Prof: So we are going to talk today about two of the most
significant episodes of Part II of the Quixote,
episodes that mark a transition to--
that begin the sort of the down slope of the novel as it moves
towards its conclusion.
It is a protracted culmination and finale consistent
with the slower more deliberate pace of Part II.
We will be meeting one character from Part I,
under the guise of master puppeteer Master Peter,
and there will not only be repetitions of episodes from
Part I, but even repetitions of
episodes from Part II within Part II.
After the episodes that I will discuss today,
three major new developments occur.
First, that Don Quixote will sometimes leave the center of
the action to be replaced by Sancho.
Second, that both Don Quixote and Sancho become the objects of
amusement for frivolous upper class characters who have read
Part I.
And three, that the protagonist will be surrounded by many more
characters than before.
The overarching theme of the novel continues to be
internal authors.
It is an action that is highly theatrical and the props or
backstage of the skits are revealed to the reader,
either during the performance or right after.
The first of the two important episodes is the one about Don
Quixote's descent into Montesinos cave,
a truly remarkable tour de force and one of the most
brilliant scenes in the Western literary tradition.
So Montesinos cave, this is one of the principle
episodes of Part II and arguably of the entire work because it
seems to engage the main literary topics and sources of
the novel and also provides a rare glimpse into the inner
workings of Don Quixote's subconscious.
It is as if we were looking behind the scenes of the
Quixote or allowed to see its reverse side,
as we see the reverse side of that painting within Las
It is also as if were allowed to dissect the protagonist while
he's still alive.
Let us first notice that this is an adventure that Don Quixote
seeks, that he looks for it,
not one that is imposed on him by chance,
like the encounters on the road or by other characters who are
scripting his life.
very beginning is trying to script Don Quixote's life,
and there will be several author internal authors doing
that, but this is not the case at all.
This is an episode, an adventure that Don Quixote
wants to undertake, and he tells the scholar or the
cousin that he wants to do so and asks how to get to
Montesinos' cave.
It is also an episode that is strictly Spanish,
and that seems to take Don Quixote into the depths of the
Spanish soil: it is as if saying that these
kinds of fabulous events also happen in Spain and in the
present, although, as you will see,
and I will speak about the sources of the episode descents
into caves and so forth, but this is one that is based
on a Spanish tradition; that is, people knew about
Montesinos cave and talked about it--they exist--and Don Quixote
wanted to go into them; he decided that he had to have
this adventure.
One way to see the episode as flowing from Camacho's
wedding--which is the big episode preceding it--is through
its connection with Ovid.
The cousin or scholar, who is their guide,
is writing a Spanish Ovid, and the explanation given about
the rivers of Spain and their names is in the spirit of the
Metamorphoses.
This scholar is another satire of students and intellectuals,
Carrasco; this is even more extreme,
this is a really ridiculous scholar who is trying to find
out who had the first cold in history, if you remember.
And so, I also said that in Part II of the Quixote
Cervantes seems to be signaling as his sources Homer,
Virgil, Ovid and, as we shall see,
Dante, as if claiming that his work is
their worthy successor: that he's in their league,
as it were, in common parlance.
I will speak about Virgil when we get to meet Altisidora,
the character that you will meet and find very amusing,
who is a version of Dido.
Now, this descent into the cave has antecedents in the
Odyssey, the Aeneid,
and the Divine Comedy, of course.
Although there are also sources in chivalric romances,
this is an adventure on a higher literary level,
this is not just going back to episodes in the chivalric
romances but Homer, Virgil, Dante.
There are, of course, also traditional stories about
going into caves in all cultures and in all literatures.
If you have read your American literature you see that in Tom
Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn,
and so forth, there are episodes where the
characters go into caves, but here, I think,
the sources are those that I mentioned.
Going down into the cave has, of course,
deep psychological resonances, having to do with Don Quixote's
sexuality, and concomitantly his fear of
death.
As he enters the cave he has to walk away at the brambles
covering the entrance in actions that are symbolic or reminiscent
of a deflowering, and the blackbirds that fly
away in fright are clear intimations of death;
they are bad omens; they have kind of a
Hitchcock-like air to me, I mean, to modern readers.
They, I'm sure, remind you of that very
frightening Hitchcock film The Birds.
What Don Quixote experiences in the cave is a dream and,
of course, this aligns it with dream literature.
This is clear by his being asleep when he is pulled back
up, and from the story he tells
about falling asleep when he sits down on the coiled up rope
within the cave.
Don Quixote says that he wakes up from that sleep,
but it is obvious that he awakens within the dream,
that this is a dream within a dream,
another mirror effect.
What the dream allows is for the untrammeled emergence of Don
Quixote's deepest fears in the form of stories related to his
fantasies or drawn from his fantasies.
It is as if he had been administered a drug,
a truth serum, or as if he had relaxed on the
psychoanalyst couch, and allowed himself to free
associate.
The story of Durandarte and Belerma is drawn from the
Carolingian cycle.
Remember that I mentioned the various cycles of the chivalric
romances and the epics and the Carolingian is from Charlemagne,
and so forth.
They're drawn from the Carolingian cycle and seems to
have embedded not only the fear of death, but the fear of
castration.
All of the characters, except for Merlin,
are from the ballads of the Carolingian and Arthurian cycle:
King Arthur, Charlemagne.
The characters are supposed to be dead and everyone is in
mourning, and the procession is kind of a mournful procession
as--like a burial.
Durandarte's body in the story has his heart removed and sent
to Belerma as a symbol of his undying love;
this is the original story.
He asked when he died to have this heart removed and sent to
his beloved.
Here his castrated cadaver, as it were, appears as the
statue grazing his own tomb unable to speak.
But the veracity of the story is compromised,
or grotesquely guaranteed, by Montesinos' explanation that
he has had to salt the heart so that it will not rot and begin
to smell.
This destroys the fantasy.
I mean, if this great hero has his heart sent to his beloved,
one never thinks that this heart will be subject to the
laws of nature, this is fantasy world;
but here, that fantasy is destroyed and the story--
the veracity of the story, in other words,
can be guaranteed by the fact that they have to salt it so
that it won't rot.
Natural laws threaten the story's verisimilitude.
A jerk-beef heart is not the same as the heart that
symbolizes love, courage and masculinity.
The heart, of course, has all of these connotations.
So if you think of it as being made of jerk-beef all of those
connotations are destroyed or become grotesque.
Although time is flexible within the episode its effects
on flesh are present; that is, impinging other
aspects.
I say that the time is flexible as was in the episode because,
how long was Don Quixote down?
The scholar and Sancho say an hour, at most;
he says three days!
And then there is the issue of how long ago these stories
occurred, hundreds of years ago, yet these characters are there.
So time within the story is flexible, as time tends to be,
as we know, in dreams.
We know now from modern studies in dreams that stories that seem
to take a long time actually take a few seconds in a dream,
and that there is this compression that Freud talks
about, how a dream compresses stories
in a very short time.
This is intimated here, in that Don Quixote says that
he's been there for three days and they say only an hour.
But the effect of time on flesh is evident.
Now, this detail of the effect of time on flesh reveals Don
Quixote's own doubts about the legitimacy of chivalric legends.
I mean, remember, this is a story he himself is
telling, so if the story comes up in
this subconscious it's because he has doubts about the
legitimacy of the chivalric legends.
The stories, those of the chivalric legends,
violate natural law, hence they are fantastic,
as other characters have been telling him all along,
and all of this seems to have had an effect on him.
Now, Don Quixote is recognized as a great knight,
revelation of the existence of Part I,
and this is something that will happen over and again in Part
II, that he is recognized as a
great knight, but in this case by character's
whose own existence is very, very doubtful,
and that he himself will doubt from now on by asking others
anxiously, like Maese Pedro's--;like
Master Peter's monkey, if what happened in the cave
was real, and by insisting that Sancho
believe that it was real and striking deals with him:
"I'll believe that if you believe the cave of
Montesinos," it shows that he's not that
sure about it.
So their recognition; that is, the recognition of his
being a great knight by these characters is hardly an
assurance.
I am underlining these doubts that the stories reveal about
his own fantasies, but the most disturbing part of
the story is the appearance of Dulcinea in the guise of the
ugly wench that Sancho tried to make him believe was his lady.
This is--we know from Freud, Freud's great book,
The Interpretation of Dreams that was published in 1900,
when he talks about the remains of the day,
how a dream picks up elements from the previous day and
incorporates them into stories, and this is sort of the remains
of the day.
Now, the appearance of this wench convinces Sancho that Don
Quixote is insane because he was the author of that charade,
but it also shows to what extent that episode of the three
peasant women has shaken Don Quixote's own beliefs and probed
deep into the sources of his own desires for Dulcinea and of his
invention of Dulcinea.
This peasant Dulcinea who smells of raw garlic,
as you remember, as she smelled of sweat in
Sancho's earlier story about her,
when he said: 'I got next to her and she
smelled a little bit because she was pitching hay or whatever it
was.'
This peasant Dulcinea is, I think, is close to Don
Quixote's own real desire for Aldonza Lorenzo,
the original Dulcinea.
It seems to be the repressed desire for a vulgar physically
strong sexually aggressive younger woman who is the very
opposite, in fact, is the co-relative
opposite of his idealization of her.
The more vulgar this woman of his desires is,
the more idealized she will become in his fantasy.
Also, when asked for a loan by her in this hilarious,
hilarious part of the story--the last thing you
imagine is for Dulcinea asking for a loan from Don Quixote--
which is going to be backed up, by the way, the guarantee is an
intimate--an inner garment of Dulcinea's;
this is a very elaborate underskirt of sorts,
and it's going to be the guarantee--I mean,
these things are highly sexualized.
But Don Quixote is short two reales: she wants six,
but he has only four left to give her.
This is a clear sign of his deep and repressed fear of
sexual inadequacy--it couldn't be clearer;
you don't have to be Freud--which may be the source
of his heroic fantasies.
He's old, he feels sexually inadequate, so he wants to
imagine himself a young vigorous knight who can go and fight and
seduce maidens.
So Sancho's invention in the episode of the enchanted
Dulcinea has dug deep into Don Quixote's dreads and into the
source of his fantasies.
In this topsy-turvy world of the cave there are eerie images
of death, also.
I already mentioned the blackbirds at the mouth of the
cave.
Durandarte's cadaver posing as a statue on its own sarcophagus
is the eeriest of them all and the uncanniest,
it's an inversion.
The statue on a sarcophagus presumably represents the body
of the dead person within it-- I'm sure you have been to
European cathedrals, where you go and you find all
of these sarcophagi and you see on top the recumbent statue of
the person within it, kings and all of that who are
usually like this with their hands like this,
and they have their swords near them and all of that--
I find that eerie enough to begin with,
but in any case--here, however, the cadaver is the
statue; nature has replaced art,
or has become art.
Do you understand?
Instead of having a representation you have
literally the cadaver on top of the sarcophagus.
But let us not forget that we are dealing here with death and
also in the realm of temporality;
if you remember that Durandarte's heart was salted so
that it would not smell.
How can the cadaver replace the statue and not rot like its
heart?
Art has been taken over by death, too;
this is what the intimation is.
Nothing, not even art, is immune from death in this
world of the cave.
There may be a pun, a ghoulish pun embedded here:
sarcophagus comes from the Greek sarcos,
flesh and phagein, to eat.
The sarcophagus literally eats flesh, the flesh of the dead
body that it contains, but here the dead body has
escaped to become its own statue.
This is a very baroque image.
We will meet--we will find another sarcophagus that we will
be discussing in the course of the next few chapters.
Now, the stories and images within Montesinos cave highlight
destruction of all illusions.
When Don Quixote comes to, after emerging from the cave,
he declares, in what is a classic expression
"Forgive ye, friends, [he tells the scholar and
Sancho] for having brought me away from
the most pleasing and charming life and sight,
that ever mortal saw or lived.
In short, I am now thoroughly satisfied that all of the
enjoyments of this life pass away like a shadow or a dream,
and fade away like the flower of the field.
O unhappy Montesino!
O desperately wounded Durandarte!
O unfortunate Belerma!
O weeping Guadiana!
And ye unlucky daughters of Ruydera, whose waters show what
floods of tears stream from your fair eyes!"
He says a bit later, quote: "I awaked,
and found myself, I knew not by what means,
in the midst of the finest, pleasantest,
and most delightful meadow, that nature could create,
or the most pregnant fancy imagined."
Unquote.
This is the locus amoenus of Renaissance,
pastoral literature that I have mentioned before--
you remember the locus amoenus into which Rocinante
wanders and falls in love with the mares and all of that.
It is a topic of Renaissance literature as the most pleasant
of place, and this is where he lands, and presumably where he
has his dream.
means to peel away the illusion, the delusion.
It is a form of self-analysis, of recognition comparable to
the one in today's terms achieved through psychoanalysis.
Don Quixote seems to have dived into this own subconscious.
Is this a regressus ad uterum, an atavistic return
to the womb?
That's the Latin way of saying it, return to the womb,
regressus ad uterum.
It's an atavistic return to the womb;
I mean, it's trying to get back into the mother's womb,
seeking solace and refuge.
Don Quixote's descent, as we have seen,
makes him look harshly upon himself.
It does not completely shake his beliefs or dispel his
madness, but it is a serious blow, and from now on he will
act saner.
How can it have been pleasurable, however?
Only if one thinks that once in the cave he was at least in the
living presence of his fictions--
this was pleasurable--and that the disillusionment became
repressed, as he experienced it.
When he met all of these elements that threatened his
disillusions he repressed them immediately,
and that--as we tend to repress unpleasant experiences--
that he was not aware, as we readers are,
that what he experienced threatened his beliefs.
So he comes back with doubts, but are not conscious doubts.
Now, everything seems to converge in the scene of the
Montesinos cave: Don Quixote's belief in the
authenticity of the romances of chivalry and the reality of what
he sees when he sees windmills, for instance, are questioned.
The topics of the courtly love tradition,
which had filtered into the romances of chivalry tumble
through literalization by their being put through the
requirements of natural law.
I already alluded several times to Durandarte's salted heart;
Belerma, for her part, may have looked under the
weather because she had her menstrual period,
thought not really it is explained, because the problem
was that she is menopausal.
Real time, and with it, periodic bodily functions,
age and aging and decay have crept into the world of fiction
contained in the cave.
No harsher way to dispel the idealization of a Renaissance
beauty than to imagine her menstruating or going through
menopause, meaning that she's already aged;
imagine Botticelli's Venus's with those problems,
it's grotesque!
It's brilliant; however, to subject these
idealizations to temporality, and temporality here means that
the age, that they suffer a menstrual period.
Why would Dulcinea need a loan?
It is said that need or necessity is everywhere in
passing; the world of magic is invaded
by needs and physical laws and what ensues are grotesque
images.
Now, there are many literary antecedents to the cave of
Montesinos episode, and I have already mentioned:
Homer, Virgil and Dante, but the originality of the
episode is not so much the descent into the cave as that it
reveals Don Quixote's subconscious.
This is Cervantes' way of showing us the knight's mind
from within, unencumbered by reason.
As such, it seems to be a better device than the soliloquy
which are parallel devices to show what a character's thoughts
are: "to be or not to be",
Dream.
It is also more modern and acceptable,
this device in Cervantes, to contemporary readers,
it seems to me, because no one goes around
delivering soliloquies that are perfectly structured
rhetorically.
I'm sure you haven't heard any of your friends going around
delivering soliloquies that are so poetically well wrought.
But telling a dream is a common activity, not only to
psychoanalysts, you tell your dreams to your
friends.
In the episode there is a grotesque combination of
fantasy, and not just reality but the possible,
all having to do with the decay of human flesh.
But as I have suggested, isn't this also a tale of
castration fear?
These are the repressed figures in Don Quixote's mind.
Peter Dunn, who was a very good hispanist,
a British hispanist who taught for many years,
at the end of his career at Wesley University nearby,
wrote the following in a very good article on this episode.
Actually, Peter Dunn wrote this article in Spanish and I'm
translating him into English; these are the baroque
inversions that you can get in this course, too.
This is what Peter Dunn said in my own translation into English:
"What is observed, in the cave of Montesinos
episode, is quixoticism from the inside.
He looks at himself in the mirror of his madness where
comedy and spectator merge and the enchanter and the enchanted
coalesce.
Far from offering us an image of eternity, Montesinos' cave
constitutes a frozen temporality.
Don Quixote will have to return to his own bed,
and dream the dream of death so Alonso Quixano can awaken,
purged of his dreams and ready to contemplate himself without
theater in the mirror of eternity."
This is anticipating the death of Alonso Quijano at the end of
the book.
Anthony Cascardi, an American hispanist,
links the episode to the dream argument in Descartes and makes
quite a few valuable observations about Don Quixote
as a whole, particularly about the entire
debate about the relationship between reality and fantasy.
He says: "I see his engagement as
with problems of skepticism and epistemology,
and more specifically, with the use of fiction as a
mode of knowledge of the world.
His response to skepticism and to its complement epistemology
is to reject epistemology while remaining anti-skeptical.
But this is only another way of saying that its purpose is to
affirm the role of fiction in our relationship to the world,
which, it might further be said, is an affirmation of the
role of fiction in the task of philosophy.
Cervantes shows that we relate to the world,
including the world of our own experiences,
in ways other than what the epistemologists call knowledge,
and that all we know of the world cannot be characterized in
terms of certainty.
Cervantes will, to include the imagination and
dreams within the range of valid human experience,
within what we call the world in the broadest sense,
free of the caveats of reasons points this up."
In short--Cascardi tends to be a little too philosophical--
in short, that stories, that literature are a form of
knowledge and a method of approaching knowledge of the
world and of ourselves and a way to understand both the world and
the workings of our own minds.
Now, psychoanalysis knows this, and this is the reason why
Freud availed himself of figures like the Oedipus myth,
to name mental processes, and, of course,
Freud acknowledged that his sources in the development and
invention of psychoanalysis, as he was really the inventor
of it, were literary,
and that he learned more from literature than from the
nineteenth century science that preceded him.
So the point is that these stories in Montesinos cave show
that stories are valid ways of approaching knowledge,
knowledge of the world and knowledge of our own minds.
And this is what this episode, I think, suggests brilliantly,
independently, and also, of course,
within the structure of the novel.
So much, for the time being, for the episode of Montesinos'
cave, to which we will probably have to allude a number of times
in succeeding lectures.
And we move now to the second important episode that I want to
discuss today, and that is Master Peter's
puppet show.
Now, I have made a crude drawing on the blackboard that
will help me explain the episode;
it is sketchy, I understand; it is more Picasso than
but you can recognize some of the figures: that,
that is the speaker, the boy who speaks;
that is Don Quixote; that is Sancho,
and then the rest of the audience, and,
of course, the puppet show as best as I could render it.
establishes a concrete continuity with Part I.
Other than Sancho, the women of Don Quixote's
house, the priest and the barber,
back in Part II.
remember that I said in that episode of the galley slaves
when he says he has written his life, he's a Mateo
a miniature playwright, a Lope de Vega in miniature--
remember, Lope de Vega, Cervantes' enemy and the great
Spanish playwright of the period.
whose not an aristocrat or a cleric and has to earn a living
from his craft.
Lope liked to put the "de Vega" in his last name to
pretend that he was aristocratic,
and he made up fables about his family and all of that,
but he was not.
and the whole episode is like a laboratory for fiction to carry
out experiments about fiction, as Cervantes tends to do,
and we have seen.
tradition or rules, and shows the limitations
imposed by the medium of literature.
Like the imagined friend of the 1605 prologue--
remember the imagined friend whom Cervantes says comes to
visit him and helps him write that prologue--
this modern author does not have a conventional or a deep
classical education and has to rely on compendia and books of
familiar quotations for his erudition.
Lope was known for this, to get his information here and
there pretend that he had read a lot.
He read a lot, but not in the way that
humanists had read a great deal, and he made it up the way that
the friend tells Cervantes in the prologue,
to just go and get this book and that and then just make a
list of sources in alphabetical order,
and that's the way these modern authors operate.
This is why I have--well, actually I have the wrong eye
covered; it's supposed to be the left
eye that is covered, so, to be true to him,
we'll uncover this eye and cover this eye,
the left eye.
He has one covered, presumably the one that pulled
in and made him cross-eyed, because he knows that this is a
distinctive trait that is dangerous for him to display.
He can be spotted, described and nabbed by the
Holy Brotherhood, so he has to disguise himself;
this is why he has to cover--it's sort of his
signature, his body signature which is that he's cross-eyed,
like having a prominent scar or something.
Remember the description of Don Quixote that the trooper reads
when he's about to arrest him, towards the end of Part I,
he has a description; so a description of
so he has to cover that eye to be safe.
Remember, he is one of the galley slaves that Don Quixote
set free, so whatever other crimes he
committed to make him be a galley slave,
he has also escaped.
Hence, I quote: "I had forgot to tell you
[this is from the book] that this same Master Peter had
his left eye and almost half his cheek covered with a patch of
green taffeta, a sign that something ailed all
that side of his face."
That's from the text of the Quixote.
But being one-eyed, as it were, even if it is
faked, suggests fresh restrictions that impinge his
art because of his limited perception of reality.
I am sort of glossing over my article in the Casebook
that you have read, presumably, by now.
This deformity also makes him look furtive,
dangerous, sneaky, and, of course,
aesthetically interesting, like the characters in Part I
He is no Renaissance idealized model of a man,
although it is said several times that he is a gallant and
good looking man, but he's cross-eyed.
reality--we have gone over this.
Now, he lacks depth perception, which is very suggestive to the
show that he will stage at the inn.
the problem of non-converging sidelines;
it is a radical way of doing so but now he lacks perspective.
Remember, that bi-ocular sight you see with two eyes,
therefore you have potentially a double vision;
and there are, because of this,
there are, in some cultures,
deities that overcome this by having a pineal eye,
which is an eye in the middle of the forehead that sort of
serves to mediate between these two.
he is eliminating this eye to have only one eye,
and therefore only one vision, where before,
as a cross-eyed, his access did not meet:
they were supposed to meet here but they don't quite meet,
and therefore he saw it in a distorted way,
but now with only one eye, as we know,
he loses depth.
Now, the whole episode of the puppet theater is besides yet
another critique of Lope de Vega,
a protracted experiment on mimesis like that of Princess
Micomicona, and not just in literary terms
but also in pictorial terms.
But as a critique of Lope Cervantes, again,
harps upon the carelessness with which Lope used history to
write his plays.
Remember the episode with the Canon of Toledo where there was
a protracted discussion and critique of Lope for just
grabbing historical elements pell-mell without being very
faithful to history.
When Don Quixote protests in the middle of the show that it
is wrong to have Moors ringing bells instead of kettle drums,
Master Peter answers with what contemporaries were surely not
to miss as an allusion to Lope de Vega.
do not criticize upon trifles, nor expect that perfection,
which is not to be found in these matters.
Are there not a thousand comedies acted almost
everywhere, full of as many improprieties
and blunders, and yet they run their career
with great success, and are listened to,
not only with applause but with admiration?
Go on, boy, and let folks talk; [he's now addressing the boy],
go on, boy, and let folks talk; for, so I fill my bag.
I care not if I represent more improprieties than there are
motes in the sun."
Now, this is as clear an allusion to Lope de Vega as
could be made, and remember that Avellaneda,
as I mentioned before, may have been a follower and a
defender of Lope de Vega, and this is why he wrote in his
prologue such insulting comments about Cervantes.
Now, as a laboratory of mimesis the show that Maese Pedro and
his assistant put on is of a conceptual complexity worthy of
Spinners, which you have seen here.
To begin with, we have that the performance of
the puppets is not enough in itself,
and that Master Peter's figures and props require a supplemental
oral commentary or narrative executed by his assistant:
this is the assistant.
I put a little balloon here, as in comic books,
because this is what he's saying.
Of course, if I may be allowed to use his convention from
comics.
So he needs the supplemental narrative by the
But the visual and verbal representations do not harmonize
properly, and both Don Quijote and
who is the author's supplementary voiceover.
It's like a voiceover in a film, but it is as if the
voiceover and the film images didn't quite mesh.
It is a dual performance of the author's invention.
That is, the author's invention, which is
ways--which is manifested visually and orally at the same
time, hoping that they will
complement each other.
But they do not mesh satisfactorily,
as if there were an inherent flaw in the recital that
reflects the awkwardness of the theatrical routine.
It's very awkward to represent the stories with these material
objects that represent human beings,
so what we have here is a very flawed combination of the oral
and the visual trying to combine,
to produce a performance, a satisfactory performance.
To produce mimesis, representation,
and it is a critique of mimesis and representation;
this is what I'm trying to say.
Don Quixote's correction to the boy is significantly made in the
language of geometry as applied to painting.
Don Quixote says: "Here Don Quixote said in
a loud voice: 'Boy,
boy, on with your story in a straight line,
and leave your curves and transversals:
for, to come at the truth of a fact,
there is often need of proof upon proof'."
Unquote.
What could seem like a mere rhetorical display on the part
of the knight is, on the contrary,
of surprising propriety in the context of the episode,
because the whole effect of the puppet show depends on a visual
trompe-l'oeil-- it's a French expression for a
trick, trompe-l'oeil,
you use it in English; trampantojo,
is an old work in Spanish, it's the same,
"trampa" and "ojos,"
trampantojos.
We don't use it any more in Spanish,
we use trompe-l'oeil, the French word,
most of the time, but it's based on a visual
trompe-l'oeil or a visual trick based on perspective,
exactly the way that a painting is organized according to
geometrical rules that produce the effect of mass and depth--
I hope you follow this: Geometrical rules of the
painting, we've talked about the book by
Alberti, produce the effect of mass and
depth by distance.
Master Peter himself, by the way, agrees with Don
Quixote, and his admonition to the boy
also appeals to the language of geometry and painting:
"Boy, none of your flourishes,
but do what the gentlemen bids you;
for that is the surest way."
"Flourishes" is "dibujos,"
or drawings, in the original.
common occurrence in Cervantes, as we have seen many times.
The puppet show's effect, its verisimilitude,
is based on a question of proportions and perspective,
and has a great deal to do with a straight a line that Don
Quixote demands that the boy narrator follow without much
success.
It is a metaphor, of course, to apply straight
line to how a story unfolds, a narrative unfolds.
The narrative straight line and the straight line that can be
drawn from the spectators to the show are related.
That is, this is the straight line from the spectators to the
show as they look at it, and I'm relating that to the
straight line in the story that Don Quixote refers to when he
admonishes the boy.
If the spectators look directly at the theater to engage in its
fantasy, they have to disregard that at
such a short distance human figures,
horses and buildings, should appear so small,
as if they were much further away.
Perspective has to be assumed as if different geometric
relations between the public and the tiny actors obtained,
as if the geometric physical relations between the spectators
and the show were different than they are because they're so
close.
The narrator goes through "curves and
transversals," as Don Quixote calls them,
to achieve the illusion of simultaneous action taking
place, and to hold the spectators
attention and approval in the same way that the theater has to
abuse the rules of geometry to stage the action--
abuses the rules of geometry to stage the action in what is
presumably a greater territory, but it is compressed on the
stage, and the proportion between the various elements,
the various--the actors and the horses and all of that,
are not followed.
closer or further away from the public,
the dimensions are a given that cannot be changed.
This whole ensemble of virtual lines,
hold up the fiction and its props at the same time in front
of the audience.
The audience here is aware both of the fiction and of the props
that are there to make up the fiction,
paintings.
To sustain the illusion the narrator not only avails himself
figuratively of the geometric figures,
but also of the rhetoric of visions repeating the anaphora
like-- anaphora is a rhetorical figure
when you repeat a word or a turn of phrase: "let us not
forget..., let us not forget...,
" the orator will repeat something like that;
that is an anaphora, and here the language of
visions in medieval literature used this figure and the boy
says: "Pray observe...,"
"See him now...," "Turn your eyes
toward...," "Now behold...,"
"Do you not see...," "Behold now...,"
"Observe that..."
What he's really telling them, with all of these repetitions
is: but don't actually see what is really happening,
overlook it to be able to accept the fiction.
Within the very illusion of a show we have a kind of mirror
duplication of the problem of perspective and vanishing point.
Remember that I talked about vanishing point in Las
Meninas about the gentleman who's at the very end,
who is literally leaving and vanishing,
so there would seem to be a pun there.
This becomes literal when Melisandra and Don Gaiferos,
who are on the same horse, gallop desperately running away
Francia," towards the line dividing
France from Spain, the border.
So if they are on the horse, here, they're moving towards
the back of the stage towards a vanishing point,
so this is literalized here the vanishing point in the fiction,
that is being depicted in the story.
Now, all of these tricks manage to confuse Don Quixote,
of course, who predictably lunges towards the action to
participate in it, caught in a net of rhetorical
and geometrical figures that have blinded him not letting him
see the difference in size between his own body and those
of his enemies: he has lost the sense of
proportion, and this is what encourages him
other than his madness, of course, to participate in
the action.
This is, by the way, this scene of Don Quixote
lunging on to the stage, is the one that Orson Welles
used in his attempted film on the Quixote.
Orson Welles never finished his Quixote,
but there are parts that he filmed,
and I spoke about them in a symposium on Orson Welles here,
a couple of years ago, and got to see some of them,
and this is one of them, and what he has,
the scene takes place in a movie, a movie that is being
shown outdoors, actually, and Don Quixote
climbs on the stage and slashes at the screen in this modern
adaptation of this famous scene.
Peter as author of modern fictions.
As he had already done in the galley slaves episode in Part I,
to not overlook that Cervantes was also maimed,
as you remember, had a lesion on his left arm
that he couldn't use.
authorship, as it were, by adjusting his
ability to perceive reality, hence to represent it.
Making himself one-eyed, Master Peter manages to prevent
the problems created by his cross-eyedness.
Remember that with two eyes, let alone their being crossed,
there are two visions, which may or may not coincide,
but certainly will not if he is cross-eyed;
we have gone over this.
This is the cause of his not being able to foresee and ending
to his autobiography–remember?
He says, 'how can my autobiography be finished if my
life is not?'
You could project that as a problem of vision,
too, if autobiography goes this way and life that way,
and you have a vision that doesn't allow for a coincidence
of the two, that infinitely receding end of
the fiction, or infinitely to the end of his
life, could be seen as part of his
problems with his eyes.
With only one eye, however, Master Peter would be
able to look straight through only one visual access,
but this is not a happy solution either.
To compensate for his loss of one-half of the visual field he
must look sideways: if he has his eye covered he
has to look sideways, askew in his head.
He cannot achieve a harmonious vision, and he makes himself
more awkward and interesting, hence he cannot represent
reality properly.
With only one eye Master Peter cannot create a perspective that
will correspond to reason, to follow Alberti's treatises
on painting that I mentioned.
His reading of literary tradition is also askew,
like the tilt of his head.
We also know that with only one eye he would also lose his depth
perception, which would disastrously affect his capacity
to create perspective.
His rewriting of the Melisendra and Gaiferos story is fraught
with errors, like Lope de Vega's plays which Don Quixote tries to
correct, as we saw.
Only that ideal reader, Alonso Quijano,
who, instead of writing romances of chivalry tried to
act one out, can see straight in the lucid
nights of his library and perceive fictions that are
harmonious and very similar within themselves and to
himself.
Don Quixote, in the darkness of Juan
Palomeque's inn, by slashing the wineskins,
makes the various fictional levels converge and resolve the
conflictive stories.
It is the ability to fuse all of those non-converging levels
of fiction that makes Cervantes such a great modern author,
whose fictions will not destroy themselves from within,
Cervantes' is a happy cross-eyedness,
because the various lines do not fuse in his imaginative
world, yet cohere in some way.
To him, the origin of vision is always already a double vision,
with irony being congenital to it, with representation
depending on it.
I like to see this whole episode of Master Peter's puppet
show as an allegory of the whole of the Quixote,
with Cervantes the author hidden inside there,
but outside his fiction, which he controls through
strings with a voice projected by an agent,
Cide Hamete Benengeli or his translators,
whom he cannot quite control either.
The story itself, like that of Melisandra and
Gaiferos, is drawn from literary
tradition but distorted and rearranged as needed,
and the public, we, the readers,
are drawn into this fiction, but not completely aware as we
are of the artifice of the whole construct.
I am moved, romantic that I am, with Cervantes' identification
roaming through Spain struggling to make a living with
this fiction making contraption.
Now, Cervantes wraps up this take on modern literature and
its labors in the brilliant scene that closes the episode of
Master Peter's puppet show, the one in which aided by
Sancho and the innkeeper Don Quixote compensates the
puppeteer for the figurines that he has smashed.
The value of each broken piece depends on his or her relative
importance in the fiction, not on its material value based
on the stuff of which it is made,
plus the workmanship.
Charlemagne is worth a great deal because of who he is in the
story, for instance.
The real and the fictional worlds cut through each other
here.
Real money is being paid in restitution for damages,
but the amount of the compensation is figured on
fictional values--Do you understand what I mean?
I mean, a slave, or a peasant,
or a servant would not--a figurine, even if it's beautiful
and big, would not cost as much as that of the king.
What Cervantes seems to be underlining here is the value of
fictional characters as creations by their author.
How much would a Don Quixote or a Sancho be worth to Cervantes?
How much a Hamlet to Shakespeare?
or Borges for Pierre Menard?
These are fictional entities, but now they have a real
monetary value in a world in which literature is becoming a
commodity, without ceasing to be,
at the same time, one of the great expressions of
the human spirit.
This scene is reminiscent of the one in Part I towards the
end when restitutions are made to the barber whose basin has
been taken, to the innkeeper for expenses
and damages and marriage vows are exchanged to make up for
Fernando's dishonest behavior towards Dorotea.
It is a miniaturized scene of restitutions,
a small-scale repetition of that scene in Part I.
To me, it is as if Cervantes were boasting of how many ways
he can rewrite episodes in Part II, and he is certainly a master
puppeteer himself.