Don Quixote and the Theory of the Polyphonic Novel

Vibha Maurya University of Delhi

In the author' s preface to the readers Cervantes makes an

appeal to the 'idIe reader' , he says:

And since all your story tries to do is shatter the authority of all those tales of chivalry, and their influence on people, especially common people, all around the world, you don't need to go begging wise sayings from philosophers, or advice from the Holy Scriptures, or myths from poets, or speeches from orators, or mirades from saints. AH you have to do is try, with meaningful words, proper1y and effectively arranged, to honestly unroll your sentences and paragraphs, dearly, sensibly, just explaining what you're up to as well and as powerfully as you can. Let your ideas be understood without making them complicated or obscure. And see, too. if your pages can make sad men laugh as they read, and make smiling men even happier; try to keep simple men untroubled, and wise men impressed by your imagination, and sober men not contemptuous, nor careful men reluctant, to praise it. .. 1

1 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote, transo Burton Raffel, New York (A Norton Critical Edition), 1995, pp. 11. All the quotes are taken from this edition.

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The author's alter ego (as interpreted by many) charts out this programme for his creative writing. Perhaps Cervantes wrote the preface of the 1605 publication in the light of the fact that the books of chivalry still made for popular reading. However, what our author did attempt was to 'knock down the badly founded mechanism of these books of chivalry.' The books of Amadises, and Palmarines were still (in 1605) read but as Jean Canavaggio, Cervantes' French biographer says, were not the fashionable readings and by the second half of the sixteenth century their popularity decreased to a great extent. At the end of the century, when the educated, bankers, and the urban elite do not find in them the representation of the idealised world in which they would have liked to live, and the sedentary, so-called enlightened population does not identify with it, then it gives way to the rise of the pastoral genre in which they could see their own image for introspection2

.

However, the success of Don Quixote is due to the delightful reading that the ingenious fantasy of free adventures of an errant knight offers to uso

Amadís and other books of chivalry undoubtedly fonned the most important reading for Cervantes himself. As one of the (not frequent) narrators in the first part of Don Quixote indicates in the text, the priest and the barber while examining the books read by Quixote, which had contributed to deranging him, decíded not to confine to fire 'the best books of this genre', even though they threw into the flames most selected collections. The question that Jean Canavaggio is 1rying to raise is did they agree with the censorship agents of the past epoch, who used to see in those books

2 Jean Canavaggio, Vida y Literatura: Cervantes en el 'Quijote', Don Quijote de la Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes, Barcelona, (Instituto Cervantes. Critica) ed. by Francisco Rico, 1999, pp. XLI-LX.

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Don Quixote and the Theory ofthe Polyphonic Novel

devil's hand? And then Canavaggio answers in the negative. Because as we know the priest was a fine reader of Aristotle's Poetics, he judged the quality of the works in the light of the Aristotelian text and separated the good grain from the chaff.

Cervantes was quite well-versed in different kinds of writings of his times. He had read literature, philosophical and ideological treatises and his literary works were not adventurous projects, rather they were guided by his own experience and training. Obvious it looks that, Miguel de Cervantes was located within the

literary debates of his time. Renaissance had developed typical forms of the two tendencies inherited by it from the middle Ages: the idealist literature (heroic and tragic writings) and the literature with materialist inclinations (the comic, picaresque one). The stress

laid by Renaissance on the power of reason and the need for ideals on one hand and inclination to the most immediate and worldly values are the two streams which gave new life and concrete shape to the sprouting literary genres in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the context of Fernando de Rojas' La Celestina Cervantes described it as divine as well as human.3

Fifteenth century Italy and Spain, as is shown by Américo Castro in his remarkable book Cervantes' Thought (1996), had clearly witnessed the development of both these streams in art and literature. That is why the heroic, the chivalrous, the ideal love were placed against the picaresque, the comic and the farce. A critical or materialist vision of life 'blurred the magicalIy

supernatural visiono The ideal view is hurled down by the COnllC

3 Amarieo Castro in his book Cervantes' Thought has argued in great details about the poetics of the Universal and the partieularities of the historical. We have drawn from his thoughts.

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aspect, a function which the picaresque novels like Lazarillo de Tormes and Horozco's works and others had initiated,.4 This kind

of radical shift taking place also created a situation wherein idealist literature of earlier ages faced a dangerous threat. It was clear that the rise in the circulation of printed texts was posing serious problems for the church, which was trying to prevent 'its faithfuls' from reading them either by condemning them or by imposing on

them a hard censorship. However, these measures could not prevent literature from carving out for itself an autonomous space. This in turn led to a fierce competitíon between literary texts and religious ones. The Picaresque truly introduced, as Lázaro Carreter shows, 'the concept of the reader's neighbour in the story, author, characters, public, inhabit the same time, same land, share the same problems, and the relationship between them is different now. The world is not remote or improbable rather, it is near and known,.5 Literature was also related to the immediate world and did not much concern itself with alI that was supernatural. Therefore, it is interesting to note that des pite the early triumph of Renaissance ideas, the mid XVI century saw a direct and hard reaction from the church and from the so called moralists. Efforts were made to obstruct dissemination of such texts that dealt with the worldly fantasy and sensibility. In the literary scene of that period one aspect became very debatable, Le. to return to diviníty or give way to profane poetics. It is in this context that Cervantes' works draw special attention. As Américo Castro underlines Cervantes' great originality Hes in playing with the 'System of

4 Américo Castro, El pensamiento de Cervantes, Barcelona, Madrid, 1980, p.28. AH translatíons are mine.

s F. Lazaro Carreter, 'Las voces del 'Quijote' (Estudio Preliminar), Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. by Francisco Rico, Barcelona, 1999, pp. XXI-XXXVII

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Don Quixote and ¡he Theory o[ the Polyphonic Novel

double truth' Le. the ideal and the comic. This perhaps was the point which did not get a good reception amongst the moralists.

However, it is important to remember that, as mentioned

earlier towards the mid sixteenth century there was a radical

change in the perceptions of the reHgious authorities. Aristotelian

doctrine turned into the 'doctor of the church' (Castro). Till then,

due to bad Latín translations Aristotles' Poetics was Httle known in

Italy and Spain. The poetry being written was divorced and distant

from real life and no one thought that literature could be used for

the betterment of customs and values. 'The worldly books were

being criticised for being immoral and lascivíous. This artistic

order could only be compared with the doctrine of 'double truth',

Le. truth of reason and truth of faith, which in turn lead to the very

characteristic Renaissance concept of dualismo (Castro) However,

in 1548 a new edition of Poetics brought the harmonising ethical

and rational objectives to Spain. Attempts were made to create a

synthesis of art with life and morality. By the second half of the

sixteenth century, the relationship between history and poetry also

became central to the debate and received its due importance.

Purely imaginary, autonomous literature was being censured by the

church. It reiterated the need for a truly exemplary literature. And

Aristotles' Poetics lent itself solidly for such ideas. 'Poets should

not narrate the things as they happened but as they ought to have

happened .. .' 'Poetry treats things more in a universal sense while

history does so in a particular sense.' (Castro) What was in fact

being suggested is that the 'possible truth' or the ought to be

doctrine was being used to set a norm for literary works as welL In

the name of harmony it argued that the inevitable poetic fantasy

should correspond with the 'truth' , thus, the characters and

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discourse of a text should set examples of virtue and not of

indignant persons or statements of history.

One could say that Cervantes seemed to be fully aware of these discussions, since he spent sorne time in Italy. His theoretícal sources were derived from interactions with his Italian contemporaries. Tasso, for example, had shown to have similar conceros. Cervantes stayed in Italy between 1569 and 1575 and was able to lay his hands on Poetics of PiccoloIDÍni. However, it is also clear that Cervantes was interested in creating a literature which would be more subversive than submissive. As Castro says:

Cervantes introduced in the most intimate life of

his heroes theoretical issues which were troubling his

age. He situated Don Quixote on the side of the poetry

and Sancho Panza on the history. But the characters

and not the author fight in the novel to defend their

respective positions.6

It is also interesting to note that Renaissance in the final analysis did emancipate the narrative and gave way to the development of autonomous characters. Lázaro Carreter says:

The fundamental change offered by Renaissance

to fictional literature essentially consisted in the

growing independence of the characters. As against

their absolute subordination to the writer, in earlier

times, now they tend to escape from the author' s

domínation, asserting more and more their own whims.7

For more discussion on this aspect see El Pensamiento de Cervantes, by Amaneo Castro.

6 Castro, Américo, pp. 32-33. 7 F. Lazaro Carreter, op.cit. 5.

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Thus far we have discussed the time and historical conditions in which Cervantes was creating his characters. Our main concern in this paper is with Cervantes' heroes namely Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and their position vis-a-vis the author. We are attempting to look more closely at the position of the hero rather than examine the discourses of the characters. Bakhtin' s understanding of the polyphonic novel as 'a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousness' is very often studied from the point of view of linguistíc polyphony (linguistic parody etc.). We have chosen to first examine the independence of the heroes from the author and then see their voices in linguistic terms. Bakhtin, while discussing Dostoevsky's heroes in his book Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics says:

The hero interests Dostoevsky as a particular

point 01 view on the world and on oneself as position

enabling a person to interpret and evaluate his own self

and his surrounding reality. What is important to

Dostoevsky is not how his hero appears in the world but

first and foremost how the world appears to his hero

and how the hero appears to himself.8

The hero's irnage, or worldview and opinion in a sense need not correspond to those of the author. The hero's social position, his physical appearance, his values and habits, i.e. all the elements that help an author in creating a 'fixed and stable' image of his hero are now objects of the hero's own reflections or the subject of his self-consciousness. Bakhtin also underlines that the self consciousness of the character cannot be seen as an elernent of his reality alone or as a reflection of his own irnage; rather aH this

8 M. Bakhtin, Problems 01 Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and transo By Carl Emerson, UK, 1984. p.47.

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becomes the reality of his character' s self-consciousness. This is

what Bakhtin has called the 'field of vision' of the character. Thus

the author does not keep for himself any definition or concrete

depictions. His representation functions only as a means for the

realisation of the hero's consciousness. This way the hero's

representation gets transferred from one place to another and

acquires a different artistic meaning. This in turn means that an

integral image of closed-off character cannot be constructed:

Bakhtin says:

We do not see who he ¡s, but how he is conscious

of himself, our act of artistic visualisation occurs not

before the reality of the hero but before apure function

of his awareness of that reality.9

The reality surrounding the hero and the outside world are

drawn into the process of self realisation and self-awareness therefore, the shift occurs in the field of visiono The author can no more dictate, fix or finalise his hero's image.

Cervantes, almost as a visionary and precursor of the modern

novel, considered it essential to liberate his hero from his own

clutches. This is evident from the very beginning as the narrator in Don Quixote expresses his ignorance about the name of our knight

from La Mancha: 'Sorne say his surname was Quixada, or Quesada,

because the authors themselves differ in this particular: however,

we may reasonably conjecture he was called Quixada' ( ... ) (I 1).

Even though doubting the actual name the narrator settles for

Quijana. which also turns out to be incorrect in the end because the

knight himself unveils his identity by saying that he was Alonso

Quijano (ll, 74). While Sancho Panza's character carnes a name

dictated by his physical appearance:

9 Bakhtin p. 49.

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Near him was Sancho Panza, holding his donkey's

halter, and underneath him there was another

inscription, reading: 'Sancho Zancas', and apparently,

at least as far as we can tell from the picture, he was

short, with a hig helly and long legs, which is why he

must have heen given the names Panza [belly] and

Zancas [long legs].

Novel

The k:night and the squire are looking at themselves in the second part of the novel with a view to critically examine and

judge their own selves which hints at the liberated characters. The dialogue between the college graduate Samson Carrasco on the one hand and Don Quixote and Sancho Panza on the other in Chapter III of Part II about the manner in which the main characters were

conceived and constructed in part 1 by the author also serves an example of what Bakhtin had called a 'dominant governing the entire act of artistic visuaIisation and construction of the characters'. This discussion also reminds us of the use of the miTror in nineteenth eentury novels. Bakhtin has eited an example from Dostoevsky where ... 'Hero is forced to contemplate in the mirror and thanks to this fact alI the concrete features of the hero remain fundamentally unchanged.' (Bakhtin) In Don Quixote the discussion between the characters about their heroic deeds of the past and their recording for posterity, as well as the people's response to these recorded facts are sorne of the episodes which

reflect upon the transfer of representation from one plane to the other. Don Quixote says:

One of the things most pleasant to a virtuous and

distinguished man is to see himself, while he is still

alive, go out among the nations and languages of the

world, printed and bond, and bearing a good reputation.

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'A good, reputation,' 1 say because, should 1 be the

opposite, no death can be worse ...

But tell me, your grace, señor university graduate,

which of my famous exploits are the most impressive,

in this history? (11, 3)

The reality of the hero and the externaJ everyday life shift from the authorial world and are grounded into the character' s field of visiono There is no explanatory function now assigned to the author, however, along with the self consciousness of the hero who anyway absorbs the world objects, there now coexists another consciousness or another field of vision, another point of view. Bakhtin emphasises that 'to the aIl-devouring conscÍousness of the hero the author can juxtapose a world of other consciousnesses

with rights equal to those of the hero.' Cervantes has dealt with this issue at a different level. As was mentioned earlier, Don. Quixote speaks in the name of the credible and universal truth and Sancho defends the sensible and the particular. These binaries are not to be resolved, but to remain open ended. Don Quixote while talking to Samson Carrasco is worried about his own representation in history, but Sancho, being a vigilant and keen observer, has something new to add, sorne other things to correct: 'TelI me, Mister coIlege graduate' said Sancho, 'does this book tell about the

muledrivers from Yanguas, when our fine friend Rocinante decided to shoot for the moon?' (H, 3)

Sancho has a huge appetite for truth, understands the ground

reality and keeps dragging his master out of the make-belief, mythified world to newer realities even though Don Quixote makes

successful attempts to quieten Sancho Panza as if warning him not to interrupt and complicate the smooth flow of heroic history' by

his insignificant quotidian interventions. In fact, Sancho is advised

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to take up knighthood by participating in violent encounters and by

improving his discourse. Sancho Panza is obviously neither amused nor does he agree to the proposition. Quixote says:

'Be quiet, Sancho,' said Don Quixote, 'and don't

interrupt a college graduate, who 1 ask to please

continue telling what this history says of me.'

'and about me,' said Sancho, 'because it also says

that I'm one of its main personages.'

'personages, not personages, Sancho, my friend,'

said Samson.

'Oh ho: have we got ourselves another speech

teacher?' said Sancho. 'If you keep going down that

road, we'll spend our whole Uves and never get

anywhere.' (II, 3)

This brings us to the second part of our study of polyphony in Don Quixote, that is the discourses of the characters, mainly that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Bakhtin insists that the construction of a character requires the creation of 'an artistic atmosphere and design which would allow his discourse to 'reveal and illuminate itself'. Thus, as mentioned earlier, the character' s freedom could exist within the boundaries of artistic designo This way the characters' discourse is also created by the author and is so created that it looks to him as 'someone else's discourse, the world of the character himself'. Therefore as Bakhtin says 'it does not

fall out of the author's design but only out of a monologic authorial field of vision.' 10

10M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imaginatíon, ed. and transo By Michael Holquist and Cryl Emerson, Austin, 1981, p.4S.

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The characters are located in what Bakhtin calls, the zone of

dialogical contact with the author. This means that the character

can converse with the author, who can observe the limitations and

shortcomings of the language of bis characters and know their

world view. In the language used by Don Quixote and Sancho

Panza these elements are very much present - Quixote' s archaic

and absurd lexicon and Sancho' s fauld and faulty - Bakhtin, in his

long essay, From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse underlines

this fact. He says:

The image of another' s language and outlook of

the world simultaneously represented and representing,

is extremely typical of the novel, the greatest novelistic

images (for example the figure of Don Quixote) belong

precisely to this type.' These descriptive and expressive

means that are direct and poetic (in the narrow sense)

retain their direct significance, when they are

incorporated into such a figure.! 1

Cervantes proves to be a master craftsman in this area as well.

His hero Quijada or Quijano is born to be brought up by the books of literatme. He goes mad reading and not only is impressed and

ínfluenced by the heroic adventures of the knights but also by the

way those adventmes are narrated and the language used:

He brought home as many as he could find, and

read them, but none seemed to him as good as those

written by the famous Feliciano de Silva, which he

relished for the clarity of their prose and their

complicated arguments, to his mind positively pearl-

11 Bakhtin, P.45 (note 10)

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Don Quixote and the Theory ofthe Polyphonic Novel

like, especialIy when he read gallant love declarations and letters full of courtly challenges. (1, 1)

Perhaps in an earlier period it was impossible to conceive a hero like him, aman sick of consuming infinite quantity of literature in very expressive language. It is obvious that Cervantes creates his heroes not out of neutral words alien to him but out of the heroes own discourses. Once the master and squire pair was constituted the search for an adequate expression of the two characters begins. Lázaro Carreter says that there is 'an intimate relationship between the discovery of the quotidian as an object of the narrative and the irruption of linguistic polyphony.' Street life and entire social strata becomes central to the narration (Lazarillo,

Picaresque) therefore the language could not remain neutral. Those realities could not be expressed with the exquisite, omamented words learnt in the Latín Schools. 'In Lazarillo perhaps still a little timidly, in Guzman decisively and in Cervantes extensively are perceived the changes'. (Carreter) Don Quixote's period-bound language is related to a particular world view and is represented as an image that speaks. The author' s relationship with him can not be neutral because he has conceived him under a particular artistic designo

Cervantes' narrator in Don Quixote introduces the hero in an ambiguous manner and his physique is depicted without any detailed enumeration. His birth is not known, he appears before us only at the age of fifty. However Don Quixote's discourse about himself and his world is not as visible to us as it is audible to him. He is not an objectified image but an 'autonomous discourse, a pure voice.' The knight Don Quixote right at the beginning, while preparing for his first sally fulfils certain obligation of a knight. He acquires a horse, to whom he gives a pompous name, similarly he

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looks for a beloved who is also supposed to be a beauty of that region. In the second chapter his beloved Dulcinea de Toboso is remembered:

Oh princess Dulcinea, mistress of this miserable

heart! How sorely you have wronged me, driving me

out of your presence, spurning me with your harsh,

unbending scorn, ordering me never to appear before

your surpassing, incomparable beauty. (J, 2)

The rigour with wbich Don Quixote assumes the idiomatic properties of the knights is quite evident here. This ornamented address, thé adjustment of words according to the situation present a varied register. This not only exist in the discourse of the hero but the register changes in each one of the characters. This is an obvious parody of the hundreds of those books that Don Quixote had read. The linguistic parody of that genre seems to be one of the objectives of tbis book. Don Quixote moves from a bighly rhetorical, archaic, officious vocabulary to an extremely spontaneous colloquial diction. His speech is mainly oral and is launched in an oratorical forrn pitching high in sound as well as in selection of words. The episode in the inn with rustic, peasant women surprises not only his interlocutors but bis readers as well.

In addition to the images of Don Quixote's language there is Sancho Panza's language image, less dramatic and pompous but highly profound and complexo There is a combination of the language of a villager with a comical but serious and true reflection of folk wisdom. This aspect is taken care of by filling his discourse with sayings and proverbs. Apart from this, Sancho's language is also shown to be grammatically and lexically faulty, nevertheless any amendments to his language are not acceptable to Sancho. He

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wants to be understood and that is aH. The novel has a considerable

section in Sancho' s 'voice-zone'.

Cervantes has made remarkable efforts to look for a different

voice for Sancho Panza and he is quite successful as is evident

from sorne of SamSGn Carrasco's appreciation which appear is the

second part; Samson Carrasco says: 'Many of those that love mirth

better than melancholy cry out, give us more Quixotery; but let

Don Quixote appear and Sancho talk, be it what it will be, we are

satisfied.' (11, 2).

Cervantes uses the entire range of voice-zones available to

him from his time and from the earlier ages. This multivoicedness

becomes more complex as each character acquires a different

speech register but there is a system of language that mutually

interanimate each other. Since it is not a single unitary language

polyglossia steps in. However, in this process our author does not lose sight of the parody that he wants to create because parodie

forms help prepare the ground for the novel to liberate the object from the language in which it had got entangled. A distance is deliberately created between language and reality. As Bakhtin says 'only polyglossia fully frees consciousness from the tyranny of its own language and its own myth of language.' 12 Thus, the artistic

design of the author comes ¡nto clear play. Even though, as discussed earlier, the author does not himself participate in the

novel with a language of his own he is still present with what

Bak:htin has caBed the artistÍC designo Finally the characters'

freedom exists within the lirnits of the author's artistic designo

Therefore they are also created and not invented and that's why we

can say that the characters' independence is relative.

12Bakhtin M: The Dialogic Imaginarion transo Caryl Emerson & Micheal Holquist, USA, 1981, p.45.

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Bibliograpby

Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quijote, transo Burton Raffel, (Critical

Edition), New York, 1995.

- Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Francisco Rico, (Instituto

Cervantes, Crítica), Barcelona, 1999.

Canavaggio, Jean, Cervantes, transo Mauro Armiños, Colección

Austral, Madrid, 2003.

Castro, Américo, El pensamiento de Cervantes, Barcelona, Madrid,

1980.

Bakhtin Mikhaíl Problems of Dostoevsky 's Poetics, ed. & transo

Caryul Emerson.

- The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, transo Caryl

Emerson and Michael Holquist, USA, 1981.

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