CERVANTES, MIGUEL DE (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra; 1547–1616)

CERVANTES, MIGUEL DE (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra; 1547–1616), Spanish novelist, dramatist, and poet. Cervantes is known especially for his novel Don Quixote (1605; 1615). Read largely as a funny book in Cervantes's time, the Romantics and their later brethren were to focus on Don Quixote's pathos and his quest for impossible dreams. The madman who tilted at windmills and read the world in accordance with the conventions of books of chivalry was to become a symbol of spiritual values and, in the case of Spain, the embodiment of a national ethos (Close, p. 246). Don Quixote has been called "the classic and purest model of the novel as genre" (Bakhtin, p. 325), encompassing a diversity of voices, social speech types, and even languages (Bakhtin, pp. 262–269). Its antiauthoritarian bent has been a source of inspiration to scores of well-known writers, among them the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, who has written eloquently on Cervantes's critique of reading, and the Czech Milan Kundera, who reminds us that with Don Quixote the world ceases to be a given and becomes a problem.

Today, as cultural studies are increasingly marked by identity politics (race, gender, ethnicity), and issues of "alterity" and "hybridity" are brought to the fore, Cervantes's writing has become a field of contention between critics who adhere to traditional humanist and/or historicist readings and those whose work is largely informed by avantgarde, poststructuralist theory. Overall, these battles (fought especially within the North American academy) have enriched the discussion surrounding Cervantes's novelistic project and have had the effect of renewing interest in his Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617; Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda), a Byzantine prose fiction narrative that used to be read largely as Christian allegory but is now seen by some as a kind of counternarrative of colonization (Wilson) and as a critique of utopias and religious orthodoxy.

In reading Cervantes's novels and novellas one is treated to extraordinary storytelling skills and devices (multiple authors, narrators, and narratees), which contribute to the larger project of decentering traditional loci of authority. His writing shows a high degree of self-reflexivity and constant testing of classical concepts of poetic discourse that run up against a narrative practice that resists adherence to rules. His experimental fiction incorporates virtually every written and oral genre known in his time: books of chivalry, pastoral romances, picaresque "lives," Italianate novellas, epic narratives, ballads, folk tales, carnavalesque stories and situations, proverbs, masquerades, inquisitorial discourse, devotional and legal writing, and so on. Cervantes was also a poet and a playwright. As a lyric poet he wrote in the vein of Petrarch and Garcilaso de la Vega; as a playwright he was out of sync with Lope de Vega's new theater ("new comedy") which, by the early 1600s, had monopolized the public stage by playing up to the taste of an undiscriminating mass-receiver who internalized the myths propagated by this important vehicle of official culture. Perhaps for this reason Cervantes's late plays, together with his comic entremeses ('interludes'), are redirected to the private sphere of reading, inscribing within the written text a performance that is only realizable on stage in a distant future. Of his earlier plays one might make special mention of Los tratos de Argel (1582; Life in Algiers), a drama of captivity and discovery of self and other in the city of exchange between Islam and Christendom, and La numancia (1583; Numancia), a tragedy involving the collective suicide of a city in 133 b.c.e. in defiance of Scipio's legions and Roman rule.

Cervantes's writing drew from a wide range of cross-cultural experiences that went beyond the mediation of reading. He spent time in Italy (especially Rome and Naples) and resided in several Spanish cities, among them Madrid, Valladolid, and Seville, the quintessential city of trade and commerce. He fought in the victorious battle of Lepanto against the Turks (1571), where he lost the use of his left hand, and experienced the despair of captivity in Algiers (1575–1580) followed by rejection and disillusionment upon his return to Spain, where the hero who had hoped for glory and rewards for the services rendered to his country now found himself a mere survivor. Unable to secure a bureaucratic position in the Indies (1590), he worked as a procurer of wheat for the Invincible Armada (1588); became a tax collector (1595); and landed temporarily in jail in Seville on charges of embezzlement (1597). Just a few years later he was to write (1602) and publish (1605) the first part of what is regarded by some as the greatest novel of all time: Don Quixote de la Mancha. Despite the commercial success of Don Quixote and the generosity of the 7th count of Lemos, his major patron, Cervantes and his family did not escape poverty.

It was largely during the last decade or so of his life that Cervantes was to give a totalizing artistic expression to his exceptional wealth of experiences. The chronology of his publications is telling: after the appearance of his pastoral prose fiction La galatea (1585), and a brief engagement as a practicing playwright toward the end of the sixteenth century, he was heard from again in 1605 when Don Quixote was published in Madrid. All of his other works appeared in print between 1613 and 1617: Novelas ejemplares (1613, Exemplary novellas); Viaje del parnaso (1614; Journey to Parnassus); Don Quixote II (1615); Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses (1615; Eight plays and eight interludes); and Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617; The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda).

While the international success of Don Quixote is undeniable, this extraordinary novel belongs to a more complex project that encompasses Cervantes's entire discursive production, one that is marked by a continuous transgression of the limits of traditional genres, a transgression that constitutes a central point in his epistemological project. In the end, neither novel nor poetry nor theater can "double" the world, so that the metaphor of the mirror that is implied in the traditional theory of imitatio has to be substituted for that of the modern shattering glass (Spadaccini and Talens). Cervantes's influence on the development of the novel is substantial, and the universality of Don Quixote and Sancho is undeniable. Yet, equally significant is the manner in which his narratives incorporate the multiple and contradictory voices of his own age.

See also Spanish Literature and Language .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quijote. Translated by Burton Raffell and edited by Diana de Armas Wilson. New York, 1999.

——. Don Quijote de la Mancha. 2 vols. Edited by Francisco Rico with the collaboration of Joaquin Forradellas. Barcelona, 1998.

Secondary Sources

Bakhtin, M. M. "Discourses in the Novel." In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, Tex., 1981.

Canavaggio, Jean. Cervantes. Translated by J. R. Jones. New York, 1990.

Close, Anthony. The Romantic Approach to Don Quijote: A Critical History of the Romantic Tradition in Quixote Criticism. Cambridge, U.K., 1978.

Cruz, Anne J., and Carroll B. Johnson, eds. Cervantes and his Postmodern Constituencies. New York and London, 1999.

Forcione, Alban K. Cervantes' Christian Romance: A Study of Persiles y Sigismunda. Princeton, 1972.

Fuentes, Carlos. Don Quixote, or the Critique of Reading. Austin, Tex., 1976.

Kundera. Milan. "Epilogue." In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. New York, 1981.

Riley, E. C. Cervantes's Theory of the Novel. Oxford, 1962.

Spadaccini, Nicholas, and Jenaro Talens. Through the Shattering Glass: Cervantes and the Self-Made World. Minneapolis, 1993.

Wilson, Diana De Armas. Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World. New York, 2000.

Nicholas Spadaccini