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Call for papers #37

Quint, David. Cervantes's Novel of Modern Times: A New Reading of 'Don
Quijote.' Princeton University Press, 2003. 192 pp.

Upon first glance, the premise of David Quint's book seems basic: to show the coherence and relationship between theme and form. Any professor of an undergraduate literature course has at some time had this as his or her goal. But it is rare to have a book that still adheres to this basic premise of literary analysis; rarer still that it be applied to that most capacious of texts, Don Quijote.
Quint's work is well-known and well-used by Hispanists-in particular Epic and Empire, a comparative study of epic including, among many, Virgil, Alonso de Ercilla, Camòes, and Milton; it is a book that in its breadth of comparison measures up to classics such as E. R. Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Anyone familiar with Quint's work, therefore, would pick up his latest tome with high expectations. He does not disappoint. While cogently invoking theme and form throughout, Quint's book on Don Quijote is the inverse of his book on epic; while in the latter he traced historical trends in various examples of one genre, in the Quijote he traces trends and genre traditions found in one text.
The principal method Quint applies here is interlace, a strategy that comes out of the romance tradition, in which seemingly disconnected storylines in fact interrelate and shed light on each other. Cervantes's use of this technique has been overlooked by students of Don Quijote who, in Quint's view, have given too much weight to Cervantes's use of the picaresque, and thus overlooked his adaptation of romance techniques, particularly underestimating his debt to Ariosto. Arguing for a closer look at the many interpolated tales of Part One on the one hand, and the seemingly unrelated episodes of Part Two on the other, Quint claims for them all a central role in the understanding of the larger text. Tales of Part One such as the "Curioso impertinente" or the "Historia del cautivo" have echoes in the main story of the adventures of knight and squire, as do smaller episodes of Part Two such as the wedding of Camacho or Roque Guinart.
But far from a structuralist or formalist approach that ignores historical circumstance, Quint's use of interlace allows him to draw out the grander issues at stake in early modern Spain. When interlace is applied vigorously to Don Quijote, Quint argues, it shows a historical movement from feudalism to nascent capitalism, a development reflected formally in the text itself. Moreover, the new social fluidity of early modern Spain, depicted in the text, is expressed through minor genre forms, thus helping to create that heterogeneous genre, the modern novel.
Through an exhaustive reading, Quint shows how the many episodes of Part One display an uneasy movement away from feudalism-away from the idealized and courtly love of Dulcinea or the depiction of sacred letters-toward a world of money-as seen in the importance of Don Quijote's other love, the princess Micomicona, or the growing emphasis on secular letters in a newly bureaucratic state. These positions are turned around in Part Two, where we begin in the modern world but return to a feudal one. For while in the first few chapters of the sequel Don Quijote is allied with middle-class characters such as Don Diego de Miranda and Camacho, in most of Part Two, he is thrust back, if falsely, into the world of feudalism at the castle of the duke and duchess. Don Quijote's ultimate disquiet in their surroundings shows how much he has changed and how much he himself has become a middle-class citizen of a socially fluctuating and modern world. This change is underscored by one of his final adventures, the episode with the outlaw Roque Guinart, who serves as a kind of reminder of who Don Quijote was in Part One- heroic but also mad- as opposed to who he has become in Part Two. This evolution, Quint tells us, "speaks to the larger historical change that it charts: the suppression of a feudal-aristocratic order by a modern society and the gentler values of its moneyed, middle class" (130). And it is this new and less heroic middle class, of course, that becomes the domain of the modern novel.
For historians, literary scholars, students, or general readers, Quint's book functions as guide and as an entrée to the text. While many bemoan that academics too frequently write for a narrow group of colleagues, Quint has managed to write a book that will be of interest to anyone who wants to read Don Quijote for the first time, or who has already read it, or who, in the celebratory fashion of Alonso Quijano himself, desires to reread and reread it, but perhaps with a new perspective.

Mary Quinn
University of California, Berkeley