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tion is prefigured in the outcome of nearly every one of Quixote 's adventures
and is realized in Quixote' s final " sanity " and death.
These matters are made explicit in the exchange , from which I quoted
earlier , concerning Cide Hamete' s inclusiveness as a historian . Quixote is less
than pleased to learn that even Sancho 's capers on the blanket are a part of the
record :
" In my opinion ," said Don Quixote, " there is no human history in
th e world which has not got its ups and d owns, particularl y th ose that
treat of knight errantry. They can never be full of fortun ate in cidents. "
" For all that, " replied the Bachelor, "some who have read yo ur his–
tory say th at th ey would have been glad if the auth ors had left out a few of
the countless beatings which Don Quixote received in various en–
counters.
" That 's where the truth of the story comes in ," sa id Sancho.
A materialist who knows that the flesh must remember its pain , Sancho is here
implicitly defining the empirical commitment of Cervantes 's book and of the
literary genre it originates. The physically , the experientially real , Sancho
says, my encounters with the solid objects in the phenomenal world-that is
where the truth comes in .
Quixote doesn ' t quite dispute this view ; his respect for the flesh is very
great and has been widely underestimated . But he does suggest that " fair–
ness " might have led his chronicler to minimize the beatings . Even Aeneas,
he suggests, was not so pious as Virgil paints him . Carrasco now offers a crucial
distinction whose presence , in this context especially , indicates how clear and
explicit is Cervantes's own sense of his book 's originality .
" That is true ," replied Sampson; "but it is one thing to write as a
poet, and another as a historian . The poet can relate and sing things , not
as they were but as they should have been , without in any way affecting
the truth of the matter. "
The historian's commitment, which is the novelist's, Carrasco insists, is
to things as they are . Unlike Cervantes himself, Carrasco may be rather too
confident that things as they are can be objectively perceived and then transla–
ted into words ; but he is scarcely alone in his confidence , for the prevailing
understanding of the novel as a genre proceeds from some conception of its
"realism.' ,
"Realism" is a slippery term , of course , and one might wish to substitute
Ian Watt' s term, "formal realism," which is intended to describe the primary
narrative methods or procedures of the novel. Watt remains , I think , the most
lucid and intelligent theorist of the novel , and his basic definitions have
