On Narration and Theory

TLDR: Howard's article on Cervantes as the Narrator of Don Quixote as mentioned in this paper is a variation on a position he has maintained for many years, a perspective now supplemented by an accessory that gives new meaning to "cutting-edge": Ockham's razor (i.e., the principle of parsimony).

Abstract: These remarks are prompted by Howard Mancing's article on "Cervantes as Narrator of Don Quijote" in this journal. Howard and I have known each other for many years, so my comments are offered in the spirit of friendly exchange. He may be surprised to learn that I feel empathy--even nostalgia--for his basic premise, that Cervantes is the narrator of Don Quixote. I read the book exactly that way the first time through. I was 22 then. Today, alas, I have been seduced into thinking that fictional tales told almost entirely in third person have a narrator other than the author, a narrator that may be explicit or implicit. There was a growing sensation of deja-vu as I proceeded with Howard's article, and it dawned on me finally that I had offered a brief response to this thesis in 1988, in my Don Quixote: An Anatomy of Subversive Discourse (30). What he presents in his recent article is a variation on a position he has maintained for many years, a perspective now supplemented by an accessory that gives new meaning to "cutting-edge': Ockham's razor (i.e., the principle of parsimony). Howard is to be congratulated on his skillful wielding of Ockham's freshly-stropped straight razor, without apparent damage to any body parts. The unkindest cut of all, in my estimation, is to Cervantes' narrative art. If Cervantes was manco before, he may be considered doubly so now, thanks to the commonsense paring away of his intratextual extremities by this sharp object. Viewed from another perspective, one students of art might appreciate, here we have Cervantes as Saturn, devouring and assimilating his diegetic offspring. Think of the painting by Goya that hangs in the Prado. Or, in terms Sancho might savor, the baby has been tossed out with the bath water. It strikes me that we find in the article another instance of a common problem for literary criticism: the importation of concepts and approaches from other fields. A concept that may be useful in logic, or in reducing redundancy and technical jargon in theological postulates, is not necessarily the appropriate instrument for dealing with complex prose fiction. Beyond that, if simplification is a good thing, we should perhaps pursue it at the mimetic level as well. A logical next step would be to pare down the unnecessary verbiage--involving adventures, interactions and dialogues of hero and helper, etc.--to a few elementary propositions, in the manner initiated by Propp and carried to its logical extreme by Greimas and Todorov. Common sense is not all that common, but it too is a fallible guide when it comes to analyzing literature. It can lead astray, as we see when the article equates discursive and creative writing at the bottom of p. 120. This blending is remindful of another well-known reader's commonsensical conflation of history and poetry. Common sense would say that writing is writing, after all. Surely there is no need to put a fine point on it. There is also the commonsensical collapsing of Lanser's private narrator into Genette's intradiegetic narrator (127), which is not accurate for Don Quixote, as I read it; private narrators like Dorotea, the Captive Captain, and Cardenio are situated at Genette's metadiegetic level. Then there is the commonsense quest for the originary manifestation of festive tone, which Howard locates in the prologue. In fact, that "festive, satiric, intellectually subtle" tone (126) has already been succinctly developed and put on display for the discreet reader in the 1605 title, well before we come to the prologue. The article also applies the principle of parsimony to spelling ("discrete" for "discreet," 122). Paring down this redundant pair to a single written form offers an ingenious illustration of why orthographic renderings should not proliferate beyond the absolutely necessary. This instance could serve as a telling emblem for the argument about telling advanced in the essay. Let me try now to revive this ox of mine that has been so grievously gored--not mortally, to be sure (although it was a close shave). …