438
PARTISAN REVIEW
contingent fiction, potentially at least a kind offailure; and also by the way in
which the characters and events within such novels are similarly preoccupied
"
with the meaning and uses of fictions. Thus, for one example, a recurring
situation in the
Quixote
is the gathering together in inns and castles and
forests of storyteller (or actor or puppetmaster) and audience, gatherings
whose central purpose is to reveal the complexity and ambivalence of the
human needs which give rise to fiction-making. Or again, in
Lord Jim,
Marlow's narrative difficulties, and the book's whole air of nervous incerti-
tude, have a precise counterpart in all those moments in the story when Jim
tries with increasing desperation to explain to others and to himself what has
happened to him.
In the
Quixote
the parallels between the protagonist's story and the
narrators' drama of the telling are significant in ways I've not yet indicated,
and in ways that may help to explain the immense stature of Cervantes's book,
which seems to me to understand its subject matter and to exploit its technical
resources with unsurpassed subtlety and completeness. In any event, Cer–
vantes's drama of the telling leads to the heart of his vision of experience, and
specifically to his recognition that the impulse to fiction-making, far from
being a Quixotic aberration, is a universal imp;Jlse, shared in some degree
by all men.
...
The narrators' drama in the
Quixote
mirrors, or enacts in its sphere, a
curious, comic, and finally immensely moving drama of increasing involve–
ment and sympathy. Early in the novel the Spanish narrator who has paid a
Moorish scribe to translate Cide Hamete's manuscript complains of Cide
Hamete's failure to "let himself go in praise of such a worthy knight." But
increasingly as the narrative continues Cide Hamete is driven to exclamations
of personal involvement and even respect and affection for his subject. All the
comic references to Cide Hamete's untrustworthiness come to have resonance
now, for the distance between Moor and Christian, and especially between a
Moor and a man whose chivalric enterprise has a particularly Christlike signifi–
cance, has been bridged by sympathy, and culminates on the last page of the
novel, in an assertion not just of sympathy but of identity, in Cide Hamete 's
address to his pen:
For
me
alone was Don Quixote born and I for him. His was the power of
action, mine of writing .... [W)e two are at one ...
Cide Hamete's progress toward Quixote, an aspect of the drama of the
telling, enacts in small the novel's drive toward a general sympathy and iden–
tification with Quixote. And something like this same pattern is present in the
changing attitude of the Spanish narrator himself, who begins by complaining
