My last post, aligning Don Quixote with Descartes and the birth of modern philosophy, elicited some terrific responses, for which I am very grateful. One response, though, claimed that I had to misinterpret both Cervantes and Descartes in order to make my point, and that this proved I was under the sway of postmodernism, much like the Comp Lit department at Stanford, where I received my PhD. In making this claim, the author relies on the most conventional and traditional interpretation of Don Quixote, one to which—obviously, I suppose—The Man Who Invented Fiction is entirey opposed. Notably, the author's logic suffers from exactly the same dizzying circularity that I point out below in P. E. Russell's claims. As I had already dedicated some paragraphs to debunking that interpretation in my manuscript, I will use this blog post to quote them.
When Spaniards say, "It’s all the Germans' fault," they could be referring to the European debt crisis. When British Hispanists say the same, they are most likely talking about the so-called Romantic interpretation of Miguel de Cervantes' masterpiece Don Quixote. In his influential book The Romantic Approach to Don Quixote, the late Cambridge don Anthony Close assailed critics who read Cervantes' work in a philosophical light for imposing "modern stereotypes and preoccupations" on a novel that, in his view, was written exclusively as a parody of the tales of chivalry predominant in the sixteenth century. Close's Oxford ally P. E. Russell did him one better, asserting that Cervantes should not be considered to have "contributed anything of originality to the history of ideas." The logic Russell used to support this claim was almost dizzying in its circularity, as it required him to stipulate—as a standard for establishing that someone has had a truly original idea—the presence of a contemporary who had expressed more or less the same idea.
The agents-provocateurs of this most British pique were, as I indicated before, Germans. To be more specific, they were the thinkers and poets associated with or influential to the German Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century, most notably Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Although divided by substantial philosophical and poetic differences, what these thinkers shared in common (apart from the name Friedrich), was having identified Cervantes and, in particular his Don Quixote, as a foundational text of the modern world and a source and inspiration for their own work as well.
Schiller, a poet of the Storm and Stress movement, purchased a copy of (yes) Friedrich Justin Bertuch's 1775 translation of Don Quixote in 1794, and in his On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, published the following year, already singled Cervantes out as the epitome of the sentimental poet. As Werner Altmann describes it, Ludwig Tieck, one of the founders of the Romantic movement and author of the celebrated 1803 translation of Don Quixote into German, related in a letter to Goethe how he and Schiller had discussed Don Quixote and other works of Spanish literature during the summer of 1799 as he was at work on his translation, praising them as spiritually rich material [geistreichen Stoff] for Schiller's own romantic and fantastic tendencies [bei seiner eigenen Neigung zum Phantastischen und Romantischen]. (Tieck, it should be noted was also one of the few poets at the time not to be named Friedrich, an oversight quickly corrected when his brother, the sculptor Friedrich Tieck, came along three years after his birth.) Schlegel, the Romantics' primary theorist, called Don Quixote "the Greatest Romantic Novel" and saw in it a model for his notion of irony. For the archetypical Romantic philosopher Schelling, the novel was "a mythical saga symbolizing the inevitable struggle between the ideal and the real, a conflict typical of our world, which has lost the identity between the two." Hegel for his part situated Romanticism in the past as, in fact, the last age propitious to artistic production at all. For him Cervantes was remarkable for having written the last Romantic work, and as such occupied a transitional moment between the Romantic period and Hegel's own present.
Were Close, Russell, and their ilk right? Did Schlegel and Romanticism Inc. create a Cervantes of their own liking by tailoring an interpretation of Don Quixote cut from their own cloth? There can be no doubt that strict attention to Cervantes' own protestations could support this critique. In the justifiably famous prologue to Don Quixote, he writes that his work is "an invective against the books of chivalry," and that his only purpose was that "the melancholy be moved to laughter, and the merry made merrier still." A deeper look, however, suggests that a great deal more is at stake than such simple disavowals allow. Even the first claim above must be taken with a great deal of salt, given that it is uttered by a fictional friend who is urging Cervantes to get over the angst he purports to feel over the dearth in his front matter of sonnets, endorsements, footnotes, and quotations from famous historical figures. Since the only purpose of the book is to lampoon the tales of chivalry, the friend tells him, he has no need for quotes from Aristotle, Saint Basil, or Cicero, none of whom had anything to say about them.
While it is likely that focusing on the meaning of such lines can only draw the critic into a death spiral of speculating as to authorial intent, Cervantes' creation was deserving of the Germans' adulation in a way that is entirely independent of what his intent may or may not have been. Thus when Close writes at the end of The Romantic Approach, "We are essentially concerned in literary criticism with what literature means. We presuppose that what is meant is what was intended, because we are congenitally unable to do otherwise," I can only reply that such congenital limitations may be little more than self-important blinders to the truth. Far from having contributed nothing of importance to the history of ideas, it is my contention that Cervantes encoded in a new genre of writing the most basic structures of self and world that animate modern thought. What the German Romantics recognized in his genius was not, then, the intentional theorization of a set of ideas that they then borrowed; it was far more fundamental then that. What the Germans sensed was a sea change in culture and ideas registered in a new literary form that went on to help create their own, and our own, world.
Doesn't it look like the genius of Cervantes is that everyone is making his or her own Cervantes after reading him? I think hermaneutics of Cervantes are unavoidable - don't you think so?
In the the protagonist novel Alonso Quijano, Don Quixote was the best character I've read in a fictional novel.
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Anyone who takes literally the invective against chivalry can't, it seems to me, have read the novel very carefully. Surely it's telling that the barber & curate don't burn Amadis, the book supposedly at the center of all the trouble? I'm happy with a plurality of approaches to the novel, from Romantic to skeptical, but the insistence in making a master of irony fit into narrow boxes seems misguided.
I like this post & agree about sea changes, new literary forms, and the "basic structure of self and the world" for early modernity -- with the caveat that Cervantes learns so much from Heliodorus, here and elsewhere.
As the unnamed “provocateur” of this blog post I wondered if I should reply. How does one argue with someone who dismisses loyalty to both text and original author, with irony dripping, as ”The So-Called Historical Approach”? And anyone citing them, as one who “suffers” from “dizzying circularity?”
In fact, I fear Prof. E. reveals himself even more of a Postmodernist than I had assumed: That abysmal hatred of the text! And the poor author, who in true Marxist fashion is disowned, for the sake of a collectivist “cultural change”-interpretation, just short of being “killed” - in the Barthesian sense.
By so ditching the text, Prof. E. undoes, with the stroke of a pen, 400 years of progress in Cervantine studies. Because that is how long it took until critics of the early 20th century finally took Cervantes’ actual text seriously through the philological approach, in order to decipher the author’s intent within the complex interface of episodes. (Which, incidentally, neither P.E. Russell nor A. Close ever did, being stuck on satire. So their use as straw men here is odd.)
Instead, Prof. E. insists on reverting back 200 years, when textual understanding of “DQ” was still woefully underdeveloped. True, the German Romantics were the first to take the work seriously. But, - Oh God! - at what cost! Because that unfettered idealism, that Rousseauian emotionalism and sentimental subjectivenes that these Romantics so uncritically and so permanently thrust upon DQ, is still the bane of Cervantes-teachers. It often takes infinite patience to ween students off what I call the “Man of La Mancha-syndrome”, and make them see what Cervantes actually intended.
For, can we agree, when it comes to privileging either Cervantes himself or his “Romantic” interpreters, for the average reader, which of the two deserves priority consideration? I ask because Postmodernists - Prof. E. included - appear so intent on bracketing out author and text that they end up devising implausible critical scenarios.
Take the proposed book title “The Man Who Invented Fiction”. Average logic defines “fiction” as “inventing, feigning, lying” - as derived from Lat. “fingere”. Now, are we to believe that there was no “fiction” before Cervantes? Surely it was exactly the opposite: It was the surfeit of fiction, lead by the chivalric kind, which scandalized Cervantes and many of his contemporaries, because they genuinely feared for the epistemological and even ethical integrity of a society addicted to “lying”. They were indeed DROWNING in fiction, prompting Cervantes to actually help curtail it, discipline it through the application of Aristotelean verisimilitude. Strictly speaking then, Prof. E.’s proposed title should read “The Man who CURTAILED Fiction”.
That it does NOT, suggests that he has something far different in mind when he defines “fiction”. He says so in a prior post:
“My contention in making the contentious claim that Cervantes "invented" fiction is that fiction is reducible neither to stories-that-are-not-true nor to the long-form narrative polyglossia of the novel; that it designates not merely a form or style of but more profoundly a reorganization of the implied relationship between writing and reality.”
Now, as a “most conventional” and “most traditional” interpreter of “DQ” - acc. to Prof. E. - I readily understand the first part of the statement. But the last line certainly puzzled me. It stirred my old-fashioned philological memory: Where had I seen such a statement before? Ah, of course! This is an almost word-for-word rendition of Althusser’s definition of ideology as ”the imaginative relation to reality”! Substitute “imaginative” with “fiction”, and Prof E.’s proposal becomes clear. Therefore, the PROPER title of his projected book should in all honesty read: “The Man Who Invented IDEOLOGICAL Fiction: Cervantes in the Modern World”. In other words: Prof. E. is aiming at an updated Marxist, Postmodern definition of Cervantine fiction. As for the “Modern World” - that is probably more limited in size to “Comp Lit departments” only.
This then is the Postmodern "modus operandi": Hollow out the original text and the identity of the author, in the way one hollows out a pumpkin or a chili pepper, then stuff the emaciated shell with ideology and social and cultural change, sprinkle with Edward Said-style history - and voilà, the deconstruction party can begin. Now, in gastronomy this “stuffing” procedure may yield rewarding dishes: Who has not enjoyed “chile relleno”? And what would French cooking be without its imaginative “farci” dishes? But in literature, what exactly is it that you get with a hollowed-out “DQ” or a depleted author identity? What remains of their unique authenticity and with it, of the attraction that originally drew you to them? What you get instead is a post-mortem infliction of an inauthenticity of almost Heideggerian dimension on someone who did not ask for it.
The most perfect practitioner of this method has to be Anthony Cascardi, in whose Cervantes-essays practically the only recognizable “Cervantes”-element is the name of the author. Mercifully, Prof. E. is not THAT extreme. Plus, he can articulate clearly, and sustain a linear argument. But it’s the direction that counts! Given his repeated obsession with “cultural change” he is clearly in the trend of Comp Lit departments as primarily “cultural change departments”, and only secondarily as “literature departments”, just as most Humanities and Social Sciences have in reality now become “dépendances” to a bigger Lukacsian “totality” - or, if you will - of a giant Frankfurt School system, where students are to be “interpellated” rather than “educated”.
The Frankfurt School, through its avowed ancestor Marx, harks back to Romanticism, though in spirit more to the French socio-political kind, than to the more mystical, metaphysical German kind. The major weakness of German Romanticism is that it produced far better poetry and drama than sustainable, practical epistemology. Unfortunately it is the latter that Postmodernism inherited, and with it, agravated by the nihilistic voluntarism of Nietzsche and the mystic obscurity of Heidegger, the unlimited license for subjective judgements with which to obscure, to wildly deconstruct and to frankly falsify at will, all for the sake of ideology. In short, the fact that Prof. E. finds so much comfort among the Romantic interpreters is disquieting, and bodes ill for Cervantes Studies.
...I see i have not convinced you yet! I do hope you read the book itself when it comes out, though, for there is so much author and text in this chile relleno that it's fairly bursting from its emaciated shell. Indeed, the fiction Cervantes is curtailing (in your suggested wording) is more to ideology, or its first modern manifestations. What he invents is a tool for exposing with it. But I think you misplace me critically, reading into my emaciated shell the stuffing of your own battles with something you know as postmodernism or comp lit. My book is in fact deeply historical and even biographical, hence "The Man Who..." part of the title. (And thanks for the "Blumen" about my writing; even more appreciated coming from a critic of my thought ;)