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~dventures in ~aradox
 PENN STATE STUDIES
in ROMANCE LITERATURES
Editors Frederick A. de Armas Norris Lacy Allan Stoekl

Refiguring the Hero: Medieval Spanish Epic:

From Peasant to Noble in Mythic Roots and Ritual Language
Lope de Vega and Calderon by Thomas Montgomery
by Dian Fox
Unfinished Revolutions:
Don Juan and the Point of Honor:
Legacies of Upheaval in
Seduction, Patriarchal Society,
Modern French Culture
and Literary Tradition
edited by Robert T. Denomme and
by James Mandrell
Roland H Simon
Narratives of Desire:
Nineteenth-Century Spanish Stages of Desire:
Fiction by Women The Mythological Tradition in Classical
by Lou Chamon-Deutsch and Contemporary Spanish Theater
by Michael Kidd
Garcilaso de la Vega and the
Italian Renaissance
Fictions of the Feminine in the
by Daniel L. Heiple
Nineteenth-Century Spanish Press
by Lou Chamon-Deutsch
Allegories of Kingship:
Calderon and the
Anti-Machiavellian Tradition The Novels and Plays of
by Stephen Rupp Eduardo Manet:
An Adventure in Multiculturalism
Acts of Fiction: by Phyllis Zatlin
Resistance and Resolution
from Sade to Baudelaire
Fernando de Rojas and the
by Scott Carpenter
Renaissance Vision: Phantasm,
Melancholy, and Didacticism in Celestina
Grotesque Purgatory:
A Study of Cervantes's Don Quixote, Part II
by Ricardo Castells
by Henry W Sullivan
The Poetics of Empire in the Indies:
Spanish Comedies and Historical Prophecy and Imitation in
Contexts in the 1620s La Araucana and Os Luciadas
by William R. Blue by James Nicolopulos

The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel:

Literature and the Left in the Maria de Zayas Tells Baroque Tales of Love
Wake of Engagement and the Cruelty of Men
by Danielle Marx-Scouras Margaret Greer

Madrid 1900: Vision, the Gaze, and the Function of the

The Capital as Cradle of Senses in Celestina
Literature and Culture James F. Burke
by Michael Ugarte

Ideologies of History in the Adventures in Paradox:

Spanish Golden Age Don Quixote and the Western Tradition
by Anthony J Cascardi Charles D. Presberg
The Pennsylvania State University Press
University Park, Pennsylvania
Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Program for Cultural Cooperation
between Spain's Ministry of Education and Culture and United States Universities.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Presberg, Charles D.
Adventures in paradox: Don Quixote and the western tradition / Charles D. Presberg.
p. cm.-(Penn State studies in Romance literatures)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-271-02039-3 (alk. paper)
1. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 1547-1616. Don Quixote. 2. Paradox in literature.
I. Title. II. Series.

PQ6353 .P72 2001

863'.3-dc21
99-055297

Copyright © 2001 The Pennsylvania State University

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,
University Park, PA 16802-1003

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper for the first
printing of all clothbound books. Publications on uncoated stock satisfY the minimum
requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
 For
Michael Stephen, and Philip
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments IX

Introduction: Paradoxical Problems 1

PART I
Western Paradox and the Spanish Golden Age

1 Paradoxical Discourse from Antiquity to the Renaissance:

Plato, Nicolaus Cusanus, and Erasmus 11
2 Paradoxy and the Spanish Renaissance: Fernando de Rojas,
Antonio de Guevara, and Pero Mexia 37

PART II
Inventing a Tale, Inventing a Self

3 "This Is Not a Prologue": Paradoxy and the Prologue to

Don Quixote, Part I 75
4 Paradoxes ofImitation: The Quest for Origins and Originality 163
5 "I Know Who I Am": Don Quixote de la Mancha, Don Diego
de Miranda, and the Paradox of Self-Knowledge 193

Concluding Remarks 231

Works Cited 237
Index 247
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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Mary Gaylord and James Iffland guided me in turning an earlier version of this
project into a doctoral dissertation presented at Harvard University, heroically
enduring drafts that resembled what Henry James would call "a loose and baggy
monster." I am deeply grateful to both of them, not only for helping me tighten
my argument and diction but also for their compelling blend of humanity and
professionalism, which I have retained as a model for imitation in my own pro-
fessional endeavors.
I also owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my friend and colleague Henry
Sullivan, who read the entire manuscript, commenting insightfully on almost
every page. With thankful enthusiasm, I have incorporated all his suggestions
into my text.
I thank my colleagues Lucille Kerr, Maria Cristina Quintero, and Ramon
Araluce for commenting on various chapters of the manuscript. I thank Carroll
Johnson, Michael McGaha, Harry Sieber, and Luis Murillo for questions, con-
versations, and correspondence that have helped refine important parts of my
critical argument. I express my thanks to Raul Galoppe for his diligent assistance
in proofreading, research, and editing; to Melinda Howard for her excellent
research and proofreading, as well as for preparing a first draft of the index.
At Penn State University Press, I wish to thank Frederick de Armas, series edi-
tor, for his unflagging support; Romaine Perrin, for her expert copyediting; Peter
Potter, Shannon Pennefeather, Cherene Holland, and Patty Mitchell, for their
skill and patience in bringing this book to completion.
A section of Chapter 3 appeared in MLN (formerly Modern Language Notes)
110 (1995): 215-39; and an earlier version of Chapter 5 appeared in Cervantes
14 (1994): 41---69. I am thankful to the editors of both journals for permission to
reproduce that material here. My thanks go, as well, to The Research Board at the
University of Missouri for a summer research grant that permitted me to finish
x Acknowledgments

this project in a timely fashion; and to the Program for Cultural Cooperation for
a generous grant.
I thank my ex-wife Elizabeth for her support at crucial stages of this book's
preparation. And last, I thank my three children, Michael, Stephen, and Philip,
for allowing me to rank happily among those persons who, in blessings and love,
owe more than they can repay.
 Introduction

Paradoxical Problems

More than twenty years ago, Francisco Marquez Villanueva wrote: "The study of
Don Quixote as a masterwork in the genre of paradox has yet to be carried out
and remains one of the sizeable gaps in Cervantes scholarship" (El estudio del
Quijote en cuanto obra maestra del genero parad6jico no se ha realizado aun y
constituye uno de los grandes huecos en la bibliografia cervantina) (Marquez
Villanueva 1975, 214).1 Since then, scholars have generally recognized the per-
vasiveness of paradox in Don Quixote, although no one has yet undertaken a sys-
tematic investigation of this trope in Cervantes' masterpiece. 2 My purpose in this
study is to situate Cervantes' Don Quixote within the tradition of paradoxical
discourse, or paradoxy, in the West. Hence, this book is a response, in part, to

1. Translations from Spanish to English are mine unless otherwise stated.

2. The subject of Cervantes' use of paradox is explicit in Russell 1969 and latent in an important
study of semantic ambiguity and authorial ambivalence in Don Quixote by Duran (1960), both of which
2 Introduction

the challenge set forth by Marquez Villanueva, though I recognize that the spe-
cific gap to which he refers will remain unfilled and, perhaps, unfillable.
In the first place, though I believe that Marquez Villanueva is right in point-
ing to Don Quixote as a work of literary paradoxy, my examination of that trope
leads me to doubt whether one can properly speak of "paradox" as a "genre"
(genero parad6jico) and, hence, to doubt whether Cervantes' fiction exemplifies
such a genre. 3 The tradition of paradoxical writing encompasses works in disci-
plines as diverse as philosophy, rhetoric, and literature. And, among the literary
works alone, a rhetoric of paradoxy informs a host of poems, dramas, prose nar-
ratives, anatomies, and miscellanies, all varying considerably in the selection-as
well as the comic or serious treatment-of their subject matter. Paradoxy, in
short, represents a particular if broad species of artful discourse. It is a trope of
thought, a structuring principle, or a rhetorical strategy that moves freely and
playfully across the boundaries that convention assigns to genres, modes, and
intellectual disciplines.
In the second place, I am aware that my attempt to undertake a systematic
investigation of a slippery trope in a slippery text must begin with what Rosalie
Colie calls a "defense of the indefensible"; that is, a defense of this "attempt to
treat systematically a subject [both the trope and the text] designed to deny and
destroy systems" (Colie 1966, vii). Paradoxically enough, the defense and indefen-
sibility coincide in that paradoxy both "denies" and "destroys" systems through a
rhetorical gesture of self-reference. In other words, paradoxical discourse system-
atically uses the categories of language and logic to question and mock the very
categories that undergird language and logic as discursive systems. As a conse-
quence, paradoxist and public alike must reassess their formerly untested assump-
tions about logic and language, even as they realize that the measure of a writer
or rhetor's success in using the system against itself is also a measure of his or her
failure to undermine that system. In equal measure, what Colie would call
destruction thus becomes a form of validation, denial a form of affirmation. In
the present analysis of Cervantine paradoxy, it is therefore necessary to acknowl-
edge, at once, the utility and futility of systematic treatment. The categorical
limits set forth in these pages stand as only one possible means of arranging a

studies predate Marquez Villanueva's observation quoted above. Besides the study by Marquez Villanueva
from which that quotation is taken (1975, 147-27), other discussions of paradox in Don Quixote include
those by Eisenberg (1987, 188-93), Jones (1986), Martin (1991, 79-80) and Parr (1988, 103-19). Two
studies by Forcione (1982, 1984) explore aspects of Cervantes' paradoxical discourse chiefly in relation to
that author's Exempldry Novellds (Novelds ejempldres).
3. It seems that the "genre" that Marquez has in mind is the "paradoxical encomium," also called the
"mock encomium," a burlesque species of declamation that I discuss in Chapter 1 of the presenr study.
 Introduction 3

subject that both implies the necessity and questions the fixity of all orderly
arrangements in discourse.
In more specific terms, in this study I argue that Don Quixote exemplifies a
species ofliterary discourse that is about, for, and against literary discourse, includ-
ing its own. Cervantes' fiction represents a self-conscious text that is made from
other texts, and a text that is about the reading and writing of texts. Indeed, one
of the fiction's chief traits is that it dramatizes a systematic yet open method of
paradoxy that simultaneously affirms, denies, and enlarges the categories by which
we judge and speak about the mysteries of both art and nature. Further, in its
development of both character and action, the fiction enlists a specifically narra-
tive method that relates nothing less than the paradoxicality of both literature and
life, and that prevents its readers from equating either "knowledge" or "truth"
about those matters with a rationalist quest for closure or formulaic certainty.
What is more, as playfully dramatized in Cervantes' fictional work, the myriad
manifestations of paradox emerge as variations on the problem of infinity-infi-
nite regress, infinite series, the vicious circle, eternity-a problem that is insolu-
ble solely within logical or linguistic terms (which invariably strive to terminate
further discussion) and approachable only by way of negation. After the manner
of Cervantes' text, I adopt in this study a method that relies heavily on what logi-
cians call negative assertions, which are neither identical nor simply reducible to
a denial of positive statements. 4 For logical and semantic contradiction need not
be confined to a dogmatically skeptical terminus of "undecidability" and "cancel-
ing out."
A further consequence of their infinite and undefinable quality is that para-
doxes are also "generative" (Colie 1966,3-40). One paradoxical utterance about
either literature or life necessarily gives rise to another, often its opposite, ad
infinitum, thus militating against both the narrative and academic requirements
of fitting one's discourse within a discernible beginning (thesis), middle (discus-
sion) and end (conclusion). An examination of Don Quixote as a masterwork of
paradoxy thus forces one to acknowledge the dual impossibility of identifying
"all" the paradoxes that the text presumably "contains" or the infinite number of
ways in which that text may be deemed paradoxical.
Moreover, in keeping with the tradition of paradoxical discourse-which
resists the tidiness of logical, linguistic, or literary form-Cervantes' long tale
about its mad protagonist and about itselfas tale both begins and ends with star-
tling abruptness. Rather than concluding, it simply comes to a halt. Put another
way, the story (called a history) relates, at the start of its first chapter, how the
4. Barwise and Etchemendy (1987, 177) discuss the distinction, in both logic and semantics,
between negations and negative assertions.
4 Introduction

personality known as Don Quixote "comes to life" as the product of a nameless

hidalgo's deranged imagination. In this "history," more than 120 chapters are
then devoted to the "adventures" that the "knight" Don Quixote undertakes
until, at end of the history, "amid the sadness and tears of the persons gathered
there, [Don Quixote] gave up the ghost, by which I mean that he died (entre
compasiones y lagrimas de los que alli se hallaron, dio su espiritu, quiero decir
que se muri6) (DQII: 74, 591).5 Likewise, what in this study takes the form of
beginning, middle, and end amounts to little more than a series of somewhat
arbitrary choices about where to start; what to include, expand upon, or hold in
abeyance; and where, finally, to stop.

The title of the present study, Adventures in Paradox: "Don Quixote" and the
Western Tradition, alludes to a twofold aim. First, as stated in the preceding para-
graphs, I hope to open up further rather than fill a gap in the bibliography on
Don Quixote and, more generally, on the tradition of paradoxy in the West.
Next, the element of "adventures" in the title, besides suggesting the ideas of
quest, surprise, and escape from the humdrum for all adventurers, signals my
interest in examining paradoxical novelties that accrue for both characters and
readers from the fictional and extrafictional aspects of Cervantes' narrative. I
shall be concerned to examine how, at their respective levels of "being," charac-
ters and readers alike engage in a series of parallel adventures, as they negotiate
the paradoxes within Cervantes' fictional world.
Designating the adventures of the characters and the reader as parallel implies
that they are dissimilar and cannot simply be shared. To be sure, Cervantes' char-
acters occupy their own world, or heterocosm. What for them, in their hetero-
cosm, appears as history remains fiction for the reader of Cervantes' text. These
commonplace observations become necessary, first, because I respectfully disagree
with Americo Castro's sighting of "Pirandellism" within the Cervantine text
(Castro 1967,477-85). The characters in Don Quixote are never in search of an
author and remain blithely unaware of either their imaginary status or a world
outside their heterocosm. Second, I believe that Cervantes' careful preservation of
the cleavage separating the fictional and extrafictional worlds increases the self-
conscious quality of his work, expands the scope of his textual paradoxes, and
enhances his examination of the literature/life and history/poetry boundaries.
That the narrative draws an analogy between the characters' adventures and
those of the reader becomes clear from the prominence that readers, written

5. All references to Cervantes' Don Quixote are to the edition by Luis Murillo, by abbreviated title,
part, chapter, and page number in instances of quotation. Hence, the above citation (DQII: 74,591) indi-
cates Don Quixote, Part II, chapter 74, page 591.
 Introduction 5

texts, and stories enjoy in the narrative. For example, in Part I, if the madness of
our anonymous hidalgo and his emergence as the protagonist Don Quixote are
not simply the product of his reading the romances of chivalry, the identity of
that protagonist and the shape of his pseudochivalric adventures remain defined
by the stories he reads and by his interpretation of those stories as histories. The
prominence of readers, texts, and stories is probably nowhere more evident
within the heterocosm of Part I than at Juan Palomeque's inn (DQ I: 32-47),
where characters exchange their life tales, listen to the priest's reading from a dis-
covered manuscript titled "The Tale of Impertinent Curiosity" (Novela del
curioso impertinente), and voice their opinions about the merits and demerits,
truth and untruth, of chivalric romance. Further, the final version of the history
concerning the exploits of Don Quixote is put forth, within the fiction we have
before us, as the work of a narrator-editor, necessarily a reader, who is working
primarily from the manuscript attributed to Cide Hamete.
In Part II of the fiction, the majority of the characters have either read or are
informed about the contents of Cide Hamete's history, the fictional analogue of
Miguel de Cervantes' own Don Quixote, Part I. What is important to stress here
is that, in light of those allusions within the text, we can hardly avoid perceiving
fictional analogues of ourselves in such readers and listeners of fictional and non-
fictional tales, including a tale (for them a history, for us a fiction) about Don
Quixote. And it seems that we can hardly avoid perceiving such parallels and
analogies between the fictional and extrafictional planes of the work as the prod-
uct of artistic design.
However, it is pertinent to add that parallels between the adventures of Cer-
vantes' characters and those of his readers possess an ethical as well as aesthetic
dimension. As a prime example of literary paradoxy, Don Quixote is a seriocomic
book. Within Cervantes' heterocosm, all his characters' "lives" include interpre-
tations regarding the deeds of other characters, material items (e.g., windmills,
fulling mills, basins, "helmets," or "basin-helmets"), stories, manuscripts, and at
least one "historical" narrative. About these matters, Cervantes' characters emit a
host of judgments-which vary in their degree of wisdom and folly-and later
act upon those judgments. Their spoken judgments and actions, including their
actions as interpreters, are integral to their characterization, reflecting upon them
for good or ill-usually ill. In their encounter with Cervantes' fictional text, read-
ers may come to realize that their own conduct as interpreters of the tale and its
protagonist likewise characterizes them, and that their reading and judging what
occurs within the heterocosm amounts to their observing an analogue of their
own extrafictional drama as readers and judges. The similarities between charac-
ters and readers-between the heterocosm and the historical world-point to the
6 Introduction

creating intelligence of a self-conscious author who makes each reader both

accomplice and nemesis in a complex, metaliterary game. The boundary between
cosmos and heterocosm, or literature and life, is alternately confirmed and
undone, thanks in no small measure to the preservation of a fictional frame-a
frame that allows the text to function as a mirror of its own readings.

In order to examine the analogous adventures in paradox that accrue for both
readers and characters throughout Don Quixote, I have divided my study into
two parts, which encompass five chapters. Part I, "Western Paradox and the
Spanish Golden Age," encompasses Chapters 1 and 2. In Chapter 1, I explore
the development of paradoxy in the West from Classical Antiquity to the
Renaissance, paying special attention to three pivotal texts: Plato's Parmenides,
Nicolaus Cusanus's OfLearned Ignorance and Erasmus's The Praise ofFolly. After
discussing how the term paradox was understood in Cervantes' time and how it
is understood in our own, I focus in Chapter 2 on the slow rise of paradoxy in
Spain's Renaissance, as exemplified, particularly, in popular works by Fernando
de Rojas, Antonio de Guevara and Pero Mexia. For it was not until the begin-
ning of the Baroque period that Spain underwent what Colie dubs an "epi-
demic" of paradoxy, already pandemic in the rest of Europe (Colie 1966). Poised
between the Spanish Renaissance and the Baroque, Cervantes' thoroughgoing
paradoxy in Don Quixote marks the infectious beginning of a literary epidemic
that will persist until the advent of the eighteenth century.
Now it may seem, at first blush, that the historical reconstruction of Western
paradoxical discourse in those first two chapters constitutes an overlong preamble
to an exploration of Cervantes' rhetorical strategy in Don Quixote. In response, let
me first point out that, as indicated in my title, the topic of this book-length
study is not simply the rhetoric of Cervantes' masterwork, but the place of that
rhetoric and that work within the formerly unreconstructed tradition of para-
doxy in the West. Second, as I found in the process of composing this text, to
have started my discussion with the practice of paradoxy in Cervantes' own age
would have required me to keep explaining this rhetorical-poetic tradition in a
piecemeal, desultory fashion. This would have blurred the outline of what is
already a complex argument about a complex subject. Indeed, what I hope to
contribute to the field ofliterary studies in general and Cervantes studies in par-
ticular is an increased understanding of how the Spanish Renaissance and, with
Cervantes intervening, the Spanish Baroque remain indebted to and riddled
with devices of paradoxical discourse inherited from a centuries-long praxis.
More practically, for readers interested specifically in Don Quixote, the histori-
cal reconstruction constituting this book's Part I is an effort to provide a coher-
 Introduction 7

ent, if selective, view of what Cervantes had at his literary disposition in crafting
his great work.
In Part II of this study, "Inventing a Tale, Inventing a Self," I focus exclusively
on Don Quixote, but without attempting a comprehensive reading of Cervantes'
text. Adopting a method of non multa sed multum, I undertake a detailed analy-
sis of selected episodes in that fictional work that illustrate a Cervantine vision of
both artistic creation and the human subject. To this end, in Chapter 3 I exam-
ine a cluster of metaliterary issues against the backdrop of the Prologue to Don
Quixote, Part I (1605). Those issues, which Cervantes both dramatizes and the-
matizes throughout his work, concern the complex and fluid relations between
art and nature, literature and life, poetry and history, as well as author, reader
and text. I argue in this chapter that, as both preface and epilogue to the subse-
quent narrative, the Prologue of 1605 represents a fictional work in nonfictional
guise. That Prologue is also shown to form an integral part of the fiction Don
Quixote.
Let me add at once, however, that in Chapter 3 I make no attempt either to
extricate a Cervantine theory of fiction from the text or to contrast Cervantes'
theoretical stance with the classical opinions that held sway among many of his
contemporaries both in Spain and abroad. At best, such an attempt would merely
duplicate the important work of E. C. Riley (1962) and Alban K. Forcione
(1970).6 Rather, my interest lies in discussing how the Prologue of 1605 broaches
important metaliterary questions and how those questions are dramatized and
played out more fully, as questions, and as instances ofliterary paradoxy, in other
parts of the text.
Cervantes' dramatization of the overlap and interference between art and life
yields what I discuss, in Chapter 4, as "Paradoxes of Imitation." In the Renais-
sance and Baroque alike, art was understood in both the Aristotelian sense as an
"imitation of nature" and in a Ciceronian sense as an "imitation of models."
Though seemingly at odds, both acceptations of the term were seen as comple-
mentary and inseparable. Moreover, it was only in a debased sense that artistic
imitation (imitatio) was undertaken as, say, copying or aping. In its ideal form,
imitatio was understood to involve inventio, from invenire, which means both "to
invent" and "to discover." Artistic imitation was understood to be, at the same
time, transformative and perfective. Hence, in Chapter 4, I shall examine three
types of paradox that arise from how Cervantes dramatizes Renaissance imitatio
in a seriocomic fashion: (1) the need somehow to combine what today we would
call "originality" with a dependence on "the original"; (2) how each inventive imi-
6. Also in reference to Cervantes' aesthetics of fiction, see Martinez Bonati 1992; Avalle-Arce and
Riley 1973, 293-322; and two other studies by Riley (1981, 69-85; 1986,62-72).
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