Representación

Los locos y los caballeros

Bakhtin, Mikail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin:

University of Texas Press, 1981.

• “Any adventure-time will contain a mixture of chance, fate, the gods and so forth. Indeed, this type of time emerges only at points of rupture (when some hiatus opens up) in normal, real-life, ‘law-abiding’ temporal sequences, where these laws (of whatever sort) are suddenly violated and events take an unexpected and unforeseen turn. The ‘suddenly’ is normalized, as it were, in chivalric romances; it becomes something generally applicable, in fact, almost ordinary. The whole world becomes miraculous, so the miraculous becomes ordinary without ceasing at the same time to be miraculous. Even ‘unexpectedness’ itself –since it is always with us– ceases to be something unexpected. The unexpected and only the unexpected, is what is expected. The entire world is subject to ‘suddenly,’ to the category of miraculous and unexpected chance. The hero of Greek romances, on the other hand, had striven to establish some ‘systematicalness,’ to reunite the sundered links in the normal course of life’s events, to escape from the game of fate and to return to ordinary, normal life (which of course exists outside the limits of the novel); he endured adventures as if they were calamities sent from above –but he was not an adventurer per se, he himself did not seek out adventures (he was deprived of any initiative in this respect). The hero of a chivalric romance, on the other hand, plunges headfirst into adventures as if they were his native element; for him, the world exists exclusively under the sign of the miraculous ‘suddenly’; it is the normal condition of his world. He is an adventurer, but a disinterested one (he is not, of course, an adventurer in the later sense of the word, that is, in the sense of a man who cold-bloodedly pursues his own greedy goals by extraordinary means). By his very nature he can live only in this world of miraculous chance, for only it preserves his identity. And the very code by which he measures his identity is calibrated precisely to this world of miraculous chance.

• “Moreover, the very coloration chance takes on –the fortuitous simultaneities and equally fortuitous disjunctions in time– is, in the chivalric romance, quite different from the Greek novel. In the Greek novel the mechanics of temporal partings and comings-together are unadorned, they take place in an abstract space fill with rarities and curiosities. In the chivalric romance, by contrast, chance has all the seductiveness of the miraculous and the mysterious; it is personified by good and evil fairies, good and evil magicians; in enchanted groves, in castles and elsewhere it lies in wait. In the majority of cases the hero does not endure real ‘misfortunes’ –which intrigue only the reader– rather, he lives ‘miraculous adventures,’ which are interesting and attractive to him as well. ‘Adventure’ takes on a new tone in the context of this completely miraculous world in which it occurs.

• “Furthermore, in this miraculous world heroic deeds are performed by which the heroes glorify themselves, and glorify others (their liege lord, their lady). The heroic deed is the feature that sharply distinguishes the chivalric romance from a Greek one, and brings it closer to epic adventure. Glory and glorification are features completely alien to the Greek romance, and this fact heightens the similarity between the chivalric romance and the epic.” (152-153)

Bakhtin (continuado)

• “Finally, both the hero and the miraculous world in which he acts are of a piece, there is no separation between the two. This world is not, to be sure, his national homeland; it is everywhere equally ‘other’ (but this ‘otherness’ is not emphasized)-- the hero moves from country to country, comes into contact with various masters, crosses seas –but everywhere the world is one, it is filled with the same concept of glory, heroic deed and disgrace; throughout this world the hero is able to bring glory on himself and on others; everywhere the same names resound and are glorious.” (153-154)

• “The rogue, the clown and the fool create around themselves their own special little world, their own chronotope. In the chronotopes and eras we have so far discussed, none of these figures occupied an essential place, with the possible partial exception of the everyday-adventure chronotope. These figures carry with them into literature first a vital connection with the theatrical trappings of the public square, with the mask of the public spectacle; they are connected with that highly specific, extremely important area of the square where the common people congregate; second –and this is of course a related phenomenon– the very being of these figures does not have a direct, but rather a metaphorical, significance. Their very appearance, everything they do and say, cannot be understood in a direct and unmediated way but must be grasped metaphorically. Sometimes their significance can be reversed –but one cannot take them literally, because they are not what they seem. Third and last, and this again follows from what has come before, their existence is a reflection of some other’s mode of being –and even then, not a direct reflection. They are life’s maskers; their being coincides with their role, and outside this role they simply do not exist.

• “Essential to these three figures is a distinctive feature that is as well a privilege –the right to be ‘other’ in this world, the right not to make common cause with any single one of the existing categories that life makes available; none of these categories quite suits them, they see the underside and the falseness of every situation. Therefore, they can exploit any position they choose, but only as a mask. The rogue still has some ties that bind him to real life; the clown and the fool, however, are ‘not of this world,’ and therefore possess their own special rights and privileges. These figures are laughed at by others, and themselves as well. Their laughter bears the stamp of the public square where the folk gather. They re-establish the public nature of the human figure: the entire being of characters such as these is, after all utterly on the surface; everything is bought out on to the square, so to speak; their entire function consists in externalizing things (true enough, it is not their own being they externalize, but a reflected, alien being– however, that is all they have). This creates distinctive means for externalizing a human being, via parodic laughter.” (159-160)

Bakhtin (continuado)

• “Characteristic for Don Quixote is the parodied hybridization of the ‘alien, miraculous world’ chronotope of chivalric romances, with the ‘high road winding through one’s native land’ chronotope that is typical of the picaresque novel.

• “Cervantes’ novel has enormous significance in the long history of literature’s assimilation of historical time –a novel whose significance is not, of course, exhausted merely by this hybrid of two already familiar chronotopes –and all the more so because the very process of hybridization radically changes their character; both of them take on metaphoric significance and enter into completely new relations with the real world.” (165)

• “Novels of the First Stylistic Line aspire to organize and stylistically order the heteroglossia of conversational language, as well as of written everyday and semiliterary genres. To a significant extent this impulse to order determines their relationship to heteroglossia. Novels of the Second Stylistic Line, however, transform this already organized and ennobled everyday and literary language into essential material for its own orchestration, and into people for whom this language is appropriate, that is, into ‘literary people’ with their literary way of thinking and their literary ways of doing things – that is, such a novel transforms them into authentic characters.

• “An understanding of the stylistic essence of the First Line is impossible without taking into account the following extremely important consideration, namely the special relationship these novels have with conversational language and with life and everyday genres. Discourse in the novel is structured on an uninterrupted mutual interaction with the discourse of life. The chivalric romance in prose sets itself against the ‘low,’ ‘vulgar’ heteroglossia of all areas of life and counterbalances to it its own specifically idealized, ‘ennobled’ discourse. Vulgar, nonliterary discourse is saturated with low intentions and crude emotional expressions, oriented in a narrowly practical direction, overrun with petty philistine associations and reeks of specific contexts. The chivalric romance opposes to all this its own discourse, linked only with the highest and noblest associations, filled with references to lofty contexts (historical, literary, scholarly). Thus may the ennobled word – as distinct from the poetic word – replace the vulgar word in conversations, letters and other everyday genres just as a euphemism replaces a course expression, for it seeks to orient itself in the same sphere as real-life discourse.

• “Thus does chivalric romance become a vehicle for the extra-generic literariness of language – it aspires to provide norms for language in real life, to teach good style, bon ton, how to converse in society, how to write letters and so on. . . .The chivalric romance provided a discourse proper to all possible situations and events in life, while at the same time everywhere opposing itself to vulgar discourse and its course ways.

Bakhtin (continuado)

• “Cervantes excelled in describing encounters between a discourse made respectable by the romance and vulgar discourse – in situations fundamental in both novels and life. In Don Quixote the internally polemical orientation of ‘respectable’ discourse vis-à-vis heteroglossia unfolds in novelistic dialogues with Sancho, with other representatives of the heteroglot and course realities of life and in the movement of the novel’s plot as well. The internal dialogic potential embedded in respectable discourse is thus actualized and brought to the surface – in dialogues and in plot movement – but, like every authentic manifestation of the dialogic principle in language – it does not exhaust itself completely in them, and is not resolved dramatically.” (384-385)

• “Representatives of the Second Stylistic Line (Rabelais, Cervantes and others) parodically reverse this device of avoidance, they develop, by means of comparisons, a series of deliberately crude associations, which have the effect of dragging what is being compared down to the dregs of an everyday gross reality congealed in prose, thereby destroying the lofty literary plane that had been achieved by polemical abstraction. Here heteroglossia avenges itself for having been excluded and made abstract (in, for instance, the speeches of Sancho Panza).

• “For the Second Stylistic Line, the respectable language of the chivalric romance – with all its polemical abstractness – becomes only one of the participants in a dialogue of languages, it becomes the prosaic image of a language – most profoundly and full instanced in Cervantes – capable of internally dialogic resistance to new authorial intentions; it is an image that is agitatedly double voiced.” (386)

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1970.

• “Don Quixote is a negative of the Renaissance world; writing has ceased to be the prose of the world; resemblances and signs have dissolved their former alliance; similitudes have become deceptive and verge upon the visionary or madness; things still remain stubbornly within their ironic identity: they are no longer anything but what they are; words wander off on their own, without content, without resemblances to fill their emptiness; they are no longer the marks of things; they lie sleeping between the pages of books and covered with dust.” (47-48)

• “Cervantes’s text turns back upon itself, thrusts itself back into its own density, and becomes the object of its own narrative.” (48)

• “Don Quixote must remain faithful to the book that he has now become in reality; he must protect it from errors, from counterfeits, from apocryphal sequels; he must fill in the details that have been left out; he must preserve its truth. But Don Quixote himself has not read this book, and does not have to read it, since he is the book in flesh and blood.” (48)

Foucault (continuado)

• “Once similitude and signs are sundered from each other, two experiences can be established and two characters appear face to face. The madman, understood not as one who is sick but as an established and maintained deviant, as an indispensable cultural function, has become, in Western experience, the man of primitive resemblances. This character, as he is depicted in the novels or plays of the Baroque age, and as he was gradually institutionalized right up to the advent of nineteenth-century psychiatry, is the man who is alienated in analogy. He is the disordered player of the Same and the Other. He takes things for what they are not, and people one for another; he cuts his friends and recognizes complete strangers; he thinks he is unmasking when, in fact, he is putting on a mask. He inverts all values and all proportions, because he is constantly under the impression that he is deciphering signs: for him, the crown makes the king.” (49)

• “. . . The madman fulfils the function of homosemanticism: he groups all signs together and leads them with a resemblance that never ceases o proliferate. The poet fulfils the opposite function: his is the allegorical role; beneath the language of signs and beneath the interplay of their precisely delineated distinctions, he strains his ears to catch that ‘other language’, the language without words or discourse, of resemblance. The poet brings similitude to the signs that speak it, whereas the madman loads all signs with a resemblance that ultimately erases them.” (50)

• “[The madman’s] words unceasingly renew the power of the strangeness and the strength of their contestation” (50).

“Las meninas” por Diego de Velásquez

“El jardín de amor” por Pedro Pablo Rubéns