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PARTISAN REVIEW
places them in a special class, a sort ofsub-genre, which some have even called
"the anti-novel." Many contemporary fiction writers-Nabokov, Borges and
Beckett especially, but many others as well-are commonly praised in such
terms, and on the mistaken ground that their interest in the theme of art is
radically innovative, a distinctive characteristic, in fact, of modern literature.
The limitations of such a view of the novel are exposed richly and fully in
Cervantes's book, and especially in the episode from Part II we have been
examining. For whatever Carrasco himself may think, the very discussion he is
carrying on with Sancho and Don Quixote concerning the reliability of the
Moorish historian who has written Part I calls attention unmistakably
to
the
fact that the question of authority or authenticity is acutely baffling; indeed,
that a commitment to empirical as opposed to "poetic" truthfulness actually
creates
rather than disposes of epistemological perplexity. For
to
lay claim to
truths that are assumed
to
inhere in a reality that can be verified on our pulses,
and to commit oneself
to
a largely referential language (as novelists and
Carrasco's historians in part surely do), is to be vulnerable as never before
to
a
nominalist perception of the unbridgeable distance between objects and
words, between experience and the language we contrive to describe and
encompass it. As the
Quixote
shows preeminently, the novel's very commit–
ment to a new particularizing and concretizing realism is at the same time a
potential commitment to an unremitting self-absorption, an acute self–
consciousness concerning the authority of its own statements and the very
nature of language and the ordering faculties of the mind . Such epistemo–
logical difficulties are latent, of course, in all literary works, indeed in all
verbal expression, as the structuralists especially have been insisting in recent
years. But my point is, what is latent in the nature of language and in other
literary kinds is explicit in the novel, whose defining empiricism makes some
kind ofself-searching nominalism inescapable. There are no maps of Arcadia,
but many of us are Spaniards or have been
to
Spain.
This, and other related conclusions are forced upon us by the
Quixote's
encompassing self-consciousness, and especially by its tactic of filtering the
story through various narrators. The reader, Cervantes delights in reminding
us, is given the story by a Spanish narrator, who has employed a scribe to
translate from the original Arabic a history composed by Cide Hamete
Benengeli, a Moor whose fairness concerning his Christian protagonist that
hero himself calls into question. And there are still other sources of error and
distortion, as Sancho reveals in chapter four of Part II when Carrasco inquires
into an apparent inconsistency in the history.
.. I don't know how to answer that," said Sancho ... All I can say is that
perhaps the history-writer was wrong, or it may have been an error of the
printer's. "
