READING CERVANTES: A NEW VIRTUAL REALITY

Author(s): John Beusterien

Source: Comparative Literature Studies , 2006, Vol. 43, No. 4, Don Quixote and 400 Years
of World Literature (2006), pp. 428-440
Published by: Penn State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25659544

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 READING CERVANTES: A NEW VIRTUAL REALITY

John Beusterien

Will your thinking-machines, your representing-machines,

suffer?
?Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Can Thought Go On Without a Body?"

In 1995, Fakespace Systems developed the CAVE, a visualization tool

that combines high-resolution, stereoscopic projection and 3-D computer
graphics that create the illusion of a complete sense of presence in a virtual
environment. The first virtual reality technology of its kind in the world,
the CAVE allows multiple users to immerse themselves fully in the same
virtual environment at the same time. In 2006, the company expanded its
trademark CAVE into larger virtual environments (now available with four,
five, or six projection surfaces), and Fakespace Systems leads the world in
this technology. More CAVE rooms, known as Immersive Rooms, are in
stalled in visualization facilities around the world than any other spatially
immersive option.1
The markets for this technology are exploding. Museums, universities,
and centers for medicine, the life sciences, and entertainment increasingly
take advantage of CAVE-style technology. Energy companies simulate drill
ing; design and manufacturing companies use virtual prototypes from car
parts to machines; the military simulates realities for nearly every anticipated
combat outcome and scenario. The premise behind CAVE technology and
its offshoots assumes a virtual reality that replaces a "real" reality: simulated
drills project data for real drilling in northern Alaska (arguably reducing
unnecessary development), or a simulated cockpit drops bombs in a war
game. Most intellectuals perceive and indeed urgently demarcate the division
between reality and virtual reality with respect to its practical applications,
such as in ecology and war. The existence of that owl in cyberspace is only

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES, Vol. 43, No. 4,2006.

Copyright ? 2006 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

428

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 READING CERVANTES: A NEW VIRTUAL REALITY 429

the reminder that we must do everything we can to save the real owl. The
child destroyed in the simulated war game will help avoid the bombing of
real children.
Fakespace-type technology is increasingly an icon for twenty-first-cen
tury culture. By "culture" I do not just mean the culture of computer games,
Internet pornography, and other screen phenomena, but also how past culture
is understood?how we understand the book and reading in the twenty-first
century. The Fakespace 2006 website boasts a walk-in space that "recaptures
the spirit" of the ancient Alexandria library. Recreating the Alexandria library
reflects the ultimate future fantasy of cyberspace with respect to culture: entire
world histories, with all their living, feeling inhabitants, will be resurrected in
the Internet. Hans Moravec muses about a future world in which cyberspace
does not just create reality but also absorbs it entirely:

[A] mature cyberspace will be effectively much bigger and longer

lasting than the raw spacetime it displaces. Only an infinitesimal frac
tion of normal matter does work that's of interest to thinking beings
like us_[A] human brain equivalent could be encoded in less than
one hundred million megabytes, or 1015 bits.... [T]he entire existing
world population would fit in 1028. Thus, in an ultimate cyberspace,
the physical 1045 bits of a single human body could contain the ef
ficiently encoded biospheres of a thousand galaxies.2

The following paper about the spirit of a library and books refers to
virtual reality as it operates not only in contemporary computer-generated
systems, like the CAVE, but also in fantastical future scenarios such as this
one offered by Moravec. Jean-Francois Lyotard argues against the possibility
of a thinking mind in cyberspace by suggesting that thinking cannot take
place without the body. He takes his position against the principle that Hilary
Putnam used to legitimate attempts to create artificial intelligence?that is,
the principle of the separability of intelligence, the capacity of the mind to
separate itself from the body. Lyotard argues that the body is indispensable
hardware for the software, the mind, and that each of them is analogous to
the other in its relationship with its environment: the sensible world, in the
case of the body, and the symbolic, in the case of the mind. The world of the
senses tied to the body presupposes suffering and death, and Lyotard calls
suffering the mark of true thought, since thinking cannot take place without
pain. Lyotard's notion of suffering can be thought of as the recognition of
mortality and the aging and end of the body. Putnam's theory of the separa
bility of intelligence fails because the mind existing only in cyberspace reality

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430 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

leaves the body bereft of spatial coordinates, eliminating the distantiation

between life and death.3 In the Fakespace CAVE, we are the protagonist of
Alejandro Amenabar's film, Abre los ojos (or in Tom Cruises later spinoff,
Vanilla Sky), who endlessly plays out fantasies and deaths, never returning to
a nonvirtual reality. In the Fakespace CAVE, we are characters in the Matrix
series, never leaving a cyber universe in which we can never go "down under,"
because there is no bodily death.4
Virtual reality, as defined in most contexts, depends on the computer.
Definitions either implicitly or explicitly put the computer as the agent that
enables virtual reality: the computer simulates a system (most often optical,
but increasingly including the other senses) that enables the user to perform
operations on the simulated. This article makes an anachronical argument:
Cervantes defines a virtual reality diametrically at odds with contemporary
definitions, because virtual reality can never be generated by computer
technology. The Fakespace CAVE can never "recapture the spirit" of human
culture, because, for Cervantes, virtual reality must be generated from the
reading human mind. I do not pretend to assess computer virtual reality,
as it is rapidly changing our relationship with what is left of the material
world. Instead, I look to Cervantine virtual reality by exploring the Cave
of Montesinos episode in chapters 22-24 of Part II of El ingenioso hidalgo
Don Quijote de la Mancha.5 With the cave episode, Cervantes proposes a
philosophy of how to be a good reader. That definition of reading suggests
that the experience should take us down to meet subterranean spirits: we
confront what lurks below consciousness; we confront what exists under
neath symbols of economic exchange; and we confront the book as spirit.
Ultimately, reading is both a confrontation with death and an act of suffering,
as the body foregoes its pleasures.
Like computer virtual reality, the simulation of reality in the Cave
of Montesinos is not imitation but a semblance of a nonexistent reality.
Cervantess cave (and indeed both books of the Quijote) functions like the
experience of cyberspace in that it makes its workings transparent; Cervantes s
writing recognizes itself as "screen" (artificial) and simultaneously as real
(human). With respect to the cave episode, Quijote declares the experience
in the cave a real adventure. He was awake in the cave and he could surely
see and experience all his senses: "Despabile los ojos, limpiemelos, y vi que
no dormfa, sino que realmente estaba despierto; con todo esto, me rente la
cabeza y los pechos, por certificarme si era yo mismo el que alii, o alguna
fantasma vana y contrahecha; pero el tacto, el sentimiento, los discursos
concertados que entre mi hacia, me certificaron que yo era alii entonces el
que soy aqui ahora" ["I opened my eyes wide, rubbed them, and saw that I

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 READING CERVANTES: A NEW VIRTUAL REALITY 431

was not sleeping but really was awake; even so I felt my head and chest to
verify whether it was I myself or some false and counterfeit phantom sitting
there, but my sense of touch, my feelings, the reasoned discourse I held with
myself, verified for me that, there and then, I was the same person I am here
and now"].6 Immediately after the cave episode, Cervantes recognizes the
artificial?the process of writing fiction?by employing meta-literary lan
guage, calling attention to the writing process behind the story that Quijote
has told. The morisco who is translating the entire novel from Arabic for the
narrator tells the reader that the original author, Cide Hamete Benengeli, has
written not just the story but also a note in the margins alongside the story:
"[Y] asf, sin afirmarla por falsa o verdadera, la escribo. Tu, lector, pues eres
prudente, juzga lo que te pareciere" (738) [w[A]nd so, without affirming either
its falsity or its truth, I write it down. You, reader, since you are a discerning
person, must judge it according to your own lights" (614)]. Throughout the
novel, Cervantes makes transparent a whole series of artifices that separate
the "story"?the cave images, the "false" images on the screen (thinking of
Plato)?from true reality, namely, the process of simulating reality through
the writing process.7 The "true," historical Quijote, according to the narrator,
has passed through the hands of the first author, Cide Hamete Benengeli,
and is translated by the bilingual Arabic-Spanish translator. The cave epi
sode receives the further special note of self-reference to the writing process,
because the translator tells us that the original author has written a marginal
note about the entire episode.
Cervantes is transparent in the sense that he painstakingly calls attention
to the nuts and bolts behind the creation of a narrative that purports to be a
human truth, the true history of Don Quijote. Cervantess work is virtual, in
that the narrator always mediates the truth in history with an admission of
an intermediary that has modified that purported truth. Cervantes, though,
demands his reader to be prudent, to make judgments in conceiving virtual
reality. In the cyber universe, the recipient of the virtual reality?for instance,
the one who experiences the virtual reality of the Fakespace CAVE?is pas
sive. Aside from the passivity of the player in computer virtual reality, the
genesis of Cervantine reality comes from a fundamentally different origin.
Computer and software engineers generate virtual reality not through hu
man language, but through a computer code that at its base is a series of
off-on signals. When the reader is the agent, the materiality of reality is
not entrusted to an invisible or impenetrable technology (the base code is
incomprehensible to all but a few computer hardware specialists), but to
human language.

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432 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

Cervantes insists that the one who experiences the virtual reality of
the Cave of Montesinos must do so by being a good reader. The episode of
the cave is especially instructive in illuminating the meaning of reading for
Cervantes, because he introduces the character of the Primo, who exempli
fies a clear, wonderfully comic definition of the bad reader. The Primo, the
aspiring author, is the first reader and interpreter of the Cave of Montesinos
episode, and his gloss of the cave casts its shadow on all future interpretations,
whether they be a return to the womb, a burlesque of the hero's journey to
the underworld, or my word here.8 Cervantes has the Primo know exactly
the meaning of the cave and what is enclosed inside. The Primo gives the
author of the cave episode, Quijote, complete, unquestioned authority and
takes the facts?his interpretation?as truth-bits worthy of publication.
Cervantes portrays him as the one who has the answer, the type of answer
that ends dialogue?he knows with certainty how to interpret the epi
sode?and would make future commentary on the cave episode absolutely
unnecessary. The Primo describes how the cave episode supplies valuable
textual proof for future publications. He tells Quijote and Sancho that
the mention of "paciencia y barajar" (739) ["have patience, and shuffle the
deck" (615)] establishes historical evidence about card playing at the time of
Charlemagne, a perfect fact for inclusion in his work in progress, Invention
de las antigiiedades [The Invention of Antiquities]. The Primo also declares
that the cave episode proves the true origin of the river Guadiana, a detail
that he plans to publish in his Spanish version of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Through the pedantic, onanistic Primo character, Cervantes critiques the
interpretive approach that give primacy to the reader who closes interpreta
tion. I mention the Primo's interest in "truth-bits" since the Primo wants to
use the story in his story of national origins, but also because it means "units
of information" in computer culture. The Primo is a bad reader in the sense
that he is the passive subject who lets the virtual reality appear before him,
and he takes it as truth.
With the Primo, Cervantes does not want us to look only at the bad
reader. He also directs his careful reader in a different direction?to the
ghosts that haunt the cave at the heart of the cave episode. While the
Primo character lives in the text that surrounds the cave narrative, more
primos occupy the inner text of the cave. These are the two knights whom
Quijote meets on his underworld journey: Montesinos, who is Quijote's
guide through the enchanted, chivalric world, and Durandarte, the undead
knight who lies dormant, his heart having been cut out by Montesinos and
sent to his beloved Belerma. At various points, Quijote has Montesinos and
Durandarte address each other as "oh primo." This vocative, "oh primo,"

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 READING CERVANTES: A NEW VIRTUAL REALITY 433

serves as an address from the one cousin to the other, and it is also Quijote's
own cautionary, comic apostrophe to his reader, the Primo. For instance, the
literally heartless Durandarte, who rarely speaks, does open his mouth to utter
the following words to his cousin Montesinos:" joh primo!, digo, paciencia y
barajar" (732) ["dear cousin, I say have patience and shuffle the deck" (608)].
Moreover, when Montesinos finishes describing how Durandarte s squire
Guadiana has mourned his master to the point that it has converted him
into the river Guadiana, he shouts, with the added emphasis of exclama
tion marks, "jOh primo mfo!" (731). The primo embedded in the internal
or mother text of the cave speaks to his primo carnal [blood cousin], and
to the Primo, the exemplary bad reader, who hears selectively on the outer
textual space of the cave and is not attentive to the inner spirits of the cave.
We know that the Primos ears perked up at these apostrophic moments,
since it is precisely the information that he recalls at the end of the narration
and decides to include in his publications. With respect to reading?herein
the joke becomes more than just a pun, and evolves into a Cervantine
hermeneutics?Cervantes wants us to understand reading as a simultaneous
gesture. Reading is being attentive to the nuance of the original narrative,
seeing primo as Durandarte, and being attentive to ourselves as interpreters
of the cave text as new, more careful Primos. Cervantes mocks the Primo for
reading in a closed historical context (they really did play cards back then)
or for reading to establish origin myths (we now know the true origin for
this river), since he takes only what he wants to hear?insignificant details
from a deeper, spirit-laden text.
Through the Primo character, Cervantes teaches how to be attentive
not to a closed reading, but to a close reading. The apostrophe to primo
underscores how the reader needs to be attuned to a reading that is a self
critique (understanding ourselves as Primos, gleaning what we need from
the text) and needs to look to the nuances of the original mother text (letting
the primos, the characters themselves, speak). The reader must create virtual
reality through being attentive to the nuances of human language. When I
say that the text is "spirit-laden," I do not just mean that Cervantes creates
undead characters, such as a talking corpse whose hair continues to grow.
Spirits rise from the objects and people that we mystify or, in the terms that I
employ here, that we fetishize. In the Cervantine text, we discover the spirit,
the fetish, through attention to the word necesidad [necessity, want]. In the
chapter immediately following the cave episode, a young man approaches
Quijote and Sancho singing the following seguidilla: "a la guerra me lleva / mi
necesidad / si tuviera dinero / no fuera en verdad" (741) ["I'm forced to go to
the war / because Im so poor; if I had money, believe / me I wouldn't leave"

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434 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

(617)]. His song?where a Lepanto-wounded soldier reflects on a young

man who goes to war to earn money rather than to uphold an ideal?broadly
mirrors Quijote's own time-out-of-joint problem of recuperating the warring
ideals of a knight. However, the young soldiers seguidilla?"a la guerra me
lleva / mi necesidad"?also has immediate and direct textual resonances.
The existence of the word necesidad in the seguidilla echoes the word from
the previous chapter within the text of the Cave of Montesinos. Quijote
reaches the climax of the Cave of Montesinos narrative when he describes
his amazement and disbelief at the knowledge that the notion of necesidad
exists in a cave of enchanted beings. At the most important moment in the
cave episode?the point at which the interior-fantasy chivalric story disap
pears, and we glimpse an exterior present-day problem?Quijote asks his
guide and the caves keeper, Montesinos: "<;Es posible, senor Montesinos,
que los encantados principales padecen necesidad?" (736) ["Is it possible,
Senor Montesinos, that distinguished persons who are enchanted suffer
from need?" (612)].
With the word "necesidad? Cervantes pushes us to become careful read
ers?to take time, idle time, to enjoy and think through necesidad. What does
the human psyche need, and what lack makes it suffer? Necesidad suggests the
nature of Quijote s repressed desire. In the womb space of the cave ("womb"
in the sense that it evokes the return to the mother, the reminder of union
and the missing phallus), Quijote experiences the delightful recuperation
of his virility as well as the repugnant horror of his own castration. While
she is clearly born from Sancho's fabricated description of her, in this virtual
reality, the impossible happens: Quijote tells us that he meets and speaks to
Dulcinea. Cervantes aptly describes the Quijote subconscious fantasy: the
meeting with the dreamed-up girl and the impossibility of sexually fulfilling
ones desire. Dulcinea turns her back on Quijote and disappears forever on
her horse. To fetishize the moment, to provide the material sign through
which Quijote re-experiences the memory of sexual fulfillment (he met her)
as well as impotence (she disappeared), the two skipping damsels that Sancho
had invented for Quijote interrupt the list of the enchanted inhabitants from
chivalric and romance literary tradition, and one of Dulcinea's handmaids
brings him an article of clothing.
The fetish, a petticoat, is offered to Quijote in exchange for money. Its
status as a pawn for sale makes it not only a Freudian fetish but a Marxist
fetish as well. For Marx, objects acquire their value based on their practi
cal social purpose, their use-value. They also acquire value through market
forces, their exchange-value. The fetishization of the object occurs when its
use-value is abstracted into money, a process that discards its use-value (how

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 READING CERVANTES: A NEW VIRTUAL REALITY 435

it would be exchanged from person to person without surplus value before

abstraction). Use-value is replaced by the forces of the market (people, society)
that dictate a price. With the word "necesidad? Cervantes suggests the pawn
as an economic fetish, an object that the individual is unable to pay for that
triggers a sense of traumatizing lack. The market exchange-value, the price
that Dulcinea and her maids have put on the petticoat, exceeds the use-value.
Cervantes mentions that the petticoat is made of cotton, an inferior fabric in
that age; however, the undergarment is overpriced, and Quijote has only four
reales and is unable to come up with the six realesneeded to buy it. Quijotes
amazement that enchanted beings suffer necesidad informs his own broken
place in the world?that he comes up short when trying to pay a debt and
when attempting to give and receive sexual satisfaction. In her article "Cer
vantes and the Night Visitors: Dream Work in the Cave of Montesinos,"
Diana de Armas Wilson rightly connects Quijotes sexual and economic
alienation in this episode. The replaying of necesidad in the world outside
the cave in the following chapter indicates that behind or, better, underneath
Quijotes preoccupation with a young soldiers economic frustration lies a
sense of sexual impotence. The subject, Quijote s out-of-kilter placement
in the material world, is described in this moment with the economization
of the knight s literary ideals and the creation of an unreachable love object.
The Quijote pledge of constant knight-errantry is not enough to cover his
debt to Dulcinea, and the damsel in the cave chastises him: "Todo eso, y
mas debe vuestra merced, a mi senora" (737) ["All this and more your grace
owes to my lady" (613)].
Slavoj Zizek is revelatory in his thinking through the fetish with re
spect to virtual reality. In the society of the screen?from cinema, but most
especially cyberspace?the fetish is not the secret locus of the prohibited,
that which cannot be shown, but rather that of the fully exposed. We allow
ourselves into the virtual reality scene and accept the simulation as truth,
but at the same time we know that there is nothing behind the scenes but a
machine run by electric currents, computer chips, and digital computation
controlled by a simple base-2 language (1 + 0 or + and -). Since the simula
tion in computer virtual reality is not imitation but rather a semblance of a
nonexistent reality, the fetish of postmodern screen culture then simultane
ously creates and denaturalizes reality through disclosing the mechanism
responsible for its generation. The purely virtual, the end of a difference
between nature and artificial reproduction, is the real because it regulates
all reality, material and imaginary.9
Cervantes likewise simultaneously creates and denaturalizes reality
through revealing the mechanism (writing) responsible for its generation.

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436 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

But he tells us something more than "the truth is that there is no truth," the
postmodern dictum that finds itself in the introduction to Anne J. Cruz and
Carroll B.Johnsons edition of Cervantes and His Postmodern Constituencies.10
By giving us his book and by asking us to be good readers, Cervantes rescues
us from contemporary computer virtual reality, from the "drip-feeding of all
minds" and the "networking of all functions?of body, of time, of language,"
in the terms of Jean Baudrillard.11 The word necesidad and the six reales
from the cave scene most fundamentally link to the sense of insufficiency
and sufficiency that accompanies writing and reading. The story, or cuento,
whether it be Quijote's whipped-up wild world of the Cave of Montesinos
or Cervantess novel itself, is that which exists outside of and because of
necesidad. The debt that Quijote owes Dulcinea is that debt that stifles and
drives the Quijote journey and creation. I take the tavern owner from Book
I (chapter 17) to also have the eyes of the bad reader, the one who does not
take a moment of idle time. The prologue to Book I begins as an apostrophe
to the idle {desocupado) reader, Cervantess jab at those lazy readers of chivalric
novels. However, here I suggest, in the spirit of duplicitous Cervantes, that
desocupado for Cervantes is not a critique of his reader, but a guide for good
reading. It is a Cervantine injunction for idleness: a necessary time for the
story, the humor, the imagination, and the thinking through. The tavern owner
is no reader; he has no necesidad for a cuento?the words, the stories, and the
literary fooling?but only for the cuenta [bill]. He wants his payment and he
needs it in full. He tells Quijote: "Senor caballero, yo no tengo necesidad de
que vuestra merced me vengue ningun agravio [...]. [S]6lo he menester que
vuestra merced me pague el gasto que esta noche ha hecho en la venta [...].
[P]agueseme lo que se me debe, y dejemonos de cuentos ni de caballerias;
que yo no tengo cuenta con otra cosa que con cobrar mi hacienda" (168-69)
["Senor Knight, I have no need for your grace to avenge any offense.... All
I need from your grace is that you pay for the night you spent in the inn....
Pay me what you owe me, and leave off your stories and chivalries; I don t
care about anything but earning my living" (121)].
Reading Don Quixote restores a broken lack?the necesidad?since it
is the authors gift to his reader, and a gift that makes up for the plaguing
fetish. Although Quijote did not have the six reales, his most avid reader,
the narrator, desperately wants to read the book, and he has come upon
the bargain of all bargains. The narrator has found a gift: the Quijote text,
worth more than six reales, a value of which the boy selling the papers is
unaware. The price of the fetish, the cotton petticoat, is forgiven in the first
meta-literary moment of the novel. The narrator searches the market in
Toledo and comes across a discovery that only a careful, lucky reader can

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 READING CERVANTES: A NEW VIRTUAL REALITY 437

make: "Estando yo un dia en Alcana de Toledo llego un muchacho a vender

unos cartapacios y papeles viejos a un sedero; y como yo soy aficionado a
leer; llevado desta mi natural inclination, tome un cartapacio de los de que
el muchacho vendia, y vile con caracteres que conoci ser arabigos" (101-2)
["One day when I was in the Alcana market in Toledo, a boy came by to
sell some notebooks and old papers to a silk merchant; as I am very fond
of reading, even torn papers in the streets, I was moved by my natural in
clinations to pick up one of the volumes the boy was selling, and I saw that
it was written in characters I knew to be Arabic" (67)]. The Arabic words
were the missing words of the Quijote story, and the author ends up buying
the loose papers and parchments for a half a real: "[C]ompre al muchacho
todos los papeles y cartapacios por medio real; que si el tuviera discretion y
supiera lo que yo los deseaba, bien se pudiera prometer y llevar mas de seis
reales de la compra" (102) ["I bought all the papers and notebooks from the
boy for half a real, but if he had been astute and known how much I wanted
them, he certainly could have demanded and received more than six reales
for their purchase" (67)].
Cervantes suggests the experience of virtual reality takes place when
we confront human language by reading well. He "recognizes" the workings
of contemporary screen culture, in the sense that Quijote sees a version of
a framed or simulated reality in the Cave of Montesinos. The user of the
computer and the reader of Cervantes know that the images in the Fakespace
CAVE and the images in the Cave of Montesinos are frame images?like
the experience of images in the cinema, the spectators use the experience as
a mental foil to assure themselves that a glimpse of "real" reality exists on the
outside. To use the example of Plato's cave, the bound spectator seeing the
shadows on the wall knows (assures himself he knows) that the frame images
are only shadows because someone has escaped the cave and seen the "true"
sunlight and forms. But both Cervantes and computer virtual reality make
clear that the promise of reality (the true Platonic form, for instance) is just
that?a promise of reality. The experience in the digital and Cervantine caves
promises something else truly real and natural while exposing that promise
as void, because both are artificial fabrications. Computer reality depends
on its declaration of itself as "virtual," as a "fakespace." Cervantess reality
likewise depends on declaring itself fiction.
But reading virtual reality, Cervantes-style, radically contrasts with
computer virtual reality. From a Cervantine perspective on virtual reality,
the simulated recreation of a burnt Alexandria library, all the living libraries,
or even a Borges library that contains every possible book will be a failure.
Because the eye of the spectator gives itself up to the simulation, and because

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438 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

computer code rather than the human language creates that simulation,
computer virtual reality stifles the virtual reality created by reading, the act
that for Cervantes is key to recapturing human spirit. In computer virtual
reality, the outside becomes the inside because virtual reality immerses the
senses of the one who experiences it; computer virtual reality is the eyeball,
because the screen images are produced from inside the machine. Reading is
shut out to the one who enters the Fakespace CAVE, because the images have
already been generated for the eyes. Virtual reality saturates the imagination,
while Cervantine reading nurtures and gives it birth. In Cervantine virtual
reality, the mind s eye reigns, and the inside creates the outside. Multiple
users can participate within the Fakespace CAVE; even though one person
is in Houston and the other in Paris, both people can touch and manipulate
the same object. Multiple users also share, through reading, Cervantes s book,
but because the person in Houston and the other in Paris never share the
same time-space reading context, they will always conceive it as a different,
unique object?the opposite goal of the Fakespace CAVE project.
A digital library of Cervantess complete works, including facsimile
editions, modernized versions, criticism, and translations, along with illustra
tions from countless editions, can now be found growing in cyberspace. The
results of such projects are an incredible tool for the specialist who wants
to see original versions, has questions about variations, and who needs to
search for words. The simulation in cyberspace of virtual reality increases
Cervantess accessibility and shelf life, but just as it does not preserve the
spirit of the Alexandria library, cyberspace does not preserve the spirit of
Cervantes or his work. If anything, the impression that Cervantes has been
processed or raz^because he is safely tucked away in eternal digital code works
toward an ethic that encourages the end of reading: the imagination is dead,
because death has died.12
Cervantes does not want to end the story with a payoff but with a mo
tion of literary generosity that gives precedence to the cuento, the imagina
tion. With the cave episode, Quijote and Cervantes respond to the tavern
owner, offering an imaginative narrative that playfully recognizes that what
matters are the matters of the heart. In a literal sense, the author and his
creation?whether it is Cervantes writing his Quijote, or Quijote speaking
about the characters in his cave?are all heartless. The centerpiece figure
of the cave is the knight Durandarte, who is missing his heart, but Cer
vantes enticingly introduces the cave episode by telling us that it occupies
the central space of his hero's geography: the cave itself is in the "corazon
de la Mancha" (719) [heart of the Mancha (597)]. Cervantes playfully
incites Primo-readers to tell us that they have located this figurative heart,

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 READING CERVANTES: A NEW VIRTUAL REALITY 439

whether they be scholars who pinpoint the Quijote creation as the pride of
la Mancha, or other scholars who search la Mancha terrain and tell us that
they may have found the true location of the Cave of Montesinos. No map,
however, leads to Montesinos and the heart of la Mancha and, by extension,
the heart of Quijote and Cervantes. Only those who have read to find new
meaning in the cave, those who have gone down to see Durandarte, those
who accept Cervantess gift of imagination, know that a heart beats in his
heartless body as well as in those of Quijote and Cervantes. Perhaps those
readers also catch a glimpse of the spirit, the quickly approaching angel of
the body suffering, the reminder of death.

Texas Tech University

Notes
1. See the homepage for Fakespace Systems, http://www.fakespace.com/.
2. Hans Moravec, Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999),
166-67.
3. Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Can Thought Go On Without a Body?" in Materialities of Com
munications, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, trans. William Whobrey
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 286-300.
4. In 1997, Jean Baudrillard wrote Ecran total [Total Screen] to suggest the screen as the
dominating cultural mode of the world system of the West. More recently, he characterized
the film The Matrix as exemplary of how virtual reality absorbs society into a general asphyxia:
"[The Matrix] is the very archetype of the global installation, of the total global fact: not just the
film, which is, in a way, the alibi, but the spin-offs, the simultaneous projection at all points of
the globe and the millions of spectators themselves who are inextricably part of it. We are all,
from a global, interactive point of view, the actors in this total global fact" (Jean Baudrillard,
The Intelligence of Evil, or the Lucidity Pact, trans. Chris Turner [Oxford: Berg, 2004], 110).
5. The Cave of Montesinos episode is hereafter periodically referred to as "the cave epi
sode."
6. Miguel de Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Martin de Riquer
(Barcelona: Planeta, 1992), 728; Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman
(New York: Ecco, 2003), 605.
7. For a list of seven meta-narrative voices, see James A. Parr, Don Quixote, Don Juan,
and Related Subjects: Form and Tradition in Spanish Literature, 1330?1630 (Selinsgrove, PA:
Susquehanna UP, 2004), 58.
8. For a listing of some of the many critical responses to the cave episode, see Diana de
Armas Wilson, "Cervantes and the Night Visitors: Dream Work in the Cave of Montesinos,"
in Quixotic Desire: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Cervantes, ed. Ruth Anthony El Saffar and
Diana de Armas Wilson (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993), 70 n. 35, and Henry W. Sullivan, Grotesque
Purgatory: A Study of Cervantess "Don Quixote," Part II (University Park: Pennsylvania State
UP, 1996), especially pages 11-48.
9. Slavoj Zizek, "Cyberspace, or, the Unbearable Closure of Being," Pretexts 6 (1997):
53-79.
10. Anne J. Cruz and Carroll B. Johnson, eds., Cervantes and His Postmodern Constituencies
(New York: Garland, 1999), xii.
11. Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil, 117.

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440 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

12. See Harry Sieber, "Literary Time in the Cueva de Montesinos," Modern Language Notes
86.2 (1971): 268-73. Sieber reads the cave episode as one in which duree?literary time, eternally
frozen?rubs against the temporal, the chronological. The primos, for instance, are frozen in
time; Quijote, however, confronting temporal fragmentation, the coming-apart of his internal
world and his death, reports that fingernails, beard, and hair are growing on the characters in
the cave. In the brief comparative work I have done here, duree alone works as the time of the
Internet (surfing virtual space, images, names, and enchanted, otherworldly figures appear at
will). Always aware of but also responding to duree, the Cervantine reader suspends time and
simultaneously accepts the impossibility of its suspension.

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