All history as reconstruction of the past is of course myth

My purpose has been to place in the plaza of our republic a game table which everyone can approach to entertain themselves without fear of being harmed by the rods; by which I mean without harm to spirit or body, because honest and agreeable exercises are always more likely to do good than harm.

–Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Prologue to Novelas ejemplares [my translation]

We are engaged in a technical enterprise at the species scale.

–Jacques Lacan, “L’agressivité en psychanalyse” [my translation]

While I was all intent on watching him,
he looked at me, and with his hands he spread
his chest and said: “See how I split myself!”!

–Dante Alighieri, Inferno 28.28-30

For much of this century, Hispanists have labored in an effort to elevate Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) to the coveted status of the “first modern novel.” Today this kind of criticism may strike our postmodern sensibilities as a rather traditional enterprise, the kind more interested in establishing an elite hierarchy of literary tastes than in saying anything new about an author or text. For many, the study of literature is still an aesthetic beauty pageant in which “great books” like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767) or Marie de la Vergne de La Fayette’s La princesse de Clèves (167 are paraded across the stage in a contest to seduce the Western intelligentsia. The postmodern student of literature may not have much concern for this age-old territorial contest, but she might be interested to learn that the fallout from Hispanism’s quest for the “first modern novel” has involved so much attention to, indeed complication of, Don Quixote, that the book now resembles more a postmodern text than an early modern one. At the turn of the century, we have been left with what Jorge Luis Borges would recognize as an “aleph”: an infinite ideological labyrinth that reflects and/or cannibalizes all forms, thereby escaping all attempts to describe it. Whatever we currently mean by “Cervantes” (an author, a collection of texts, an ideological construction, and so forth) carries with it an impressive range of critical responses. Cervantes has been labeled converso (Castro, Canavaggio), Christian humanist (Castro, Bataillon, Forcione, Herrero, Vilanova), disillusioned secularist (Lukács, Cascardi), precapitalist (Johnson), anti-essentialist (Wilson), anti-Eusebian (Presberg), Menippean (Bakhtin), feminist (El Saffar, Rabin, Cruz), sadist (Nabokov), ethnocentric imperialist (Mariscal), medieval (Gorfkle), homophobic (Martín), non-organicist Aristotelian (Read), and either discursively or actually homosexual (Combet, Rossi, Smith, Arrabal). This list is nowhere near complete, but the reader will grasp the robust effects of the plurality of perspectives on Cervantes.

Each of these interpretations is valid to varying degrees within various contexts, but at present I am interested in reading Cervantes as the author of a multicultural manifesto on behalf of the Moriscos of Southern Spain. Within the contexts of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and Palestinian postcolonial literary critic Edward Said, materialist, postcolonial, and multicultural critiques of various forms of power and their ideologies can be seen as the fundamental propositions of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Cervantes’s ultimate orientation may perhaps be inescapably Eurocentric, but his responses to the European experience of the rise and expansion of an ethnocentric militaristic nation state are relatively centrifugal when compared to the attitudes of many of his contemporaries.

In surveying some of the antihegemonic details of Cervantes’s novel, I am also interested in dispelling the popular myth of Don Quixote. Especially in the English-speaking world, and particularly in the United States, Don Quixote remains captive to a romantic interpretation. Despite the efforts of numerous cervantistas, the protagonist is still generally taken as a positive hero “dreaming the impossible dream” against his oppressive society, the tone of Wasserman’s Man of La Mancha (1966) as well as of a forthcoming Hollywood version of the novel in which the writers have chosen to make the narrative “move” by having Don Quixote attempt to rescue Dulcinea from the evil Inquisition. These are but two examples of the common misrecognition of Cervantes’s radicality, whereby the author is appreciated for having anticipated the modern bourgeois values of everyone from Goethe to Jefferson–individual freedom, creative escapism, metaphysical multiperspectivism, and so on. While Cervantes’s anti-inquisitorial and even protofeminist attitudes are quite tenable, the liberal individualist reading risks erasing the more fundamental cultural component of his agenda. In short, Cervantes did not intend Don Quixote to be a noble hero, but rather an annoying ethnocentric fool, a menace to society who acts out his infatuation with the laughably antiquated aristocratic ideology of Arthurian chivalric romance.

Althusser

Althusser’s most salient term, “interpellation,” is used throughout his critical negotiation of the hegemonic ideology of liberal capitalism in his famous 1970 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”:

Ideology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it recruits subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or “transforms” the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey, you there!” [174]

This is essentially a political translation of Lacan’s mirror stage of human development, where the infant is deceived into accepting the illusion of its autonomy via its recognition of a corporeal self. In Lacan’s developmental trajectory, the social self loses its preverbal plurality; in Althusser’s political trajectory, the interpellated individual loses radical agency. But since Althusser’s definition of interpellation is for the purposes of discussing the relatively endogenous phenomenon of the rise of modern European bourgeois ideology, he privileges the exchange between classes over that between cultures. In deference to the latter, the term interpellation can have a more active and oppositional meaning which Althusser never fully develops [see note 4]. In the context of international relations, interpellation is a diplomatic gesture, the process by which a foreign minister formally questions the actions or policies of another nation-state. As we shall see, both senses of the term are ideal for a discussion of Cervantes’s ideological and cultural intentions.

At the beginning of the narrative, Don Quixote has already been called to action–that is, been interpellated in the Althusserian sense–by the ideology of Spanish chauvinism. His desire to imitate the prenational hero Amadís de Gaula is a logic brought on by his having confused chivalric romance with real history. To the extent that the books of chivalry have muddled Don Quixote’s interpretation of reality, they have functioned like one of Althusser’s ideological apparatuses, which subtly interpellate the reader who ingests their values. Such is made clear by the novel’s exposition. As the narrative proceeds, however, the discomfort and humor that form the thematic backbone of the novel’s episodes derive from Don Quixote’s repeated inability to gratify his chivalric impulses with respect to others. The initial phase of this process culminates in the cliffhanger at the conclusion of chapter 8, when the second narrator intrudes to inform the reader that the manuscript he has been transcribing has ended without offering a resolution to the battle between Don Quixote and the Basque. Here, as the frustration of the reader’s desire for a satisfactory narrative climax coincides with the frustration of the protagonist’s desire to conquer his enemy, Cervantes unveils the process of diplomatic interpellation as a key to overcoming ideological interpellation: if the subject already ideologically interpellated is the protagonist of Cervantes’s novel, the subject now being formally questioned by Cervantes’s novel is the ingenuous reader, who shares the second narrator’s and the protagonist’s nostalgia for the cultural and military dominance of Castile. Just as one might say that Althusser wishes to counterinterpellate the capitalist subject of 1970, Cervantes wishes to counterinterpellate the nationalist imperialist subject of 1605.

Said

Said’s Orientalism (197 offers an important critical perspective on the history of European literature from Dante to the present. The general mystique of the Orient has more often than not been a hyperbolic formulation based upon fear and ignorance, and hence one highly conducive to the sanctioning of military aggression and economic exploitation by the European powers. The theoretical play of Said’s term orientalism derives from the fact that it describes an Occidental phenomenon–specifically the ethnocentrism of English and French colonialism. It is therefore curious, but perhaps not so surprising, that aside from two rather perfunctory references to the medieval epic Poema de mio Çid [63, 71] and a quick portrait of the stupid brutality of Spanish colonial imperialism in the New World [82], Said’s discourse on the European encounter with the Oriental Other is largely silent with respect to the case of Spain. Particularly disappointing is Said’s stereotypical reference to Cervantes’s Don Quixote as a book about the dangers of literal reading [92-93]. One is tempted to conclude that Said does not seek allies for his project, that his silence with respect to Cervantes is a case of “anxiety of influence” in the still-nascent field of cultural criticism. Cervantes’s novel concerns itself with precisely the same problems that preoccupy Said. By his deconstruction of the very national and colonial period of Spanish history that should be of more interest to Said, Cervantes is an important precursor in the task of diplomatically interpellating European orientalism.

Cervantes

If the intended significance of Don Quixote is an Althusserian counterinterpellation of the ideology of early modern Spanish imperialism and a Saidian or diplomatic interpellation of the ideology of early modern Spanish orientalism, this intention is to be found most explicitly in the fundamental climax of the first part of the novel, which occurs between chapters 8 and 9 and on the heels of the famous adventure with the windmills. Significantly, this is precisely where the novel achieves its modern status as a “writerly” text, a book that, as Said puts it, challenges its reader’s tendency “to prefer the schematic authority of a text to the disorientations of direct encounters with the human” [93]. Between chapters 8 and 9, where the so-called first modern novel’s most important rupture takes place, Don Quixote is left in the midst of his duel with the Basque:

Venía, pues, como se ha dicho, don Quijote contra el cauto vizcaino, con la espada en alto, con determinación de abrirle por medio, y el vizcaíno le aguardaba ansimesmo levantada la espada y aforrado con su almohada, y todos los circunstantes estaban temerosos y colgados de lo que había de suceder de aquellos tamaños golpes con que se amenazaban; y la señora del coche y las demás criadas suyas estaban haciendo mil votos y ofrecimientos a todas las imágenes y casas de devoción de España, porque Dios librase a su escudero y a ellas de aquel tan grande peligro en que se hallaban.

Pero está el daño de todo esto que en este punto y término deja pendiente el autor desta historia esta batalla, disculpándose que no halló más escrito, destas hazañas de don Quijote, de las que deja referidas. Bien es verdad que el segundo autor desta obra no quiso creer que tan curiosa historia estuviese entregada a las leyes del ovido, ni que hubiesen sido tan poco curiosos los ingenios de la Mancha, que no tuviesen en sus archivos o en sus escritorios algunos papeles que deste famoso caballero tratasen; y así, con esta imaginación, no se desesperó de hallar el fin desta apacible historia, el cual, siéndole el cielo favorable, le halló del modo que se contará en la segunda parte. [137-38]

Don Quixote, as we have said, rushed at the wary Basque with sword aloft, determined to cleave him to the waist; and the Basque watched, with his sword also raised and well guarded by his cushion; while all the by-standers trembled in terrified suspense, hanging upon the issue of the dreadful blows with which they threatened one another. And the lady of the coach and her waiting-women offered a thousand vows and prayers to all the images and places of devotion in Spain, that God might deliver their squire and them from the great peril they were in.

But the unfortunate thing is that the author of this history left the battle in suspense at this crucial point, with the excuse that he could find no more records of Don Quixote’s exploits than those related here. It is true that the second author of this work would not believe that such a curious history could have been consigned to oblivion, or that the learned of La Mancha could have been so incurious as not to have in their archives or in their registries some documents relating to this famous knight. So, strong in this opinion, he did not despair of finding the conclusion of this delightful story and, by the favour of Heaven, found it, as shall be told in our second part. [74-75]

The promised “second part,” which follows in chapter 9, is anything but satisfying to the reader who seeks the gratification of an immediate resolution to the armed conflict. Chapter 9 begins with the confession on the part of the Christian narrator that the fabled original manuscript has left him in the lurch as well. First he tells of his disappointment at finding the text to be incomplete, and then he tells of his joy at the fortuitous discovery of its continuation:

Dejamos en la primera parte desta historia al valeroso vizcaíno y al famoso don Quijote con las espadas altas y desnudas, en guisa de decargar dos furibundos fendientes, tales, que si en lleno se acertaban, por lo menos se dividirían y fenderían de arriba abajo y abrirían como una granada; y que en aquel punto tan dudoso paró y quedó destroncada tan sabrosa historia, sin que nos diese noticia su autor dónde se podría hallar lo que della faltaba. [139]

In the first part of this history we left the valiant Basque and the famous Don Quixote with naked swords aloft, on the point of dealing two such furious downward strokes as, had they struck true, would have cleft both knights asunder from head to foot, and split them like pomegranates. At this critical point our delightful history stopped short and remained mutilated, our author failing to inform us where to find the missing part. This caused me great annoyance, for my pleasure from the little I had read turned to displeasure at the thought of the small chance there was of finding the rest of this delightful story. [75]

The intended irony of all of this is easy to miss, but fortunately it is historically specific. The comedic battle between the archetypal Castilian knight and his Basque enemy at the conclusion of chapter 8 is an emblem of the initial phase of Christian military consolidation on the Iberian Peninsula prior to the rise of Castile in the twelfth century. The episode’s humor derives as much from the parody of a military encounter as it does from the Basque’s inability to speak proper Castilian, but the scene also contains an abstraction for the popular imagination’s version of the prehistorical encounter between Cantabrian tribes, an encounter that must have occurred long before the Reconquest, and perhaps even before the Moorish invasion (cf. the role of Minaya Álbar Fáñez in the Poema de mio Çid). In 1611, for example, Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco, the Cuencan lexicographer, describes the Basque language with historical awe for a postdiluvian golden age:

La lengua de los desta tierra llamaron vascongada. Tiénese por cierto que la primera población de España fué la de esta tierra, por Tubal, tataranieto de Noé; y es cosa admirable que hasta nuestros tiempos se aya conservado sin mezcla de otra alguna, excepto algunos vocablos que por la comunicación de los demás pueblos se avrán introducido. Esta gente hasta la predicación del Evangelio vivió en la ley de naturaleza, adorando un solo Dios verdadero. La Cantabria, Guipúzcoa, Álava, Vizcaya y las demás partes del reyno de Navarra, que han participado y participan desta lengua, es de la gente más antigua y más noble y limpia de toda España. ["Vascuña" 995]

The language of those from this land is called vascongada. It is taken as certain that the first population of Spain was that of this land, by Tubal, third grandson of Noah; and it is an admirable thing that until our times it has been conserved without mixture with any other language, except for a few words which have been introduced due to communication with the other peoples. These people up until the teaching of the Gospel lived under the law of nature, worshiping one true God. Cantabria, Guipúzcoa, Álava, Vizcaya, and the other parts of the kingdom of Navarra that have shared and continue to share this language, are possessed of the most ancient, noble, and pure people of all Spain. [my translation]

J. J. Menezo’s genealogy of Spanish heads of state shows that this foundation myth persists today: “Se puede considerar el nacimiento de Castilla como una manifestación de los pueblos cántabro y vasco, poco romanizados, que defienden su peculiar modo de vida; teniendo como base, la propiedad y libertad individual frente al Fuero Juzgo, nostalgia del Nuevo Imperio Gótico” [1] (”The birth of Castile can be considered a manifestation of the scarcely Romanized Cantabrian and Basque townships that defended their particular way of life, having as its base, individual liberty and property before the Just Law, a remnant of the New Gothic Empire” [my translation]). Not surprisingly, numerous members of the Covarrubias family served in the government of the Hapsburgs and were often intimately involved in the recovery and redissemination of the Fuero Juzgo. Covarrubias even proudly includes the family name in his definition of the term [613].

Clearly, Cervantes’s text questions the construction of national identity being mounted by Castilians like the Covarrubias and their Hapsburg patrons. The slippery issue of whether or not the ancient Iberians accepted this “just law” or instead had it violently imposed upon them, first by the Visigoths and later by Castilla-León, is another underlying tension at the end of chapter 8. The conclusion foregrounds the violent contradiction between the imperial nostalgia of the Castilian Don Quixote and the linguistic and nationalistic independence of the primordial Basque. Of particular interest is the fact that in Cervantes’s version of the cultural tension at the mythical foundation of Castile, the character fighting for his freedom is not Don Quixote, who instead violently contaminates–or “stains” as the epithet “de la Mancha” indicates–the purity of the Basque.

Ask the popular reader which is the most famous episode of Don Quixote, and she will recall the windmill at the beginning of chapter 8. But she will not understand the symbolic relationship between the windmill and the postponed image of the crossed blades of the Castilian and the Basque, where “X marks the spot” again at the conclusion of the very same chapter. Fidel Fajardo-Acosta has pointed out that the giant windmills are a reference to the final circle of the Inferno, where Dante undergoes his own crucial transformation by having to embrace Satan and symbolically reverse the upside-down logic of his universe in order to proceed. Subsequently, Don Quixote’s ridiculous battle with the Basque marks the climax of the novel’s satirical portrait of the Castilian national identity that remains incapable of learning from its “revolutionary” fall and is still hell-bent on demonizing everything and everyone it meets. Indeed, only moments after being thrown to the ground and having his lance broken by the windmill, but still previous to his encounter with the Basque, Don Quixote had already declared his intention to emulate a certain Diego Pérez de Vargas, whose fame and epithet derive from his prowess against Moors:

–Yo me acuerdo haber leído que un caballero español llamado Diego Pérez de Vargas, habiéndose en una batalla roto la espada, desgajó de una encina un pesado ramo o tronco, y con él hizo tales cosas aquel día y machacó tantos moros que le quedó por sobrenombre Machuca, y así él como sus decendientes se llamaron desde aquel día en adelante Vargas y Machuca. Hete dicho esto, porque de la primera encina o roble que se me depare pienso desgajar otro tronco tal y tan bueno como aquel que me imagino, y pienso hacer con él tales hazañas, que tú te tengas por bien afortunado de haber merecido venir a vellas y a ser testigo de cosas que apenas podrán ser creídas. [131]

I remember reading that a certain Spanish knight called Diego Perez de Vargas, having broken his sword in battle, tore a great bough or limb from an oak, and performed such deeds with it that day, and pounded so many Moors that he earned the surname of the Pounder, and thus he and his descendants from that day onwards have been called Vargas y Machuca. I mention this because I propose to tear down just such a limb from the first oak we meet, as big and as good as his; and I intend to do such deeds with it that you may consider yourself most fortunate to have won the right to see them. For you will witness things which will scarcely be credited. [69]

And so the unmasking of imperialist ideology that occurs at the conclusion of this chapter is made even more complete by the sudden contextual presences of both the original Arabic author Cide Hamete Benengeli and the Morisco translator. If the battle between the Basque and Don Quixote is symbolic of the dialectical difficulty at the mythic foundation of Castile, then the presences of the Arab and the Morisco allow for the “othered” perspectives of more recent Castilian history. Similarly, the use of the term “granada” as an image of the hypothetical outcome of the violence between the Basque and Don Quixote (”dos furibundos fendientes, tales, que si en lleno se acertaban, por lo menos se dividirían y fenderían de arriba abajo y abrirían como una granada” [139] (”two such furious downward strokes as, had they struck true, would have cleft both knights asunder from head to foot, and split them like pomegranates” [75]) strongly suggests the kingdom by the same name that is the current site of the Morisco problem [see note 3]. In conjunction, then, the Moor, the Basque, the Arab, and the Morisco contain the Castilian (protagonist, second narrator, and reader) and force him to examine the violence both at the beginning, middle, and present of his national history. Much more than a modern deconstruction of the suspension of disbelief involved in the acts of narrating and reading, what is truly marvelous about Cervantes’s “disorienting” transition is the way in which he weaves the laughter of the Arabic Other into a deconstruction of Castilian identity. Cervantes, the ultimate author of what at this moment becomes the modern novel, subtly invites his reader to laugh along with both the Morisco translator and the original Arabic author at the ingenuous antics of the medieval Castilian nationalist.

At the beginning of chapter 9, Cervantes’s Christian narrator enthusiastically seeks the outcome of the battle. Indeed he seeks the self-privileging pleasure of an already-known outcome. The mere fact that a Castilian is transcribing the novel for a Castilian public would indicate that Don Quixote is expected to defeat the Basque for the historical allegory to reflect reality. But the rupturing action of Cervantes’s narrative disallows this result, and what ensues instead is a dizzying deconstruction of national, ethnic, religious, and linguistic subject positions. Here in Toledo, in the very heart of Spain, in its religious center just south of Madrid, in its ancient imperial Visigothic capital–the glorious multicultural center of medieval translations, but later home to one of the bloodiest inquisitorial tribunals–a young boy in the marketplace (”alcaná” from the Arabic “al-ja^-na^-t”) provides the Castilian narrator with the Arabic text that supposedly promises to relinquish the preferred outcome:

Pasó, pues, el hallarla en esta manera:

Estando yo un día en el Alcaná de Toledo, llegó un muchacho a vender unos cartapacios y papeles viejos a un sedero; y como yo soy aficionado a leer, aunque sean los papeles rotos de las calles, llevado desta mi natural inclinación, tomé un cartapacio de los que el muchacho vendía, y vile con carácteres que conocí ser arábigos. Y puesto que aunque los conocía no los sabía leer, anduve mirando si parecía por allí algún morisco aljamiado que los leyese, y no fue muy dificultoso hallar intérprete semejante, pues aunque le buscara de otra mejor y más antigua lengua, le hallara. En fin, la suerte me deparó uno, que, diciéndole mi deseo y poniéndole el libro en las manos, le abrió por medio, y leyendo un poco en él, se comenzó a reír. [142-43]

This is how the discovery occurred:–One day I was in the Alcaná at Toledo, when a lad came to sell some parchments and old papers to a silk merchant. Now as I have a taste for reading even torn papers lying in the streets, I was impelled by my natural inclination to take up one of the parchment books the lad was selling, and saw in it characters which I recognized as Arabic. But though I could recognize them I could not read them, and looked around to see if there was not some Spanish-speaking Moor about, to read them to me; and it was not difficult to find such an interpreter there. For, even if I had wanted one for a better and older language, I should have found one. In short, chance offered me one, to whom I explained what I wanted, placing the book in his hands. He opened it in the middle, and after reading a little began to laugh. [76]

And so the old Morisco translator in Toledo greets the fumbling second narrator and his complicit reader with laughter. Laughter at what? In general, laughter at the desperate importance that the Castilian has placed on such a silly text. But the specificity of this laughter is even more amazing, and perhaps paradoxically justifies said importance. For the Morisco translator has comprehended an Arabic commentator’s joke in the margin about a classic Castilian anxiety that deserves to be laughed at:

Preguntéle yo que de qué se reía, y respondióme que de una cosa que tenía aquel libro escrita en el margen por anotación. Díjele que me la dijese, y él, sin dejar la risa, dijo:

–Está, como he dicho, aquí en el margen escrito esto: «Esta Dulcinea del Toboso, tantas veces en esta historia referida, dicen que tuvo la mejor mano para salar puercos que otra mujer de toda la Mancha.» [142-43]

I asked him what he was laughing at, and he answered that it was at something written in the margin of the book by way of a note. I asked him to tell me what it was and, still laughing, he answered: “This is what is written in the margin: ‘They say that Dulcinea del Toboso, so often mentioned in this history, was the best hand at salting pork of any woman in all La Mancha.’” [76]

This is much more than the Morisco laughing at the object of the Castilian Christian’s desire; this is a complicated geopolitical and cultural joke. He is mocking the Castilian Christian’s ethnic anxiety, his need to prove, by eating pork, that neither he nor his love object are Jewish or Islamic. The Morisco translator’s laughter discloses the knowledge he shares with Arabic readers and glossers who recognize that Don Quixote’s lady is also from “La Mancha,” and therefore quite likely Semitic despite her reputation for salting pork. In short, after nearly 900 years of convivencia, this pathetic Castilian attempt at a clear ethnic or cultural distinction strikes the Morisco as absurd. The question now: is the Spanish reader of 1605 still laughing? The ultimate result of the windmill episode is as simple as “what goes around comes around.” Just as Don Quixote would contaminate the Basque golden age with Castilian history, so the Morisco reduces the late sixteenth-century Castilian concern for blood purity with marginal irreverence. Moreover, the fact that this culturally interpellating joke occurs in the marketplace adds a Bakhtinian dimension to the Cervantine critique. Bakhtin’s positive assessment of the lower-class humor of Rabelais as the textual equivalent of liberating spaces and events like the marketplace or carnival is akin to Cervantes’s regard for the young merchant as well as his sympathy with the laughter of the Morisco translator.

Conclusion

Reading Don Quixote side by side with Althusser and Said we have analyzed some of the details of Cervantes’s dual process of diplomatic interpellation and ideological counterinterpellation of Castilian identity. But since Cervantes’s text is generally considered a work of art rather than social criticism, a word is in order on Althusser’s understanding of art. At one extreme of the critical spectrum, one might expect Althusser to adopt the classic marxist line that any art which is not socialist realism is bourgeois ideological nonsense, little different from the academic philosophy that Lenin called (quoting Dietzgen) the “refined, elevated professorial religion of muddled idealists” [cited by Althusser 30]. Yet Althusser offers a surprisingly moderate, and even elitist, commentary on art: “I do not rank real art among the ideologies, although art does have a quite particular and specific relationship with ideology” [221]. In his essay on Cremonini, he displays further committed regard for the representation of abstract relations [229-42]. It can be surprising to find that such an irascible materialist does not rank “real art” among the ideologies. Surely this must be Althusser’s single most idealistic and quixotic gesture. If interpellation is the means by which the dominant ideology controls the subject, then the exception that Althusser grants to the sophisticated abstractions of “real art” suggests a materialist agenda, meaning that “real art” has the potential to “counterinterpellate” the dominant rationale of the reading subject. Cervantes’s Don Quixote anticipates this definition of “real art” as a purposeful means of breaking his society’s structures of misrecognition.

In reading art as social criticism, we grant it a modicum of authorial intention, acknowledging at least the author’s attempt at the logic of a persuasive discourse. Wimsatt and Beardsley’s insistence that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art” [3] should not preclude us from attending to the cultural and historical specificity of what happens when a text intentionally fails to work, as it does at the end of chapter 8 of Don Quixote. In the broad cultural and geopolitical terms to which the text is historically predisposed and that thus require no substantiation through authorial intent, we might say that Cervantes’s text marks the crossroads of the interdependent births of modern imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. But in Don Quixote Cervantes does more than record his historical context; he purposefully reveals how Spain, owing to its hybrid cultural history and its geographical location as an intercontinent between Africa and Europe, cannot evince the same kind of easy colonialist orientalism as France and England. In Spain the more enduring presence of the Arab “disorients” the European to a far greater degree than in the rest of Europe. At the first major break of his novel, when Cervantes interrupts Don Quixote’s battle with the Basque in order to have a Toledan Morisco laugh at an Arabic joke scribbled in the margin of a passage about a Spanish identity crisis, he has inserted a metatextual obstacle, a kind of narrative trajectory that approaches, but always resists, an asymptote of the gratification of Castilian aggression. Perhaps a tragedy of early modern Spanish history is that the antiquated nationalism of Don Quixote won and the marketplace humor of the Toledan Morisco lost. But in his novels, Cervantes would have his readers both comprehend and desire the economic laughter of the Other in order to move in a direction opposite that of actual history–that is, opposite the dominant history exemplified by Don Quixote. In this sense, the character Don Quixote is a portrait of perpetually misdirected aggression around which Cervantes constructs the novel Don Quixote as an apparatus for its rational containment. Thus in the 1605 novel’s conclusion Don Quixote arrives literally in a cage at the center of his town’s plaza. And given Cervantes’s stated purpose of placing a multiperspectivist literary game in the public plaza of his republic (see this paper’s epigraph), it would seem that the body of Don Quixote is to serve an analogous purpose. The scene very much implies that Don Quixote is to be punished or sacrificed for the public good, the simple irony being that such public humiliation was common in the treatment of heretics rather than heroes.

Malcom Read has pointed out that Cervantes’s rationalism is “not to be confused with the scientific empiricism and mechanical rationalism that correspond to the next stage of bourgeois development, which was to take place in England and France” [6]. Yet the image of Don Quixote’s hopeless and laughable battle with the windmill both anticipates and complicates Lenin’s understanding of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism. The precapitalist scenario of chapters 8 and 9 shows the imperialist hopelessly battling against the onset of the dehumanization of capitalism, and failing at that, immediately returning to his old ways, sublimating his own defeat into a renewed aggression against Others like Basques, Moors Arabs, and Moriscos. If, on the one hand, as Fernand Braudel has claimed, “the ‘imperial idea’ had its roots in the historic Spanish crusade” [418], on the other, the most famous episode of Don Quixote allows that the imperialism and colonialism of Hapsburg Spain was also dynamically related to the bourgeois materialism threatening from the north. To the extent that Don Quixote is a negative exemplar of the abuses of Hapsburg imperialism against various Others, Cervantes also seems to be making a qualified appeal for the very scientific empiricism and mechanical rationalism that Don Quixote would resist. Such an attitude may well be the secular and economic corollary of Erasmism, what Javier Herrero has called “the new, to a great extent bourgeois, Christianity which descended to the South of Europe from the Low Countries” [77].

Diacritics 29.2 (1999) 68-85

By E. C. Graf, an assistant professor who teaches Spanish and comparative literature at Smith College. He is currently finishing a manuscript entitled Cervantine Politics: From Princely Advice to Quixotic Critique and is working on the political and sexual dynamics of the Poema de mio Cid.