Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Related Subjects

This is Professor Parr's most cogent statement to date about the major figures of Spanish literature prior to 1700. Continuing an approach he helped pioneer for this field, he scrutinizes five classic texts from a largely postmodern perspective, interrogating theoretical assumptions along the way.

Part I centers on Don Quixote . There is discussion of translating and interpreting Cervantes's masterpiece, focusing on the most recently published and reissued translations. Parr proceeds to argue for a return to a newer formalism, focusing on narrative technique. He shows that Don Quixote anticipates in its praxis many key ideas of present-day theoria . The porous and peripatetic narrative frames of Don Quixote are detailed, as well as narration and disnarration, including his coinages “supernarrator” and “supernarratee.” Orality and literacy are explored. He further proposes a return to humanism, following the lead of a younger generation of Parisian writers and thinkers who have come to reject '69 philosophy, with its convoluted style, anti-rationalist bias, and general negativism. The genre of Cervantes's masterpiece is discussed by comparing it to Antoine Furetière's Le Roman bourgeois of 1666. Cervantes's text is Horatian in tone and Menippean in structure, while Furetière's is more splenetic and personalized, and thus more Juvenalian.

Part II begins with a comparison of Don Quixote and Don Juan. The two are often thought to be antipodes of each other in terms of age, values, and comportment, but they ultimately share a common trajectory that takes them well beyond what Freud calls the pleasure principle. The original Don Juan play represents one of the four types of Spanish tragicomedy extant at the time. Tragic isolation from society and comic integration into society are both offered as possibilities near the end, and it is this self-conscious juxtaposition of the two potential endings that constitutes a new kind of irony, which Parr calls generic irony. The more likely author of El burlador de Sevilla is Tirso de Molina, to whom it has been attributed traditionally. The defenders of Claramonte have not proved their case. Therefore, there is no valid reason to take away from Tirso what has been considered his. There is a legitimate canon of the seventeenth-century Spanish Comedia , and El burlador de Sevilla belongs at the center of that canon. The role of anthologies in the creation of this canon in North America is a key consideration. The symbiotic relationship between the select and critical canons is another. Each feeds off the other to their mutual increase and enhancement.

Part III is devoted to three classics from earlier times, followed by a commentary on time frames. The titles discussed are the fourteenth-century Libro de buen amor , in terms of deep structure, then the late fifteenth-century Celestina , in relation to contemporary painting, and finally the sixteenth-century Lazarillo de Tormes , which initiates the picaresque tradition, with regard to its rhetorical and referential satire. Parr concludes by advocating a less freighted and ambiguous approach to periodization, beginning with the banishment of “Renaissance,” “Baroque,” and “Early Modern” from critical discourse.

LC 2004007343

ISBN 1-57591-084-5

Printed in the U.S.A.

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