A Reader on Reading

Cervantes (the imaginary figure we call Cervantes) guides and diverts, again and again, this fictitious time. When after barely eight chapters, halfway through an adventure, Cervantes confesses not to know how to continue Don Quixote’s story, a miracle occurs. Finding himself one day in Toledo, Cervantes tells us, he finds a folder full of papers written in Arabic characters and since he can’t read them, he looks for a morisco aljaimado (a Spanish-speaking Arab) to translate them for him. He discovers that the manuscript is by a certain Cide Hamete Benegeli, who has put on paper the entire story of Don Quixote. That is to say: depending on our point of departure, either Cide Hamete Benegeli narrates the story of Don Quixote that a morisco translates for Cervantes — the Cervantes who is a character in the preceding chapters — or the character called Cervantes, author of a book found in Don Quixote’s library, has the translator read him the story of what follows the knight’s first adventures in the manuscript of an Arabic author who writes in aljaimia, a Romance tongue transcribed in Arabic characters. The book we hold in our hands is such that, at whichever page we open it, conventional time disappears and becomes the time of fiction in order to render it “more real,” as Don Quixote himself explains.

So thoroughly does Cervantes’s fiction absorb reality to render it “more real” that it ends up devouring its own self. In the second chapter of Part 2, Sansón Carrasco lets Sancho know that his adventures are told in a book (which Carrasco has read in Salamanca, a town famous for the seriousness of its academic publications) “under the title The Ingenious Knight Don Quixote de la Mancha.” Hearing this, Sancho crosses himself in fright; much the same reaction is that of the reader for whom, if the first part of the book he’s reading has also been read by the characters of the part he’s reading now, then he, a creature of flesh and blood, is also part of that device, that trickery, that imaginary world, a ghost among ghosts, a servant not of his own will but of another man’s dreams, a man who is not dust and ashes and who once upon a time was called Miguel de Cervantes.

Cervantes was no doubt aware of the mirror he held up to his readers. Towards the end of Part 2, a certain scholarly canon tells Don Quixote that he cannot understand how certain books can delight without teaching unless they are nothing but beautiful. For the canon, “Delight conceived in the soul must be that of loveliness and balance seen or observed in things that sight or imagination bring forward; since anything that carries in itself ugliness or imperfection can produce no contentment whatsoever.” The world of which the canon approves is that of perfect sterility, meaningless beauty, vacuous creations, like that of today’s fashion models or sitcom characters for whom everything is immaculately aseptic, and time nothing but an interminable state of existence in which there is no responsibility and no distress. To this time without depth and without limits with which society shrouds the real passing of time, Don Quixote opposes a time of ethical action, a time in which every act has its consequences, good or evil, just or unjust. Instead of a vast and anonymous magma in which we exist unconsciously, Don Quixote proposes a time in which we are alive and fertile, in which our consciousness works towards rendering us more fully in our own image, becoming whoever it is the canon’s time prevents us from knowing. In this time, in this truly real time, we must live, Don Quixote says, “undoing all manner of wrongs, and placing ourselves in situations and dangers which, once overcome, will grant us eternal renown and fame.” This, Cervantes tells us, is the time of the stories we tell in order to be able to affirm that we exist.

Saint Augustine’s Computer

“But there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory

works both ways.”

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 5

IN THE FIRST YEARS OF THE sixteenth century, the elders of the guild of San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice commissioned the artist Vittore Carpaccio to paint a series of scenes illustrating the life of Saint Jerome, the fourth-century reader and scholar. The last scene, now set up high on the right as you enter the small, darkened guildhall, is not a portrait of Saint Jerome but of Saint Augustine of Hippo, Saint Jerome’s contemporary. In a story popular since the Middle Ages, it was told that Saint Augustine had sat down at his desk to write to Saint Jerome, asking his opinion on the question of eternal beatitude, when the room filled with light and Augustine heard a voice telling him that Jerome’s spirit had ascended to the heavens.