Post tenebras spero lucem: Cervantes, El Ingenioso Hidalgo, and the Poetics of Imitatio
UNLIKE THE WORKS OF HIS PREDECESSORS, CERVANTES' MAGNIFICENT HUMANIST FICTION, EL INGENIOSO HIDALGO DON QUIJOTE DE LA MANCHA ( 1605; SEGUNDA PARTE, 1615) IS THE PRODUCT OF LATE AGE--LATE IN THE LIFE of the author and late in the age of humanism, and of a Continental humanist poetics. Strikingly similar in certain ways to the work of Rabelais, Don Quijote is a diegesis--in this instance, of two companions, Don Quijote and Sancho Panza, "one the pole-star of knight errantry and the other the star of squirely fidelity" according to the Duchess; "el uno, por norte de la andante caballeria, y el otro, por estrella de la escuderil fidelidad"1--that is also an act of peirastics, a narrative that inquires after truth. Like Gargantua and Pantagruel, Don Quijote is a rich and seemingly inexhaustible work, written, as Mark Van Doren tells us, by a man who had "a mind both spacious and subtle, both full to overflowing and free to overflow."2 At the same time, the astonishingly variegated world of the Don and Sancho seems at once simpler and more accessible than that of Pantagruel and Panurge. Rather than surprise us with the unexpected and the fabulous, Don Quijote insists on realizing old models anew, aligning the prototypical with the present and so authenticating (and giving timeless value to) the past. This emphasis on models is evident everywhere, for Don Quijote is primarily a book about books, about the shapes, uses, and effects of books. As such, it allows us at once, in this grand metafiction, to locate ourselves in the structures and forms of the chronicle, pastoral, romance, novella, verse, debate, essay, satire, burlesque, ballad, drama, and proverb--the whole arsenal of humanist writings--in ways that constantly solicit our attention (as they often do with the characters of this novel) and invite our unending speculation (which the characters too frequently forgo). As a consequence, Don Quijote is
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