The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World
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The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World
272eBook
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Overview
The Man Who Invented Fiction explores Cervantes's life and the world he lived in, showing how his influences converged in his work, and how his work--especially Don Quixote--radically changed the nature of literature and created a new way of viewing the world. Finally, it explains how that worldview went on to infiltrate art, politics, and science, and how the world today would be unimaginable without it.
William Egginton has brought thrilling new meaning to an immortal novel.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781620401767 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 02/02/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Sales rank: | 488,840 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
William Egginton is a philosopher and literary scholar at the Johns Hopkins University, where he is the inaugural director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, holds the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities, and chairs the department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures. He is the author, editor, or translator of more than a dozen books, including How the World Became a Stage (2003), Perversity and Ethics (2006), A Wrinkle in History (2007), The Philosopher's Desire (2007), The Theater of Truth (2010), In Defense of Religious Moderation (2011), and The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered In the Modern World (2016).
Read an Excerpt
The Man Who Invented Fiction
How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World
By William Egginton
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2015 William EggintonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62040-175-0
CHAPTER 1
Poetry and History
A few other details were worthy of notice, but they are of little relevance and importance to the true account of this history, for no history is bad if it is true.
If any objections can be raised regarding the truth of this one, it can only be that its author was Arabic, since the people of that nation are very prone to telling falsehoods, but because they are such great enemies of ours, it can be assumed that he has given us too little rather than too much. So it appears to me, for when he could and should have wielded his pen to praise the virtues of so good a knight, it seems he intentionally passed over them in silence; this is something badly done and poorly thought out, since historians must and ought to be exact, truthful, and absolutely free of passions, for neither interest, fear, rancor, or affection, should make them deviate from the path of the truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, repository of great deeds, witness to the past, example and adviser to the present, and forewarning to the future.
On a hot August day in 1604, a man walked through the dusty streets of Valladolid, Spain, clutching in his right hand a heavy package. In the absence of any authentic portraits, we must trust his own words to know that he was brown-haired and silver-bearded, with an aquiline (but well-proportioned, he adds) nose and cheerful eyes partly hidden behind a pair of smeared spectacles resembling, in the words of one of his literary rivals, badly fried eggs.
Of medium build, and missing most of his teeth, which was common enough in those times for a man just shy of sixty years, he had lost the use of his left hand many years earlier, when he was hit by a harquebus shot while boarding a Turkish galleon at the Battle of Lepanto. His clothes, from the wide ruff collar around his neck to the woolen stockings exposing the hardened muscles of his calves, would have broadcast to his fellow pedestrians his status as a member of the gentry, just as their ragged state would have advertised his precarious financial straits.
Even though just recently arrived, the man was hardly a stranger to his neighbors in Valladolid's meatpacking quarter, the rastro de carneros, where he and his wife, two sisters, a niece, and his illegitimate daughter by another woman occupied the floor above a raucous tavern. The rastro was on the outskirts of a town that, in 1604, could not keep pace with its exploding population. The rush of newcomers driven by the transfer of King Philip III's court from Madrid three years earlier had brought new life and glamour to Valladolid, but it had also imposed a severe housing crisis. While the government tried to control growth and crowding by issuing zoning laws limiting the city's brightly colored buildings to two stories, the city's savvy landlords responded by constructing houses with hidden stories in the back. Thus the man's motley clan was not alone in the landlord Juan de Navas's house; all told, there were some twenty tenants living in its thirteen rooms, almost all of them friends or relations of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.
As the aging soldier stepped gingerly over the rivulets of blood and offal that cut through the district's dirt-and-stone streets, his one good arm hugged that heavy package tightly to his chest. In it were hundreds of sheets of paper, each sheet packed to the margins with the neat, slanted hand of a professional scribe. Cervantes's own more rounded, slightly meandering script, which overflowed the many more hundreds of pages of his blotted, scratched, and corrected manuscripts, can be seen today on few precious remnants: a signed document from his 1597 stay in Seville's municipal jail, where it is thought that he first dreamt up Don Quixote; a letter to the Archbishop of Toledo; and some itemized accounts.
None of his original manuscripts survive. In fact, very few manuscripts from that period do. At the time, the very idea of saving manuscripts would have seemed most unusual. An original manuscript, which by the nineteenth century would be endowed with an almost mystical connection to the genius of the author, was more likely to be seen as an imperfect starting point, a draft to be jettisoned once a more reliable source for the printers was available. No, Cervantes would have followed the practice of the time (especially for such a large book) of handing the original pages over to a professional scribe who would have compiled them into a copia en limpio, or "clean copy," and, in the process, added spacing and punctuation that could easily have been missing from the author's manuscript.
For this was the heyday of a burgeoning, modern print industry, and Cervantes was hoping desperately to reap a share of its growing profits. Literacy rates had exploded during the previous century, and for the first time in history large chunks of the population could read, including, astoundingly, a growing number of people outside the clergy and nobility: commoners and townspeople, merchants and farmers. We see the presence and influence of books in the very first pages of Cervantes's great novel, where he describes the aging gentleman who will become Don Quixote as being so consumed with books that "in his rash curiosity and folly he went so far as to sell acres of arable land in order to buy books of chivalry to read." And while these books are the ostensible cause of Quixote's madness, they also quickly become the subject of commentary by and heated exchange among the novel's legions of characters, no matter their station in life. As Quixote is escorted home after his first ill-fated outing, his household is in an uproar, with his housekeeper lambasting his books at the top of her voice, crying, "Woe is me! Now I know, and it's true as the death I owe God, that those accursed books of chivalry he's always reading have driven him crazy." The housekeeper's complaints are seconded by Quixote's niece and his friends the village priest and barber, as the group proceeds to rifle through his library, tossing the books they find there out the window and into the corral below to be burned.
But their enthusiastic foray into book burning, a task usually reserved for the Inquisition, soon founders on the mixed opinions some of them have formed of the books themselves. Thus, after a long series of comments on the relative merits and flaws of books he is clearly very familiar with, Quixote's friend and neighbor the village priest suggests that two be spared and the rest thrown away, at which point Master Nicolás, the barber, pulls out another book that ought to be saved, and the whole process reignites, until the group again becomes distracted and thus never gets around to burning anything. Books, it is clear, have become ubiquitous objects, things not only to read, but also to buy, exchange, argue about, despise, and fall in love with. As the priest says upon seeing in the barber's hands the title The Tears of Angelica, a book published in 1586 by Luis Barahona de Soto, "I would have shed [tears] myself if I had sent such a book to be burned."
The sale of books to a burgeoning mass market was an outgrowth of a technological innovation born about one hundred fifty years earlier, itself one of the very first examples of the mass production that would become the signature of the industrial age. A mechanical printing press using moveable letters molded into quadrangular bits of metal was the brainchild of Johannes Gutenberg, a financially strapped goldsmith with a luxuriant beard and piercing eyes who was living in the city of Mainz when the first of his almost two hundred Bibles rolled off the press. The ability of a printer to set the type for one page, spread an oil-based ink onto its metal surface, and proceed to press out any number of virtually identical copies of that page before resetting the type and starting on the next page — this was an innovation that perhaps more than any other helped usher in the modern world.
Prior to 1450 most knowledge had to be maintained and communicated by memory, oral tradition, or books painstakingly copied by hand, word for word. Now any tome considered worthwhile reading had no other upper limit on the number of copies it engendered than its printer's reckoning of potential demand against the costs of his materials and labor. The works of theology, literature, and history that had previously found multiple readers had been disseminated through the extraordinary efforts of rooms full of patient monks slowly losing their eyesight through countless hours of tediously copying and often illuminating manuscripts for the wealthy and powerful to own, perhaps to read, but more frequently to put on display as emblems of their taste and learning. Now all that was needed to propagate hundreds of copies of a political treatise, a national history, a religious tract, or a raucous satire was a press, a printer, and the money to fund them.
Well, not exactly all. As Cervantes was keenly aware, one also needed the blessings of the state and, specifically, of the royal censor, in this case one Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, an official historian in the pay of the crown. He was a "one-man think tank" who had scrupulously read each and every line of Cervantes's manuscript, crossing a good number out and demanding that others be rewritten, before finally granting his approval, the famous "license and privilege" of publication. Herrera y Tordesillas's decision had the imprimatur of the king himself, whose approval in the form of a statement ending with the words "I, the King" would grace the front matter of each book published in his realm.
For the monarchy had begun to realize both the advantages and potential dangers of the new information economy, and assiduously controlled the form and content of what could be published in or imported into its borders, just as its religious wing, the Inquisition, imposed strict guidelines on the moral and religious contents of published works. The Inquisition's Index Librorum Prohibitorum, first published in 1559, ballooned larger and larger with each edition. The 1667 Index includes, along with its many thousands of specifically banned titles, a series of general rules prohibiting "all books in vulgate dealing with disputes and controversies having to do with religion, between Catholics, and Heretics of our time," while explicitly condoning "books dealing with ways of living well, contemplating, confessing, and such arguments, in vulgate."
If there were no room for corruption, graft, or at least a little bending of the rules between friends, however, it wouldn't have been Spain at the turn of the seventeenth century. The government's censors were all literary men themselves who frequented the same academies and taverns and passed around one another's work, contributing poems of praise when they approved of a new book or sending barbs and pasquinades when they did not. When the second volume of Don Quixote came out in 1615, for instance, it seems that Cervantes managed to convince the royal censor assigned to that tome, a man named Francisco Márquez Torres, to allow him to pen his own official approbation and pass it off as the censor's words.
That text, which has all the signs of Cervantes's love for playing with the boundaries of reality and fiction, recounts Márquez Torres's meeting with some visiting dignitaries in the company of the French ambassador. We can imagine Márquez Torres and Cervantes sharing a good laugh as the former reads the latter's version of the conversation that ensues. For when the supposed Frenchmen learn that Márquez Torres is reading a new book by Miguel de Cervantes, they begin to sing his praises and to ask about his social standing in Spain. When the censor in turn explains to them that Cervantes is "old, a soldier, a gentleman, and poor," one of them ostensibly replies, "If his neediness obligates him to write, then may it please God that he never have abundance, so that he may enrich the whole world with his works, even if he remains poor himself." Cervantes, as always, is winking at us across the ages as he wryly reminds his friend and eventually his reading public that fame and adulation, as welcome as it is, won't pay the bills on their own.
When he inserted that apocryphal encounter into the front matter of the second volume to Don Quixote, Cervantes was doing more than just using his newfound influence to mess with his government's system of censorship. He was also continuing to push the boundaries of a technique that he had already mastered in the book's first volume and that was central to its success and influence. To be sure, Cervantes's penchant for letting his stories bleed into the front matter of his books, and the informality with which he treats the border between what is supposed to be fanciful in a book and what we assume to be true, are crucial aspects of what was so new and exciting about his writing.
At that time, it was generally accepted that literature should fall into one of two general categories as defined by Aristotle: poetry and history. Aristotle's views on poetry and history have come down to us in the short work known as The Poetics, the fragmentary remains of a larger body of lectures on poetic theory that were available to medieval and Renaissance culture only through Arabic translations and commentaries. In those lectures, Aristotle stipulates that "the poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose ... The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular." Today we tend to think that what Aristotle had in mind with his concept of poeisis was something like fiction. The problem with that assumption is that it imposes on Aristotle our own aesthetic and literary prejudices, which mainly revolve around our idea of what Aristotle meant by tragedy being about a hero who is undone by his "tragic flaw." While this notion is taught to almost every student who reads Sophocles's Oedipus the King in school, none of it is representative of what Aristotle actually taught.
To begin with, Aristotle does not speak of a hero. He even insists, on several occasions, that tragedy is an imitation of an action, not of a human being. He speaks of a change of fortune as being essential, but is ambiguous about whether that change need be for the better or the worse; and while we usually understand the infamous tragic flaw to refer to something wrong with the hero's character — most famously the hubris we associate with Oedipus — the Greek term hamartia means something more like an error in judgment. All in all, where we tend to understand Aristotle's theory of tragedy as being about character, it is really about situations.
In order to attain general truths, then, poetry could not be concerned with the particularities of specific characters, their perspectives, the depths of their unique emotions, the interiority of their states of mind — precisely those aspects we value most in fiction today. While Aristotle does speak of a kind of emotional connection with what's going on in the tragedy (the catharsis or purgation of fear and pity that the spectator experiences), it would be wrong to think that Aristotle envisions this as taking place through what we would call identification with a character. Rather, the most important aspect of tragedy is, as he writes, "the structure of the incidents. For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life"; character, he insists, is "subsidiary to the actions."
Today, in contrast, we think of catharsis as having everything to do with character, with entering into a character's world, experiencing his values and choices, and suffering or finding pleasure vicariously through them. As the great critic Northrop Frye once wrote,
the essential difference between novel and romance lies in the conception of characterization. The romancer does not attempt to create "real people" so much as stylized figures which expand into psychological archetypes. It is in the romance that we find Jung's libido, anima, and shadow reflected in the hero, heroine, and villain respectively ... The novelist deals with personality, with characters wearing their personae or social masks.
For us, then, what Aristotle called poetry would most properly be an imitation of character, and the action or events that occur to that character would be secondary. That is because we assume as natural a category that didn't exist for Aristotle: fiction.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Man Who Invented Fiction by William Egginton. Copyright © 2015 William Egginton. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Within and Without xi
1 Poetry and History 1
2 Open and Closed 23
3 Soldier of Misfortune 47
4 A Captive Imagination 71
5 All the World's a Stage 93
6 Of Shepherds, Knights, and Ladies 117
7 A Rogue's Gallery 141
8 The Fictional World 163
Acknowledgments 185
A Note on the Sources 187
Notes 189
Bibliography 213
Index 227