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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 21.41-42 (2004): 123-141 A Cave Full of Caves On his way to Saragossa, Don Quixote decides to explore the famous cave of Montesinos. He arrives there accompanied by Sancho and a local scholar and aspiring author of a book entitled The Metamorphoses or the Spanish Ovid, whom he employs as a guide, then, commending himself to the graces of Dulcinea, descends into the cave tied to a rope: “I am just going to precipitate, to ingulf, and sink myself in the profound abyss here before me, only to let the world know, that if thou favourest me there is no impossibility I will not undertake and accomplish” (680). The results of this expedition are surprisingly anticlimactic. Don Quixote is pulled out in a catatonic state that requires some efforts from the part of Sancho and the guide to dispel. Then, at “about four of the clock in the afternoon, when the sun, hid among the clouds, with a faint light and temperate rays” (682) he produces what can arguably be considered as the most unusual account of his many odd adventures: About twelve or fourteen fathom in the depth of this dungeon, on the right hand, there is a hollow, and space wide enough to contain a large wagon, mules and all: a little light makes its way into it, through some cracks and holes at a distance in the surface of the earth. This hollow and open space I saw, just as I began to weary, and out of humour to find myself pendent and tied by the rope, and journeying through the dark region below, without knowing wither I was going: and so I determined to enter it and rest a little. I called out to you aloud, not to let down more rope till I bid you: but it seems you heard me not. I gathered up the cord you had let, down and coiling it up into a heap, or bundle, I sat me down upon it, extremely pensive, and considering what method I should take to descend to the bottom, having nothing to support my weight. And being thus thoughtful, and in confusion, on a sudden, without any endeavour of mine, a deep sleep fell upon me; and when I least thought of it, 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 imagine. (682-3) [end page 123] In this meadow, Don Quixote has a rather unexceptional encounter with the wizard Montesinos and several enchanted heroes from which he emerges with the usual reinforcement of his convictions regarding Dulcinea’s beauty and the righteousness of his mission. What makes his account truly atypical is rather the ambiguity of the perspective from which it is told. The first anomaly comes in the form of a temporal discrepancy: Sancho tells him that barely an hour has passed since he descended into the cave, but Don Quixote replies with confidence that he had been inside for three days (688). But, more importantly, the adventure in the cave of Montesinos forces Don Quixote, for the first and last time in the novel, to seriously consider whether his experiences are real or imagined[1]. Initially, Don Quixote is convinced enough of the truth of the events to reject his customary failsafe device that consists of assigning the blame for the differences between his perceptions and those of others, to the nefarious enchanters that persecute him: ‘I believe,’ answered Sancho, ‘that the same Merlin, or those necromancers, who enchanted all the crew your worship says you saw and conversed with there below, have crammed into your imagination or memory all this stuff you have already told us or that remains to be told.’ Of course, the core of the vision – the appearance of the enchanted Dulcinea and the promise of her future redemption – are all based on a lie that Sancho produces in chapter 10: when asked to deliver a letter to the non-existent Dulcinea, he manages to convince Don Quixote that three particularly coarse and vulgar peasant women are the sophisticated princess and two of her ladies in waiting (586-90). Nonetheless, as far as Don Quixote is concerned, all this is irrelevant, since his outlook on life is always such that he can accommodate any event to suit his own predetermined course of action. The real dilemma here is not referential, as in most of his other adventures. The question is not whether Don Quixote had dreamt the whole episode or it had actually happened to him, but whether he relates the story as truth or lie. Thus, the unusual nature of the incident lies in the perpetually ambiguous nature of its presentation.[2] For the first time one of Don Quixote’s adventures is left with no external vantage point to judge it by. So far, the border between fantasy and the real world has been clear – regardless of Don Quixote’s wildest flights of [end page 124] imagination, there has always been a plethora of characters that see the event for what it really is. In the Cave of Montesinos Don Quixote is for the first time alone – there are no witnesses, and more importantly, his own reception of the occurence keeps shifting as even he has periodic doubts as to the nature of his experience. The memory of the event will follow him throughout the rest of the novel, with increasing persistence, a counterpart perhaps to his mounting, if unconscious, realization of the discrepancies between his life and its recounted version. The ambiguity of the whole affair resists even the clarifying attempts of Cid Hamet Ben Engeli, the original chronicler of the history of Don Quixote’s adventures: …and so, without affirming it for true or false, I write it. Since, reader, you have discernment, judge as you see fit; for I neither ought, nor can do any more; though it is held for certain, that, upon his death-bed, they say he retracted, and said he had invented it only because it was of a piece, and squared with the adventures he had read of in his histories. (693) It is one of the profound ironies of the novel that, like its readers, its protagonist has to continuously sort through so many conflicting accounts of his own life, of whose ultimate intelligibility he is so deeply convinced. Part II in fact finds Don Quixote increasingly aware of his own fictional status. In chapter 3 he hears from the bachelor Sampson Carrasco about Part I of Don Quixote and its author, Cid Hamet (although, strangely, Don Quixote never appears to remember him or question the sources of the man who chronicles his life). Later on he learns of an apocryphal second part to the chronicle of his life. Don Quixote, who, besides living a good portion of his life on what is basically a different plane of reality, is at the same time the actor and the spectator of his adventures, now also becomes the critic of the account of his own exploits. His actions, already distorted by the schizoid, anamorphic lens that Christine Buci-Glucksmann identified as the prevalent baroque perspective,[3] become even more removed from the subject that performs them. The conversation with Sampson Carrasco is particularly enlightening in this respect. The bachelor points out that some of the readers of Part I of Don Quixote could have done without the accounts of the numerous humiliating beatings endured by the hero. For Sancho, these unglamorous “drubbings” are “the truth of the history” (Cervantes 540), but Don Quixote favors a more “abridged” account because it would be more conducive to the right historical interpretation: [end page 125] ‘They might, indeed, as well have omitted them,’ said Don Quixote, ‘since there is no necessity of recording those actions, which do not change nor alter the truth of the story, and especially if they redound to the discredit of the hero. In good faith, Aeneas was not altogether so pious as Virgil paints him, nor Ulysses so prudent as Homer describes him.’ This discussion is, of course, a restatement of Aristotle’s familiar arguments from the Poetics: “…the one [history] describes the thing that has been, and the other [poetry] a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars” (Aristotle 636; 9:1451 b). Don Quixote’s comments on history and fiction similarly rework a previous statement about historical truthfulness which the narrator makes in chapter 9, part 1: “…for historians ought to be precise […] and neither interest nor fear […] should make them swerve from the way of truth, whose mother is history,[4] the rival of time, the depository of actions past, the example and instruction to the present and monitor to the future” (Cervantes 77, emphasis added). Nevertheless the situation has radically changed from that of Part 1. If at the beginning Don Quixote only had to live up to a relatively loose standard determined by the romances that he has read, by Part 2, that standard is irreversibly altered by the introduction of the printed account of his adventures (and complicated even further by Avellaneda’s apocryphal continuation), and he is forced to conform to an already objectified factual model over which he has no control: “The more the question of representational accuracy is pursued, the further it recedes behind the irreducible objecthood of the book as representation” (McKeon 1987: 277). In fact, the more the novel insists on the accuracy of its historical claims, the more these claims are in fact questioned and made ambiguous. Marthe Robert points out Cervantes’ almost irritating refusal to take sides, his “remarkable neutrality in matters where writers usually assert their opinions” (1980: 132) which combine to make the novel’s ideology remarkably opaque. She attributes this perpetual hesitation to various historical circumstances ranging from the climate of ideological duplicity and pervasive suspicion created by Marranism and the Inquisition (1980: 132-8) to Cervantes’ own epigonic nostalgia for the obsolete time [end page 126] of a melancholy king, which would turn the novel and its protagonist’s quasi religious devotion to romances into an “exalted tribute to Charles V” (1977: 54-55). In the end, all Don Quixote manages to establish is a tyranny of representation, but of a representation that is devoid of any precise referentiality. Just as Don Quixote’s chivalric progress revolves around his blind infatuation with the image rather than the physical presence of Dulcinea,[5] the novel itself revolves around the always iconic but ultimately vague image of its protagonist. Don Quixote appears to be built around several prominent episodes (like the story of Cid Hamet, the adventure of the Cave of Montesinos, and so on), whose detailed, striking nature gives them an almost painterly quality. Nabokov elegantly points out how this “most scarecrow masterpiece among masterpieces” is loosely spread out, hanging from a few “structural pegs” but “forming against the backdrop of time a marvelous photopia (vision with light-adjusted eyes) of folds, f,o,l,d,s” (27). Shlovsky, too, argues that the novel is structured as a series of significant episodes linked together, rather loosely, by the figure of Don Quixote – the result appears as “a unifying thread of wise sayings” (73). The image of the thread gives the impression of linear progression, which is in a sense true, as Don Quixote does follow the basic picaresque progression from incident to incident. But the image of the novel as a mere series of adventures ignores its propensity to turn in on itself, questioning its own assumptions. To Shlovsky’s necklace, one should perhaps prefer Nabokov’s heavy baroque curtain, that in its turn proleptically echoes Deleuze’s dermatological drapery (“decorated only with a stretched canvas ‘diversified by folds,’ as if it were a living dermis”; 4) that conceals and emphasizes the cavernous nature of matter: Dividing endlessly, the parts of matter form little vortices in a maelstrom, and in these are found even more vortices, even smaller, and even more are spinning in the concave intervals of the whirls that touch one another. Don Quixote is thus built on a set of self-canceling oppositions; it presents itself as “history,” yet its sources are unreliable; it is concerned with accuracy and truthfulness to its subject, all the while questioning the verisimilitude of interpretation and being deeply skeptical about the [end page 127] reliability of perception. The narrative is continuously distorted and obscured because of its encasement into multiple frames that put one another into question. And, last but not least, the novel insidiously returns, at least in part 1, to the very values it seems to decry. Its parodic relation to romance is quickly revealed to be a façade – in 1605 “Cervantes seems to be flogging a dying horse; his ridiculing of a genre that was losing its prestige, his biting irony directed at knights-errant, it would seem could count on the indulgent smile of the better informed public” (Lima 4). While it appears to lampoon an almost exhausted genre – the chivalric romance – Don Quixote has nevertheless trouble establishing a clear position regarding its attitude towards it. The most detailed theoretical discussion (part 1, chapter 47) fails to establish a value hierarchy between history and fiction – at the very best, it sets them up as opposed, but completely separate modes of representation. The canon’s exhortation against the supposed lack of verisimilitude of the romances is contradicted by his admission of an alternative mode of reading that appears to concentrate not as much on truth, as on invention: …he found one good thing in them, which was, the subject they presented for a good genius to display itself, affording a large and ample field, in which the pen may expatiate without any let or incumbrance, describing shipwrecks, tempests, encounters, and battles; […] because the unconfined way of writing these books gives an author room to show his skill in the epic, or lyric, in tragedy or comedy, with all the parts included in the sweet and charming sciences of poetry and oratory…. (474-5) Before, the priest (one of the strongest opponents of romances) had admitted, albeit reluctantly, their usefulness. It is a strange assertion, because, even as it relegates romances to the ludic domain, it appears to absolve them of any pretence of truthfulness: …as in all well-instituted commonwealths, the games of chess, tennis and billiards are permitted for the entertainment of those who have nothing to do, and who ought not, or cannot work; for the same reason they permit such books to be written and printed, presuming, as they well may, that nobody can be so ignorant as to take them for true histories. (308) Rather than proposing an ineffective debate on the merits of history and fiction, the novel undertakes a more complex argument. Lima points out [end page 128] how the pseudo-Aristotelian arguments of the curate and the priest are undermined by the ambiguous framing of the book. The two agree that decorum and verisimilitude are essential even for the construction of a proper romance – the lack of appropriate imitatio is presented as the main flaw of the genre, and the redemption of the few “good” romances like Amádis, since even invented works must measure up to a certain universal standard of truthfulness. If this is the poetics to which Cervantes subscribes, this would leave an important question unanswered, namely, what is, within this poetics, the status of the imitatio of an imitation, which, is how, ultimately, Don Quixote sets itself up? Lima disagrees on this point with E.C. Riley, who, influenced by A.S. Piccolomini, contends that this is not even a problem for Cervantes: the imitation of an imitation is true, since the imitated model is true, albeit an invention. Nevertheless, such a position ignores an important aspect of the novel – the unreliable Cid Hamet (and, one may add, his translator, and the chronicler of that translation), who is repeatedly presented as both an accurate historian and a potential liar. The real question that must be asked is in this case “If imitation presupposes truth as the center and model, what is the truth that Don Quixote imitates?” (Lima 8-10) Don Quixote establishes in fact a new domain for a new form of representation, through the negation of both “undiscriminating fantasy and […] the ineffability of the quotidian.” This new domain is fictionality, which unlike fictitiousness, which is grounded in orality, and therefore “implies the general principle of truthfulness,” brackets the truth and is based in writing (Lima 10). If the space of romance, that is the “fictitious,” was controlled through rationalism and always hedged by its subordination to the notion of imitation, the fictional approaches the real obliquely, thus sidestepping the problem of truth. The canon’s discussion with the priest best illustrates the ambiguous nature of fictitiousness, inasmuch as the two cannot reconcile the gratuitousness of romances with their apparent mimetic and instructional merits. Nevertheless, Don Quixote refuses to take sides in the debate. Its own domain, namely fictionality, is, in a sense, a form of representation of the “second degree.” It is self-questioning, and, most importantly, it can only be accessed via an interpretative intermediary: Thus it is important to emphasize that when modern fiction appears, critical activity is seen not as a mere supplement to creation but rather as an activating part of its makeup. Against the naïveté presupposed by pre-Cervantine fictitiousness, based on the illusion that its own territory is not to be distinguished from that of truth, modern fictionality is based on irony, on distancing, on the creation [end page 129] of a complexity that, without alienating the common reader, does not present itself to him as a form of illusionism. (Lima 7) A closer look at the novel reveals that its simple picaresque chronology is in fact entirely invented by Don Quixote himself, that is, it is always created on the spot, and as such it is continuously wavering. Don Quixote has no history – his past is a quicksand, continuously reconstructed and shifting; events are uncertain, identities doubtful (in Part 2, Don Quixote develops an apocryphal double) and names sometimes notoriously hard to pinpoint, beginning with that of the protagonist: “It is said that his surname was Quixada, or Quesada (for in this there is some difference among the authors who have written upon this subject), though by probable conjectures it may be gathered that he was called Quixana” (23). Dulcinea may or may not be based on the peasant girl Aldonza Lorenzo who had “the best hand at salting pork of any woman of La Mancha” (75). In an illustration from Cid Hamet’s manuscript Sancho Panza’s name is misspelled as “Sancho Zancas” (76); his wife is initially called Mari Gutierrez (64), then her name changes to Tereza Panza (509), and then back to Mari Gutierrez, and again to Teresa Panza (949).[6] At one crucial point, the task of fictional construction is actually shifted from Don Quixote to Sancho: his fake report of the enchanted Dulcinea (585-90) constitutes the impulse of many of Don Quixote’s actions in the second part of the novel. All these confirm Lukács’ intuition that the novel is essentially rooted in a sense of abandonment, funded on the irreparable separation of the human from the transcendental: “The abandonment of the world by God manifests itself in the incommensurability of soul and work, of interiority and adventure – in the absence of a transcendental ‘place’ allotted to human endeavour” (97). “Dazzled by the demon” of “abstract idealism” (97), Don Quixote loses the sense of a distance between ideal and idea, and the ability to recognize transcendence in spatial terms (98). Don Quixote is thus rooted in the divorce of psychology from action, on the isolation of the soul brought about by incapacity to experience (Lukács 99). The adventurer/hero wanders through a world which he tries to internalize in Procrustean fashion, by trying to make it conform to an inward ideal, which, because of its fundamental isolation, is also illusory (100). From this isolation the soul emerges irretrievably separated from reality, transformed into “a work of art” (Lukács 100), which, in a sense, has always been Don Quixote’s unconscious aspiration. His very build, lean and tall, is iconic. He has an almost magnetic attraction to theater, that most melancholic and grand form of representation, according to Benjamin: “… having been, from my youth, a great admirer of masques and theatrical representations” (Cervantes 593). His relation to repre-[end page 130]sented images is deeply ambiguous and revolves around the same schizoid attitude he has to his own life – in short, he views them at the same time as reality and simulacrum.[7] We are dealing with the transformation of direct perception into specular mediation. This is “the Don Quixote effect” – the displacement and incorporation of the body into the fictional by means of a frame or “aesthetic border” which transforms it into an image (Stoichiţă 6-9). Stoichiţă uses an example from Part 1, chapter 43 of Don Quixote, in which the hero is tricked by Maritornes the servant into believing that her mistress Clara is in love with him. Don Quixote, who has already overheard Clara’s description of the ruse she had employed to communicate with her lover (“framing” herself in a window, thus allowing him to see her from a distance), readily believes that the spike-hole of the inn’s hay loft is in fact the gilded window of a palace. When he puts his hand through, Maritornes puts a halter around it and leaves him hanging there (Cervantes 436-7). For Stoichiţă, the window becomes an area of mediation that opens up the possibility of seeing, and transforms the body into a “pseudo-portrait.” At the same time, this framing transforms the purely visual space into a field of communication, and thus the “portrait” it holds becomes a surrogate of presence. But it is a one-way communication, since Clara in her tempting pose causes a “semiotic frenzy” in her lover, who from a distance signals that he wants to marry her (Stoichiţă 7). The framing thus produces an apparently contradictory effect – Clara’s body is made more prominent, more apparent but at the same time, it is also made more ambiguous; it becomes charged with a meaning that exists only in the onlooker. At the same time, the frame establishes a powerful fictional barrier between the image and its spectator – a barrier that cannot be crossed without the punishing effects that Don Quixote experiences. But there is more to this episode than Stoichiţă’s essay recognizes. Don Quixote does not merely ignore the fiction that Maritornes has set up in her story. Rather, in doing so, he also places himself in Clara’s position – he transforms himself – or rather a part of himself – into an image. His hand (the very same that will soon be disciplined for transgressing the liminal spaces between fiction and reality), is also “framed” by the window and, for a moment, assumes the distinct quality of a painting: “Take, madam, this hand, or rather this chastiser of the evil-doers of the world: take, I say, this hand, which no woman’s hand ever touched before, not even hers, who has the entire right of my whole body. I do not give it to you to kiss, but only that you may behold the contexture of its nerves, the firm knitting of its muscles, the largeness and spaciousness of its veins, whence you may gather what must be the strength of that arm which has such a hand” (436-7, emphasis mine). [end page 131] In other words, Don Quixote constantly positions himself into a frame that separates him from the real he refuses to acknowledge but at the same time cannot bring himself to see that the procedure is not exceptional. The baroque is, after all, an age of spectatorship. The real, the historical, the natural, the body itself, are continuously removed from the perceiving subject, they are framed for contemplation. Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s Lacanian analysis of the baroque frame of mind insists on this schizoid split of the self that is a necessary consequence of this ontology – the spec(tac)ular fashioning of the subject entails not only the perception of the world but also that of the self as image (93). Thus comes into being that inner discipline, the martyric bent that Benjamin identified in that apex of baroque beings that is the courtier. Self-fashioning as image involves a contemplative perception of the self from the external position of a spectator, hence the “innate pensiveness” (140), which Benjamin saw as a direct consequence of the baroque’s interest in matters of grand display. We thus return to Lukács’ notion of the novel’s nearsightedness: “distance, losing its objective reality, is turned into a darkly beautiful ornament, and the leap necessary to bridge it is turned into a dance-like gesture – both distance and leap are transformed into purely decorative elements” (102). The immobile space of Don Quixote is in fact the space of allegory. Don Quixote can in fact be read as an extended allegory of time. For Benjamin, the baroque allegory is constituted primarily by time, by the violent separation of “visual being” and “meaning.” It “calmly” con-templates this abyss, without the “disinterested self-sufficiency of the sign” (165). History in this case, is not “the mother of truth” – rather it becomes a frozen, “petrified” landscape (Benjamin 166). This landscape is the setting of Don Quixote’s wanderings; he is himself an allegorical figure, an emblem removed from its context; he does not notice it, but all the interposed narrators do. Don Quixote is the allegorical representation of his own life: he cannot perceive the world except through the lens of a constructed past, which is why the only alternative to his romance life is the pastoral.[8] Don Quixote’s world is populated by the excess of images that makes allegory into a figure of melancholy: “With every idea the moment of expression coincides with a veritable eruption of images, which gives rise to a chaotic mass of metaphors” (Benjamin 173). Here, details are at the same time incidental and essential – the temporal gap between objects and significance gives birth to a multiplicity of meanings. Things are at the same time undervalued and elevated by the very ability of allegory to raise them on a higher plane – as Panofsky, Klibansky and Saxl point out about Dürer’s “Melancholy 1,” conventional details appear as accidental (495). [end page 132] Thus, a relatively trivial incident like Don Quixote’s discovery of a hole in his stocking takes on the incongruous appearance of both an allegorical representation of melancholy and of a deflating parody of an epic moment: He shut his door after him, and by the light of two wax candles, pulled off his clothes; and, at stripping off his stockings (O mishap unworthy of such a personage!) forth burst, not sighs, nor anything else that might discredit his cleanliness, but some two dozen stitches of a stocking, which made it resemble a lattice-window. The good gentleman was extremely afflicted, and would have given an ounce of silver to have had there a drachm of green silk; I say, green, because his stockings were green. (833) Don Quixote’s picaresque trajectory is similarly pushed between transcendence and debasement – the never ending movement that, according to Deleuze, propels the baroque.[9] His life is in fact the ars combinatoria, that willful invention that for Benjamin is the sign of a minor, decadent literary mode – it is in fact so dependent on interpretation that it simply cannot stand on its own (55, 181). Don Quixote is a mortified work of art (Benjamin 182), his increasingly leaner frame, already a sign of something else, already an emblem, an allegory. Because of this he comes to us already distanced, as a faint echo, an “incomplete” and “imperfect” object (Benjamin 186), whose auratic lack makes it entirely dependant on the petrifying gaze of interpretation: it is “set up for that erosion by criticism which befell them [the baroque works of art] in the course of time” (Benjamin 181). Thus, Don Quixote’s vertigo in the cave of Montesinos acquires a new implication – the experience there is not allegorical, but mystical, because it is the contemplation of nothingness – of that gap that separates the object from its representation. Hence the fundamental ambiguity of the episode, since this type of experience is neither capable of communicating knowledge or of being communicated to others. William James points out that mystical states have no truth value: their very character as a deeply intimate and personal event precludes any possibility of accurate representation (396). While these states are “absolutely authoritative” over the individuals who experience them, they do not necessarily have a truth value for those who “stand outside of them” (414). Since they resemble “sensations” rather than “conceptual thought” (396), they can only point or suggest; in this respect they resemble music, rather than speech: “they [the paradoxes inherent in the descriptions of mystical states] prove that not conceptual speech but music rather, is the element through which we are best spoken to by [end page 133] mystical truth. […] Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict though it may laugh at our own foolishness in minding them” (411-2). Martin Buber in his preface to Ecstatic Confessions points out a similar fundamental contradiction: the ecstasy, the stepping-out-of-one’s-self is in fact the contact with a profound and limitless unity, an experience so personal that it involves absolute solitude and silence, since the I is thus separated from that most communal of the instruments of representation, language: “One’s unity is solitude, absolute solitude, the solitude of that which is without limits. […] The I is transferred outside the community and since language is a function of community, it is not adequate for the description of the experience” (6). As Buber memorably puts it, silence is the protective symbolon against “the gods and angels of the commotion.” The confession of this experience, also a deeply personal act, is nevertheless a breaking of this unity, since it places the ecstasy within language. The event comes to us as already fragmented, doubly removed, because filtered through both consciousness and will, through a process which is perhaps not unlike that of allegorical production: “consciousness puts ecstasy outside, in projection; the will puts it outside again in the attempt to say the unsayable. […] They say, and already they say the other things.” Thus, the only way to communicate an ecstatic state is to alter it, to temporalize it by filtering it through language and memory – the confession is never the expression of unity, rather it expresses the reverse: it is at the same time “a labor in the dark” and a “memorial” for something ineffable and traceless: it “tows the timeless into the harbor of love” (10). It is this impossibility of containment that gives the experience its melancholy character – the mystical, ecstatic state is, at its core, the reflection of a lack, since its form will always point to a fundamental absence within the content. Marthe Robert also recognizes a religious undertone in Don Quixote’s undaunted devotion to the romance model; she points out that a “displacement of genres” (1977: 56) seems to be taking place within the novel, in which devotional is replaced by the chivalric while maintaining the same stress on irrational ideology (60) and image worship (61). We might nevertheless be dealing not as much with a displacement as with a return to origins. Michel de Certeau’s Fable Mystique represents the Christian mystical literature of the 16th and 17th centuries as a fundamentally ineffable experience circumvented, like a painting, but not contained, by a set of four codes that encase the mystical language, while being at the same time surpassed by it: a new eroticism, psychoanalysis, historiography, and orality, or fiction, represented by the “fable” (12). Of these four, the erotic dimension is the most pervasively melancholic.[10]. De Certeau sees a direct link between the development [end page 134] and decadence of mysticism in Europe and the emergence of eroticism – the gradual disappearance of God as unique object is compensated by the emergence of the Other as the object of love. But since mysticism is a search for Oneness, the “le fantôme de l’unique” (12) will always be present beyond the play of the ephemeral phantasms of eroticism (de Certeau points to Don Juan’s conquests as offsetting the absence of a “unique,” eternally inaccessible woman). The Unique as the object of mystical contemplation is transformed into the Other, whose fundamental elusiveness delineates a loss that is obsessively described. The Western mystical production of the 16th and 17th centuries is thus organized along two lines – a multiplication of conquests that compensate for an original loss and an analysis of these conquests as an interrogation on the primary void out of which they originate (de Certeau 12-5). This is in fact the method of melancholy mourning – “the withdrawal from the object and the withdrawal into itself of the contemplative tendency” which “offers the paradox of an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object” (Agamben 19-20). The separation of the self from the world is at once voluntary and irreversible – the melancholic appropriates not the object, but rather its loss (Agamben 20). Mourning takes precedence over the object: its details are made more pregnant, but at the price of a loss of meaning. The world is contemplated only to become irretrievably estranged: The imaginary loss that so obsessively occupies the melancholic tendency has no real object, because its funereal strategy is directed to the impossible capture of the phantasm. […] No longer a phantasm and not yet a sign, the unreal object of melancholy introjection opens a space that is neither the hallucinated, oneiric scene of the phantasms, nor the indifferent world of natural objects. […] the troubling alienation of the most familiar objects is the price paid by the melancholic to the powers that are custodians of the inaccessible. (Agamben 25-6) Don Quixote knows all too well this mechanism, especially at the time of his adventure in the cave, when Dulcinea, as the object of his desires has sublimated to the point of a complete disappearance, affected as she is by Sancho’s fictional spell. His vision is at the same time redemptive and comical – the procession of enchanted romance characters (Durandarte, Montesinos, Belerna and their retinues) is strangely offset by the vision of a still enchanted Dulcinea, in her coarse peasant look and the episode that involves one of her servants asking Don Quixote on her behalf for “six reals, or what you have about you, which she promises to return very [end page 135] quickly” (691) and then “instead of making […] a curtsy […] cut[ing] a caper full two yards in the air” (692). The image is at the same time hopelessly grounded in a reality of the lowest and most intense degree (precisely what Don Quixote has been avoiding) and redemptive, since it also contains the promise of Dulcinea’s future disenchantment. Most notably, however, Dulcinea, despite her vulgar appearance, maintains throughout the scene, the hermetic aspect of a true vision – she is in fact the only character in the scene with whom Don Quixote cannot establish contact: “I spoke to her; but she answered me not a word: on the contrary, she turned her back upon me, and fled away with so much speed that an arrow could not have overtaken her” (691). The vision is at the same time an unconscious recognition of the illusory nature of an object of desire and the almost desperate need to keep it alive.[11]. The 16th and 17th centuries establish an imagery of melancholy that includes a double push, not unlike the permanent up/down, spirit/matter oscillation that Deleuze identified in the baroque: “c’est le mélancolique dont l’esprit vole au ciel dans l’extase de l’intuition unitive; c’est encore une fois le mélancolique qui s’écarte dans la solitude, qui s’abat dans l’immobilité, qui se laisse envahir par la torpeur et l’hébétude du désespoir” (Starobinski 1989: 47). There is at the same time, a clear relation between the solitary allegorization of melancholy among the four humours and the melancholic characteristics of allegory itself. For Starobinski, allegory is in fact a form of dramatic representation: it splits the ego into a multiplicity of characters/actors irrevocably imprisoned within the confines of a conscience turned theatre. Melancholy is after all the only humour which cannot be easily evacuated: while the blood, phlegm or yellow bile can be easily expurgated, the melancholy or black bile hides in the spleen: in a closed cavern within the cavern of the body. Hence the reflective black waters or deep wells which have been its allegorical companions at least since Charles D’Orléans (Starobinski 1963: 412-4, 418). The experience of melancholy is at the same time a descent and a reflection. Don Quixote’s exploits are in perpetual need of a witness, an interpreter, an exterior presence who would see reality for what it is, but would need nevertheless to be convinced and made to see differently. On this perpetual doubt and contrary opinion rests the fragile structure of his romance world. In the Cave of Montesinos he is deprived of this grounding company and because of this, his experience there, though certainly uplifting, remains contradictory: it is at the same time mystical, and therefore authoritative, and hallucinatory, therefore ambiguous. For William James, the obverse of the optimistic mystical experience is pessimistic madness (414) and in the cave Don Quixote is swept away by [end page 136] interpretive instability, confronted as he is by an experience whose meaning he cannot fix. Seen from this perspective, the entire episode acts as an “echoing chamber,” a zone of dizzying obscurity that cannot be penetrated, but which, like a black hole sucks in interpretations. Within the context of Cervantes’ heavily framed and ambiguous novel, Don Quixote’s speleological vertigo can be read as an allegorization of allegory itself, a perpetual mise an abîme of an ever receding meaning, an endless series of Deleuzian caverns.
[1]. The unreliable nature of experience reappears in the lengthy episode that takes place at the Duke’s palace (Chapters 30 to 57 of Part 2). This time nevertheless we are dealing with a play, a staged experiment whose subjects never doubt the truth of an elaborately fake experience. Don Quixote and Sancho are convinced to mount the wooden horse Clavileño – which they suppose to be able to fly, controlled by a wooden peg in his neck. They allow themselves to be blindfolded “lest the height and the sublimity of their way should make their heads swim” (807-8). The episode bears a remarkable similarity to act, 4 scene 6 of “King Lear” (on the resemblances between Don Quixote and “King Lear,” see Nabokov 7-8 and 50), inasmuch as it is built on the same principle of experiential self-suggestion. The Duke and Duchess use a whole collection of instruments (bellows, torches and so on) to convince the two that they fly through the air, close to the sun and stars. In the end the horse is blown up and the riders tumble to the ground. Sancho produces a detailed description of the heavens (which he supposedly spies through his loosened blindfold) and even convinces himself that he dismounted and played with the “seven little she-goats” (the Pleiades): “…I slipped down from Clavileño, and played with those she-goats, which are like so many violets, about the space of three quarters of an hour; and all the while Clavileño moved not from the place, nor stirred a foot” (816). Don Quixote is more skeptical of his squire’s adventures – his experience of the non-existent flight tells him different: “…for the fiery region being between the sphere of the moon and the utmost region of the air, we could not reach that heaven, where the seven goats Sancho speaks of are, without being burnt; and since we are not burnt, either Sancho lies, or Sancho dreams” (816). In this case, the task of reflecting on the nature of self-suggestion is left to the reader – the only one with full access to all the details of the scene; as for Don Quixote, the presence of Sancho, his trusty “unreliable” witness, reinforces his perceptions, as usual. The Cave of Montesinos does not offer him the same reassurance. [end page 137] [2]. “We are never quite sure whether Don Quixote is or is not aware that he has invented the whole episode” (Nabokov 61). [3]. “Or le baroque repose précisément sur une cosmologie keplerienne (Severo Sardury, Barocco) qui substitue au cercle comme téléologiquement parfait et au centre unique, l’ellipse au double foyer, dont un virtuel et absent.” To the instability of the ellipse, Glucksmann adds Leibniz and Descartes’ research into the geometry of the conic spaces –“cet éspace mécanique, en morphogenèse et ‘catastrophe’ permanente, sans centre ni point fixe” (76-7). [4]. This is also one of the fragments authored by Borges’ Pierre Menard. Menard’s twentieth-century reauthoring of the Quixote places the fragment in a light that was perhaps not that atypical even for Cervantes, inasmuch as it may be read through the same ironical lens that Menard’s chronicler uses (for a more extended discussion on the seventeenth-century’s reversal of the Aristotelian hierarchy of disciplines and the contradictory valuation of history as a repository of knowledge at the same time as a new skepticism regarding the possibility of collecting accurate historical information begins to appear, see Dooley 1999; also Lima 1984: 23-31, on the 16th and 17th century clash between the historical and the fictional modes): “History, the mother of truth! – the idea is staggering. Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history not as delving into reality but as the very fount of reality. Historical truth, for Menard, is not “what happened”; it is what we believe happened. The final phrases – exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor – are brazenly pragmatic” (Borges 1998: 94). On a related note, one cannot help but notice how Quixotic is Pierre Menard’s enterprise, and, conversely, how Menardian is Don Quixote – in both cases we are dealing with repetition with a difference. Redundant actions (Don Quixote’s anachronistic revival of the chivalric mode, Menard’s rewriting of Cervantes’ novel as an original) are placed in different perspectives, but they remain irremediably separated from their sources and dependant on the contextual and apprehensive interpretive voice of another to survive: “He resolved to anticipate the vanity that awaits all the labors of mankind; he undertook a task of infinite complexity, a task futile from the outset. He dedicated his scruples and his nights ‘lit by midnight oil’ to repeating in a foreign tongue a book that already existed. His drafts were endless; he stubbornly corrected, and he ripped up thousands of handwritten pages. He would allow no one to see them, and took care that they not survive him. In vain I have attempted to reconstruct them.” (Borges 1998: 94-5). [end page 138] [5]. It can be argued, of course, that Dulcinea doesn’t have a body to begin with; but Don Quixote, who easily dispenses with outward appearances without ever renouncing the physical (hence his numerous bruising encounters with giants and sorcerers), seems to always deny himself the chance of coming face to face with her. When Sancho offers him the clear chance of an encounter, Don Quixote is deflatingly prosaic: ‘…are your worship’s eyes in the nape of your neck, that do you not see it is they who are coming, shining like the sun at noonday?’ [6]. “For here he [i.e., the author of the apocryphal second part of Don Quixote] says, that the wife of my squire Sancho Panza is called Mari Gutierrez, whereas that is not her name but Tereza Panza; and he who errs in so principal a point, may very well be mistaken in the rest of the history” (Cervantes 949-50). This final mention of the name of Sancho’s wife only serves to further obfuscate the already murky question of sources in the novel, since Mari Gutierrez is her original name and it does appear in the original Don Quixote! [7]. Chapter 26 finds Don Quixote at Master Peter’s puppet theater where, minutes after lecturing the puppeteers on matters of verisimilitude and narrative accuracy, he hacks the puppets to pieces in an effort to “help” the two protagonists escape the Moors who pursue them: “I protest to you gentlemen, that hear me, that whatever has passed at this time seemed to me to pass actually and precisely so: I took Melisendra to be Melisendra; Don Gayfreros, Don Gayfreros; Marsilio, Marsilio; and Charlemagne, Charlemagne” (715). Confronted with representations, Don Quixote, whose entire life has become one big theatrical spectacle, an imitation, blacks out – looking at specular images is like looking at himself, but since he “is so maniacally imprisoned in himself” (Lukács 100), he cannot resist the implication that his own experiences can also be duplicated. [8]. A few examples: in Part 1, the meeting with the goatherds, which prompts Don Quixote into a discourse on the Golden Age, and the tragic love story of Marcela and Grisostomo in chapters 11 and 12, the setting of the lengthy critical discussion between the curate, the priest and the imprisoned Don Quixote in chapters 48 to 50 and the ensuing love story told by a goatherd in chapter 51. In part 2 we find the “adventure of the enamoured shepherd” in chapters 18 to 20 (with a pastoral within the pastoral, in the form of the wedding entertainment). In chapter 58 Don Quixote meets a group of young people who are trying to recreate the Arcadian way of life. And finally, in chapter 67, after being defeated by the [end page 139] Knight of the White Moon and forbidden to fight, Don Quixote decides to change genres, and live as a shepherd: “I could wish, O Sancho, we might turn shepherds, at least for the time I must live retired. I will buy sheep, and all other materials necessary for the pastoral employment, and I, calling myself the shepherd Quixotiz, and you the shepherd Panzino, we will range the mountains, the woods and the meadows, singing here and complaining there, drinking the liquid crystal of the fountains, of the limpid brooks, or of the mighty rivers” (Cervantes 1008). [9]. “In the Baroque, the soul entertains a complex relationship with the body, it discovers a vertiginous animality that gets it tangled in the pleats of matter, but also an organic or cerebral humanity (the degree of development) that allows it to rise up, and that will make it ascend over all the folds” (11). [10]. In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton only reluctantly separates love melancholy from religious melancholy, acknowledging nevertheless that “some do not obscurely make a distinct species of it, dividing love-melancholy into that whose object is women, and into the other whose object is God” (3.4.I.I). [11]. “Le discours mystique transforme le détail en mythe; il s’y accroche, il l’exorbite, il le multiplie, il le divinise. […] Ce pathos du détail (qui rejoint le délices et les tourments de l’amoureux ou de l’érudit) se marque d’abord en ceci que le minuscule découpe une suspension de sens dans le continuum de l’interprétation” (de Certeau 19). Thus, Dulcinea’s cryptic silence as well as her odd behavior do not cheapen her image; rather they inject it with a newfound sense of inscrutability.
References Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas. Word and phantasm in Western culture. Trans. Roland J. Martinez. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P/“Theory and History of Literature,” 69, 1993 Aristotle, “The Poetics.” Introduction to Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Random House, 1947: 624-67 Benjamin, Walter, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: Verso, 1998 Borges, Jorge Luis, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. London: Penguin, 1998: 88-95 Buber, Martin, Ecstatic Confessions. Collected and introduced by Martin Buber. Ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr. Trans. Esther Cameron. [end page 140] Cambridge: Harper and Row, 1985 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, La Folie du voir. De l’esthétique baroque. Paris: Galilée, 1986 Burton, Richard, The Anatomy of Melancholy. Ed. Holbrook Jackson. New York: New York Review Classics, 2001 de Certeau, Michel, La Fable mystique, 1. XVIe-XVIIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 1982 Cervantes, Saavedra Miguel de, Don Quixote de la Mancha. Trans. Charles Jarvis. Ed. E.C. Riley. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998 Lima, Luis Costa, The Dark Side of Reason. Fictionality and power. Trans. Paulo Henriques Britto. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992 Deleuze, Gilles, The Fold. Leibinz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993 James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience. A study in human nature. London: Longman, 1952 Klibansky, Raymond, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturne et la mélancolie. Études historiques et philosophiques: nature, religion, médecine et art. Trans. Fabienne Durand-Bogaert et Louis Évrard. Paris: Gallimard, 1989 Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel. A historico-philosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1977 McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1987 Nabokov, Vladimir, Lectures on Don Quixote. Ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983 Robert, Marthe, Origins of the Novel. Trans. Sacha Rabinovitch. Brighton: Harvester Press: 1980 ___, The Old and the New. From Don Quixote to Kafka. Trans. Carol Cosman. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977 Shklovsky, Victor, Theory of Prose. Trans. Benjamin Sher. Dalkey Archive Press, 1990 Starobinski, Jean, La mélancolie au miroir. Trois lectures de Baudelaire. Paris: Julliard, 1989 ___, “L’encre de la mélancolie.” La Nouvelle Revue Française, XI. 03 (1963): 410-23. Stoichiţă, Victor Ieronim, Efectul Don Quijote. Repere pentru o hermeneutică a imaginarului European (The Don Quixote Effect. For a hermeneutics of the Western imaginary). Trans. Ruxandra Demetrescu, Gina Vieru, Corina Mircan. Bucharest: Humanitas, 1995
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