by Ilan Stavans
Then comes the Arab historian. In the First Part, chapter IX, the Narrator tells of coming across an old manuscript when, in Toledo, a boy “came up to sell some pamphlets and old papers to a silk mercer.” The manuscript was called “History of Don Quixote of La Mancha, written by Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab Historian.” There, the Narrator asks un morisco aljamiado, a Muslim convert, to prepare a quick translation, which is what we read as the majority of the novel.
In the tense atmosphere of ethnic relations that prevailed in Spain in the seventeenth century, the idea of making an Arab the true author of the knight-errant’s story is astounding. Muslims in Cervantes’s time were held in little regard. For the Narrator to suggest that a morisco knows more about Don Quixote than anyone else is a slap in the face to the nation’s Christian mores.
Occasionally, the Narrator questions the veracity of the story by suggesting that the translator has done a poor job or by implying that Arabs, even Arab historians, cannot be trusted. For instance, at the beginning of the Second Part, chapter XLIV, the Narrator discusses some liberties the translator took with the “original”:
It is stated, they say, in the true original of this history, that when Cide Hamete came to write this chapter, his interpreter did not translate it as he wrote it—that is, as a kind of complaint the Moor made against himself for having taken in hand a story so dry and of so little variety as this of Don Quixote, for he found himself forced to speak perpetually of him and Sancho, without venturing to indulge in digressions and episodes more serious and more interesting. He said, too, that to go on, mind, hand, pen always restricted to writing upon one single subject, and speaking through the mouths of a few characters, was intolerable drudgery, the result of which was never equal to the author’s labour, and that to avoid this he had in the First Part availed himself of the device of novels, like “The Ill-advised Curiosity,” and “The Captive Captain,” which stand, as it were, apart from the story.
In short, El Quijote is the tale of a found palimpsest. From here on, Benengeli is described as “the true author,” whereas the Narrator becomes a commentator on the original story delivered by the historiador arábigo, as translated by the morisco aljamiado. It is important to note that the name Cide Hamete Benengeli is itself a parody: Cide is Arabic for señor (as in El Cid, The Señor) and Benengeli is a variation on the word berenjena, eggplant, a favorite ingredient in Middle Eastern cuisine.
The fictional palimpsest spanned a real one (or at least an attempt at a real one): just as Cide Hamete’s manuscript achieved an afterlife in the hands of first a translator and then a narrator within the novel, El Quijote itself took on new life in another author’s hands when a bogus follow-up suddenly materialized in 1614—Segunda parte del ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, authored by one Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda—before Cervantes even completed his own second part. Avellaneda’s book is commonly known as “the false Quijote” as well as the “pseudo-Quijote.” I prefer the latter.
In the tradition of chivalry literature, novels such as Felixmante de Hircania and Palmerin de Inglaterra gave place to new installments, sometimes written by other hands and in different languages. Certainly aware of this trait, Cervantes, at the end of the First Part, promises a sequel. Perhaps he made the promise because he wanted to attract readers to his other forthcoming works. But life interfered and none materialized for a decade. Audiences were eager, and Avellaneda capitalized on the public hunger.
Avellana in Spanish means “hazelnut”; Avellanado, “hazel wood.” Little is known about this author, although, again, as in the case of the controversy surrounding Shakespeare’s authorship, there have been all sorts of “unveilings” of potential perpetrators. One possibility is that Avellaneda was Jerónimo de Pasamonte, on whom Cervantes appears to have modeled the character of Ginés de Pasamonte (also known as Master Pedro). Another possibility is Pedro Liñán de Riaza, a popular novelist at the time who was a friend of both Cervantes and Lope de Vega. Since Liñán died in 1607, the argument is made that some of Lope’s friends, including Pasamonte, as well as Baltasar Elisio de Medinilla, Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola, and Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa, contributed to the completion of the work.
Ironically, what we do know about Avellaneda comes from the pseudo-Quijote and from El Quijote itself. In the Second Part of El Quijote written by Cervantes, the Narrator describes Avellaneda as an Aragonese from the town of Tordesillas, a “great, coarse, ill-trimmed ostrich” with a “frozen wit.” It’s clear he is aware of Spanish literary circles and that he might have been an admirer of Lope de Vega, since in the pseudo-Quijote Avellaneda takes Cervantes to task for having limited talents, being one-handed, and envying Lope.
It wasn’t uncommon in Cervantes’s day for unofficial sequels of literary works to appear. The Lazarillo of Tormes, for instance, inspired not one but two. Other popular books also fostered follow-ups, which in general were derivative and, for the most part, poorly written. That is the case with Avellaneda’s work. Its style is trite and uninspired, its storyline confusing, its character development unripe. This, in short, is the product of a lousy writer. Today, he is seen as a Judas figure: a traitor, an impostor. However, since there was no copyright law in Cervantes’s time, Avellaneda was not legally forbidden to co-opt another person’s creations. But he was certainly morally wrong. Or was he? Plagiarism is directly linked to the concept of private intellectual property. Yet during the Renaissance, such a concept had little appeal. Authors often stole ideas, characters, and entire plots from their admired predecessors as a way to pay tribute to them, to declare them role models.
But perhaps here there is a truco cervantino, a literary trick. Could it be that Cervantes himself was Avellaneda? In other words, what if Avellaneda never existed—what if the real author of El Quijote also wrote the lousy pseudo-Quijote? It’s an implausible, absurd, far-fetched idea, yet one that is undoubtedly entertaining. Since posterity knows little about this “pretended” author, it is easy to speculate. What if Avellaneda is a device, and his apocryphal novel Cervantes’s own effort to get his novelistic juices flowing? After all, Cervantes had already created another pretend author: the Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengeli. Couldn’t he simply multiply the effort by two?
The problem with this theory is that stylistic analysis of Avellaneda’s sequel does not reveal similar traits—for example, the same syntactical database, or the emphatic use of grammatical signs. Even the idea that Lope’s friends co-wrote it is implausible because the work is replete with an Aragonese jargon only a native would be able to employ freely. Yet Cervantes hasn’t been put through the same scrutiny that Shakespeare has. Digital examination of Shakespeare’s works has enabled us to understand how his use of language changed over time, what percentage of his own writing is present in his collaborations with other playwrights, and what kind of continuity there is between the syntax in the sonnets Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece and later plays like Macbeth (1606) and The Tempest (1610–11). We don’t have digital data to compare the First and the Second Part of El Quijote written by Cervantes, let alone to see any unlikely similarities between El Quijote and the pseudo-Quijote.
El Quijote uses the Avellaneda impostureship to test its own limits. Frequently in the Second Part, Don Quixote and Sancho are aware of their own existence as literary characters. They decry their cheapening portraits in the pseudo–Second Part, as when, in the Second Part, chapter LXII, Don Quixote and Sancho, in a print shop in Barcelona, come across a book called “ ‘The Second Part of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha,’ by one of Tordesillas.”
“I have heard of this book already,” said Don Quixote, “and verily and on my conscience I thought it had been by this time burned to ashes as a meddlesome intruder. . . . [F]or fictions have the more merit and charm about them the more nearly they approach the truth or what looks like it; and true stories, the truer they are the better they are;” and so saying he walked out of the printing
office with a certain amount of displeasure in his looks.
Don Quixote therefore suggests that fiction is true when it is also original and authentic. Likewise, Cervantes attacks his rival author at every turn, accusing him of dishonesty and, worse, of having a second-rate talent:
For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him; it was his to act, mine to write; we two together make but one, notwithstanding and in spite of that pretended Tordesillesque writer who has ventured or would venture with his great, coarse, ill-trimmed ostrich quill to write the achievements of my valiant knight;—no burden for his shoulders, nor subject for his frozen wit: whom, if perchance thou shouldst come to know him, thou shalt warn to leave at rest where they lie the weary mouldering bones of Don Quixote, and not to attempt to carry him off.
These comments make the novel anxious, impatient with itself. They also explore issues of authenticity as well as control. What is real and what is art? To what extent is our life a performance?
El Quijote becomes a hall of mirrors. Is its Narrator truly at the helm? And if Cide Hamete Benengeli is actually the real author, why can’t Avellaneda also be “a real second author”? In the end, the novel is a series of reflections that question modernity—its limits, its implications—while also endorsing it as a way of life.
5
THE CONJUROR OF WORDS
El Quijote has a total of 2,059,005 letters and 381,104 words. There are some 4,160 end-of-sentence periods, 4,040 end-of-paragraph periods, 40,165 commas, 4,800 semicolons, 20,050 colons, 960 question marks, and 690 exclamation marks. The latter is significant: while the exclamation mark is pervasive in our electronic age, particularly on Twitter (!!!), during the Renaissance it was modestly employed. Its role was to convey wonder, not to exaggerate it. Cervantes might be considered an early champion of it.
In the most authoritative edition of the novel, known in Spanish as Don Quijote de la Mancha, edited by Francisco Rico in 1998 and issued under the aegis of Instituto Cervantes, the most frequently used word is que (meaning “what” or “who,” used to introduce subordinate clauses), featured as either a preposition or a conjunction. It shows up 20,617 times; that is, it constitutes 5.41 percent of the complete text.
It is emblematic that the word Quijote is present 2,174 times in the novel, with the word Sancho coming closely behind with 2,147 instances, and Dulcinea lagging behind at 282. For a novel published in an age of religious fanaticism, it is somewhat surprising that the word dios, Spanish for “God,” shows up only 516 times. The word verdad, truth, appears nearly as often, 431 times.
And here’s the essential number: El Quijote has a total of 22,939 different words. This number represents the author’s verbal reservoir in his magnum opus. Shakespeare, in contrast, used slightly more: a total of 29,066 different English words in the sum of his plays.
Cervantes’s most lasting contribution is the depth and complexity of his language. A conjuror of words, he pushed Spanish beyond its boundaries. He didn’t revolutionize language like Shakespeare did—the Bard coined close to 1,700 new words that have become common over time, such as academe, amazement, champion, discontent, gossip, hurried, fashionable, laughable, majestic, pedant, unreal, and zany. In that sense, Cervantes was rather conventional. His innovation is found in his linguistic plasticity, in the way he uses standard words to create a multifarious reality.
Through a novel that has magically survived its own context, Cervantes’s syntax has become the default standard style in Spanish. Cervantistas have spilled large amounts of ink explaining, in great detail, how his language functions, what his lexical preferences are, his ticks, his mistakes, the influences he got from previous Spanish authors. I won’t purport to replicate, or even to survey, those scholarly studies in these pages. However, there is consensus that Cervantes’s capacity to summon the Spain of the seventeenth century in all its complexity, his talent to understand the tension between our inner reality and the world that surrounds us, his power to use language to scrutinize the complexity of human nature—all are done through a spirited, improvisational style that never feels caged.
Writing at the crest of the Enlightenment, a time when there was a clear distinction between highbrow, sophisticated scholarly language (still embodied in Latin although dwindling in favor of the vernacular) and the parlance of the people, he succeeded in reflecting this cultural divide in the linguistic paso doble, the dialogue between Don Quixote and Sancho, a nobleman and a villager, as well as through the parlance of other socially diverse characters, from a priest to a barber, from a hostel owner to a duke and a duchess. His use of the particular lengua romance called castellano, Castilian, also known as español, Spanish, offered a cornucopia of possibilities.
To understand those possibilities, it is crucial to appreciate the linguistic forces that affected Cervantes. The Spanish language, a bit more than a century before Cervantes used it as a conduit in El Quijote, was a witness to Spain’s consolidation as a nation-state. This consolidation came about when the indeseables (Jews and Arabs) were pushed out and while colonies (including those in America) were being incorporated into the empire. The creation of the first Spanish-language press in Valencia in 1474 and its subsequent expansion also contributed to the cornucopia of artistic, political, and economic possibilities that would flourish during the Spanish Golden Age.
In the early seventeenth century, however, the Spanish Empire, perhaps the richest on the globe, was profoundly fractured, its economy in shambles. Tax evasion ran rampant. Corruption prevailed. Political cronyism was the law of the land. The Crown depended on the wealth imported from the American colonies to pay for its budget deficit.
This resulted in a dramatic class divide. Whereas capitalism had taken hold in different European nations, among them Germany, France, and Italy, where an emergent bourgeoisie was already assuming a leading role, Spain remained stuck in a feudal mentality. Don Quixote’s stilted language is that of a lowly nobleman, while his squire, Sancho Panza, peppers his parlance with dichos, popular sayings, to which the knight-errant reacts with disdain, saying they clog Sancho’s thought process. By the time El Quijote appeared at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the language—Castilian having metamorphosed into Spanish—was stunningly malleable. It was a vehicle to explore the national character, as Cervantes brilliantly does in his pages. Of course, it was Cervantes himself, along with a handful of other Siglo de Oro authors, who expanded the possibilities. In doing so, they helped solidify its standing.
If El Quijote is masterful in its entirety, its first sentence is unforgettable: an extract, an Aleph, a microcosm. It is an astonishing exercise in concealment, hiding as much (or as little) as it reveals; it gives both purpose and traction to the narrative:
En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor.
With only thirty-three words Cervantes invokes an entire universe. Millions know it by heart. A poll done in 2004 by the Spanish newspaper El Mundo revealed it was the best-known literary first line in Spain. Here is Ormsby’s translation:
In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing.
There is a fairy-tale quality to the way that world is being portrayed, a kind of “Once upon a time” that enables the reader to nonetheless settle on a specific time, place, and individual.
Specific but not specified, for the line raises more questions than it answers. For instance: Where is this region called La Mancha? What about the village itself? Why isn’t the village named? How about the hidalgo? Who is he? Does he have a name? How old is he? What are the items listed meant to tell us about his character? How did he get them? Does he have any family? Friends? Is he a loner?
Borges found even just the first six words of El Quijote wo
rthy of syntactical study. In his essay “An Investigation of the Word,” collected in El idioma de los argentinos (1928), he wrote (in my translation):
En [in]. This is not a whole world, but the promise of others to come. It indicates that what immediately follows is not the main point in this context, but rather the location of the main point, be it in time or in space.
Un [a]. Properly speaking, this word declares the unity of the word it modifies. Here it does not. Here it announces a real existence, but one not particularly individuated or demarcated.
Lugar [place]. This is the word of location, promised by the particle “in.” Its task is merely syntactical, not adding any representation to the one suggested by the two previous words. To represent oneself “in” and to represent oneself “in a place” is the same, as any “in” is in a place and implies this. You will reply that place is a noun, a thing, and that Cervantes did not write it to signify a portion of space but rather to mean “hamlet,” “town,” or “village.” To the first, I will respond that it is risky to allude to things in themselves, after Mach, Hume, and Berkeley, and, that, for a sincere reader, there is only a difference of emphasis between the preposition in and the noun place; in response to the second, the distinction is true, but only discernible later.
De [of]. The word is usually dependent, indicating possession. Here it is synonymous (somewhat unexpectedly) with in. Here it means that the scene of the still mysterious central statement of this clause is situated in turn somewhere else, which will be immediately revealed to us.
La [the]. This quasi-word (they tell us) is a derivation of illa, which means “that” in Latin. That is, it was first a word of orientation, justified and almost animated by some gesture; now it is a ghost of illa, with no further task than to indicate a grammatical gender, an extremely asexual classification which ascribes virility to pins (“los” alfileres) and not to laces (“las” lanzas). (By the way, it is fitting to recall what Graebner wrote about grammatical gender: Nowadays the opinion prevails that, originally, the grammatical genders represented a scale of values, and that the feminine gender represents, in many languages—among them the Semitic—a value inferior to the masculine.)