho's inundating proverbs and «artless» folktales (plagued by redundancies and
interruptions), the stilted pastoral with its transparent artificiality, the picaresque (flawed
by the limitations of the first-person narrative), erudite commentaries like Fernando de
Herrera's Anotaciones, inflexible satires like Avellaneda's sequel. Certainly no one would
argue with the notion that the whole of the Quixote is greater than the sum of its parts.
From the dialogue between the Curate and the Canon of Toledo in Part One, Chapter 47,
emerges the vision of an all-inclusive literary genre, that ideal, total form which would
subsume every other. The Curate, of course, purports to describe not the Quixote itself,
but that good book of chivalry, the prose epic. Cervantistas have found a greater likeness
to his picture of fictional perfection in the Persiles. The notion that Cervantes' success is
an effect of distance seems to postulate a true, magisterial voice, which the author
withholds as the key to his power. To catch this authentic voice, we must then either posit
its nature without ever having heard it, or identify it arbitrarily with particular passages in
the text. Critics inevitably differ as to which of these belong to the «real» Cervantes.
Perhaps, then, it is more fruitful to recognize that the need for a voice pure and secure in
its aloofness, untainted by lesser spirits, is our own. Cervantes does not speak
unmediated, but through many other voices. Although one of his voices may proclaim the
intent to «derribar la máquina destos caballerescos libros» (p. 25), the requirements of
parody make the ridiculer and the ridiculed necessary bedfellows. The author's «own»
voice is always inextricably bound up with the languages and personae he exploits.

Cide Hamete provides a particularly instructive case of the difficulties we face when
we try to draw a line between Cervantes and his surrogates. As parody of the overworked
fictitious-authorship device of the chivalric romances, Cide Hamete is transparently a
pretext. Although from Chapter 9 of the 1605 Quixote on, and increasingly in the second
part, the author uses him to introduce episodes and to evade theoretical requirements like
verisimilitude, the Arab historian seems to be present only when mentioned. Few studies
have actually endeavored to characterize the -96- nature of Cide Hamete's voice or the
features of his rhetoric.20 If we want to go along with the novelist's ruse of faithful
translation faithfully reported, we can technically make nine-tenths of the book Cide
Hamete's and declare the Arab the means of the author's absence from his work. If, on the
other hand, we recognize that the parentheses which his name sets up are largely phony,
we must conclude that the invocation of Cide Hamete does not necessarily transform the
voice of the narrator. Mancing suggests that the Arab alters that voice only abruptly and
momentarily. When, on the last page of Part Two, we are invited to listen to the Arab's
ode to his pen, the voice we hear sends us back to the words of the author's «own»
prologues. First he -or is it the pen?- reaffirms proprietary authority against «el escritor
fingido y tordesillesco:» «Para mí sola [sic] nació don Quijote, y yo para él (p. 1068).
Then, sounding in these final lines clear echoes of the first Prologue, he brings the book
full circle:

no ha sido otro mi deseo que poner en aborrecimiento de los

hombres las fingidas y disparatadas historias de los libros de
caballerías, que por las de mi verdadero don Quijote van
tropezando, y han de caer del todo, sin duda alguna.

(p. 1068)

Surely Cervantes does not expect us to be duped. Here he introduces Cide Hamete, figure
and instrument of authorial distance, at that moment -Death- when distances and
differences collapse, when Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Cide Hamete and Don Quixote
collapse into one. If the Arab chronicler and the text's many other surrogate authors are
masks of Cervantes, it follows that the text's jokes on them, especially as they engage the
idea of authorship, of authorial authority, are jokes on Cervantes as well.

Américo Castro preferred to call the famous 1605 Prologue an epilogue. As such, it
might be taken for a final summation (of Part One at least), repository of the author's
intentions, that moment when we might hope to catch the clearest sound of the master's
voice. Yet we found in it no image of assurance and control, but a writer worrying about
the problem of how to give his work its authority. The entire Prologue has its fun at the
expense of the idea of authority. Every category it introduces -literary lineage and
heredity, freedom, intention and clarity, and so on- falls prey to ironic contradiction. The
author, although calling himself padrastro to Don Quixote, offers his child as
confirmation of the genetic rule «like -97- father, like son». Painting himself as a rebel
against conventions, he has produced his offspring in a prison. The friend's advice too is
contradictory. First he flippantly commends the trappings of traditional scholarly
authority (Latin marginalia and erudite annotations), then brushes that aside, affirming
that the writer need only stick to imitation, say what he means: «procurar que a la llana,
con palabras significantes, honestas y bien colocadas, salga vuestra oración y período
sonoro y festivo, pintando, en todo lo que alcanzáredes y fuere posible, vuestra intención»
(p. 25). Even these last words make the author's power contingent: «en todo lo que
alcanzáredes y fuere posible» leaves the proverbial distance between the cup and the lip
dangerously open.

In this Prologue, then, precisely where we are tempted to think ourselves closest to
Cervantes, we learn the law of his text: that every sign, even and especially those which
appear to make straightforward declarations and those we might most like to embrace,
must be read as partial signs. In particular, critical utterances which champion verbal
decorum, structural clarity and wholeness (as in the case of Don Quixote's exasperation
with Sancho's mannerisms and Maese Pedro's famous advice, «Vuelve a tu senda y
camina»), or authorial omnipotence, must, in a text replete with interruptions,
affectations, inconsistencies, be read as problematic rather than programmatic. When
Cervantes invokes aesthetic perfection and authorial intention, he does so not in blind
belief, but because these are issues which affect his activity as an artist. His self-portraits,
caricatured authors and the theoretical pronouncements scattered throughout his works
must be considered together, for each by itself is only part of an inquiry into the nature
and status of fiction. The critical impulse to reduce the multiple facets to one clear image
invariably meets with the text's resistence.21 Within Cervantes' fiction, such reductive
postures always offer an easy mark for parody.

-98-

At this point it may prove useful to appeal to the literary theory of Cervantes' day for
help in reassembling the puzzle we have created. It is now well established that Don
Quixote's author experienced the Italian revival of Aristotle's Poetics by way of Alonso
López Pinciano's Philosophia antigua poética (1596).22 This fictional sixteenth-century
tertulia concerns itself with the most urgent literary questions of the time: imitation, truth
in fiction, verisimilitude and the marvelous, unity and variety, the characteristics of
classical literary genres, the nature of poetic language, the power of literature. El
Pinciano's second epistle, confirming the Platonic view that makes painting a less
powerful form of art than literature («Los pintores no alborotan tanto los ánimos de los
hombres como los poetas» [I, 169]), even contains the remarkable story of the author's
friend Valerio, who was so moved in the course of reading Amadís de Gaula, that he fell
into a mortal swoon. That anecdote, of more than passing interest to Don Quixote's
creator, alerts us to the possibility that the Philosophia antigua provided Cervantes not
only a theoretical scaffolding, but materials for his imaginative edifice as well.

Although he brings together Platonic and Aristotelian issues to a greater extent than
is often acknowledged, El Pinciano remains a faithful Aristotelian in his concern with the
structure of fable. Where literature's essence is the «imitation of an action», the theorist's
overriding concern becomes the structural logic of that action. The Aristotelian metaphor
for the structure of poetry is the human figure; the Philosopher conceives literary
perfection in terms of the harmonious proportions and interworkings of the members of
the body. Tragedy embodied for him the greatest structural and therefore anatomical
perfection. The Poetics concentrate not so much on the attributes of the artist, as on the
nature of art. Aristotle describes the anatomy of poetry. The contertulianos of the
Philosophia antigua lean very heavily on the analogy of the cuerpo de fábula (II, 15).
When one of them, Ugo, suggests that «la fábula toda es un vientre o menudo, y que el
argumento es aquella tela mantecosa, dicha entresijo, de donde están asidos los intestinos,
y que éstos son los episodios, los quales se -99- van enredando con la fábula como los
intestinos con la tela» (II, 21), he predictably elicits much mirth. Yet a generally serious
dependence on the anatomical metaphor pervades the work, giving rise to frequent
exaggerations that would in all likelihood have appeared to Cervantes as convenient
springboards to parody.23

Beyond this flirtation with humor, the Philosophia antigua as a whole seems to sense
that Poetry (meaning Literature) is caught up in a web of contradictions. One of these
contradictions implicates the traditional hierarchy of genres. Of course, tragedy, comedy,
even the epic as Aristotle described them, did not flourish in sixteenth-century Spain.
How was one, then, to adapt the Poetics to the reality of the literary scene? El Pinciano's
enthusiasm for Heliodorus sits awkwardly with the clear superiority Aristotle accords to
tragedy. Not only does heroic poetry mix voices (that is, the epic poet speaks directly with
his own voice as well as indirectly though the voices of his characters) and build its story
out of many separate actions; but the author of Theagenes and Cariklea writes in prose.
El Pinciano's sensitivity to that dilemma matches a recurring concern with the
contradictions and paradoxes inherent in every demand of art. Literature must seek truth,
yet prefer lies; it must amaze, yet appear real; it must rouse, yet still the passions; its
language must be clear, yet not common; it must entertain, yet teach; its episodes must be
organic, yet separable. One requirement turns its complementary opposite into a defect. In
the fifth epistle, where the subject of discussion is verisimilitude, Fadrique, marveling at
the extent to which theatrical performance hangs on suspension of disbelief, puzzles:

Pregunto si la acción se puede hazer sin estos defectos. Parece

que no. Y más pregunto, si bien parecen essos actos, aunque
no verisímiles. Paréceme que sí. ¿Qué resta? Que pues no
puede ser de otra manera y la acción es deleytosa, la tal fábula
no sea condenada, ni el autor tenido en menos. Y como
generalmente las faltas suelen estar en los artífices y no en las
artes, al contrario, algunas vezes suele estar la obra con
alguna imperfección no por falta del poeta, sino de la misma
arte; la qual, assí como todas las demás, tiene sus fragilidades
y impotencias.

(II, 73)

Rather than blame the artist for the flaws we find in particular forms or works, his
argument concludes, we must recognize fragility and -100- impotence to be inherent in
the very nature of art. The author-character nods assent:

Ya lo veo, dixo el Pinciano, que por esto los antiguos hizieron

y fingieron sanos y enteros a todos los dioses, excepto a vno
que entre ellos era artífice, el qual era coxo. Si, respondió
Fadriq[ue], todas las artes son coxas.

(II, 73-74)

The artífice coxo of the myth is, of course, Hephaestus or Vulcan, son of Jupiter and
Juno. One version of his story has his parents evict him from heaven because his
deformed body so displeased them. Another has him maimed in the fall when Jupiter,
enraged at his son's intervention in a conjugal dispute on the side of his mother, hurled
him down to earth. Vulcan's love life traces a series of frustrations: unsuccessful in his
suit of Minerva, goddess of Wisdom, he married Venus. As husband of the goddess of
Love and Beauty, fashioner of exquisite, miraculous warriors' shields, Vulcan appears
entangled in a compromising but suggestive triangle with Venus and Mars.24 Vulcan's
forge and his art, then, figure the power and desire of the cripple, former suitor of
Wisdom, wedded on the one hand to his own deformity and on the other to Beauty
herself. The particular image of art concentrated in the figure of the crippled artifex
enables El Pinciano not to criticize the failings of a genre, but rather to locate precisely in
that flawed genre the very quintessence of art, with paradox as its paradigm.
 The crippled artist brings us back once again to Cervantes' self-portraits and to the
surrogate authors who crowd his novel. In the figure of Vulcan the common denominator
of the portraits of Cervantes and his others becomes visible: love of beauty wedded to the
consciousness of imperfection, even ugliness, deformity, dismemberment; «divine»
creative power counterbalanced by limitation. The manco de Lepanto, it is clear, serves
no idle referential purpose nor the author's vanity, but functions semiotically within the
same system of signs that includes another maimed artifex, creator and captive of his own
feeble armor, that gloriously vulgar Vulcan, Don Quixote de la Mancha. In terms of the
literary theory of Cervantes' day, this figure of the artist speaks to the tension between
Platonic and Aristotelian -101- views of literature, the uneasy sense of poetry's power
and its fragility. Vulcan, after all, is no golden Apollo, but an unsightly craftsman at the
service of principles of order, beauty, strength. He is a compromise -in the myth he is
openly compromised, or cuckolded-, a contingent authority. In El Pinciano's sensitivity to
the paradoxes of literary representation, we find a way to deal with the apparent
arbitrariness of Cervantes' text, where theory contradicts theory, and theory contradicts
practice. Vulcan's figure, Pinciano's sign of flawed perfection, makes these
inconsistencies not careless aberrations but part of the very essence of art.

Perhaps it is our own sensitivity in the late twentieth century to these paradoxes of
representation which enables us to see Cervantes and El Pinciano in this light. Our
concerns in turn create a new danger: that we will set aside the cast-off myths of
Cervantes as recreator of the spirit of his people, or Cervantes the crusader, or Cervantes
the God-like artist, only to bring out a newly fashioned myth of Cervantes as post-
structuralist. It would be a mistake, I believe, to discover exactly mirrored in Cervantes
our fascination with the troubled, infinitely deferred itinerary of reference. Truth for
Cervantes was not fictional. As Spitzer insists, in his works an immutable truth lies
always behind the play of appearances. But that truth is God's truth: nowhere, without
mockery, does Cervantes attribute that truth to a human actor.

A final caution needs to be added. I do not suggest in these pages that Cervantes did
not «actually» possess and enjoy the privileges of authorship. His control over his text is
an historical fact, although the significance of that fact might be argued, particularly by
contemporary theorists of intertextuality. Certainly no one would wish to belittle the
achievement of a prodigious work which has withstood centuries of reductive assaults and
will surely survive ours. In the end, the self-portraits and autobiographical references only
serve to renew the sense of wonder -frequent privilege of the reader of Cervantes- at the
intricate workings of a semiosis which miraculously turns dross into imaginative gold,
and then suspends its shining threads in the precarious space between fact and myth.25 Yet
it is striking that Cervantes chooses to dramatize the author's relation to his text in figures
which do not suggest authority, control, -102- power, but rather contingency,
limitation, even impotence. If he makes visible the strings of authorial manipulation, he
does so not so much glorying in the power of his art as wrestling with its paradoxes.

In Cervantes' literary cosmos, the authorial deity is a crippled god.

Department of Romance Studies

Cervantes [Publicaciones periódicas] : Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America.

Volume III, Number 2, Fall 1983
 Notas
1

An earlier version of this paper was read at a session of the Kentucky Foreign
Language Conference (University of Kentucky, Lexington), April 23, 1982.1.1

(N. from the A.)

1.1
Note: this study was continued in «Cervantes' Portraits and Literary
Theory in the Text of Fiction», Cervantes, 6.1 (1986): 57-80. (N. from the
E.)

«La dimensión autobiográfica del Viaje del Parnaso», Cervantes, (1981), 37. (N.
from the A.)

Demetrios Basdekis, «Cervantes in Unamuno: Toward a Clarification», RR, 60

(1969), 178-85. (N. from the A.)

F. Navarro y Ledesma (Madrid, 1905). (N. from the A.)

R. de Garciasol (Madrid: Editorial Nacional, 1944). (N. from the A

Luis Astrana Marín (Madrid: Reus, 1948-58), 7 vols. (N. from the A.)

William Byron, Cervantes. A Biography (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1978).

Another extreme, product of continental psychoanalytic criticism, is Louis Combet's
Cervantès ou les incertitudes du désir (Lyons: Presses Universitaires, 1980), which uses
portraits of authors in Cervantes' texts to make a composite portrait of Cervantes the man.
(N. from the A.)

Ruth El Saffar, Distance and Control in «Don Quixote»: A Study in Narrative

Technique (Chapel Hill: Department of Romance Languages, 1975). See also Helena
Percas de Ponseti, «Authorial Strings: A Recurrent Metaphor in Don Quijote», Cervantes
1 (1981), 51-62. Percas suggests that Cervantes opposes the «strings» of pseudo-authority
to his own authentic creative power. (N. from the A.)

The Romantic Approach to «Don Quixote» (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1977). (N. from the A.)

10

«Linguistic Perspectivism in the Don Quixote», in Linguistics and Literary History

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 41. (N. from the A.)

11

The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1967). (N. from the A.)
12

For example, Ruth El Saffar, Novel to Romance. A Study of Cervantes's «Novelas

ejemplares» (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). Here, as throughout this
article, we give only representative bibliography for issues discussed by many important
cervantistas. (N. from the A)

13

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Martín de Riquer

(Barcelona: Juventud, 1958), p. 19. Future references appear in the text. (N. from the A.)

14

This tendency to treat the Captain's narrative like a documentary is reinforced by its
resemblances to a «Memorial» addressed by Cervantes to Philip II in 1590. See Astrana
Marín, IV, 455-56. (N. from the A.)

15

For full treatment of these autobiographical aspects of the Capitán cautivo, see
Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Personajes y temas del «Quijote» (Madrid: Taurus,
1975), pp. 92-146; and J. J. Allen, «Autobiografía y ficción: el relato del Capitán
cautivo», ACerv, 15 (1978), 149-55. Márquez Villanueva stresses the fictional traditions
which are present in the triptych's framing stories. (N. from the A.)

16

Elias L. Rivers, «On the Prefatory Pages of Don Quijote, Part II», MLN, 75 (1960),
214-21. (N. from the A.)

17

This paper sketches the outlines of a much larger study on Cervantes' portraits of the
artist, a book in progress. I have previously dealt with poets in La Galatea («The
Language of Limits and the Limits of Language: The Crisis of Poetry in La Galatea»,
MLN, 97 [1982], 254-71) and in the Entremeses («La poesía y los poetas en los
Entremeses de Cervantes», ACerv, forthcoming). (N. from the A.)

18

Cf. Ruth El Saffar, Distance and Control. (N. from the A.)

19

Alban K. Forcione, «The Cervantine Figure of the Poet: Impostor or God?» Chapter
9 of Cervantes, Aristotle and the «Persiles» (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1970), especially p. 306. (N. from the A.)

20

One recent exception is Howard Mancing's «Cide Hamete Benengeli vs. Miguel de
Cervantes: The Metafictional Dialectic of Don Quijote», Cervantes, 1 (1981), 63-81. (N.
from the A.)
21

The principal work on Cervantes' theory continues to be E. C. Riley's Cervantes's

Theory of the Novel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). More recent attempts to codify his
pronouncements are Helena Percas de Ponseti's Cervantes y su concepto del arte (Madrid:
Gredos, 1975); and Anthony Close's «Cervantes' Arte Nuevo de Hazer Fábulas Cómicas
en este Tiempo», Cervantes, 2 (1982), 3-22. (N. from the A.)

22

Philosophia antigua poética, ed. Alfredo Carballo Picazo (Madrid: C.S.I.C., 1973), 3
vols. All future references appear in the text. On Cervantes and El Pinciano, see Forcione,
Riley, and the carefully documented study of Jean Canavaggio, «Alonso López Pinciano
y la estética literaria cervantina en el Quijote», ACerv, 7 (1958), 13-107. (N. from the A.)

23

The anatomical metaphors of El Pinciano deserve a study of their own; I devote to

them a chapter of my book on Cervantes' portraits. (N. from the A.)

24

Specifically Spanish sources for the myth of Vulcan include Fernando de Herrera's
Anotaciones, published by Antonio Gallego Morell in Garcilaso de la Vega y sus
comentaristas (Granada, 1966); and Juan Pérez de Moya, Filosofía secreta, ed. Eduardo
Gómez de Baquero (Madrid, 1928). (N. from the A.)
25

Cf. Jean Canavaggio, «La dimensión autobiográfica...», p. 37. (N. from the A.)