Refiguring Authority by Gerli E. Michael;Gerli Michael E;

Author:Gerli, E. Michael;Gerli, Michael E; [Gerli, E. Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The scene is meant to create an air of suspense and anticipation and to break all illusion through the invocation of the lacuna in the manuscript; it leaves readers in a state of aggravated consternation, and with an intense awareness of the artifice of fiction—the referential fallacy lying at the bottom of its bag of tricks.

Before the heterotopical rupture, however, the description draws us in as it underscores the menacing posture of the combatants through the depiction of physical movement and the evocation of the alarmed reaction of the witnesses to the struggle. As expectation is heightened, the narrative achieves dynamism though related in a direct, unadorned fashion—what Gilbert Highet, speaking of the passage in his Anatomy of Satire, has labeled Cervantes’ “plain eggs-and-bacon prose” (1962, 118). The adjectives employed here fail to trespass the bare limits of description. We are told of the “cauto vizcaíno” “cautious Biscayan”, the “gran cuchillada” “great swipe of the sword” that the latter aims at Don Quijote, of the spectators “temerosos y colgados” “fearful and full of suspense”, and “aquellos tamaños golpes con que se amenazaban” “those great blows with which they threatened each other”, and, finally, about the “grande peligro en que [las damas del coche] se hallaban” “the great peril in which the ladies in the coach found themselves”. Though full of tension, the description never topples into melodrama, mock-heroics, or grandiloquence. The mode of expression is nothing short of economical: it seeks to be unobtrusive and to create verisimilitude by means of a not unusual, almost spoken idiom. The technique summons the stylistic model invoked in the prologue to the novel by the author’s friend, who exhorts him to “procurar que a la llana, con palabras significantes, honestas y bien colocadas, salga vuestra oración y período sonoro y festivo” (25) “endeavour to deliver with significant, plain, honest, and well-ordered words, thy jovial and cheerful discourse, expressing as near as thou mayst possibly thy intention, making thy conceits clear, and not intricate or dark” (9).

At the beginning of Chapter 9, after the story has been interrupted by the break in the manuscript read to us by the narrator, the authorial, temporal, and spatial confines of the narrative are redeployed, as readers find themselves in a new chronotope. At this point, the narrator / editor speaks to the reader as he reconstitutes and recapitulates from memory the battle between Don Quijote and the Biscayan. Recollecting the struggle for the reader, the conflict is now recreated from the images in his own imagination, rather than from words on a manuscript page:

Dejamos en la primera parte desta historia al valeroso vizcaíno y al famoso don Quijote con las espadas altas y desnudas, en guisa de descargar dos furibundos fendientes, tales, que si en lleno se acertaban, por lo menos se dividirían y fenderían de arriba abajo y abrirían como una granada; y que en aquel punto tan dudoso paró y quedó destroncada tan sabrosa historia, sin que nos diese noticia su autor dónde se podría hallar lo que della faltaba.

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