From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
10.2 (1990): 55-72.
Copyright © 1990, The Cervantes Society of America
Narrative Levels and the Fictionality of Don Quijote, I:
Cardenio's Story
t is possible to divide
and categorize the vast corpus of criticism devoted to Don Quijote
according to specific areas of interest. James A. Parr, for example,
in his recent study (Don Quijote: An Anatomy of Subversive Discourse
[1988]) identifies several typical orientations toward Cervantes's
masterpiece, such as the Romantic and ‘cautionary’ schools, both
of which focus on the protagonist; the ‘perspectivist’, which focuses
on the problematic nature of ‘reality’; and the aesthetic (or narrative
technique) school (24).1 Parr's own orientation
is admittedly aesthetic, that is, focused on “completion of causal
sequences, satisfaction of conventional expectations for irony and parody,
and realization of . . . humor, burlesque, and incongruity”
(70). One point I wish to emphasize in this essay has been made before, but
is, I think, in need of constant restatement: that the various critical
orientations mentioned by Parr in his remarkably perceptive and stimulating
study are by no means mutually exclusive and that, in fact, such orientations
as the perspectivist (concerned with the represented
1 The
term ‘cautionary school’ denotes the critical reaction against
Romantic (‘soft’) interpretations of Don Quijote. Perhaps
the best-known example of the cautionary (‘hard’) tradition is
Anthony's The Romantic Approach to Don Quixote (1977).
55
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reality) and the aesthetic (concerned with the representing discourse) often
overlap and mutually reinforce one another.
In chapter 4 (“Levels and
Transgressions”) of his book, Parr utilizes Gérard Genette's
system of narrative levels to elucidate the embedded narratives of Don
Quijote. The concept of ‘narrative levels’ helps to clarify
that “shifting but sacred frontier between two worlds, the world in
which one tells, the world of which one tells” (Narrative Discourse
236). If I tell a tale, for example, the events that I relate (the world
of which I tell) constitute the primary, ‘basic’ level of narrative,
which Genette calls the ‘intradiegetic’ or ‘diegetic’
level.2 The immediate narrating situation,
that is, the context that includes both myself as teller and my audience,
is what Genette calls the ‘extradiegetic’ level (the world in which
I tell). Finally, if one of the characters in my tale should become a narrator,
the events that he or she relates would constitute the ‘metadiegetic’
level of narrative. None of these terms is absolute; rather, they are relational
or functional (229). A narrative may be considered metadiegetic only relative
to a primary, intradiegetic narrative.
What happens when the ostensibly
‘sacred’ frontier between narrative levels, or even that between
textual and extratextual reality, is transgressed or violated, as it blatantly
is in so many ways in Don Quijote? One such transgression occurs early
on, during the inquisition and burning of Don Quijote's books in chapter
6 of Part I, when a copy of Cervantes's Galatea is found, and the
priest remarks that its author is an old friend of his: “Muchos años
ha que es grande amigo mío ese Cervantes, y sé que es más
versado en desdichas que en versos”
(120).3 The conventional relation between
creator and creation appears to have been violated, for, somehow, Cervantes
and his early pastoral novel have been ‘magically’ included in
the represented (intradiegetic) world of Don Quijote, Part I.
Another, even more blatant, violation is the
inclusion of Don Quijote, Part I, within the represented world of
Don Quijote, Part
2 Genette
uses the two terms interchangeably (228). Despite the invariably relative
nature of these terms, I shall (for the sake of clarity, and following Parr)
use the term ‘intradiegetic’ in this essay to refer specifically
to the “universe of the characters” (Anatomy 58), that is,
the basic level of narrative on which Don Quijote and Sancho have their
adventures and interact with other characters.
3 All quotations,
except where indicated, are from Part I of the Murillo edition of Don
Quijote (Castalia, 1978).
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II. At the beginning of the second Part, only a month after the events described
in Part I have taken place, Don Quijote learns that a published edition of
his exploits has already appeared and is currently enjoying a wide circulation
and great popularity. John J. Allen has succinctly expressed the implications
of this apparent paradox: “Don Quixote, Part I, is the only specific
object in the phenomenal world of Part II which exists literally, and lies
ready at hand for our confirmation of its objective reality, yet it is precisely
the presence of this book, Don Quixote, Part I, which violates the
realistic terms of that world” (Hero or Fool I:79).
Such narrative transgressions —examples
of what Genette calls ‘metalepsis’— obviously defy the logical
expectations of most readers. Genette mentions Julio Cortázar's
short-story “Continuidad de los Parques” as an obvious example
of metalepsis that is well known to Hispanists: “the story of a man
assassinated by one of the characters in a novel he is reading” (234).
Metalepsis ultimately has a dizzying effect on the reader that radically
unsettles his or her sense of reality: “The most troubling thing about
metalepsis indeed lies in this unacceptable and insistent hypothesis, that
the extradiegetic is perhaps always diegetic, and that the narrator and his
narratees —you and I— perhaps belong to some narrative” (236).
As Genette reminds us, Borges was clearly interested in narrative transgressions
of this type and made a similar observation: “¿Por qué nos
inquieta que don Quijote sea lector del Quijote, y Hamlet, espectador
de Hamlet? Creo haber dado en la causa: tales inversiones sugieren
que si los caracteres de una ficción pueden ser lectores o espectadores,
nosotros, sus lectores o espectadores, podemos ser ficticios” (“Magias
parciales” 105). By so radically stretching and transgressing the limits
of the reading process in this way, Don Quijote constitutes a relentless
questioning of that very process: its conventions and its uses. The concept
of narrative levels is therefore central to the Quijote's exhibiting
and questioning of its own status and authority as fiction.
Part I of Don Quijote offers a good
many interpolated, metadiegetic narratives. Among the principal ones are
Pedro the goatherd's tale of Marcela and Grisóstomo; Sancho's tale
of Lope Ruiz and Torralba; Cardenio, Dorotea, and the Cautivo also
relate their own stories. In addition to all of these, a fictional narrative,
the “Novela del curioso impertinente,” is read aloud at the inn.
One of the longer narratives is Cardenio's, and it presents problems because
it is not exclusively his. Not only is he not the only
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source for his story, but the story itself is fractured by the text's
presentation of it, and part of the reader's task is, of course, to put the
various pieces together. His story is, in part, that of other characters,
whose lives and whose own narrations are radically interwoven with and affected
by his: narration, in Don Quijote, is never ‘merely’ narration,
nor can it ever be.
The beginning of Cardenio's involvement is
presented in the following order:
| 1. |
Having entered the Sierra Morena, Don Quijote and Sancho find a bag. |
| 2. |
| In the bag: |
a. DQ finds a book of writings. |
|
b. Sancho finds some gold coins. |
|
| 3. |
DQ reads aloud from the book, at Sancho's request. |
| 4. |
DQ and Sancho see a lone figure wandering through the mountains. |
| 5. |
DQ conjectures that he is the owner of the bag. |
| 6. |
DQ and Sancho go off to look for him. |
| 7. |
DQ and Sancho find a dead mule. |
| 8. |
DQ and Sancho run into a goatherd. |
| *9. |
The goatherd tells DQ and Sancho about a certain young man who has recently
appeared wandering about in the mountains. |
| 10. |
The young man appears. |
| 11. |
The four of them sit down to eat, at the young man's request. |
| *12. |
The young man says that his name is Cardenio and proceeds to tell his
story, at DQ's request. |
| *13. |
At a certain point, Cardenio mentions that Luscinda en joyed reading
books of knighthood. |
| 14. |
DQ interrupts Cardenio's narration and starts to discuss books of knighthood. |
| 15. |
Cardenio experiences a spell of locura: he attacks his audience
and runs off, leaving them badly beaten. |
(HIATUS: DQ remains in the Sierra Morena to do ‘penance’; Sancho
goes to deliver DQ's letter to Dulcinea, and runs into the priest and the
barber at the inn; these three go to find DQ, in order to bring him back
home; as they approach the spot where DQ was last seen, Sancho goes off to
look for him.)
| 16. |
The priest and the barber overhear someone reciting poetry. |
| 17. |
The priest and the barber approach him: it is Cardenio. |
| *18. |
Cardenio tells his story, at their request. |
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The striking characteristic of this listing is the ‘fractured’
effect noted above: as readers, we must reconstruct Cardenio's story piece
by piece, as it is given to us. In Genette's terminology, our sense of Cardenio
is the result of a combination of both intradiegetic and metadiegetic elements.
All the items in the above listing are obviously intradiegetic, i.e., events
that take place on the basic level of narrative. But items 9, 12, 13, and
18 (indicated by asterisks) ‘contain’ and give access to the
metadiegetic level. These all shed light on Cardenio's past, either remote
or relatively recent.
Cardenio's story represents two essential motifs,
discontinuity and change in perspective. The former is evident in the hiatus
noted on the list; just as Don Quijote's own brand of locura interrupts
Cardenio's telling of his past, so do the knight-errant's and Sancho's adventures
interrupt the process by which we, as readers, learn about Cardenio.
Discontinuity also characterizes the fragmentary and metonymic process by
which Don Quijote and Sancho, themselves, learn about Cardenio: literally,
piece by piece (his clothing, his money, and his writings, all found in the
bag; then his mule; then the unnamed goatherd's words about a young man who
has recently appeared there in the mountains; finally, Cardenio himself).
Once Cardenio has related his story to the priest and the barber, bringing
both them and us up to his ‘present’ (after the ‘hiatus’
noted above), his story continues for us on the intradiegetic level of narrative,
when he plays a role in the intrigue devised by the priest to lure Don Quijote
back home. (This intrigue itself involves a further metadiegetic narration,
namely, the story that Dorotea tells to Don Quijote in her role as Princess
Micomicona.)
At this point, Cardenio's involvement is
interrupted by several episodes that appear to have little or no direct relation
to him. These include the second encounter with Andrés (and Don Quijote's
metadiegetic narration of earlier events concerning him); the arrival at
the inn; the reading aloud of the “Novela del curioso impertinente”;
Don Quijote's interruption of that reading by doing battle with the
‘giant’ / wineskins; the completion of the reading of “El
curioso impertinente.” Only after these events have occurred do Fernando
and Luscinda appear at the inn, thereby enabling Cardenio (along with Dorotea)
to take center-stage once again. Discontinuity is thus the result of a series
of interruptions, both intradiegetic and metadiegetic.
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The text also presents Cardenio to us by way
of a marked and persistent perspectivism, offering information about him
from various points of view.4 We first learn
about him through the eyes of Don Quijote and Sancho. This is a golden example
of such perspectivism, for (as we all know) these two tend to see things
very differently from one another. Upon finding Cardenio's bag, Don Quijote's
interest centers on the book containing Cardenio's writings; Sancho, on the
other hand, goes immediately for the gold coins. The importance of the
distinction —for this essay— derives not so much from broad thematic
notions of ‘spirituality’ and ‘materiality’ (although
it is evident that these also play a role here), as from the simple perspectivist
notion that ‘reality’ is defined at least as much by the perceiving
subject as by the perceived object.
We first see Cardenio indirectly, then, through
the divided vision of Don Quijote and Sancho, when they find his bag. Next,
the unnamed goatherd relates all that he knows about Cardenio, including
the latter's earlier appearance there in the Sierra Morena and his treatment
of (and by) the other shepherds. Cardenio then makes his first appearance
and we see him as ‘directly’ as we ever will, that is, by way of
certain intermediaries (some explicit, some inferred), such as the unnamed
—and reportedly unscrupulous— Moorish translator of Cide Hamete's
historia or the dubious ‘second author’ who reports at the
beginning of chapter 9 that he found the manuscript. These intermediaries
function as extradiegetic ‘filters’ for all of the intradiegetic
action of the novel5 When Cardenio tells his
story to Don Quijote,
4 The
‘perspectivist’ orientation toward Don Quijote has, of course,
a long tradition that includes Américo Castro's seminal El pensamiento
de Cervantes (1925) and Leo Spitzer's important essay, “Linguistic
Perspectivism in the Don Quijote” (1948). This orientation has
found more recent expression in the work of such eminent critics as Joaquín
Casalduero, Manuel Durán, E. C. Riley, and John J. Allen, to name
only a few.
5 Many of these
‘filters’ do not serve as actual narrators; rather, they make
themselves felt as inferred presences within the narrative voices that do
effectively ‘speak’. One such presence is Cide Hamete (although
it is possible to argue that this status changes in the final chapter of
Part II). Parr lists and discusses at some length these various “narrative
voices and presences” (30-39), describing them as intradiegetic. They
are intradiegetic, of course, insofar as they are circumscribed by the
extradiegetic level of what Parr calls the “supernarrator” (see
below). But they are themselves extradiegetic insofar as they are exterior
(and provide ‘access’) to the level of [p.
61] narrative on which Don Quijote has his adventures: therein lies
the functional or relative nature of these terms. It is finally —begging
the reader's indulgence— a matter of perspective.
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Sancho, and the goatherd, we get (as it were) his own perspective on himself.
When he later reappears, after the ‘hiatus’, we see him from the
perspective of the priest and barber: along with them, we overhear his poetry
without knowing that it is in fact Cardenio who is producing it (329-30).
Later on, the story told by Dorotea intersects with Cardenio's tale (by way
of Fernando), so that we get, however limited, her perspective on him. Although
her story is not Cardenio's, and could not be, it has enough points of
intersection with it to corroborate his story and her own, as well. Finally
—and completing the list of perspectives on Cardenio— we see him
‘directly’ once again, that is, mediated only by the extradiegetic
filters noted above.6
Cardenio's first encounter with the shepherds
in the Sierra Morena constitutes a revealing and tangible example of this
perspectivism, when we receive the same information from two sources, first
from the goatherd and then from Cardenio himself. The goatherd reports to
Don Quijote and Sancho that Cardenio “[p]reguntónos que cuál
parte desta sierra era la más áspera y escondida; dijímosle
que era ésta donde ahora estamos . . .” (287). Later,
Cardenio relates the following to the priest and the barber: “vine a
parar a unos prados . . . y allí pregunté a unos
ganaderos que hacia dónde era lo más áspero destas sierras.
Dijéronme que hacia esta parte” (341). This sort of mutual
corroboration of information occurs a good deal throughout the novel.
Another example, one which combines the two
motifs of discontinuity and perspectivism, occurs when Cardenio comments
upon (and apologizes for) the number of digressions that his tale contains.
The sense of discontinuity is made explicit to the point of self-reference,
because Cardenio's commentary is itself a digression from a digression. He
stops himself in the middle of a hyperbolic description of Luscinda's beauty
in order to ask:
6 These
extradiegetic ‘filters’ underlie the intradiegetic perspectives
noted in this paragraph. One might speak here of ‘horizontal’
perspectives (the points of view of intradiegetic characters), as opposed
to ‘vertical’ perspectives of various degrees (the actual and inferred
points of view of the extradiegetic voices and presences). This distinction
is admittedly problematic, however, for one of the most essential characteristics
of Don Quijote's narrative structure is precisely the simultaneous
tracing and erasure of the borders between the intradiegetic and the
extradiegetic, between the narrated event and the event of narrating.
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¿De qué sirve representar ahora la incomparable belleza de aquella
adorada enemiga mía? ¿No será mejor, cruel memoria, que
me acuerdes y representes lo que entonces hizo, para que, movido de tan
manifiesto agravio, procure, ya que no la venganza, a lo menos perder la
vida? No os canséis, señores, de oír estas digresiones
que hago; que no es mi pena de aquellas que puedan ni deban contarse sucintamente
y de paso, pues cada circunstancia suya me parece a mí que es digna
de un largo discurso (338).
The priest proceeds to reply to Cardenio, which is to say, he expresses his
own point of view: “A esto le respondió el cura que no sólo
no se cansaban en oírle, sino que les daba mucho gusto las menudencias
que contaba, por ser tales, que merecían no pasarse en silencio, y
la mesma atención que lo principal del cuento” (338). The priest's
comment illustrates not only the interwoven, digressive structure of Cardenio's
tale, but also that of Don Quijote, Part I,
itself.7
The motif of narrative digression reappears
at the beginning of chapter 28, when, as if to comment upon the latest digression
from the basic line of action and to anticipate those even longer ones which
are to come (“El curioso impertinente” and the Cautivo's
tale), the narrator intrudes in order to express an opinion, as well:
gozamos ahora, en esta edad, necesitada de alegres entretenimientos, no
sólo de la dulzura de su verdadera historia, sino de los cuentos y
episodios della, que, en parte, no son menos
7 The
problem of artistic unity is, of course, at the heart of this exchange. The
Cide Hamete of Part II apparently disagrees with Cardenio and the priest,
for we are told that the Moorish historian believes that he deserves the
praise of his readers precisely because he has refrained (in the second Part)
from the type of digressions in which he indulged in Part I: “pues se
contiene y cierra en los estrechos límites de la narración,
teniendo habilidad, suficiencia y entendimiento para tratar del universo
todo, pide que no se desprecie su trabajo, y se le den alabanzas, no por
lo que escribe, sino por lo que ha dejado de escribir” (II: 367). Cardenio's
narrative dilemma has a modern echo, among many others that come to mind,
in the words of Todd Andrews, the narrator/protagonist of John Barth's The
Floating Opera (1956): “Good heavens, how does one write a novel!
I mean, how can anybody stick to the story, if he's at all sensitive to the
significances of things? As for me, I see already that storytelling isn't
my cup of tea: every new sentence I set down is full of figures and implications
that I'd love nothing better than to chase to their dens with you, but such
chasing would involve new figures and new chases, so that I'm sure we'd never
get the story started, much less ended, if I let my inclinations run
unleashed” (2).
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agradables y artificiosos y verdaderos que la misma historia; la cual,
prosiguiendo su rastrillado, torcido y aspado hilo, cuenta que . . .
(344).
There is great irony and ambivalence (not to mention potential contradiction)
in the use of the terms “agradables y artificiosos y verdaderos”
to describe these narrative digressions, especially in relation to the
“verdadera historia,” a phrase that is itself problematic. This
passage brings immediately to mind those vital aesthetic problems (historical
versus poetic truth, artistic unity, verisimilitude) that receive much fuller
treatment in the later discussion between the canon and the priest (chapters
47-48) concerning the status and reception of books of knighthood, and other
related literary matters.8 The “rastrillado,
torcido y aspado hilo” is perhaps the best summarizing image of this
aesthetics of fragmented and discontinuous storytelling. Even more striking,
however, and more relevant to this discussion, is the fact that we are presented
with three different perspectives on the nature of digressions, all within
a relatively short section of the novel.
This multiplicity of point of view on Cardenio
(as well as on other matters), in conjunction with the interruptive and
fragmentary quality of his involvement, serves to effect a representation
of ‘reality’ that is based largely upon the terms of human perception:
Cervantes's novel may be called ‘realistic’ not only in regard
to the world it represents, but also in regard to the way it represents that
world.9 The perspectivist orientation (toward
the represented reality) and the aesthetic orientation (toward the representing
narrative mode) are, as I said, mutually reinforcing.
By evoking the intersubjectivity that is implicit
in the three interrelated tales (the goatherd; Cardenio; Dorotea) and that
which is implied by the multiple perspectives enumerated above, the novel
also attempts to authorize its various discourses by substantiating their
explicit claims to referential truth. In allowing each of the character/narrators
and points of view to corroborate one another, the discourse of each is granted
an authority that is normally reserved for ‘true’ narrations. We
have seen, for example, how Cardenio corroborates —often very
precisely— the facts reported by the goatherd, and how Dorotea's entire
8 The
basic study of this literary debate remains Chapter 3 of Alban Forcione's
masterful Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles’
(1970).
9 This sense
of ‘realism’ is, of course, incessantly undermined by the novel's
many narrative transgressions (as noted above).
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tale serves to corroborate (although much less directly) that of
Cardenio.10
It is significant in this respect that Dorotea
refers to her tale, once she has finished telling it, as “la verdadera
historia de mi tragedia” (359). She can do so truthfully because the
events that she relates metadiegetically have, in fact, taken place within
the represented world (i.e., on the basic, intradiegetic level) of the novel.
But this is certainly not the case with the tale she tells in her role as
Princess Micomicona, when she takes part in the elaborate intrigue designed
by the priest to lure Don Quijote back home. And, as if to pun on her previous
words, she prefaces her made-up tale by referring to it as “mi verdadera
historia” (373). Even granting the ambivalence of the word
historia in Spanish (meaning both ‘story’ and
‘history’), the term becomes problematic by virtue of what appears
to be a logical contradiction: in one case, it denotes a narration of events
that have ‘actually’ occurred; in the other case, a narration of
events that have not.
Perhaps one could offer the following
justification: that Dorotea's fictive narration has a certain amount of truth
to it, for Princess Micomicona's situation is in some sense analogous to
Dorotea's; that the giant who threatens her kingdom is analogous to the
‘evil’ side of Fernando and his ill-treatment of Dorotea, and so
on. But this would require an imaginative leap from literal to figurative
language on the part of the reader and would belie the use of the words
“verdadera historia” to describe it. Or would it? Such questions
concerning the referential value of a given discourse are not idle, for the
very ambivalence of the term historia greatly encourages them,
particularly in a work whose protagonist is so obviously a victim of precisely
this type of confusion of levels and modes of discourse.
This confusion is explicit in the often-quoted
conversation between the priest and Juan Palomeque (the innkeeper), just
prior to the reading aloud of the “Novela del curioso impertinente.”
The innkeeper is enamored of books of knighthood and, although he cannot
read, enjoys listening to them whenever the opportunity presents itself.
After Palomeque demonstrates his enthusiasm for these books by naming some
of their
10 This
does not prohibit the same intersubjectivity from functioning simultaneously
in such a way as to subvert the authority of each of the individual discourses
—that is, by ‘de-centering’ them, by presenting them in relation
to one another.
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better-known protagonists, Cardenio remarks that the innkeeper appears to
believe that the events described in them have actually occurred. When the
priest attempts to dissuade him from attaching any historical veracity to
them, Palomeque insists that if the books were not truthful, their printing
and circulation would not be permitted:
¡Bueno es que quiera darme vuestra merced a entender que todo aquello
que estos libros dicen sea disparates y mentiras, estando impreso con licencia
de los señores del Consejo Real, como si ellos fueran gente que
habían de dejar imprimir tanta mentira junta y tantas batallas y tantos
encantamientos que quitan el juicio! (397).
Since this sort of confusion —that does, indeed, “quita el
juicio” and that explicitly questions the conventions and processes
of reading— is so central to Don Quijote, it seems appropriate
at this point to broach that critical problem that was given one of its earliest
and best-known articulations by Aristotle in his Poetics (IX): the
distinguishing of ‘history’ from ‘poetry’ or
‘fiction’.11
One fruitful way of thinking about such categories
is suggested by Barbara Herrnstein Smith in On the Margins of Discourse.
She distinguishes there between ‘natural utterances’ and ‘fictive
discourse’. ‘Natural utterances’ are those “that can
be taken as someone's saying something, somewhere, sometime, that is, as
the verbal acts of real persons on particular occasions in response to particular
sets of circumstances” (15). ‘Fictive discourse’, on the other
hand, is not born of a context that is historically determinate and consists,
rather, of ‘artificial’ representations of natural utterances.
In effect, ‘nobody’ utters a fictive discourse. According to this
scheme, a history must be regarded as a type of natural utterance: it is
created by a real person, in response to real circumstances. We read history
by a convention that, for practical purposes, allows us to identify the
‘narrative voice’ with the real-life author. This is obviously
not the case with fictive discourse. When we open up to chapter 1 of Don
Quijote, there is nothing which permits us to assume that the narrative
voice is that of Cervantes himself. Quite the contrary, in fact: one of the
conventions by which we read and identify fictive discourses is that the
narrator as well as his or her
11 Perhaps
the clearest introduction to the problematic relation between fiction and
history in Don Quijote is Bruce Wardropper's “Don Quixote:
Story or History?” (1965).
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very act of referring are things that have been artificially created. We
assume a distance or ‘space’ between author and narrator, between
creator and creation. This distance is explicit in autobiographical narratives,
such as Lazarillo de Tormes, but implicit in (so-called) third-person
narratives.
Smith's distinction between natural utterances
and fictive discourse can be related to Genette's system of narrative levels
in the following way: history (or any natural utterance) functionally neutralizes
the distinction between certain narrative levels. In Genette's terms, we
refer to the basic level of narrative as intradiegetic; to the narrating
situation as extradiegetic; and to the situation of the author (to take the
terminology one step further) as
‘extra-extradiegetic’.12 As a natural
utterance, history theoretically ‘collapses’ these levels into
one. By tacit agreement, the reader of a history assumes that three realms
—the intradiegetic (represented) world within the text; the extradiegetic
world (the narrating situation); and the ‘extra-extradiegetic’
world (of the author and the reader, and that is outside the text)—
are, for practical purposes, all continuous. Now, against this argument,
one might insist that there is a difference, in histories, between
author and narrator, that there is a clear distinction to be made
among all of the aforementioned levels. The answer to this objection is simply
that the conventions by which we read such utterances as ‘history’
do not allow this distinction to function.
But it is altogether the other case with fictive
discourse. It is precisely this distinction that allows for what might be
called the ‘functionality of fiction’. The dear differentiation
of various narrative levels and the often indeterminate relations among them
allow fictive discourses to signify in ways that natural utterances cannot.
Fictive discourse inevitably implies a space, a relative indeterminacy, between
the extradiegetic and the intradiegetic, between the intradiegetic and the
metadiegetic. This ‘space’ allows for a full functionality of
figurative uses of language, of metaphor, of
irony.13 It is a space that invites, indeed,
demands to be filled in by the reader. This, of course, is what we call
‘interpretation’.
12 I
am, admittedly, taking liberties with Genette's terms, when —despite
his explicit warning against doing so (230)— I here extend their scope
in order to apply them to extratextual reality. My goal in perpetrating this
‘transgression’ is to establish as clearly as possible the relation
between Genette's and Smith's terms.
13 This is not
to imply that examples of figurative language and/or irony are not to be
found in a ‘history’. Obviously, they are. But such uses of
[p. 67] language in a ‘history’ are
ultimately subordinated to a structure that is not regarded as figurative.
My claim for fictive discourse (following Smith) is that its structure is
ultimately regarded as figurative.
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As Smith has it: “Poems and novels, as opposed to biographies and histories
of the Civil War, are linguistic structures whose relation to the world is
short-circuited” (10). It is left to the reader to ‘complete the
connection’, to infer a plausible yet equally fictive context for the
fictive text (33).
It is in Don Quijote that this process
of inference and interpretation may be seen in all its exuberance, because
it is a text that specifically and self-reflexively exhibits its own status
as fiction. It accomplishes this by way of two essential gestures. One is
the extended game that it makes of pretending to be history. This
pretense is so obvious and so consistently self-conscious that it effectively
undermines any possibility of belief in the ostensible veracity of the
“historia.” The various narrative transgressions noted above (such
as the inclusion of the author, Miguel de Cervantes, along with a multitude
of implied writers and readers, within the intradiegetic level of narrative)
are means by which the novel points to the fictive nature of its own
‘reality’. The most important effect of this game of pretense and
dizzying transgression is, finally, the parodic defamiliarization of the
narrative authority of history. The Quijote thereby encompasses and
renders ironic two discursive extremes. As has often been noted, it parodies
one of the supremely idealistic fictional forms that had been in vogue throughout
the sixteenth century: the books of knighthood. At the same time, it constitutes
a parody and, consequently, a questioning of the ostensible reality and authority
of (written or printed) history itself. As Robert Alter has stated in
Partial Magic, his brilliant study of the novel as a ‘self
conscious’ genre, “[t]he novel begins out of an erosion of belief
in the written word and it begins with Cervantes” (3; quoted by Parr
[21]).
Secondly, Don Quijote presents explicitly
what is implicit in every fictive discourse: various extradiegetic levels
of different degrees —both actual and potential— separate the
real-life, historical Cervantes (and his real-life, historical readers) from
the intradiegetic level of narrative on which Don Quijote and Sancho have
their adventures. These extradiegetic levels may be inferred from all of
the various intermediating “voices and presences” through which
we, as readers, perceive Don Quijote and his world.
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CHARLES ORIEL |
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One of these narrative voices —the so-called
“first author”— provides the material from chapter 1 until
near the end of chapter 8 of Part I. At that point, we learn that this material
has been mediated by a “supernarrator” (Parr 9-11), who refers
to a “second author,” who (in turn) refers in chapter 9 to the
old Arabic manuscript that is the source of all the succeeding material and
that has been rendered into Spanish by an anonymous and reportedly unreliable
Moorish translator. In the midst of this narrative labyrinth is that enigmatic
historian, Cide Hamete Benengeli, who is, ostensibly, the ‘source’.
But the obvious question (of which Cide Hamete himself is a constant reminder)
has been begged and hangs inexorably over the entire rest of the novel: what
other texts, authors, worlds, might lie behind him?
The distances and relationships among these
various extradiegetic levels are ‘spaces’ of indeterminacy: sources
of playfully subversive ‘obfuscation’ (Riley Don Quixote
162). It is this same indeterminacy which is both the process and the product
of all fictive discourse. The basic, intradiegetic level of narrative in
Don Quijote is irremediably encrusted (from without) by various and
largely indeterminate levels of extradiegesis. In the same way, it is
‘infected’ (from within) by various examples of metadiegetic narration
—some fictive, some not— of which Cardenio's story is only one
example.
Earlier, I noted two prominent characteristics
of the novel's presentation of Cardenio, namely, its fragmentary quality
and its explicit perspectivism. These qualities are, of course, also prominent
in the structure of Don Quijote as a whole, precisely by way of these
same narrative levels. The ‘reality’ of the Quijote is a
fragmentary conglomerate of various narrative levels and perspectives, and
the ways in which they may, potentially, be related. E. C. Riley emphasizes
this idea in his Cervantes's Theory of the Novel: “there is in
fact an infinity of potential versions, interpretations, points of view.
Englobed in Don Quixote, by allusion or by inference, are all the
possible partial accounts of Don Quixote” (219). In his “Introduction
to the Quijote” (as well as in other essays), Américo
Castro similarly notes the dynamic perspectivism that is the basis of Cervantes's
masterpiece:
The Quijote is founded on the supposition
that the objects for which men strive, about which they think, and with which
they live have a changing reality. They are lodged in no sure resting place:
a thing seems to be this, but it may be who knows
what. . . . The observer and what he observes do not
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necessarily or even usually coincide in a manner acceptable as valid by other
observers (An Idea of History 115).
Genette's system of narrative levels —representing an unabashedly aesthetic
approach to narrative texts— is implicitly related to this perspectivist
orientation, for each of the embedded narrative levels of Don Quijote
represents a potential point of view.
The distinction between ‘history’
and ‘fiction’ (based upon Genette and Smith) that I have discussed
in this essay is by no means an absolute one. The important fact about these
categories is that they are not inherent or formally implicit in any given
discourse. Much like Genette's terms for distinguishing narrative levels,
they are functional, relative categories, which is to say that they distinguish,
not types of texts, but ways of reading. In theory, we may read any given
text as either a natural utterance or as fictive
discourse.14 Novels, for example, may be
read (and have been read, as we all know) as strictly historical, sociological,
or biographical documents. But to do so is to limit drastically their
possibilities of signification; even further, it is to abolish their status
as fictive discourses. For this reason and for many other more obvious
ones, reading novels as though they were history can be a very dangerous
enterprise, one which, I need scarcely point out, is precisely Don Quijote's
problem. The cause of his madness and the focus of the entire novel is the
nature of reading itself: its conventions, its uses, its abuses. Cervantes's
novel provides us with a veritable map of both reading and misreading.
An important effect, then, of putting into
play the various narrative levels in Don Quijote is to unsettle the
reader with a proliferation of narrative voices (and implied points of view)
that both force and enable a suspension of judgment as to their authenticity
and authority. For this reason, Cervantes's masterpiece
14 The
deconstructionist point of view, for example, would insist upon the essentially
fictive quality of all texts, regardless of their ostensibly
‘fictive’ or ‘natural’ status. In this regard, the
deconstructionists (as readers) are at precisely the other end of the spectrum
from Don Quijote and, say, Palomeque. The former represent a totally
‘faithless’ reading of texts, a reading that is incessantly aware
of the artificiality of all texts, of all ‘text’; Don Quijote and
Palomeque, on the other hand, represent a totally ‘faithful’ reading,
one that is lacking in critical distance and that sees no difference between
‘text’ and ‘life’. It is interesting —and rather
paradoxical— to note that the deconstructionist view leads (by a road
coming from the opposite direction) to the same conclusion, i.e., that there
is no difference between ‘text’ and ‘life’, that there
is literally “nothing outside the text.”
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CHARLES ORIEL |
Cervantes |
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is supremely ‘dialogic’, in all the Bakhtinian senses of that term.
The discourses of Don Quijote are truly subversive (and self-subverting),
as Parr makes abundantly clear: “one voice undermines its predecessor,
subverting its authority, only to have the process reinforce itself in an
infinite regress until all narrative authority, and implicitly the authority
of the printed page itself, is called into question” (9). The universe
of Don Quijote is a relational one, de-centered by a profusion of
possible perspectives. The proof of this is that the ostensible reality or
‘center’ of the novel —what I have postulated throughout as
the ‘basic’, intradiegetic level of narrative— is both everywhere
and nowhere: fragmented and diffused among a multitude of competing, mutually
contradictory, and self-contradictory discourses. The reader is suspended
among these various discourses: thrust (at least in a strictly parodic sense)
into the same ‘twilight zone’ as Don Quijote, ‘Reader’.
And, while Genette's and Smith's systems may not help us see our way out
of the delightful confusion that constitutes the Quijote (and the
modern novel), I believe they offer us theories by which we may more clearly
articulate and examine the ways in which we are confused. Because Don Quijote
represents the extreme of the confusion of various levels and various worlds,
he is also thoroughly representative of the kinds of reality that we, as
readers, experience.
| WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
IN ST. LOUIS |
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Technique. Part I. 1969. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1980.
Alter, Robert. Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre.
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Borges, Jorge Luis. “Magias parciales del Quijote.” Otras
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——. Don Quixote. Unwin Critical Library. London: Allen &
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