Cervantes and Ariosto: Renewing Fiction

by Thomas R. Hart

Overview

Thomas Hart examines Erich Auerbach's contention that Don Quixote is not a tragedy but a comedy and suggests that Auerbach's view was shaped by his reading of Ariosto's chivalric romance Orlando furioso. At the same time Hart argues that neither Don Quixote nor Orlando furioso is so free from political intention as Auerbach believed they were. He demonstrates that Cervantes shared not only Ariosto's attachment to the moral code of chivalry but also his doubts that it could be practiced effectively in the contemporary world.

Originally published in 1989.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691636313
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Essays in Literature , #969
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 0.60(d)

Read an Excerpt

Cervantes and Ariosto

Renewing Fiction

---

By Thomas R. Hart

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06769-8

---

CHAPTER 1

Erich Auerbach's Don Quixote

* * *

In the first edition of Mimesis, which appeared in German in Switzerland in 1946, Erich Auerbach discusses Don Quixote briefly in two different chapters. In the chapter on the chivalric romances of Chrétien de Troyes, he compares Don Quixote's first sally, which leads him to an inn that he takes to be a castle, to Calogrenant's journey in Chrétien's Yvain. The essential difference between the two journeys is that

the world which Don Quixote encounters is not one especially prepared for the proving of a knight but is a random, everyday, real world. By his detailed description of the circumstances of his hero's life, Cervantes makes it perfectly clear [that Don Quixote] is the victim of a social order in which he belongs to a class that has no function. ... Only upon such a man, whose life is hardly better than a peasant's but who is educated and who is neither able nor permitted to labor as a peasant does, could romances of chivalry have such an unbalancing effect. (1953b, 137)

Auerbach returns to Don Quixote at the end of the chapter on Shakespeare to explain why Cervantes' novel does not fall within the bounds of the special kind of realism whose history Mimesis undertakes to trace:

Seldom, indeed, has a subject suggested the problematic study of contemporary reality as insistently as does Don Quixote. The ideal conceptions of a past epoch, and of a class which has lost its functions, in conflict with the reality of the contemporary present ought to have led to a critical and problematic portrayal of the latter. ... But Cervantes did not elaborate his work in this direction, (ibid., 332–33)

Auerbach prepared a separate chapter on Cervantes for the Spanish translation of Mimesis published in Mexico in 1951; the German original, "Die verzauberte Dulcinea," appeared in a German scholarly journal in the same year. In the Spanish translation, and in subsequent editions and translations of Mimesis, the new chapter follows the chapter on Shakespeare. In the new chapter Auerbach refers to the "sociological and psychological interpretation" of Don Quixote that he had offered in his chapter on Chrétien and says that he "leave[s] it there because in the context of that passage it is justified." He now insists, however, that "as an interpretation of Cervantes' artistic purpose it is unsatisfactory, for it is unlikely that he intended his brief observations on Don Quixote's social position and habits of life to imply anything like a psychological motivation of the knight's idée fixe" (ibid., 348). Auerbach finds little in Don Quixote that deserves to be called tragic or problematic — one of his favorite words — because "Don Quixote's idee fixe saves him from feeling responsibility for the harm he does, so that in his conscience too every form of tragic conflict ... is obviated. He has acted in accordance with the rules of knight-errantry and so he is justified" (ibid., 346). Auerbach thus sees Don Quixote as "a comedy in which well-founded reality holds madness up to ridicule" (ibid., 347), a work whose dominant mood is one of "merry play," "unproblematic gaiety" (ibid., 354).

Auerbach's essay on Don Quixote may be seen as an elaboration of the reasons that led him to treat Cervantes' novel so briefly in the original edition of Mimesis. He recognized Cervantes' originality in juxtaposing very different stylistic levels for comic effect: "What had certainly never happened before was that [such a rustically boorish style as that of the peasant woman's reply to Don Quixote in 2.10.110] should follow directly upon a speech like Don Quixote's — a speech which, taken by itself, could never make us suspect that it occurs in a grotesque context" (ibid., 350). He also recognized the uniqueness of Cervantes' achievement in creating a work that had no real precursors and has had no real descendants: "So universal and multilayered, so noncritical and nonproblematic a gaiety in the portrayal of everyday reality has not been attempted again in European letters. I cannot imagine where and when it might have been attempted" (ibid., 358). It was this uniqueness that made Auerbach feel that Don Quixote had nothing to do with the particular kind of realism that he deals with in Mimesis, "representations of everyday life in which that life is treated seriously, in terms of its human and social problems or even of its tragic complications" (ibid., 342).

Neither of Auerbach's two interpretations of Cervantes' novel fits easily into one of the two categories into which Oscar Mandel divides modern critics of Don Quixote. Mandel's "hard" critics consider Don Quixote the butt of Cervantes' satire, a madman unwilling or unable to see the world as it is. His "soft" critics stress the sublimity of Don Quixote's motivation and see his failure to impose his ideals as an indictment of the other characters and of the world in which the action takes place: "The knight is seen variously as the embodiment of the 'ideal' ... , the ethical life, the romantic life, the life of the imagination, poetry, heroism, or the rights of the individual" (1958, 154). Auerbach was, of course, familiar with the soft view as it was formulated by the German Romantics, and he goes out of his way to say that it is not supported by Cervantes' text. The interpretation he advances in his chapter on Chrétien de Troyes differs from the romantic one in that Auerbach does not stress Don Quixote's nobility of character but rather the social and political conditions that lead him to seek refuge in the imagined world of his beloved books of chivalry. The interpretation offered in the later chapter on Don Quixote is closer to those of Mandel's hard critics, but Auerbach differs from them by denying that Cervantes condemns Don Quixote as an irresponsible idealist: he is simply a madman and therefore cannot be held accountable for his actions. His adventures never go beyond a harmless form of make-believe marked by a childlike innocence of the real world.

Auerbach did not deny the greatness of Don Quixote, though he understood its greatness differently from most post-Romantic readers. Mimesis is not a history of Western literature, still less an account of all the books Auerbach loved or that he thought important. He found no place in it for a number of authors he admired — for example, Vico, Pascal, and Baudelaire, whose works he studied in some of his most penetrating essays. In "Epilegomena zu Mimesis," Auerbach notes that he has been accused of giving insufficient attention to German writers. He concedes that the great French novelists of the nineteenth century — Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola — are given a central place in his book and that he admires them enormously, but he insists that he treats them in this way because of the special character of the problems he deals with in Mimesis and not because of any personal preference for their works over those of their German contemporaries. He adds that "for pleasure and refreshment [zu Vergnüge und Erholung] I prefer to read Goethe, Stifter and Keller" (1953a, 14). One reason he preferred them is perhaps that they, especially Stifter and Keller, offer a vision of a world still largely untouched by the tremendous historical events that were to have such tragic consequences in Auerbach's lifetime and so decisive an effect on his own life. I suspect that his affection for Cervantes may have rested on a similar basis. There is no hint of condescension in his statement that "for Cervantes, a good novel serves no other purpose than to afford refined recreation, honesto entretenimiento. No one has expressed this more convincingly in recent times than W. J. Entwistle in his book on Cervantes ... where he speaks of recreation and connects it very beautifully with re-creation" (1953b, 358). Auerbach's pairing of recreation and re-creation here comes very close to his pairing of Vergntige and Erholung in the passage just quoted. Erholung connotes rest, recovery, making whole again. Writing that can do this is hardly trivial, even if it is wholly unconcerned with everyday reality.

Why did Auerbach interpret Don Quixote in this way? The answer may lie in the expectations he brought to it, expectations formed by his university training in romance philology, a discipline to which he acknowledged his intellectual debt in the opening pages of the introduction, significantly titled "Purpose and Method," to his last, posthumously published book Literary Language and Its Public (1965, 5–6). Auerbach's university study of romance philology embraced the three principal romance languages and their literatures, but he devoted far less attention to Spanish literature than some other German and Austrian romance philologists like Karl Vossler or Auerbach's friend Leo Spitzer, to whom, in 1951, he dedicated his Vier Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der französischen Bildung. Spitzer made important contributions to the study of a number of major Spanish writers and works, among them the Poema de Mio Cid, the Libro de buen amor, the ballads, Garcilaso, Gongora, Quevedo, Lope de Vega, Calderón, and, of course, Cervantes. Auerbach's only extended discussion of a Spanish text aside from Don Quixote is his analysis, in Literary Language, of Juan Ruiz's lament for Trotaconventos in the Libro de buen amor, though there are scattered references to the Spanish theater of the Golden Age in Mimesis and perfunctory remarks on a number of Spanish works in the Introduction aux études de philologie romane that he prepared for his Turkish students. He was far more at home with French and Italian literature.

Auerbach's interpretation of Don Quixote may have been shaped in part by a tendency, perhaps largely unconscious, to see it in terms of one of the Italian books he knew and loved, Ariosto's Orlando furioso. In the handbook written for his Turkish students, Auerbach asserts that "reading [Orlando furioso] is one of the greatest pleasures offered us by European literature." He praises Ariosto as "the greatest epic poet of the Renaissance and one of the most purely artistic poets of all times," one whose work has "no other end than aesthetic pleasure" (1949, 150–51).

The last phrase suggests that Auerbach saw Ariosto in much the same light as he saw Cervantes. Ariosto appears in Mimesis only in passing — reasonably enough, given Auerbach's conception of realism — and almost always together with the author of Don Quixote. In his chapter on chivalric romance, Auerbach declares that "it is in the serene metamorphosis or the parody, Ariosto or Cervantes, that this fictitious form of life finds its clearest interpretation" (1953b, 140). In the chapter on Cervantes, he says that "I take [Don Quixote] as merry play [heiteres Spiel] on many levels, including in particular the level of everyday realism. The latter differentiates it from the equally unproblematic gaiety [problemlose Heiterkeit] of let us say Ariosto" (ibid., 354). On the next page he speaks of "the older tradition of the romance of adventure and its renewal through Boiardo and Ariosto," insisting that "no one before [Cervantes] had infused the element of genuine everyday reality into that brilliant and purposeless play of combinations."

The phrases that Auerbach's American translator Willard R. Trask renders as "merry play" and "unproblematic gaiety" are linked in the original German text by forms of the root heiter: heiteres Spiel, problemlose Heiterkeit. English offers no real equivalent for heiter:

Heiter is applied to a state of mind which manifests itself inwardly more than outwardly and which is unclouded, serene. It can be applied to the higher activities of the mind, e.g. art (e.g. die Heiterheit der klassischen Kunst), and also to its state in relation to everyday tasks and events. In the first case "serene," "bright" must often be used in English for lack of closer equivalents. In the latter case it approximates to "cheerful." Common to both heiter and "cheerful" are harmony and balance. (Farrell 1977, 214)

Serenity was a quality Auerbach valued highly, as I have pointed out elsewhere (Hart 1984, 1:260–61). He does not see Don Quixote merely as a comic work but as a comic work of a specific and uniquely valuable kind, a work wholly different in spirit from the crude slapstick to which Cervantes' contemporaries, both in Spain and abroad, seem generally to have reduced it (Russell 1969; 1985; Close 1978). Auerbach's essay is a triumph of imaginative insight, deeply rooted in both scholarly and personal concerns. Though questionable on certain points, it is, taken as a whole, the most satisfactory essay on Don Quixote that I know. It is tempting to suppose that Cervantes would have recognized it as a sympathetic and perceptive account of his work. But there is no evidence that Cervantes or his seventeenth-century readers interpreted Don Quixote as Auerbach does. Auerbach was right to reject as unhistorical the romantic view of Don Quixote as "a heroic defender of noble ideas in the face of all those who are ready to settle for the commonplace shallowness of things as they are" (Russell 1985, 94–95), but his own interpretation is hardly less unhistorical.

"Serene metamorphosis," "unproblematic gaiety," a "brilliant and purposeless play of combinations": all apply equally in Auerbach's view both to Don Quixote and to Orlando furioso. In seeing Orlando furioso in this way, Auerbach follows in the footsteps of De Sanctis and Croce, who set the tone for most criticism of Ariosto's poem in the first half of this century. De Sanctis, as C. P. Brand notes, "forces Ariosto into the pattern of his historical view of Italian literature, in which the Renaissance is condemned as abdicating moral responsibility with its cult of pure form, and the Furioso is seen as the masterpiece of art for art's sake" (1974, 192). Croce believed that Ariosto's art is concerned above all with harmony; the unity of his work is given by his irony, which is "similar to the eye of God, who watches creation moving, all creation, loving it all equally, in good and in evil, in the greatest and in the smallest, in man and in the grain of sand, because he has made it all" (quoted in English in Durling 1965, 250).

Though recent critics have laid increasing stress on Ariosto's fundamental moral seriousness and on his concern with the calamitous situation of an Italy ravaged by warfare between opposing city-states and by repeated foreign invasions, some of the most perceptive continue to find in Orlando furioso something of the serenity and gaiety Auerbach found both in Ariosto's poem and in Don Quixote. Lanfranco Caretti, for example, says that Ariosto's "wisdom rested on a serene and cordial openness toward the world [un'apertura serena e cordiale verso il mondo], which was based on a knowledge of man, of his various and even contradictory nature, and on an acceptance of reality in all its aspects" (1981, xviii). Emilio Bigi speaks of the "achieved serenity" (conquistata serenità) of Orlando furioso and sees it as the quality that makes Ariosto's poem the most representative creation of its age and links it to the works of contemporaries like Raphael and Castiglione (1982, 1:66). Maxime Chevalier (1966, 460) suggests that the quality Cervantes most appreciated in Ariosto's poem was its "serene wisdom" (sereine sagesse).

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Cervantes and Ariosto by Thomas R. Hart. Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• PREFACE, pg. ix
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. xiii
• INTRODUCTION, pg. 3
• CHAPTER I. Erich Auerbach's Don Quixote, pg. 6
• CHAPTER II. Cervantes' Debt to Ariosto: Form, pg. 16
• CHAPTER III. Cervantes' Debt to Ariosto: Themes, pg. 39
• CHAPTER IV. Imitation in Ariosto and Cervantes, pg. 55
• CHAPTER V. Pastoral Interludes, pg. 73
• CHAPTER VI. "Disprayse of a Courtly Life", pg. 96
• CHAPTER VII. Don Quixote's Readers, Don Quixote as Reader, pg. 115
• CONCLUSION, pg. 131
• BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 135
• INDEX, pg. 147
• PRINCETON ESSAYS IN LITERATURE, pg. 151

Editorial Reviews

Hart (Romance languages, U. of Oregon) compares Don Quixote with Orlando furiso, drawing on the work of Erich Auberach, and demonstrates their authors' shared awarenesses regarding life, literature, and chivalry as well as their differences. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews