For an online book club I have been reading Don Quijote (Don Quixote) by Cervantes. We have just finished the first part and it is time for some reflective thoughts on the novel so far.Right away we bump into a very intriguing and quite easily the key part of the whole text: the Author's Preface. Let's try to answer the "accomplishment" question from this point of view.
"...if I mistake not, this book of yours (...) is, from beginning to end, an attack upon the books of chivalry."
This sentence of Cervantes' so-called (advise-giving) friend can be (is) controversial of course. As - no doubt - it can be interpreted as Cervantes' intention with the book, but again: in the context of this explicitly ironic and distance-keeping preface why exactly this sentence should be taken seriously? Further more: the whole book ("novel") seems to deny this statement.
On the other hand, the idea, that DQ is merely an attack on the books of chivalry (quasi), definitely made a huge impact on the reception/reading history of it. The Preface pulls the "novel" itself into its own present tense, forces its time onto the "novel", forces its "truth" onto the "novel's" truth. (Along the same lines with Derrida's description of a Preface in Dissemination.)
Ortega y Gasset also explains the special "novel" status of DQ with a similar time- and context-change (that is, at the same time, a breaking with the epic story telling) in his famous "Meditations on Quixote": DQ, the "novel", is actually the Past pulled into the Present, a still-epic book of chivalry put into another context. In other words, the DQ itself is a Preface to other books of chivalry, and after reading Cervantes' "novel" we get to know what a book of chivalry is, so we (almost) do not even need to read them.
However, there is a very intriguing sentence about Sancho towards the end of the Preface:
"I have no desire to magnify the service I render thee in making thee acquainted with so renowed and honoured a knight, but I do desire thy thanks for the acquaintance thou wilt make with the famous Sancho Panza,..."
First of all it clearly goes against the canon: books of chivalry usually did not pay too much attention to squires - unlike Cervantes. But more importantly (and back to the achievments of DQ) this "desire thy thanks" definitely offers the interpretation of DQ as the "novel" (=story) of Sancho Panza. Right - but what kind of story then? Ortega y Gasset gives us some hints again: Sancho's job is to make (almost) all adventures impossible. The adventures themselves break into the "real world", the adventures are poetic, on the other hand Sancho is the embodiment of reality (=anti-poetic picture of reality). Now - the point is that the protagonist, Don Quijote's intent to change the reality (of his time) is the most (only?) succesful in Sancho Panza's character - just think: in this sense the critical (realistic) perspective is carried out by the narrator while Sancho Panza goes (runs, jumps, escapes) back and forth between the perspectives of reality and fiction ("miracles").
We can go on and on, just from the Preface itself: what is the real preface and what is the real text in DQ (and around DQ)? Starting with, the chivalry books that DQ read, can be interpreted as prefaces to his own story, to his own chivalry life. Then, the first chapters of DQ can be read as a foreword to the often mentioned Benengeli-variation. And of course, the whole first part of DQ can easily be taken as a long introduction (preamble) to the second part (which was written years - long years - later). Or vice versa: the books of chivalry (that DQ read) are the prefaces to Cervantes' "novel"... It depends how we want to define the word "pre-face": it can be "pre" - to give the readers some kind of pre-meditated ideas about the text they will meet soon, or it also can be a weird phenomenon: a "pre"face that actually a post-face as it already knows everything about the text that is still to be read by us...
(Photo: curtesy of New York Public Library on Flickr)
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