From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
6.1 (1986): 5-11.
Copyright © 1986, The Cervantes Society of America
Genre Definition and Interplay in Cervantes' Fiction:
Introduction
ENRES MAY BE
approached by way of various critical avenues. In the Aristotelian strain
we recognize genres as kinds within a system of classification. These categories
beg further definition, so there is a history of, on the one hand, the refinement
of divisions and subdivisions, and on the other a Platonic search for the
‘essential’ qualities of tragedy, comedy, epic poetry, and so forth.
But we are readers before we are literary historians, and genres, whether
we are aware of them or not, help us to formulate our expectations as readers.
By the recognition of genres we begin to find our way in the universe of
verbal artifacts with their feigned discourses, and to train our expectations
upon the experience that lies in wait for
us.1 To recognize things by their types or
their categories in order to become receptive to them is a part of a basic
literary competence acquired through experience, but this need to recognize
things by their kind is not an exclusively literary one. Rather, our encounters
with all the products of culture require that we recognize initially the
‘kind’ to
1 See,
for example, E. D. Hirsch, “We found the types of meaning we expected
to find, because what we found was in fact powerfully influenced by what
we expected . . .” and “. . . his interpretation
is dependent upon the last unrevised generic concept with which an interpreter
starts. All understanding of verbal meaning is necessarily genre-bound.”
Validity in Interpretation (New Haven and London: Yale U. P., 1967),
p. 76.
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which they belong, within broad or narrow limits, so that we may perform
the ongoing task of structuring our experience and, quite simply, knowing
what we are doing and judging our performance. In this country there are
banks that resemble churches and churches that resemble banks, a situation
that may provoke annoyance, cynical amusement, or witty speculation, among
the many possible reactions to this phenomenon. The ordinary citizen expects
to be able to tell which is which without having to read the sign outside,
and that is the expectation that is thwarted in this example, by their sharing
a common visual code which says ‘solid respectability and high standing
in the community.’ Genres, then, are more than a system of classification
employed by historians and critics, and their function has always been something
more than the ascription of themes and subjects to forms and styles.
From an anthropological viewpoint, genres are
a grid through which our non-reflexive experience of our culture can be mapped
and its contents made accessible to conscious perception and eventually presented
for critical reflection. From a different point of view, that of the
phenomenology of the reader or viewer of any cultural product, genre is that
which enables us to make a provisional recognition of the thing and hence
to adopt a decision as to what is the appropriate attitude of expectancy.
We have already noted that genre recognition is not only an essential part
of the extremely complex process of reading, but it is one of the first
operations we perform when we open a book. From this it is no great distance
to the pragmatic sense of genre as a kind of contract between the producer
and the consumer, the artist and the public, as to what codes carry what
significance.2
This last sense, the contractual one, is perhaps
an appropriate one from which to begin the discussion of generic interplay
—the topic of our symposium. Cultural forms are characterized by a certain
stability and continuity, and are dependent upon recognition and acceptance
by whatever group constitutes their audience. The stability and continuity
are maintained by a consensus that enables cultural forms, including literary
genres, to become institutionalized, and consequently to have a history.
As Tzvetan Todorov, Alastair Fowler and others
have observed,
2 Pierre
Kohler, “Contribution à une philosophie des genres,”
Helicon, I (1938), 233-44; II (1940), 135-47. Cited by Paul Hernadi,
Beyond Genre (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell U. P., 1972), p. 43.
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new genres develop out of old ones.3 The generic
expectations aroused by a traditional folk tale, a fabliau or an adventure
story can be rendered newly significant and complex by combining it, by framing
it within another narrative, or by breaking the traditional association between
the social role of the protagonist (e.g. priest, knight, merchant) and the
story type. Recombinations, parodies, changes of social focus and modulation
of this level of discourse are basic methods of widening the range of narrative,
of challenging the reader through disturbing or even disrupting his system
of expectations.4 The post-medieval, early
modern period that witnessed so many innovations in social, religious,
administrative and technical fields, saw a correspondingly vigorous activity
in the elaboration of its symbolic forms and in philosophical discussion
of them.
Literary genres, then, are not mere pigeonholes
nor are they fixed templates, but insofar as they are classes of works they
are no less a part of the total signifying order of the culture than are
the individual works. For a century or more critical attention has been given
to genres as separate phenomena, with their separate history (tragedy, comedy,
tragédie larmoyante, ode, Bildungsroman, philosophical
dialogue, to name a few at random). Only recently, however, have we begun
to notice that genres, like other signifiers, always participate in a synchronic
system which is the totality of the expressive modes which are operative
in a culture at a given moment. The critic looks for order, process, and
structure, but writers and artists, besides being aware of the past of their
art, are alert to the presence here and now of other expressive forms. Their
principal criterion is practical: usability. They do not attempt to map the
literary or artistic terrain, but to live off the land. They may be hostile
or indifferent to much of what they see, but inevitably it is all part of
their own artistic horizon, shaping their world of possibilities.
The age of Cervantes, Góngora and Quevedo
was one in which the ecology of genres was exceptionally rich, and Cervantes
contributed variously to the interplay of forms and styles. He did not only
develop a broad range of genres in prose narrative fiction, in poetry and
in drama, but he combined and grafted and interlaced the
3 Tzvetan
Todorov, “The Origin of Genres,” NLH 8 (1976), 159-70. Alastair
Fowler. “The Life and Death of Literary Forms,” NLH 2 (1971),
199-216.
4 Alastair Fowler,
Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1982), ch. 9, 10.
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various kinds in a single work. Consider Don Quijote. What makes it
so interesting in this regard is not the range of literary genres that are
to be found in it, but how these react upon one another. And likewise, how
the fictions and the discussions on fiction react upon one another. Don
Quijote is ineluctably dialectic. It begins and ends as the strange case
history of a nonentity. By a discursive shift it is immediately transfigured
into a quest narrative in which the teleology of epic is mediated by the
discourse of chivalric romance. As we continue reading, however, it is not
long before we discover that the hero's adventures consist not of slaying
dragons, destroying monsters, righting wrongs, rescuing damsels in distress,
humbling proud malefactors, and making the world safe for innocent virgins,
as he would wish, but rather of listening to other peoples' stories. The
other people that he meets create new surprises and suspense for the reader
and, taken all together, they contribute greatly to that sense of inclusiveness
that is part of the book's fascination. The newcomers in the story are
characterized in large measure by the kinds of stories that they tell.
The stories of their lives belong to recognizable conventions: pastoral,
picaresque, maritime adventure, etc. It is through these conventions that
these new story tellers present themselves, announce their identities, and
define the world to which they belong.
Without penetrating any deeper than this into
the Quijote we can see that the meeting of different narrative conventions
will raise many questions for us. Does the mingling of genres in fact enlarge
our sense of a complex reality, a whole boundless fictional universe? How
do the different genres coexist? At the level of formal analysis, does their
coexistence sharpen our critical awareness of them as genres and reveal the
limits of the possibilities of each one? At the level of narrative discourse,
we perceive them as rhetorical artifice, the shift from narrator to narrator,
from frame narrative to contained narrative and back, being marked by changes
in stylistic and linguistic register. But within the world constituted by
each new discourse, other problems are posed, concerning the
‘naturalness’ of any particular discourse, and of the inevitability
of narrative form for the communication of personal experience. We may ask
whether there is a mutual critiquing taking place between and beneath and
around these different modes of narrative concerning, for example, issues
such as authenticity or truth value. Bearing in mind the fact that their
common ground is the world of Cervantes' novel one might presume that this
is the case.
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Don Quijote himself has his own ideas about
who he is, and also about how who he is is defined by literary genre.
Of course, he fudges: can he really have failed to perceive what kind of
‘history’ Ariosto wrote for his Orlando, as he undertakes his
‘penance’ in Sierra Morena? But then, is his self-estimate modified
by the encounters with all those other story tellers? Wouldn't he like to
be the hero in Marcela's story? And in Ana Felix's? Is his lust for fictional
roles insatiable?
As to the book Don Quijote, it is, as
we all know, a bewildering and fascinating tissue of intertextualities, and
there is no need to labor over the obvious. The games that Cervantes plays
with chivalric style and plot, with chronicle, with epic, are well known.
The presence of the pastoral episodes signals frustration or tragic
self-deception as the consequence of a dangerous toying with illusions of
primal innocence. It is significant, then, that the hidalgo establishes the
pastoral myth of the age of gold as the moral basis for his program of heroic
action. Can such a work as this be assigned to a genre? Could one find a
method to describe the dynamic process of the interactions that take place
within it? Is it compatible with any sixteenth-century theory of genres?
The questions that could be asked are seemingly countless, and it is not
surprising that the four papers ask quite different questions about genre
and its functions. Yet they all have something valuable to tell us about
genre as a code by means of which certain kinds of experience may be communicated
(or miscommunicated) in narrative discourse.
John Jay Allen's paper shows the range of styles
that may be generated by pastoral narrative when this is contextualized within
a comic parody. The reader is made to perceive the events now through the
screen of chivalric romance, and now as comic realism. The instability is
deliberate. A different kind of uncertainty is that studied by Edward Dudley,
with reference to the episode of the mazos de batán (DQ
I, 20). There both Don Quijote and his squire invoke models by which the
unseen ‘adventure’ may be classified and hence interpreted and
its significance drawn. This is a fascinating example of how within the world
of the book, people use literary genre as a grid for interpreting, not a
story they are in the process of reading, but a ‘real’ experience,
when what is being experienced is still ‘in the dark.’ The often
repeated claim that Don Quijote begins a new genre —the novel—
is confirmed by Anthony Cascardi who argues that its generic multiplicity
is resolved when we understand it to be “the representation of a
world.”
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With respect to the Novelas ejemplares,
critics have long debated the question of the unity —the elusive or
illusory unity— of the collection as a whole. In recent years the question
has been reframed in terms of generic contrast between novel and
romance.5 But we are also finding that the
individual stories are not pure romance or pure novel (assuming that we know
what these terms mean, which is not always the
case).6 In his recent studies of the
Novelas, Alban K. Forcione has shown how Cervantes drew upon such
specialized kinds of literature as the miracle narrative, and writing of
the Coloquio de los perros he refers to “its assimilation and
refashioning of traditional genres —including the picaresque novel,
the Lucianic satire, the philosophical dialogue, the miracle narrative, the
devotional and consolatory treatise, the sermon, the fable, the aphorism,
and the
anecdote. . . .”7 In his
paper on La Gitanilla, E. Michael Gerli shows the ‘romance’
elements of the story being challenged, made more ambiguous by the intrusive
novelistic realism. The reader's expectations concerning the moral values
of romance, of questing heroes, of court and country, noble and plebeian,
are questioned and left in suspense.
All of these papers will, I feel certain, generate
further thought and discussion, The books by Colie and Fowler and other
investigators show that while most theorists in the classical tradition were
concerned with defining and analyzing the ancient genres (epic, tragedy,
comedy, and so on) a very few of them as well as writers of handbooks of
composition and rhetoric were paying attention to the minor forms where the
concept of genre becomes blurred. Shifting our ground to the idea of genre
as signifier, as I mentioned earlier, the episode of the mazos de batán
is but one instance of that ‘problem of the sign’ that runs
all through Don Quijote. Then again, if the knight's difficulty is
caused by the fact that the world of chivalry does not recognize fulling
hammers, Cervantes is giving us evidence of repression in two distinct but
mutually illustrative realms. Don
5 Notably
by Ruth S. El Saffar, From Novel to Romance: A Study of Cervantes's
“Novelas ejemplares” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 1974).
6 E. C. Riley,
“Cervantes: A Question of Genre,” in Mediaeval and Renaissance
Studies on Spain and Portugal in Honour of P. E. Russell, ed. F. W. Hodcroft
et al. (Oxford: The Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature,
1981), pp. 68-85.
7 Cervantes
and the Humanist Vision: A Study of Four “Exemplary Novels”
(Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1982); Cervantes and the Mystery of Lawlessness:
A Study of “El casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los
perros” (Princeton U. P., 1984). The quotation is from the latter,
p. 17.
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Quijote characteristically seeks to repress the realities that are not written
into his adopted role. But this reveals also something that we readers
characteristically fail to notice: that a genre is also a repressive institution
insofar as there are experiences and data and aspects of reality that are
excluded from it as being inappropriate, contrary to decorum. Hence the mixing
of genres may enable a writer to retrieve what has been lost through the
traditional setting of boundaries, prescribing of style, topics, tropes and
so forth.
The four papers are all different in method
and scope, concerned with different problems in Cervantes' work, and with
different aspects (functional, philosophical, rhetorical) of genre. These
approaches are all valid, and give evidence of the complexity of the field
of genre study and its many applications at different levels of the literary
text.
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