Edwin Williamson

The Power-Struggle between Don Quixote and Sancho: Four Crises in the Development of the Narrative

There have been countless studies of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, both as individual characters in their own right and in relation to each other, but these have concentrated, as a rule, on specific aspects of the protagonists’ interaction or on particular episodes in the novel, and few, if any, have attempted to analyse the development of their relationship over the entire course of the narrative. The most notable exception was Salvador de Madariaga, who attributed this general lack of consistent analysis of the novel’s central relationship to the deeply entrenched tendency in Quixote criticism to regard the protagonists as symbolic representations of antithetical values. Madariaga set out to demonstrate that once ‘freed from the rigidity which has simplified them with two antithetical and symmetrical characters, Don Quixote and Sancho [ . . .] take on the life-like and human mobility which they inherit from their most human father and creator’. Nevertheless, his own attempt to give a more dynamic account did not entirely overcome the antithetical symmetry that had oversimplified, in his view, the relationship between the protagonists, for his interpretation rested upon the notion of a process of mutual influence by which Sancho’s spirit rises from reality to illusion, while Don Quixote’s descends from illusion to reality, a process he famously described in Spanish as the ‘quijotización’ of Sancho and the ‘sanchificación’ of Don Quixote. And Madariaga, moreover, retained a highly sentimental notion of the mad knight and his squire, writing of ‘the fraternity of soul which unites this strange master and this singular servant’, a bond he encapsulated as follows: ‘The same sap flows through their actions, the same spirit interpenetrates them, and so they grow gradually nearer, attracting each other by virtue of a slow and sure mutual influence which is, in

Challenging the hierarchies: the interplay of romance and the picaresque in La ilustre fregona

The relationship between the ‘idealistic’ and ‘realistic’ aspects of Cervantes’ work has always presented problems for critics, but in a landmark essay, E. C. Riley made a notable advance in clarifying this vexed issue by advocating the use of the term ‘romance’ to describe the idealistic aspects of Cervantes’ prose fiction.1 The advantage of the term ‘romance’ was that, unlike the vague term ‘idealist’, it helped to identify a recurrent pattern of themes and conventions which characterized a certain traditional mode of story-telling, and this more clearly delineated the boundaries between the two modes of writing which are so evident in Cervantes’ work as a whole. Riley suggested that ‘we consider Cervantes’s romance fiction, not his novelistic, as basic or central to his writing’.2 After all, prose fiction in Cervantes’ time continued to be dominated by romance of various kinds, and other than Don Quixote itself it was the emerging genre of the picaresque which, as Riley pointed out, offered the very few examples that existed at the time of ‘preor proto-novelistic features’.3 However, Riley warned against classifying Cervantes’ works according to a simple ‘romance-novel polarity’, the distinction was ‘less stable’, for what made Cervantes’ fiction particularly interesting was its ‘fluidity’, ‘the variegated strengths of the mixture of romance and novel’, the ‘movements’ and ‘transpositions’ from one mode to another within many of the works themselves.4

Remembering Pablo Neruda

Edwin Williamson is the King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish Studies at the University of Oxford. He has written widely on Spanish and Latin American topics, and his books include Borges: A Life (2004), The Penguin History of Latin America (2009), and The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges (2013). Williamson delivered a longer version of this text at “Remembering Pablo Neruda” (January 27, 2014, Warwick Arts Centre), organized by John King, Professor of Latin American Cultural History at the University of Warwick. The event, which celebrated the 100th anniversary of Neruda’s birth, featured an additional presentation by Gerald Martin (University of Pittsburgh), and a reading of Neruda’s poems by the renowned actress Julie Christie. A special screening of the film Burning Patience (Antonio Skármeta, 1983) followed.

‘La bonita confiancita’: Deception, Trust and the Figure of Poetry in La gitanilla

Abstract Traditional readings of La gitanilla as an idealizing romance have been challenged by scholars who point to ‘subversive’ elements in the novel. But it is possible to resolve this difference by re-examining the commonplace view of Preciosa as a figure of poetry. Although she is portrayed as both ‘desenvuelta’ and ‘honesta’, this paradox does not produce a contradiction because the narrative describes a process whereby Preciosa is transformed from a deceptive gypsy, who uses her talents for mercenary ends, into an ideal embodiment of beauty and truth. The turning-point is the emergence of a bond of trust between the girl and the two rivals for her love; only then does the picaresque ethos of the gypsy world yield abruptly to the procedures of romance. In this perspective, the action of La gitanilla acquires a metafictional significance which sheds light on Cervantes’ ideas on the nature of his creative activity. He draws on both romance and the picaresque in order to address the Platonist issue of the ‘lie’ of art, and has recourse to the notion of trust between author and reader in order to defend his belief that literature can overcome deception and convey a form of truth.