From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
8 special issue (1988): 117-26.
Copyright © 1988, The Cervantes Society of America
The Archeology of Fiction in Don Quijote
ontemporary philosophy
of language views discourse as a form of action, as a human practice not
simply regulated but constituted by conventions we collectively accept or
“agree upon.” Truth is no longer defined as something to be measured
exclusively by objects or events outside of language, but as residing as
well in those shared procedures and binding conventions by which we agree
to talk to each other in certain ways and name the world with certain words.
In his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein has an imaginary
listener ask: “So, you are saying that human agreement decides what
is true and what is false?” To which he answers. “It is what human
beings say that is true and false, and they agree in the
language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of
life.”1
Within this view, sincerity or even sanity
is no longer a matter of inner thoughts or feelings holding the ultimate
truth or rationality of our words. It is rather a matter of discursive adequacy,
of linguistic competence as a form of life. Knowing how to use a language,
knowing how to talk is, among other things, having learned what thoughts
and feelings are conventionally represented in the words we use. Contemporary
philosophy of language holds a view of human reality in which self,
thoughts, feelings come neither before nor after language but
in it.
1 Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, transl. by G. E. M. Anscombe
(New York: The Macmillan Co., 1958) I, par. 241.
117
The ideas I want to sketch and briefly explore
are the following. First, that this conception of language and discourse
is contemporary but not new: it is presupposed in everything we call fiction,
and it was extensively explored in Don Quijote. Second, that Don
Quijote explores this view by embodying the opposite view in the figure
of its hero and by letting his rather solipsistic practice of discourse literally
bump against the community that surrounds him and against the shared procedures
and binding conventions that hold that community together. Third, that Don
Quijote's madness is precisely his inability to recognize and honor the
agreements that constitute our inevitably shared forms of life. Fourth, that
the object of Don Quijote's undertaking is, in some fundamental ways, language
and the practice of discourse. Fifth, that the key to Don Quijote's undertaking
is the question of telling, which is the question of language and
also the question of fiction.
In another, well-known passage of his
Philosophical Investigations, Wittgensten puts the question of telling
in its simplest, most compelling form:
Something happens —and then I make a noise.
What for? Presumably in order to tell what happens. — But how is
telling done? When we said tell anything? —What is the
language-game of telling?
I should like to say: you regard it much too
much as a matter of course that one can tell anything to anyone (I, 363).
There are many different things we can tell:
we can tell what happens or where to find something or how to go somewhere;
we can tell the time, the difference, the truth or a lie; we can tell a story.
These different kinds of telling cover some of the fundamental things we
are able to do in language and, in most cases, only in language:
referring, describing, giving instructions, distinguishing and identifying,
representing and, of course, understanding. All these uses of language that
make telling possible and fiction intelligible are also the stuff of which
the world of Don Quijote and Don Quijote's madness are made.
Now, Don Quijote's madness is highly implausible:
in the world we know, most people do not go crazy from reading books of fiction,
although some are suspected to have committed suicide after reading
Werther or Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But if it is hardly credible
that somebody would go mad Don Quijote's way, it is not altogether impossible.
This “implausible” possibility engages us in the story,
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while keeping us somewhat distanced from the hero; it teases us into feeling
reassured that, unlike Don Quijote, we can certainly tell what is the case
and what is not. Yet, on some occasions, we cans' tell, and we dons', which
accounts for all the instances in which we are mistaken, duped or taken in.
The text of Don Quijote exploits precisely
the duplicity of language which, by the exercise of the same abilities, allows
somebody to identify windmills as windmills but also misidentify them as
giants, to get the right idea but also the wrong idea, to refer to something
that actually exists but also to something that does not exist anywhere.
With gestures, we are restricted to pointing only to what is present and
perceptible ‘here’ and ‘now.’ With language, we are free
to refer not only to what is present and perceptible but also to everything
that is absent. What is absent may simply be somewhere else or may have happened
at another time; but it may neither be ‘here’ nor anywhere else;
it may never have happened. This ability to refer to absent things endows
us with a world, a conception of an objective space that we share
with others. It allows us to know other people and the world. It makes both
truth and lies possible. It opens to us the possibility of fiction.
One way to see how this possibility works and
also how it works in the text and in the world of Don Quijote is to
consider both the writing and the reading of fiction as a dialogic game of
make-believe not unlike the mud-pie games we used to play in
childhood.2 Fiction shares with the mud-pie
game the ‘seriousness’ of its pretense and the need to understand
conventions and respect procedures, not so much because misunderstandings
and abuses could spoil the fun of the game, but simply because they would
abolish the game altogether.
The name of the children's game gives away
the material substitution on which the game is based: dry mud instead
of pie. The children act out a cross between metaphor and collage,
in which mud is placed in the customary context of pies and is handled as
a pie: it is literally decorated, sometimes with pebbles, sometimes with
‘real’ raisins; it gets metaphorically baked and on occasion burned;
it can be literally served, cut into pieces, offered and exchanged; usually
it is only metaphorically tasted. While playing, children are constrained
as well as protected by the material limits of the game: in order to have
2 I have
borrowed the concept of games of make-believe and some general ideas about
mud-pies from Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (London and
New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 353-63.
their ‘pie’ they have to remember all along that it is dry mud.
The game calls for discrimination and care in the handling of things; it
enforces duplicity but makes no room for confusion: only those who
really know the difference between mud and dough can play the game,
and play it well. The pretense cannot be properly upheld unless it is consciously
acknowledged. The general rule of the game is that, by agreeing to abuse
the normal procedures for reference in ordinary language, we will point to
a piece of dry mud and call it a pie, we will pretend it is a pie, and act
accordingly. In order to enter the game we must understand and agree to its
conventionalized abuse of reference, to its pretense. Conversely, an abuse
of the pretense, say, the ‘realistic’ demand that the make-believe
pie be edible, that it actually taste like a real piece of pie and that we
act accordingly, will immediately shift us from the game into reality, where
we will find ourselves with plain mud in our mouth.
While engaged in their game, children may be
accurately described as willingly and knowingly misidentifying the mud they
call ‘pie’ and treat as a pie, the pebbles they call
‘raisins’ and handle as raisins, the board they call ‘oven’
and use as an oven; they just pretend that something that exists and
is there is other than it is. The abuse of reference that fiction
invites us to indulge in is of a more radical nature than mere substitution
of misidentification, since, among other things, neither pie nor mud ‘is
there.’ And as soon as something is named or described in the text,
we get all ‘pies,’ as it were, and no ‘mud.’ Unlike the
children's game, the pretense of fiction is not based on material substitution
but on the creation of existence from scratch. I can imagine no single rule
which could account for the creative power of our game. But for the sake
of symmetry and contrast I would suggest, very tentatively, the following:
the general rule of fiction is that by the conniving abuse of reference we
are able to say and understand that there is something which in fact
is not there, something which plainly does not exist.
The game that Don Quijote invites us
to play is not only of fiction, but also about fiction. This
much we all know and agree upon. Our disagreements arise when we try to account,
for instance, for the relationship between the novel and the books of chivalry,
between their respective heroes, worlds and modes of narration. This relationship
has come to us already framed in terms of opposition: Amadís de
Gaula is purported to be the negative model of Don Quijote: the
adventures of the hidalgo are viewed as the adventures of the world of chivalry
turned upside down.
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Yet Amadís de Gaula and the books
of chivalry are not simply the ‘negative models’ for Don
Quijote. And, in spite of Cervantes' own words, the novel does not, or
not simply, “demolish the authority and influence that books of chivalry
have in the world and among common people.” First, because in Don
Quijote “common people” become readers, characters who interpret
texts, understand them rightly and wrongly and, in doing so, make
them their own; second, because the books of chivalry call up in Cervantes'
novel the presence of other books. And all these books, passionately read,
believed in, misunderstood, critically examined or censored and burned, evoke
in the end Literature itself. This is why, rather that “demolishing,”
Don Quijote questions. And what it questions is not the fleeting authority
of one particular genre, but the way in which readers confer authority upon
the institution itself, upon literature and the written word.
Thus, books of chivalry become the exemplary
form of the contract between reader and institution that Don Quijote,
the new text, presents as ‘the old model.’ The classical genres,
the ‘old models’ are closed systems of rules that prescribe and
set up a particular form of reality, an order of things. These rules direct
and fulfill the reader's expectations; they promise and in effect deliver
the prescribed order.
The model that Amadís and the books
of chivalry offer to Don Quijote is a space with the structure of one of
those board-games where the player has to move his pieces along a fixed path.
The path has its points of arrival and departure and its ‘accidents,’
all perfectly determined. In a board-game, each piece —like the
knight-errant— has its destiny: to reach the pre-established point of
arrival. Monsters, giants, rival knights, all the “other” characters
in the books of chivalry are the obstacles that the hero must confront and
overcome. The road is no more than the apparently contingent order in which
these obstacles meet the knight. The characters and the road are the devices
by which the text of chivalry displays and at the same time conceals its
paradoxical coupling of chance and necessity, of destiny —already
established— and action —free only in appearance.
The general rule of the game of chivalry is
that the knight-errant must be on the road, that his encounters
must take place, that the obstacles he confronts must in the
end surrender to his heroic virtue. The sallies and encounters, the unequal
distribution of victory (the hero) and defeat (all his opponents), the
implausible workings of magic itself must appear as ‘natural’ events
that call for no explanation.
Cervantes' novel does not stand in opposition
to the model of chivalry. It confronts the old genre with the paradigm of
difference. The strategy of this difference is, like dialogue itself, all
inclusive and seemingly paradoxical: it assimilates without repeating and
questions without demolishing; it alters objects, concepts, relationships
and other texts in order to make them intelligible. Thus, the books of chivalry
are ever-present in the obsessive reading of the protagonist. But Don
Quijote begins when the ‘idle’ hidalgo has just stopped
reading, which is precisely when we, the ‘idle’ readers of the
novel, begin to read. The contact between the protagonist and his books has
been a process of mutual transformation: the books of fiction he reads drive
Don Quijote mad, and in his madness he turns these fictions around and forces
upon them the responsibilities of history and the authority of truth. From
this transformed and transforming act of reading comes the project of yet
another transformation: Don Quijote intends to become a knight-errant and
to make his world a world of chivalry.
Don Quijote's enterprise begins when he realizes
that his contemporary world seems to show no traces of the world of chivalry
he found depicted in his books. The lack of traces of that ‘old’
world may be explained in two different ways: either the state of affairs
depicted in the books of chivalry never was that of the actual world and
therefore the ‘reality’ of chivalry is a mere fiction, or the state
of affairs depicted in those books no longer is but was once that of the
actual world. Don Quijote believes in the necessary truth of this second
explanation. For him the discourse of chivalry books is referential, Amadís
actually existed, and the world once was as his books say it was. Moreover,
the world of Amadís —the past— had an order of its own,
previous to language and unchanged by discourse, which is only its reflection.
For Don Quijote, books of chivalry are not only historical evidence, they
are all that now remains of the past, its only testimony.
Now, the traditional archaeologist begins his
undertaking with material objects; old coins and shards, for instance, out
of which he reconstructs cities and civilizations. The new “archaeology
of knowledge” proposed by Michel Foucault begins its reconstruction
not with coins and shards but with texts from the
past.3 These texts
3 Michel
Foucault, Les mots et les choses: une archeologie des sciences humaines,
Paris: Gallimard, 1966; see also his L'Archeologie du savoir, Paris:
Gallimard, 1969.
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are fragmentary evidence of a past practice of discourse (parole).
The undertaking of the new archaeologist is to reconstruct, out of this
fragmentary evidence, the whole system of conventions (langue) that
once made that form of discourse possible. Like the new archaeologist, Don
Quijote begins his undertaking with texts, in his case, books of fiction
which he believes to be accurate descriptions of past objects and events.
He certainly does not plan to describe the objects he may find but to find
in his immediate context the objects which fit the descriptions in his books.
In order to accomplish his task, Don Quijote needs now to reverse the
relationship he himself had established between language and reality: if
the discourse of chivalry was tailored to the old order of things, it is
now the world that must be adjusted to the order of the old discourse. The
description of things past becomes for Don Quijote the necessary prescription
for things to come. His task is then a monumental attempt to reconstruct
language and discourse, and with language, the world.
Like the new archaeologist, Don Quijote has
evidence of a prior form of speech; but his archaeology of discourse is founded
in the belief that his books are direct and complete evidence of the old
abstract system and that his duty is to reconstruct the old practice itself
and its context of reality. His inevitable failure is written into the terms
of his undertaking: a past form of life is as impossible to recover as the
circumstances and the acts that once brought it into being. Thus, Don Quijote's
enterprise can only be carried on in a displaced way. His new circumstances,
his acts and his words will no doubt bring some practice of discourse into
existence, but it will be a new practice, never the one he was trying to
recover. Don Quijote's undertaking is fated to produce almost any kind of
discourse, any personal identity, except the ones he was searching for. As
evoked by this paradoxical enterprise, the books of chivalry are the privileged
objects of the world of Don Quijote. Yet they are nothing but a pretext.
Amadís is Don Quijote's goal but, in fact, he is only Don Quijote's
point of departure.
From the model of chivalry, Don Quijote derives
another paradoxical aspect of his undertaking: he not only must find identity
through difference and permanence through change but he must also make chance
the exclusive instrument of his necessary reconstruction. Thus, Don Quijote
imagines his world as a vast collection of “tuertos que enderezar”
and appoints himself as the agent who will bring about the perfect order
of things that his world is calling for. Having imagined this much, he only
needs to be on the road.
Adventures will come to him, as they necessarily came to Amadís. It
should not matter where he goes, or rather it should matter that he be on
the road without destination, because part of his task is to make chance
predictable, as, according to his books, chance must be. And if Don Quijote
is ever going to control chance, he must, paradoxically, let chance control
his journey. To do otherwise would be to admit that specific times, places,
persons and circumstances —all the things that are contingent—
do make a difference, that chance can never be controlled.
Like the mud-pie game, Don Quijote's archaeology
is based on material substitution, on a cross between metaphor and collage,
in which a barber's basin is put in the customary context of a knight's helmet
and is handled accordingly. Don Quijote abuses reference as the children
do: he points to a windmill and calls it a giant, or to a pair of Benedictine
friars and calls them evil enchanters; and having named them so, he acts
accordingly. His problem is, of course, that while he acts according to the
new identities he has assigned to people and things, these things and people
dons' they remain, as it were, in a world where pies are pies and mud is
simply mud. And this is necessarily so, because Don Quijote has no shared
or public conventions to invoke, no game to play. He plans to succeed by
prescription, since he expects that, as long as his behavior honors his words,
other people and the world will oblige. But he faces reality with the utterances
of a strictly private language, which he could never bring into agreement
with other people or with the world. Don Quijote's enterprise shares in only
the ‘seriousness’ of the children's game but not its controlled
pretense. Thus, like some untutored children, Don Quijote demands, on every
occasion, that his mud taste like a pie, which explains how he ends
up so many times and in so many ways with ‘plain mud’ in his
mouth.
Cervantes places Don Quijote's private language
in an exemplary context of shared conventions and public procedures, where
even those who break some rules (e.g. “los galeotes”) acknowledge
their existence and their binding force. The novel builds its own archaeology,
its reconstruction of literature and fiction, by letting the deranged archaeology
of the hero unfold in all its possibilities and consequences.
The novel organizes Don Quijote's world in
such a way that nothing in it will ever perfectly match the words of his
books. Thus, Don Quijote must necessarily misidentify objects, persons and
situations or give up his undertaking altogether. In order to
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misidentify, as he must do, Don Quijote needs to break the conventional tie
between words and the world. Which opens the possibility that anything could
match his words but also that nothing will. Unlike the children's game, his
enterprise promotes confusion and transforms his world into a disquieting
mix of games of make-believe that are neither fiction nor mud-pie. Don Quijote's
enterprise questions the identity of persons and things, the authority of
the past, the function of intention, of memory and desire. None of these
aspects, neither Don Quijote himself nor his confrontation with reality is
the key to his project. The protagonist of Don Quijote's undertaking is language,
not language as an abstract structure, but language as discourse, as a form
of life.
In contrast to Don Quijote's private
‘game,’ the game of fiction abuses reference not by breaking the
tie between words and the world but by invoking that tie while changing,
temporarily, the direction of reference. Only because the words of Don
Quijote are the words of a public language, the novel can depict characters
and events and bring them into fictional existence. The fundamental gesture
of Cervantes' novel, the gesture of fiction, is that those characters and
events exist only in the words that name them, in the discourse we read.
Fiction calls for discrimination and care in the handling of words; it enforces
duplicity but makes no room for confusion, although it often explores its
possibilities and dangers, only those who can tell, in all the senses
of telling, can play the game of fiction, and play it well.
By now it should be clear that my analogy between
fiction and mud-pies has broken down. But having followed it this far, we
should be able to see more sharply how the two games differ and what it is
that makes fiction an inexhaustible game and therefore so difficult to describe.
The first reason for our difficulties is that fiction is not just a game,
but a language-game, and institution like language itself, or family, or
culture. We are introduced, sometimes ritually, sometimes not, to most games
and to some institutions. But we are born into some kind of family, some
form of culture, some practice of language, and therefore of fiction. Unlike
the mud-pie game, the game of fiction is neither simple, nor predictable,
except in trivial ways. It has no material base and cannot be explained in
terms of any equivalence. Its procedures have no fixed limits, except those
of language, and its conventions are, like Don Quijote's enchanters, everywhere
present but nowhere visible.
So, I am unable to draw a definite picture
of fiction along the lines
of the mud-pie game. And I believe that it is impossible to draw such a picture
both accurately and completely, because our doing so depends on some basic
questions about language for which we dons' have, and may never have, any
satisfactory answers. Thus, for instance, we could eventually describe how
fiction abuses reference, but only by begging the question of reference;
and we could describe —as we indeed do— many things that are brought
into make-believe existence by our fictional modes of saying and understanding,
but without being able yet to tell how anyone can tell anything at all. Yet
we know how to tell and understand all kinds of things, and we actually spend
a good part of our lives telling and understanding them, and we know that
we do so, even though we do not know how it is that we can do it. The archaeology
of Don Quijote, the character as well as the book, suggests that fiction
finds its foundation and its fundamental strategies precisely in this possibility
of knowing language and know how to use it, without knowing how we know.
| GEORGE WASHINGTON
UNIVERSITY |
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Prepared with
the help of Ruth Hyndman |
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