—61→
Indiana University
One of the most distinctive features of Cervantes' novel Don Quijote is its concern for timing. The hero is renowned for his bad timing, which reveals itself to wonderful effect both in his conduct and in his speech. While the most prominent example of bad timing involves Don Quijote's belated quest to revive chivalry, a less obvious but more insidious form involves his premature boasts and promises. Don Quijote is doubly anachronistic for he speaks too soon while acting too late. The uniqueness of Cervantes' achievement, as Georg Lukács was the first to observe, consists in his having portrayed such anachronism at a crucial juncture in history59. Don Quijote is a timely exposure of bad timing, one that coincides with an increasing awareness of the irreversible nature of historical time and an increasing impatience with the static or circular time of epic. Just as Don Quijote's deeds betray the obsolescence of epic heroism so do his words reveal the obsolescence of epic time. If we attend carefully to the role of time in Don Quijote's language, we can better appreciate —62→ the relationship of the emergence of the novel to the emergence of a new historical consciousness in the early modern period60.
One of Don Quijote's most endearing and endangering traits is his
tendency to speak too soon. This tendency is epitomized in the superb phrase
with which the hero assumes his daunting obligation to free a suppliant
princess from the oppression of a terrible giant: «todo esto doy ya por hecho»
(I,
30, 37561). On another occasion, emboldened by his success
in single combat, Don Quijote «daba por
acabadas y a felice fin conducidas cuantas aventuras pudiesen sucederle de
allí adelante»
(II, 16, 135).
Later, having promised to champion the beauty of two young shepherdesses
against all comers, he assures Sancho «que con
la razón que va de mi parte puedes dar por vencidos a todos cuantos
quisieren contradecirla»
(II, 58, 493).
The danger of such premature past participles as «hecho», «acabado», or «vencido» becomes apparent when, in
fulfillment of his chivalrous promise to the «hermosísimas pastoras», Don Quijote
encounters a herd of bulls whose passage leaves him, in his own words,
«pisado y acoceado y
molido»
(II, 59, 496). The resilient
sense of destiny, of fulfilling a prescribed mission, that animates Don
Quijote's courage and distorts his grammar eventually yields to the stampeding
force of contingency that overwhelms his confidence in past models, especially
literary models. In the process, Cervantes supersedes the temporal order and
narrative logic of epic with a new understanding of time and sequence in
narrative.
No convention better represents the teleological urgency of epic than prophecy, and for that reason epic prophecy is a prime target of Cervantes' parody. Don Quijote's generous use of the past participle, of which we have just seen a few examples, amounts to an abbreviation of epic prophecy, and his prophecies invariably reveal themselves to be false promises, based not on arrogance but on irresponsible reading. The epic prophecy, in its unironic form, serves to impose an irresistible progression on narrative events and to identify a fixed endpoint or goal. This function is linked, particularly in the Renaissance, to the genealogical —63→ concerns of dynastic fiction, and together these factors, genealogy and teleology, constitute the logic of epic. Against this dynastic model of narrative, Don Quijote opposes a parodic array of false prophecies juxtaposed with an insistent meditation on «linaje» on the part of a hero who refuses his family name. Don Quijote speaks too soon because, in the contingent and open world of the novel, he can never inherit the epic destiny that he considers his birthright.
On two occasions Don Quijote expresses his sense of professional
vocation through a paraphrase of Virgil's famous formula of Roman destiny:
«parcere subiectis et debellare
superbos»
(Aen. VI,
85362). Upon taking leave of his host Don Diego de
Miranda whom he first encountered in the adventure of the lions, Don Quijote
wishes he could take Don Diego's son Don Lorenzo with him as an apprentice
knight errant «para enseñarle
cómo se han de perdonar los sujetos y supeditar y acocear los soberbios,
virtudes anejas a la profesión que yo profeso»
(II, 18, 165). This project of heroic pedagogy is a wonderful
conflation of epic and romance that reveals Don Quijote's devoutly imitative
notion of duty, His sense of epic mission is moreover prophetic since its
subtext is a prophecy. In book six of the
Aeneid, where Aeneas ventures to the
underworld, his father Anchises conjures up a prophetic roll call of Roman
history during which he foretells Rome's predilection for the arts of
government:
|
Through the use of the imperative «memento» and the future «erunt», Virgil exhorts his readers to remember the future, that is to have confidence in the recurrence of the past. The philosophical basis for such confidence is the doctrine of reincarnation and eternal return that Anchises expounded as the prologue to his prophecy, The epic sense of recurrent time is precisely what inspires Don Quijote's supreme confidence in destiny despite the manifestly errant and unpredictable style of his adventures. Unlike Augustus, Cervantes' hero never manages to impose a «pax Romana» on his hostile environment, but he does repeat his motto of «perdonar a los humildes y castigar a —64→ los soberbios» in a later episode (II, 52, 444). His prophecies are repeated rather than fulfilled.
While the historical past is irreversible, the fictional past is
recurrent, but Don Quijote does not make this distinction63. He attributes to destiny what can only be achieved by a
narrator. One way for the novelist to usurp the role of destiny is to order
events so that characters anticipate certain episodes of the story without
having any prescience of history. For instance, at the house of don Diego, Don
Quijote announces his intention of visiting the Cave of Montesinos, which he
does five chapters later. Then in his descent into the cave, which is
reminiscent of Aeneas' catabasis64, he claims to
meet the hero Montesinos, who hails him as «el
gran caballero de quien tantas cosas tiene profetizadas el sabio
Merlín»
(II, 23). The role of
Merlin's prophecies is here primarily retrospective in their reminder of
Bradamante's visit to Merlin's cave in canto III of the
Furioso, but they do look forward to a later
episode of the novel where the Duke and Duchess stage a nocturnal procession in
which their steward impersonates Merlin the Magician and delivers a prophecy in
conspicuously halting meter (II, 35). This episode in turn is based on the Duke
and Duchess' knowledge of chivalric literary tradition65. In this way, Don Quijote is
able to relive the past but only because of the arbitrary intervention of his
hosts, who are agents of the novelist, and not because of any force of
destiny.
The best-known instance of narrative prophecy in
Don Quijote involves Sancho's often-promised
island. When Don Quijote recruits his squire, he promises to make him governor
of an island, and Sancho's very first speech in the novel is a plea to his
master not to forget his promise (I, 7). Of course Don Quijote has no means
whatsoever to fulfill this promise, but the anticipation of Sancho's island is
sustained throughout the first part by various reminders which are also
narrative foreshadowings of the second part. The best example of such a
technique occurs in the Sierra Morena episode where Dorotea impersonates the
Princess Micomicona and implores Don Quijote's aid against her imaginary
adversary Pandofilando de la Fosca Vista. Complaining that
—65→
the
evil giant has usurped her realm, she insists that only Don Quijote can restore
her to the throne, just as her own father prophesied: «que todo esto ha de suceder a pedir de boca, pues así lo
dejó profetizado Tinacrio el Sabidor, mi buen
padre»
(I, 30, 372). Here Dorotea speaks
too soon, but with perfect awareness of doing so. Don Quijote, however, replies
in all sincerity that he will be happy to dispatch the giant and that he
considers the job as good as done: «que todo esto
doy ya por hecho». What appealed to Dorotea, and thus to
Cervantes, as a fantastic parody of chivalric adventures appears to Don Quijote
as a fact or «hecho» whose
grammatical status as a past participle somehow ensures its reality. For a
naive reader, the past is factual: the past tense converts fantasy to fact66.
While Don Quijote and Dorotea exchange their false prophecies,
one sincere and one parodic, Sancho begins to worry about his future as a
governor since his master has chastely refused Dorotea's offer of her hand and
her throne as a reward for his imaginary victory. To reconcile the knight and
his squire, Dorotea assures the latter that God will provide for him:
«tened confianza en Dios, que no os ha de
faltar un estado donde viváis como un
príncipe»
(376). Whereas Dorotea
has no reason to assume that Sancho will ever live like a prince, the Duke and
Duchess vindicate her prediction, which they know from their reading of part I,
when they appoint Sancho the governor of Barataria in part II. Dorotea proposes
and Cervantes disposes. The novel, while disclaiming any influence over
historical time, can effortlessly arrange narrative time so that events recall
and foreshadow other events within the story.
To assert the autonomy of narrative time even further, the novel can also disprove its own prophecies, especially when they have been fulfilled by apocryphal continuators. This occurs in Don Quijote when the hero, his hopes of chivalric glory trampled on by the herd of bulls, arrives at an inn where he discovers Avellaneda's version of the second part of his adventures (II, 59). Avellaneda had followed the lead of the final chapter of the first part of the novel and sent his bogus Don Quijote to participate in the tournament of Saint George in Saragossa, the goal that Don Quijote frequently assigns himself in the second —66→ part of Cervantes' novel (II, 4; II, 18). However, when he reads the false version of his adventures, Don Quijote, «el verdadero», abruptly changes course from Saragossa to Barcelona, thus discrediting Avellaneda and his false prophecies. At the same time, Cervantes discredits the force of teleology, showing that his story does not tend to any fixed destination and is never bound to the past, not even to its own past. The geography of Cervantes' novel is also quite original since, as many earnest editors have pointed out, one doesn't ordinarily go from La Mancha to Saragossa by way of Montesinos' Cave. Apparently, they don't appreciate that Don Quijote is a knight errant. The novelist draws his own map just as he measures his own time, independently of any «real», historical sequence.
Don Quijote's problematic relationship to the past reveals itself most strikingly in chapter 21 of the first part, a chapter which is famous primarily for its beginning, although the ending illustrates equally well Don Quijote's unique mentality. This chapter first recounts the hero's conquest of the «Yelmo de Mambrino», an episode inspired by Ariostan and Virgilian precedents67. Since the Virgilian intertext, Aeneid VIII, describes Vulcan's gift of prophetic armor to Aeneas, Cervantes' «yelmo» may well recall the prophetic pretensions of epic68. In any event, the auspicious acquisition of the pseudo-helmet at the outset of the chapter inspires Don Quijote in the remaining pages to launch into an insanely ingenious narrative of chivalric love and glory that culminates with a disillusioned discourse on genealogy. It is this story within the story, the most detailed example of Don Quijote's tendency to speak too soon, that best demonstrates the novel's consciousness of narrative time.
Secure in the possession of his coveted helmet and prompted by
Sancho to consider ways to rescue his heroism from anonymity
—67→
and
oblivion, Don Quijote tells the story of a knight who should go to court, will
meet the king, does win the love of the princess and did inherit the throne.
This remarkable manipulation of tense, noticed but rarely explained by the
commentators69, captures one facet of Don Quijote's «locura», his impulse to circumvent time in
language. His madness merits a grammatical analysis. Frida Weber de Kurlat has
already provided an excellent discussion of the syntax and style of this
episode without however acknowledging the peculiarity of the verb tenses70. She does point
out that the tempo of Don Quijote's miniature romance is quite swift in
distinct contrast to the dragging pace of ordinary chivalric romance. The swift
pace in turn accentuates the impact of the tense shift, tracing a rapid
regression from future to past. At the outset of the story, the anonymous
protagonist will be greeted enthusiastically by the king and his court, who
will recognize him for his past deeds: «Este es
-dirán- el que venció en singular batalla al gigantazo Brocabruno
de la Gran Fuerza; el que desencantó al Gran Mameluco de
Persia...»
. (255). This is an example of
hypothetical direct discourse where the preterite form of «venció» and «desencantó» serves not to describe a
fact but to propose an hypothesis, an unrealized possibility. Like the
premature past participle, the hypothetical preterite is a distinctive trait of
Don Quijote's grammar and one that achieves special prominence in this episode.
Another feature worth noting is the use of «haber» as an auxiliary of the future tense,
as if the future were obligated to follow a predetermined pattern. Once at
court, the knight will meet the king's daughter, «que ha de ser una de las más fermosas y acabadas doncellas
que en gran parte de lo descubierto de la tierra a duras penas se pueda
hallar»
. Naturally, the two of them «han de quedar presos y enlazados en la intricable red
amorosa»
. In these examples, the auxiliary
«haber» has the same sense as
the adverbial «sin duda» of
the following sentence: «Desde allí le
llevarán, sin duda, a algún cuarto del
palacio»
. By means of such verbal determinism, Don
Quijote claims affinity
—68→
with the epic hero, exemplar of destiny,
even as he recounts a romance adventure.
As the narrative sequence advances, events that were originally
foretold in the future tense are now recalled in the past tense. When the
knight tries on his scarlet mantle, Don Quijote assures us, «si bien pareció armado, tan bien y mejor ha de parecer en
farseto»
. The knight's armed appearance was and
remains an hypothesis, a figment of the narrator's imagination; but as the
narrative evolves and the knight changes clothes, his original appearance
acquires an unexpected historicity attested to by the preterite,
«pareció», just as his
new appearance is guaranteed by the deterministic future, «ha de parecer». In this way, Cervantes
exposes the mimetic illusion of narrative sequence: if the events of a story
follow in order then we are to assume that they really happen. The verb
«suceder», from the Latin
«succedo», means both to
follow and to happen, and the heading of chapter 21 promises us the capture of
Mambrino's helmet as well as «otras cosas
sucedidas a nuestro invencible caballero». As Vicente Gaos
points out in the notes to his edition, nothing else happens to Don Quijote in
this chapter besides his conversation with Sancho. Thus, the succession
mentioned in the chapter heading must refer to the rapid and rigorous sequence
of events that Don Quijote recounts and which he gradually transforms from
fantasy into fact. In effect, to return to our example of the knight who
changes clothes, the relationship between «pareció armado» and «ha de parecer» mirrors the sequential
relationship between part I and part II of the novel. When part I is finished,
its fiction becomes an historical fact to be evoked and imitated in part
II.
Inexorably, the present tense invades this hypothetical romance,
only to take on an hypothetical quality of its own. The first sentence whose
main verb is conjugated in the present describes the obligatory war between the
knight's royal host and his enemy: «Y lo bueno
es que este rey, o príncipe, o lo que es, tiene una muy reñida
guerra con otro tan poderoso como él, y el caballero huésped le
pide (al cabo de algunos días que ha estado en su corte) licencia para
ir a servirle en aquella guerra dicha»
(256). Through the verb «tener», Don Quijote asserts that the war is
in progress at the time of narration, no doubt to confer a greater immediacy
and verisimilitude on the events of his story, and yet the verb «ser», also conjugated in the present,
expresses the vaguest of hypotheses, as emphasized by the disjunctive
—69→
«o»:
«este rey, o príncipe, o lo que
es»71
. This indeterminate present recalls
a remark by Montaigne in «De la vanité» where he justifies
his nostalgia for the past on the basis that «les choses presentes mesmes, nous ne les tenons que par la
fantaisie»
. Don Quijote's present tense has only a
tenuous hold on reality. Moreover, in conjunction with the present, he
introduces the perfect tense «ha
estado» implying that the knight has been and remains at
court up to the moment of narration. In this way, the events of the story
achieve an unreal simultaneity that puts them outside of historical time72.
As the story progresses, the tenses regress further. Having
shifted from future to present, Don Quijote decides to conjugate the main verb
in the past when he dispatches his knight to the battle front:
«Ya se es ido el
caballero»
(257). Then he adds a very
curious phrase that raises the problem of tense and truth. When the triumphant
knight returns from war and marries the «infanta», the king initially disapproves but
quickly changes his mind «porque se vino a
averiguar que el tal caballero es hijo de un valeroso rey de no sé
qué reino porque creo que no debe de estar en el
mapa»
. Here, the third-person preterite,
«se vino», is linked to
verification, «averiguar»,
while the first-person present of «no
sé» and «creo» expresses ignorance or conjecture.
This is a classic case of «discours» invading
«histoire» in Benveniste's terms73. Yet, what becomes of the third-person present,
«es», which is meant to be
historically true, verified, and yet is inevitably contaminated by the
surrounding uses of the conjectural or indeterminate present? In effect, as
narrator, Don Quijote betrays quite clearly that tense is incapable of
verification; everything is «discours» rather than
«histoire». This lesson is summed up concisely in the chaotic
concluding phrase when Don Quijote, now identified with his knight-protagonist,
promises a reward to Sancho, now identified with the protagonist's squire:
«el caballero... casa a su escudero con una
doncella de la infanta, que será, sin duda, la que fue tercera en sus
amores, que es hija de un duque muy principal»
. That
suits Sancho just
—70→
fine, even though he's already married. The
remarkable conflation of future, past and present («será, fue, es») represents a
quasi-religious or mythic sensibility which transports the storyteller to a
world beyond time and certainly beyond history74.
The ease with which Don Quijote merges with his protagonist and
inherits the crown of his own invention depends upon his essentially epic sense
of time. At the conclusion of his miniature romance, both Don Quijote and
Sancho share the conviction that the whole adventure will come true just as
foretold, «todo, al pie de la letra, ha de
suceder por vuestra merced llamándose 'el Caballero de la Triste
Figura'»
. While Sancho trusts in onomastic
determinism, his master bases his conviction on past experience:
«No lo dudes, Sancho, porque del mesmo y por
los mesmos pasos que esto he contado suben y han subido los caballeros andantes
a ser reyes y emperadores»
. In other words, the past
authorizes the future, just as it did for Virgil's audience. Heeding Anchises'
advice, Don Quijote remembers the future and anticipates the past. Of course,
Don Quijote is demented, and in the course of the novel he will painfully learn
the archaism of epic time.
The problem of time in Don Quijote is linked, sequentially as it were, to the problem of genealogy. No sooner has the hero finished his nostalgically prophetic story, than he begins to doubt his future, fearing that his royal father-in-law might inquire into his family background.
| (258) | ||
For all his faith in the past, Don Quijote has no past. He has
only had his name for twenty chapters. The dilemma of «linaje» proves so acute that it threatens to
deprive the hero of his hard earned reward: «así que por esta falta temo perder lo que mi brazo tiene
bien merecido»
. The use of «merecido» to describe an hypothetical
marriage with a nonexistent bride is one of the
—71→
more spectacular
instances of the premature past participle in Cervantes' novel and yet another
reminder that the past and the future coincide in Don Quijote's mind as in his
speech.
For this very reason, this temporal coincidence, Don Quijote does not allow his genealogical predicament to prevail for long over his epic faith. Even as he acknowledges his lack of noble lineage, he reserves the hope that his friendly enchanter, who is also his biographer, might discover a forgotten king somewhere in his family tree:
|
podría ser que el sabio que escribiese mi historia deslindase de tal manera mi parentela y decendencia, que me hallase quinto o sesto nieto de rey. |
| (258) | ||
This implausible ambition for royal lineage, to be discovered by a magician-narrator, parodies the epic topos of genealogical prophecy initiated by Virgil in the sixth book of the Aeneid, where Anchises reveals to Aeneas his glorious descendants including Augustus, Virgil's patron. This topos flourished in the dynastic epics of the Renaissance such as the Orlando Furioso, where Ariosto introduces various prophetic figures including Merlin's apprentice Melissa, who foretells to Bradamante her illustrious progeny culminating in Ariosto's boss, the Duke of Ferrara (OF. 3.23-62). Such self-interested reading of the past, as Cervantes suggests, is no more reliable than Don Quijote's genealogical fantasies. The dynastic past may be a verbal conquest rather than an historical one75.
Impatient as always, Don Quijote cannot wait for a hypothetical
biographer to discover his glorious ancestors. Instead, he does so himself in
his famous debate with the Canon of Toledo over the value of the chivalric
romances (I, 49-50)76. To refute the canon's
insistence on the inauthenticity of chivalric fiction, Don Quijote responds
with a roll call of exemplary knights chosen indiscriminately from history and
fiction, resulting in a chaotic «mezcla de
verdades y mentiras»
(585). This
relativistic confusion scandalizes the classicizing canon who, earlier in their
conversation, exhorted Don Quijote to satisfy his appetite for narrative by
reading history rather than romance (581-82). The true scandal of Don Quijote's
speech is his eager recognition of
—72→
the uncomfortable proximity of
history and fiction. Don Quijote believes implicitly in the past tense of
narrative, and generic distinctions between romance, epic, history, and
chronicle are of little significance to him. He professes a naive belief in the
past, and the very consistency, the perverse logic of his profession exposes
the credulity and hypocrisy of his adversaries, who seek to segregate history
from fictional forms of narrative77. Among the many exemplary figures whom Don Quijote
alleges in favor of chivalry is a supposedly historical personage from whom he
claims linear descent:
| (584) | ||
This genealogical invention, though more humble than his earlier fantasy of royal descent, does serve to authorize Don Quijote's past and to justify his reading habits. Moreover, by linking himself genealogically to his heterogeneous list of chivalric models, Don Quijote poses a serious problem to those who would differentiate between history and fiction. In effect, he tells the canon, «If Amadis is a fiction, then so am I»; and who can argue with him? The reality of the past is a verbal construct which shares the narrative techniques of fiction78.
By claiming linear descent from the Spanish knight Gutierre Quijada, who ought to have spelled his name more carefully, Don Quijote reiterates his faith in epic logic. For the epic often resorts to genealogical exposition in order to impel its hero along an inexorable path to a destined goal. The most prominent example in Renaissance epic might be the episode from Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata where the Magus of Ascalon shows Rinaldo a vision of his forebears so as to convince him to rejoin the Crusader army and conquer Jerusalem (GL. 17.65-82). In other words, the family line and the story line run parallel in epic. Cervantes emphasizes this parallelism through lexical parallelism.
—73→In the celebrated episode of Maese Pedro, Don Quijote admonishes
the digressive narrator of the puppet show, «Seguid vuestra historia línea recta y no os metáis
en las curvas o transversales»
(II, 26,
236). The events of a story ought to follow in sequence just as directly
as the generations of the Quijote family (or Quijada). Of course, neither Don
Quijote's imaginary family nor his convoluted romances obey the logic of the
«línea recta», but
epic teleology does depend on linear progress. The epic may indeed depart from
its linear path to return to a point of origin but never by means of
unpredictable digression, for epic movement is predetermined. By preferring
curves to straight lines, the novel disavows epic determinism.
As he pursues his defense of the romances against the canon's hostility, Don Quijote reveals the extravagance of linear logic. How could romances be false, he declares indignantly, when they respect both chronology and genealogy:
|
¿habían de ser mentira, y más llevando tanta apariencia de verdad, pues nos cuentan el padre, la madre, la patria, los parientes, la edad, el lugar y las hazañas, punto por punto y día por día...? |
| (587) | ||
Chivalric romance pursues its story line just as scrupulously as
it retraces the family line, point by point. Of course, Don Quijote's esthetic
values are highly suspect and the punctuality that appeals to him must have
infuriated his author, whose style is often sparing in details79. Don
Quijote himself, when recounting the story of the «lago hirviente», abbreviates certain details
in his description of the damsels of the castle, since to observe the customary
precision of the romances «sería nunca
acabar»
(I, 50, 588). Here, as narrator,
Don Quijote demonstrates an awareness of time that he lacks as a reader.
Ordinarily, he never worries about running out of time because, in his mind,
past, present, and future are contemporary. What Cervantes achieves through Don
Quijote's unorthodox apology for romance is to parody the reader's belief in
the continuity of past and present, to challenge our faith in the unbroken line
of narrative.
In effect, Don Quijote's parody of the continuous, recurrent time of epic amounts to an expression of historicism, of the new consciousness of historical change that stood in tension with the —74→ classicism of Renaissance humanism80. There is nothing new in discerning the tension between historicism and classicism in Don Quijote's dilemma81, but it seemed appropriate to locate the tension precisely in that element of style that is most concerned with the passage of time; namely, verb tense. The extraordinary consciousness of narrative time in Don Quijote, manifested in the hero's grammar, can be thought of as the novelistic equivalent of historicism, just as it can help to differentiate the novel form from the decidedly ahistoricist genre of epic. After Guicciardini, Montaigne, and other Renaissance thinkers had formulated a new emphasis on relativism, contingency and fortune, and after Renaissance painters had cultivated the illusion of depth and distance through perspective, Cervantes wrote Don Quijote, where the past forfeits its claims on the present. Thus, at its inception, the novel was a «symbolic form» symbolizing a new sense of time and a new awareness of the broken line of history82.