From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
6.1 (1986): 39-49.
Copyright © 1986, The Cervantes Society of America
Genre Definition and Multiplicity in Don
Quixote
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“no he podido yo contravenir a la orden de Naturaleza;
que en ella cada cosa engendra su
semejante.”1 |
he following remarks on
the subject of genre definition and multiplicity in Don Quixote are
meant as a contribution to our understanding of the somewhat larger question
of the nature of mimesis in the seventeenth century. The argument which these
pages are intended to support is that there was at the time of Cervantes
and Descartes a transformation in the concept of mimesis from that of
imitation to that of representation. In this context, I hope
to place Cervantes with respect to the practice of mimesis-as-representation,
and to its theory (hence also to the philosophy of Descartes), in a way which
owes something to the interpretation put forward by Michel Foucault at the
opening of Les Mots et les choses, yet which nonetheless differs from
his in significant ways. Foucault situates Cervantes at the edge of the old
Renaissance order of things; Don Quixote, he says, is the champion of similitude,
or in his words, “the hero of the
Same.”2 The transition
1 Don
Quijote de la Mancha, I, “Prólogo.” I follow the edition
in the Obras completas, II (Madrid: Aguilar, 1970), p. 1211a.
2 In English
as The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 46.
39
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ANTHONY J.
CASCARDI |
Cervantes |
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to the new order of representation is marked, he says, by a “radical
discontinuity”; between Cervantes and Descartes would on this account
stand an archaeological abyss. Closer reflection on Don Quixote, however,
suggests that this relationship might be formulated in a different way. The
consideration of genre, its related theoretical context, and the allied problem
of point of view which I propose here, would suggest that Don Quixote
takes us to the limit of mimesis-as-imitation and in so doing projects the
need for a philosophy of representation, which Descartes would finally supply.
The implication of this interpretation for a reading of Descartes, which
is only intimated here, is nonetheless of parallel importance: if the
Quixote projects the need for a theory of representation, then the
primary bearer of that theory, the Cartesian subject, is fashioned by the
process which takes quixotic imitation to its
limit.3
One may begin from Cervantes' own invocation
of the “order of Nature” in the Prologue to Part I, which I have
cited as the epigraph to this study, and move from there to consider the
ways in which his own text contravenes that order. Nature engenders only
likeness; the “natural” is the principle by which the world is
a self-generating succession of sameness. If this is so, then the
Quixote would on almost any account have to be considered the most
unnatural of kinds. On even a cursory inspection, it appears to break
Nature's law of similitude by mixing a vast diversity of kinds. Literarily,
it includes the majority of generic possibilities available in Cervantes'
day: pastoral, chivalresque, novela morisca, autoportraiture, the
comedia (or at least Master Pedro's puppet show and the itinerant
“Cortes de la Muerte”); lyric, narrative, and burlesque verse;
an italianate novella, the picaresque, Ciceronian-styled dialogue, Erasmian
adages, political prose, letters, epigrams, as well as adventures modeled
on Classical epic and Byzantine romance. Since some of these candidate genera
are distinguished on the basis of form, some by theme or subject matter,
and others by some particular combination of aspects of these, any conception
of genre capable of assimilating them all would have to work on a principle
of heterogeneity, which in turn would prompt one to ask whether the novel
was a form capable of generic distinction at all. The multiplicity of genres
we find in the Quixote is a challenge to the idea of genre as such
—that there is an order of
3 For
a reading compatible with the one proposed here, see Jean-Luc Nancy,
“Mundus est fabula,” MLN 93 (1978), 635-53.
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kindness to things— and is thus a threat to the order of nature,
which might be thought of as the essential kinship of things; and
while it does not defeat the idea of genre it does in fact transform it in
significant ways. That transformation is shaped by the fact that, whatever
else one may say about Don Quixote, it is itself of a single kind,
a vast panoply of natural and literary “kindness” drawn together
into a single genre.
Thus the Quixote might be thought of
as the limit-case of what Rosalie Colie described as the Renaissance passion
for “inclusionism.”4 Thinking of
its diversity rather than its singularity, one might legitimately compare
it to the encyclopedia, the miscellany, or to the museum-like collection
of strange and rare marvels popular elsewhere in Europe at the time, the
Wunderkammer.5 And indeed the
Quixote's striking “inclusionism” is precisely that aspect
which we would not ordinarily expect a theory of genre to be able to admit.
The guiding assumption of genre theory, from the Classical past to the
post-structuralist present, has consistently been that generic combinations
and mixtures are inadmissible, so that when a mixture of kinds does occur,
such as happens in the Quixote, one is obliged to find a new generic
label for that kind, thus preserving the principle of genre through what
has been referred to as “genre's law,” i.e. that kinds are naturally
simple —as Cervantes says, Nature only engenders likeness— and
must not be mixed.6
This classical and potentially totalitarian
requirement remained a guiding assumption at the theoretical level throughout
the Renaissance, despite the increasing prevalence of mixed kinds. Indeed,
Renaissance writers came to specialize in hybrid genres and generic mixtures,
even if the practice flew in the face of the classical norms —witness
the emblem book, which drew together the icon and the adage; the florilegium,
which combined different species of verse; witness also the essay-book, such
as Montaigne's (where each essay is itself an assemblage of diverse citations
and sententiae), and the anatomy, such as Burton's on the popular
subject of melancholy. If
4 The
Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 31.
5 On the
Wunderkammer and the Renaissance passion for collections, see Steven
Mullaney, “Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal
of Cultures in the Late Renaissance,” Representations 3 (1983),
40-67.
6 See Jacques
Derrida, “La Loi du genre,” Glyph 7 (1980), 176-201; English
trans. “The Law of Genre,” ibid., 202-29.
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ANTHONY J.
CASCARDI |
Cervantes |
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the Quixote represents the limit of the Renaissance capacity for mixed
forms, that is in part because the mixing of kinds which occurs in it is
not literary alone: the order of natural kindness is also transgressed in
the realm of material objects (e.g., the baciyelmo) and the sexes
(e.g. the bearded waiting-women of Part
II).7 Thus rather than say that the mixture
of genres was plainly inadmissible in the Renaissance, it would be more accurate
to say that such combinations were feared unnatural, for the potentially
monstrous or ridiculous offspring which might result. This is the worry
engendered by the opening lines of Horace's epistle to the Pisos: “If
a painter chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse, and to spread
feathers of many colors over limbs picked up here and there, so that what
begins as a lovely woman ends in a black and ugly fish, could you
. . . refrain from
laughing?”8 Thus when generic combinations
are defended as single genres, such as in Lope de Vega's “Arte
nuevo de hacer comedias,” the unity of the mixed kind, which
might be considered alien to the natural order of things, could only be defended
under the rubric of the “new.” The same is implicitly true of the
Quixote, which institutionalized the novel, which is to say, the genre
of the new.
By virtue of its generic mixtures, the
Quixote founds a genre which challenges the order of nature; according
to Mikhail Bakhtin, this generic phenomenon is one with the novel's larger
multiplicity, its polyphonic mixture of stylistic voices and registers, and
its consistently anticanonical
status.9 The Quixote thus inaugurates
a genre which continually contravenes the principles of literary mimesis
according to which Nature is an order of self-engendering likeness the essential
idea of which the artist reproduces in his work. In this way, it projects
the need for a concept of genre which Renaissance
7 0n the
latter, see Arthur Efron, “Bearded Waiting
Women, Lovely Lethal Female Piratemen: Sexual Boundary Shifts in Don Quixote,
Part II,” Cervantes 2 (1982),
155-64. See also the reply of Cesáreo Bandera,
“Healthy Bodies in Not-So-Healthy
Minds,” ibid., 165-70, and Efron's rejoinder,
“On Some Central Issues in Quixote
Criticism: Society and the Sexual Body,” 171-80. The problem which
Bakhtin would focus in terms of the absolute novelty of the novel and its
anticanonical status (see note 9 below) seems implicit in these
discussions.
8 Horace, “Ars
Poetica.” My translation slightly modifies that of H. R. Fairclough
in the Loeb Classical Library Edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1970), p. 451.
9 See the essays
collected in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1981).
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notions of mimesis-as-imitation were unable to supply; indeed, it exhausts
the classical notions from which the very concept of genre was derived —the
Aristotelian notion of the genus or “category” and the Platonic
notion of the eídos or “idea.” If the
eídos as “idea” is also a name for “species”
or “form,”10 then the phenomenal
things of nature might be thought of as imitations —sometimes
images, eídolon— of their respective ideas. (In a less
orthodox interpretation, this mode of mimesis might be thought of as a form
of animation, so that Ginés de Pasamonte, being of the species
“picaro,” might be said to be animated by the picaresque genre
or idea.) But since ideas are necessarily simple, it would be difficult to
say that the Quixote, in its multiplicity, is the imitation
of anything, least of all the “imitation of an idea.” Certainly
Cervantes' novel contains many passages which may be regarded as
“imitations,” even as imitations of nature if by this is meant
the more or less faithful description of the natural world; but the book
as a whole, the novel in its singular multiplicity, cannot be the imitation
of nature if only because it is inconceivable for there to be so heterogeneous
a single idea available for imitation at all. If it is true that one consequence
of the mixing of genres in the Quixote was not the creation of a
miscellany or encyclopedia but rather the formation of a newly synthetic
genre, then the Quixote marks the limit-point of the Platonic-idealist
notion according to which works of art and the world are held to be imitations
of ideas.
If the Quixote can be thought of as
the most extreme moment in the Renaissance reevaluation of the heritage of
Platonic idealism, it does not however stand alone in this project. In
reinterpreting Plato, and in reevaluating Aristotle as well, Renaissance
thinkers came gradually to doubt the assumption that nature could be understood
in terms of categories or ideas independent of it. The broad result of this
was a new empiricism, or more accurately a new descriptivism, which
shows up in places as diverse as the essays of Francis Bacon, the natural
philosophy of Telesio (De rerum natura juxta propria principia), the
Spanish picaresque, and in genre painting in both Holland and
Spain.11 As Ernst Cassirer remarked in this
regard, the principles of
10 See
F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms (New York: New York University
Press, 1967), s. v. eídos (pp. 46-51).
11 For a discussion
of description germane to some of the problems addressed here, see Svetlana
Alpers, “Describe or Narrate? A Problem in Realistic Representation,”
New Literary History 8 (1976-77), 15-41; “Seeing as Knowing:
A Dutch Connection,” Humanities in Society 1 (1978); and The
Art of [p. 44] Describing: Dutch Art
in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
With regard to the Spanish picaresque, see Carlos Blanco Aguinaga,
“Cervantes y la picaresca: Notas sobre dos tipos de realismo,”
Nueva revista de filología hispánica 11 (1957),
313-42.
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ANTHONY J.
CASCARDI |
Cervantes |
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nature were no longer thought to lie in the Platonic or Aristotelian notions
of “form” and “matter,” “actuality” and
“potentiality,” and so forth; rather, nature was to be investigated,
as Telesio said, “according to its own principles,” and those
principles were to be sought in its “constant, concrete, and universally
uniform phenomena.”12 The task which
remained, and which neither Bacon nor Telesio would accomplish, was to provide
a totalizing perspective for this empiricism, and so also to provide a
theoretical order capable of accounting for nature as “constant,”
“concrete” and, not least, “universally uniform” (i.
e. lawful), while still admitting the diversity of kinds proper to it. If
an essayist like Bacon turns our attention toward the surface of a world
which in its essential diversity resembles that of the Quixote, then
one would have to look to Descartes for a theory of nature capable also of
accounting for the synthetic totality of kinds.
The vision of nature as a single realm which
embraces a diversity of kinds is possible where nature is seen not as an
object of (or for) imitation, but rather as an object of (or for) representation.
By “representation” I mean in part the technique whereby an object
is fixed and set before us, and we set back from it in order mentally to
posit it, so that through the frame or lens of vision we may view that object
as a whole, a structured arrangement of parts. Accordingly, I would not describe
the Quixote in terms of the “imitation of nature,”
notwithstanding the diversity of kinds which it includes, and notwithstanding
also the fact that it is itself unable to provide a theory for its own generic
multiplicity. The limitation by which the novel is unable to provide a theory
of its own generic status may be understood in several ways, all of which
are central to the broader relationship of mimesis-as-imitation and
mimesis-as-representation: it may be seen as an aspect of the generic novelty
of the novel (as Bakhtin would have it), or as a corollary of the fact that
the place from which any proper theory is articulated must be external to
the world which it projects. This is the source of the mutual and perhaps
necessary exclusions that operate between theory and the novel, or
12 The
Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), p. 146.
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between representation and imitation —beginning with Cervantes himself,
who as E. C. Riley reminded us had no theory of the
novel13 (but only a novel – the
first), and continuing to the antagonistic approaches of Unamuno (who chose
quixotic imitation, principally in the manner of the novel) and Ortega y
Gasset (whose choice was for representation, with its ancillary notions of
“perspective,” “point of view,” and “concept,”
which the Quixote demands but does not itself supply).
If the novel is the representation of a world,
then genre is like a mind-set and may be thought of as a mental frame;
accordingly, the generic multiplicity of the novel, like the multiple voices
and competing perspectives assembled in it, is unified by a governing point
of view. Ortega y Gasset and Leo Spitzer, in their respective writings on
perspectivism, tell us that this happens, but do not exactly say how; Spitzer
is, moreover, potentially misleading when he presents the resolution of
perspectivism as an act of God, operating through his surrogate, the artist
(“we have been led from a plethora of names, words, languages, from
polynomasia, polyetymologia and polyglottism, to the perspectivism of the
artist Cervantes who knows that the transparence of language is a fact for
God alone . . . . [T]he hero is Cervantes, the artist
himself, who combines a critical and illusionistic art according to his free
will”14).
In order to understand the process by which
the Quixote projects a point of view lying at the limit of the competing
perspectives which it contains (much as the Cartesian subject stands at the
limit of a world), I want to consider Colie's extension of the principles
of genre criticism to the domain of lived experience. Colie was, if not the
first, then certainly among the best of critics of the Renaissance to make
this extension, but in light of the perspectival and generic multiplicity
of the Quixote some of the limitations of her approach may be exposed.
If genre is regarded as a regulative ideal, underwritten by a set of natural
or normative congruences for the matching of topic and treatment, subject
and form, then one may suppose that the same would hold true for the
appropriateness of literary genres to the representation of perceptions and
experiences; the link between the two would be provided by the notion of
culture as the transmission of
13 See
Cervantes's Theory of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1962).
14 “Linguistic
Perspectivism in the Don Quijote,” in Linguistics and Literary
History (1948; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp.
68, 69.
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ANTHONY J.
CASCARDI |
Cervantes |
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such norms (cf. Cicero's much quoted remark from the De optimo genere
oratorum, “in the kinds, each to his own tone and voice, which the
educated recognize”15). But, as Colie
says of the Quixote, the prior expectations which are brought with
the literary organization of experience are in constant competition with
experience itself. Some episodes of the novel arrange themselves according
to expected generic patterns, but many break with the established principles
of decorum or ridicule the adherence to any generically guided mode of action.
We find goatherds who live the life that pastoralists must; Ginés
de Pasamonte is indeed the picaro he first defines himself as. Yet in the
case of someone like Grisóstomo, who plays out the role which literature
would have assigned him, a genre is like a fate. And the generic expectations
which the principal character of the book brings to bear on the world are
severely threatened by his experience in it, even if they are not immediately
shattered by it. When Don Quixote prepares to do battle with what he sees
as enemy armies or giants, he is, according to the principles of the chivalresque
genre, deserving of whatever beatings he may get. Nonetheless he remains
faithful to the principles of the genre in which he is cast. His genre is
what Colie calls his “fix” on the world, or something we might
call his perspective or point of view, provided, that is, we grant a point
of view sufficient power to rule a form of life.
The limitation of Colie's extension of the
principles of genre to the level of experience (which is deftly done through
the idea of point of view) is that it does not sufficiently account for the
diversity of perspectives synthesized in the novel, even if it does help
account for the predictability of human experience in the world. In this
area as in so many others, the Quixote stands at the limit of Renaissance
experience and projects the need for a new conceptual order of things. When
it comes time to tell whether an object is the fabled Helmet of Mambrino
or an ordinary barber's basin, the characters' reactions are indeed determined
by their respective “points of view,” which is also to say according
to the principles of genre. But at some point it becomes necessary to identify
the nature of the baciyelmo —an object which in its radical
unnaturalness is a supremely novelistic kind— and neither the
notion of mimesis-as-imitation (what idea does
15 My
translation slightly modifies that of H. M. Hubbell in the Loeb Classical
Library edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 355.
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the baciyelmo
“imitate”?16) nor the notion of
genre as literary expectation (who could have expected such a thing?) proves
sufficient to the case. If the Quixote is an assemblage of genres
—a fact which those who have written on point of view in the novel would
attribute to its “manyvoicedness” (Bakhtin) or to Cervantes'
“perspectivism” (Ortega y Gasset, Leo Spitzer), then to what genre
does it itself belong? The answer to this question, I am suggesting, is closely
bound up with the formation of a single point of view capable of controlling
a multiplicity of perspectives.
The function to which I am referring is supplied
by what would later be called the “subject.” It is the position
which Descartes constructs in the Meditations as exterior to the world,
as beyond all possibility of sensory error and also as beyond all conceptual
doubt. It is the self which reflects itself in its own silence and its own
invisibility (“I shall now close my eyes, I shall call away all my senses,
I shall efface even from my thoughts all the images of corporeal things
. . . . I shall try little by little to reach a better knowledge
of and a more familiar relationship with myself” p. 175). As with the
point of view which the Quixote projects, the establishment of the
transcendental subject with claims to philosophical certainty occurs alongside
the exhaustion of imitations, but also as a transformation of
them.17 This transformation takes place in
part because, in order to make those claims truly transcendental, the
“I” of the Meditations must place itself above the possible
deceits of imitations and must stand guard
16 Some
of the complexities of the problem are taken up by Descartes in the Third
Meditation, but in a context in which “idea” has the sense of
“picture or image” represented in foro interno: “Now
as to what concerns ideas, if we consider them only in themselves and do
not relate them to anything beyond themselves, they cannot properly speaking
be false; for whether I imagine a goat or a chimera, it is no less true that
I imagine the one than the other . . . . If ideas are only
taken as certain modes of thought, I recognize amongst them no difference
or inequality, and all appear to proceed from me in the same manner; but
when we consider them as images, one representing one thing and the other
another, it is clear that they are very different one from the other”
(The Philosophical Works of Descartes, I, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane
and G. R. T. Ross, [1911; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975],
pp. 159, 161-62).
17 See Jean-Luc
Nancy, “Mundus est fabula”; John D. Lyons, “Subjectivity
and Imitation in the Discours de la Méthode,”
Neophilologus 66 (1982), 508-524; and, on the ethical-rhetorical relations
of reader, narrator, and text, John J. Allen, “The Narrators, the Reader,
and Don Quijote,” MLN 91 (1976), 201-12.
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ANTHONY J.
CASCARDI |
Cervantes |
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against the possibility that the reader might attempt to “imitate”
it. Apart from the technical sense in which the term was later appropriated
by Kant, to describe the Cartesian subject, or the reader of the
Quixote, as “transcendental,” is also to describe it as
inimitable, or as Foucault says, “invisible.” Yet by virtue of
the fact that the transcendental subject is thus also vacant, its position,
in all its emptiness, becomes available for any reader who comes to assume
its place.
The reader who organizes the multiple perspectives
of the Quixote is thus like the viewer of Velázquez' Las
Meninas, invisible to the perspectives of the world which he projects.
The figures in Velázquez' painting, like the characters in the
Quixote, are thus made present to us, while we are not at the same
time present to them; or to phrase it in another way, the function of
representation is radically concealed from the world which it controls. If
Foucault's reading of Las Meninas is correct, then the subject of
the painting is itself representation. Yet what is interesting about Las
Meninas is the fact that the integral act of representation, its unified
temporal development, cannot itself be represented; the discrete functions
of representation have been captured on the canvas (in the spectators, the
models, and the artist-maker), but not the singular act of representation
itself. This is what Foucault means by the “invisibility” of the
activity of representation and also by the invisibility of the subject-spectator,
and it is what I mean by saying that the Quixote projects the need
for a theory which it cannot itself supply (Foucault: “In this picture,
as in all the representations of which it is, as it were, the manifest essence,
the profound invisibility of what one sees is inseparable from the invisibility
of the person seeing —despite all mirrors, reflections, imitations,
and portraits,” The Order of Things, p. 16).
What Foucault describes in Velázquez
as the problem of the subject is brilliantly focused by the fact that the
spectator of the painting fails to find his image reflected in the central
mirror. This fact suggests that there must be some categorical difference
between the spectator-subject and the representations which the subject makes
to itself. This is the very difference which Don Quixote would deny when
he claims absolute identification with the heroes whose actions he imitates.
Don Quixote is committed to the sovereign practice of mimesis-as-imitation,
where precisely what is required of the reader is a different mode of mimetic
activity, one which would allow him to resist the perils of mimesis in its
imitative mode. Thus if there is a break in the order of things as one passes
from Cervantes
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to Descartes, it is a fissure which is already projected by Cervantes' text:
the Quixote demands an idea of representation, if only as a strategy
for the containment of imitations.
In concluding that the generic multiplicity
of the Quixote is organized into a single, new genre, because the
novel is not the imitation of nature but rather the representation of a world,
we need only guard against moving from this fact of representation to the
supposition of a single, God's-eye point of view for the novel, as Spitzer
was prone to do. A diversity of kinds, seen together as a world, only looks
as if it is seen from a God's-eye point of view. We come to realize this
once we realize that this perspective is, in its unimpeachable certainty
and infinite repeatability, assumable by any reader, which in turn suggests
that it is not a property of any being (God, the reader, the author) or thing
(the world), but is literally a technique. There is no totalizing perspective
available for the novel independent of or prior to a reading of the book,
even if any reading of the novel is premised on our familiarity with certain
literary —I want to say “generic”— points of view. And
what may be said of point of view in the Quixote may, with an appropriate
transposition of terms, be said of genre itself. In Cervantes' novel, the
many different things of the world, and indeed experience itself, are inseparable
from the generic classifications and orderings which the mind provides. In
this way, genre may be seen to function as a guiding principle of
intelligibility, allowing us to deal with the diversity of experience in
the world, in among other ways by containing that experience into something
we call a “world.”
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