From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
17.2 (1997): 135-37.
Copyright © 1997, The Cervantes Society of America
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Williamson, Edwin. Cervantes and the Modernists: The Question of
Influence. London: Tamesis, 1994. 148 pp.
Most literary scholars agree that Don
Quijote inaugurated the modern novel and had a profound influence on
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prose fiction. Vestiges of the masterpiece
can be found in the literature and culture of the twentieth century. Whether
Don Quijote has had a significant impact on Modernists and Post-Modernists
and whether Modernism, in turn, has revealed new layers of significance in
Cervantes's masterpiece are questions worthy of examination. Edwin Williamson
has brought together a collection of essays by noted scholars in several
fields that addresses these questions. The volume, which demonstrates the
international cultural attraction of Don Quijote in the twentieth
century, will engage Hispanists and generalists alike.
In his introduction Williamson presents a neat
outline that treats basic issues of influence and traces the impact of Don
Quijote from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. The novel has
been a model of literary parody over the centuries, has served as a prototype
for nineteenth-century Realism, and in our own century, it has had a broad
effect on various manifestations of Modernism and Post-Modernism. That the
Quijote unfolds new meanings at different points of time is a given,
but the question of whether meanings are inherent in the masterpiece or
inventions of subsequent readers is an interesting issue that this volume
treats.
The first essay by Nicholas Round utilizes
cognitive linguistics to study the Quijote as a semantically productive
linguistic expression that is evident in subsequent texts. Linguistic expressions
possess a formal pole and a semantic pole that are related to two modalities
of influence, “availability” and “appropriation.” Round
uses two texts to discuss the influence of Don Quijote, pointing out
the instances of appropriation, the conscious imitation of a model and
availability, formal elements that are widely available in culture.
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Next, Michael Wood presents a playful reversal
of influence and imagines that Cervantes has written the Quijote after
having read two Modernist writers, Borges and Nabokov. Twentieth-century
preoccupations of these Modernist authors can be found in Don Quijote
that makes it modern yet still classic.
Paul Julian Smith's imaginative and provocative
essay on Cervantes's El amante liberal and Goytisolo's
Reivindicación del conde Julián uses the sodomitical
scene as a model to characterize the contradictory relationship of the two
authors as “(be)hindsighted.” Smith believes that Goytisolo focussed
on Cervantean elements of transvestism, homosexual desire, gender and race,
and that the unspoken sodomitical spectacle of the Turkish empire in El
amante is displaced on to the substitute figure of a feminized Cornelio.
Some readers will find his ideas sensitive and penetrating, while others
will consider them bizarre and farfetched; none will find them boring.
The collection comes to life with Edward Hughes's
insightful study of prisons and pleasures of the mind that demonstrates common
motifs and patterns in Don Quijote and Proust's A la recherche.
He starts with Proust's comparison of Baron de Charlus to Don Quijote; the
Baron is a figure of tragic grandeur based on Proust's “Romantic”
reading of Don Quijote. Hughes then points out the authors' common
concerns of psychopathology of love, the ambivalent relation between fiction
and historicity, and imprisonment in literature. He presents Lukács's
ideas on Modernism, then offers some discerning observations on individual
and homocentric isolation in both works. Perceptive references to both texts
point out common constants and templates of human experience and ideological
anxieties of their times. Cervantistas who are not well versed on Proust
will benefit a good deal from this essay.
E. C. Riley's piece on heroism treats
“correspondences” of narrative technique, image, and theme in novels
by Joyce, Kafka, Orwell, Camus, and Martín Santos. It points out the
democratization of the classical hero Don Quijote as a prototype of the
“little man” of the twentieth century, a kindred spirit of Joyce's
Leopold Bloom. In a study on Cervantes, Thomas Mann, and Primo Levi, Michael
Bell points out the Modernists' endeavors to fashion myths and to counteract
scientific reason of Realism. Starting with Mann's celebrated 1934 essay
“Voyage with Don Quijote,” he demonstrates Mann's Cervantean
dimension with regard to themes of cultural relativity, exile, and
tolerance.
The highlight of this book, Edwin Williamson's
article on the Quixotic roots of Magic Realism, will be of value to Cervantistas,
Latin Americanists, and generalists alike. Williamson's perspicacious
interpretation of Carpentier shows how the author, a cultural nationalist,
chronicled the marvels of Latin America as an alternative to the rationalism
of Europe's Enlightenment. Carpentier preferred the spiritual values of the
Creole and indigenous traditions to the barren materialism of the utilitarian
Anglo Saxons, and the figure who best represented this preference was a revived,
romanticized Don Quijote, a suffering hero who did battle against materialism.
With acute references to Cien años Williamson demonstrates
how García Márquez adopted Borges's ironic post-Romantic view
of the Quijote and captured its irony and partial magic.
In another fine study, Philip Swanson outlines
Patricia Waugh and Edmund Smyth's views on Post-Modernism and demonstrates
convincingly that it is
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legitimate to read the Quijote in a Post-Modern manner, that Fuentes's
La cabeza de la hidra ought to be read in such a way, and that even
Don Segundo Sombra can be viewed somewhat from this perspective.
Dietrich Scheunemann starts with the premise
that Cervantes chose a medium that created Don Quijote's confusion in order
to do away with the “book-conditioned” perplexities in the minds
of his readers. He outlines the ideas of Hegel, Lukács, and Walter
Benjamin on the role Don Quijote in the development of the new genre,
the novel. For Hegel the Quijote was the modern bourgeois epic, for
Lukács it was the first great novel that stood at a time when humans
became lonely, and for Walter Benjamin solitude marks the novel and its
birthplace is the solitary individual.
Although Cervantistas may not learn much new
about the Quijote from this collection, they will profit from essays
of noted scholars on a wide variety of topics. Not only will they gain valuable
insights into twentieth-century works and movements, they will enhance their
knowledge of the influence that the Spanish masterpiece has had in this century.
Readers will be convinced that Don Quijote has transcended the ideological
limits of its age and that it has anticipated many aspects of modernity,
including Modernism and Post-Modernism.
| Robert L. Fiore |
| Michigan State University |
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Prepared with the help of Sue Dirrim |
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| Fred Jehle jehle@ipfw.edu | Publications of the CSA | H–Cervantes |
| URL: http://www.h-net.org/~cervantes/csa/articf97/fiore.htm | ||