WHEN THE EXCEPTION IS THE RULE: DON QUIXOTE AS INCITEMENT TO LITERATURE
LIKE ALL CLASSICS, Don
Quixote has a certain power to incite terminological derangements; "perspectivism for Leo Spitzer,
"extraspection" for Américo Castro, "triangular desire" for René Girard, and a
"heteroglot and internally dialogized novelistic discourse" for Bakhtin. Nor are the terms all theoretical;
Dostoyevsky's Prince Myshkin in The Idiot
is Quixote reborn, and the nympholeptic vocabulary of Lolita is decidedly
quixotic: Humbert Humbert, "a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of
hot passion in [his] loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in
[his] supple spine," had been raised on Don
Quixote and Les Miserables. In its most familiar role, Don Quixote has inaugural status,
convening the novel as a "dialogue of genres," setting "a precedent for the
unprecedented.
"What is it that accounts for such a profusion of responses
and reenactments? The question is not
new, and has provoked a medley of answers that are now inseparable from Quixote
(both book and errant knight) . . . Don Quixote
is a multiply encoded work, beginning with its author's pretence to be
merely translating an Arabic original and compounded by the fact that the
second half was preceded by a maverick sequel published by another author. Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" simply confirms, in its conceptual
audacity, the extravagant incitement of intro- and extra-textual resonances in
the original. Menard, a belated
Symbolist in twentieth-century Nimes, undertakes to write (not copy) several
chapters of Quixote in a gesture of
paradoxical autonomy. Borges, his
amanuensis-inventor, suggests that "Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has
enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of
reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous
attribution." In order to approach my
topic, for which it is necessary to recapitulate a certain trajectory in the interpretation
of Don Quixote, I begin with a
comparably deliberate gesture which, unlike Menard's, makes no pretence to
autonomy. The following section-in the
spirit of Victor Frankenstein-stitches together anatomical remains in order to
reanimate certain consistencies in the archives. It's an old story, but I cite mainly sources from this century-from
a period, that is, when Literature has been recognizably institutionalized . .
.
As prelude to the more extended critical elaboration of this
essay, the following section serves as phantom double, a reminder that my own
contribution is by no means "original."
In fact, Don Quixote inaugurates
a tradition of works known for impertinent displays of their precarious claim
on originality. For the moment, I am
intent on anatomizing the terms by which a singular event has been rendered up
as a collective receptacle, an archetype-the exception sanctioning the rule