Miguel De Cervantes Don Quixote; New Edition (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

194 Pages·2010·1.51 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

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Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
Miguel de Cervantes’s
Don Quixote
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Don Quixote—New Edition
Copyright © 2010 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2010 by Harold Bloom
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miguel De Cervantes’ Don Quixote / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom.
—New ed.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations)
Spine title: Don Quixote
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60413-821-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4381-3343-0 (e-book)
1. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 1547–1616. Don Quixote. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title:
Don Quixote.
PQ6352.M455 2010
863'.3—dc22
2009053338
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Contributing editor: Pamela Loos
Cover design by Takeshi Takahashi
Composition by IBT Global, Troy NY
Cover printed by IBT Global, Troy NY
Book printed and bound by IBT Global, Troy NY
Date printed: May 2010
Printed in the United States of America
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Reading the Prologue: Cervantes’s Narrative
Appropriation and Originality 3
Carolyn A. Nadeau
Cervantes as Narrator of Don Quijote 25
Howard Mancing
Books Errant: The Objects of Invention in Don Quixote 43
Edward H. Friedman
A Novel for the Twenty-first Century 57
Mario Vargas Llosa
The Knight as Fugitive from Justice: The Quijote, Part I 69
Roberto González Echevarría
Constructing Don Quixote 91
Manuel Durán and Fay R. Rogg
Palace of the Apes: The Ducal Chateau
and Cervantes’s Repudiation of Satiric Malice 109
Bryant Creel
vi Contents
Discursive Hybridity:
Don Quixote’s and Sancho Panza’s Utopias 127
Myriam Yvonne Jehenson and Peter N. Dunn
Don Quijote 1 and the Forging of National History 145
Barbara Fuchs
Chronology 165
Contributors 167
Bibliography 169
Acknowledgments 173
Index 175
Editor’s Note
My introduction casts Don Quixote as the central narrative of the last half
millennium, a masterwork to which all the great Western novelists owe a
debt.
Carolyn A. Nadeau discusses invention and imitation in the work, as
Cervantes challenges but does not altogether reject literary tradition. Howard
Mancing then explores the interrelation of the novel’s narrative voices.
The role of objects and, in particular, the objectified book in Don Quixote
is traced by Edward H. Friedman, after which Mario Vargas Llosa posits fic-
tion as the central theme of Cervantes’s work.
Roberto González Echevarría suggests that love and law are the book’s
great themes, while Manuel Durán and Fay R. Rogg cast Cervantes as a pio-
neer in the creation of the self-referential novel.
Bryant Creel identifies the duke’s household as the novel’s domain of
malicious satire, after which Myriam Yvonne Jehenson and Peter N. Dunn
detect a cultural polyphony in the way Cervantes responds to his changing
world.
In the volume’s final essay, Barbara Fuchs contends that the novel’s sus-
tained reflection on history is as central as Cervantes’s subversion of romantic
tropes.
vii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
D
on Quixote is to the Spanish language what Shakespeare is to English,
Dante to Italian, and Goethe to German: the glory of that particular ver-
nacular. There is no similar singular eminence in French: Rabelais, Mon-
taigne, Molière, and Racine vie with Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Stendhal,
Balzac, Flaubert, and Proust. Perhaps Cervantes’s masterwork is the central
book of the last half millennium, since all the greater novelists are as much
Don Quixote’s children as they are Shakespeare’s. As I have remarked else-
where, Shakespeare pragmatically teaches us how to talk to ourselves, while
Cervantes instructs us how to talk to one another. Hamlet scarcely listens
to what anyone else says (except it be the Ghost), while Falstaff so delights
himself that Prince Hal can seem merely the best of resentful students and
half-voluntary audiences. But Don Quixote and Sancho Panza change and
mature by listening to each other, and their friendship is the most pervasive
in all of literature.
Don Quixote or Hamlet? Sancho Panza or Falstaff ? Th e choice would
be diffi cult. But Hamlet has only Horatio, and Falstaff ends in solitude, dying
while playing with fl owers and evidently dreaming of the table promised in
Psalm 23 to be prepared for one by God in the midst of one’s enemies. Don
Quixote dies in Sancho’s loving company, with the wise squire proposing
fresh quests to the heroic knight. Perhaps Shakespeare did invent the ever-
growing inner self, compelled to be its own adventure, as Emily Dickinson (an
authentic heir of Shakespeare) proclaimed. Cervantes, whose life was arduous
and darkly solitary, was able to achieve a miracle that Shakespeare evaded.
Where in Shakespeare can we fi nd two great natures in full communion with
1