The Self-Reflexive Excess in the Introductory Sections in Part II of Don Quixote,
Its Various Tensions and Possible Modes of Resolution?

	Having recently just finished writing a couple of books around the same time and not having another literary project immediately to hand can pose, as I found, an existential problem for the writer, or at least, for the writer who sees themselves as a ‘writer’. The writer of Don Quixote was no “one-off-author” being the creator of an extensive oeuvre. In my situation, fortunately for me (and my friends), I found within four days myself starting a second volume of essays and another book of poetry. More than enough to keep me off the streets and away from a considerable degree of personal angst. In the aftermath of my concluding comments, in a book I had been working on for three years, I found a sea of ideas washing around that eventually had to spill over into something more formal than a series of footnotes, endnotes or ‘afternotes’. I feel that the author Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra was presented with a similar phenomenon. 

	What are my reasons for this position? At the end of (what, effectively, was already) Part I we find the author, acting as ‘translator’, saying:

…the author of this history has searched with the most meticulous care for an account of the deeds performed by Don Quixote during his third sally, he hasn’t been able to find any information about them, not at least in writings by the reputable authors; tradition alone has preserved, in the memory of La Mancha, the belief that the third time Don Quixote left home he went to Saragossa, where he took part in some famous jousts and underwent experiences worthy of his courage and intelligence. But the author could not discover any information about how Don Quixote met his end…
	
	My first point is this: the existential merit of this series of adventures overflowed into the desire for a sequel even before ‘Part I’ was finished. The book is almost a mode of life– a new genre of activity that overflows into the world-as-lived. Indeed, we have people noting, as the author himself notes, that people now refer to their worn-out horses, their “skinny nags”, as Rocinante after the name of the Don’s horse. Ideas, literary references, etc., in this work are quickly taken up in the discourse of the people themselves. The author jokes that the book is especially popular with pageboys.
	My next point is that this work was immediately a best seller although not necessarily a money earner as the author quips in Part II. Hopefully he was only joking. No doubt a market was there for a sequel – the market was duly supplied with a pirated sequel - a fact bitterly lamented, by default, in the opening sections of his Prologue to Part II. Promising his reader there not to insult this literary intruder he did just that by immediately noting this topic of grievance and his negative feelings, such as resentment, about this interloper.

	So, it would seem that the author had intended to write a sequel and this was published in 1615, ten years after the publishing of Part I in 1605.

	In these sections, and elsewhere, there is an existential excess that spills over into the text from its adoption of a heavily emphasized self-referential habit – a practice that strikes me as very Contemporary in spirit. So, e.g., we have Don Quixote, the main protagonist of these adventures, asking his university trained friend, Sanson Carrasco, about this ‘history’ just recently read by the latter. The same, in turn, asks a number of questions about various features that have puzzled readers of this Part I. In due course the Don and Sancho tell us what was missed by the ‘translator’ of this history supposedly recorded first in Arabic (and therein we find Cervantes, in effect, answering some of his critics at the same time).

These reflexive aspects of the text are entered into with a sense of verve but not without the potentially unsettling presence of a number of sharp tensions that, although not properly resolved, are, despite that, glossed over by the reader in their desire not to disrupt their enjoyment of this dialectical frisson created therein and there between. Let me now note some of these literary tensions. 

	For a start we have a slightly unsettling temporal discontinuity between the tense of the text and its ‘lived’ historical location, and, the fact that the work is published ten years later. Its presented as if the publishing of this account had only taken place a few months, at most, previously! The Don is still recovering from his second sally and, as we no doubt expect, is about to make his third. Yet the previous history is discussed and critically evaluated by the Don as if it were written in the very recent past. Indeed, the text notes: “the blood on my blade has hardly dried” before these histories have appeared in print – which could not be true.

	We also have the unsettling problem of “who is who?” in our identification of the ‘voices’ in our reading of this text. Who was the original ‘author’ of this history, who is the ‘translator’ and final ‘editor’ of these tales, what is the relationship the Don has to the real author/these virtual ‘authors’? Just with whom do we identify with as the ‘real’ centre of this text when in effect it continually de-centered itself and is as a result centreless through an ongoing assortment of just such discontinuities in time, space, identity and author? It is as if there is a juggled set of characters, perhaps even caricatures too, hovering about an empty void from whose centre meaning and meaningfulness effortlessly bubbles up from this frisson of ‘personages’ both in the text and outside it? An interaction that even referentially involves the reader from time to time when the one of these ‘authors’ jokes about his ‘readership’!

	There is also the problem of how is it possible to record conversations between the first and second protagonists of these tales when they enter an enclosed space without anyone else being present to record their conversations and whom, it would seem, are never interviewed re the same? Yet such a record of the ‘historical’ is repeatedly realized!

We also have a number of other dialectical like-twists. E.g., we have an Islamic scholar writing the basic material for an exemplary Catholic tale as notes the ‘author’ as ‘translator’ in his defense of a recent publishing of his where he states he is “not going to start persecuting any priests”. Elsewhere he implies, in an ironic mode, that the profession of priests “which is to keep secrets” could have a satirical, non pro-Catholic second reading meaning: ‘keeping more secrets than those merely revealed in the confessional’. At the same time, he is insisting that nowhere in this book will one find “the slightest suspicion of language that isn’t wholesome or thoughts that aren’t Catholic”. Of course the joke is that the ‘original historian’ is this Moor, namely, one Cide Hamete Benengeli (although the ‘translator’ is a “Christian”). So how could this be a simple Catholic translation of a tale told by a Moor who apparently wrote his history without that intention…?

	The text is ‘aware’ of this tension both between the historian and the facts they are suppose to recount, and, the fact that this ‘history’ is not a history. We have a diatribe about ‘false historians’ and how they should be burnt as ‘counterfeiter’. The text also proffers a solution in the form that this particular non-Christian historian must be “enchanted”. As Don Quixote says: “that the author of our history must be some wise enchanter, for to such people nothing of what they have a mind to write can remain hidden”. We even have Sancho noting that he must be one of the important ‘caricatures’ in this history, and, being told that, indeed, he is the second most important character. The fact that this book has also been translated into other European languages is duly noted. The writer even makes a joke at the expense of the readers when he has our university student say: since fools are numerous (in Latin), “innumerable are those who have relished this history”. Without doubt a surfeit of reflexivity on many levels! 

	To conclude, overall, I can only add that these tensions can have no ‘satisfactory’ resolution. That, it is only through their suspension, a suspension of our disbelief (in their cognitive dissonance), that this text comes alive, in its very idiosyncratic de-centred fashion, in a shower of discontinuities whose dialectical-like frisson vastly amplifies the edginess of this text! On this comic side of this ‘edge’ we find ourselves taking an almost automatic, but, certainly, an historically guaranteed, aesthetic delight within this simulated mode of life and the existential surplus of value found for us therein and there between! In such humour we laugh at the main protagonists. Then, later in their inevitable tragedy, we identity with them at the same time. Moreover, the text, in my perception, is very much constructed as an extension of the theatre (and the genre of the tragi-comedy) and in the masks of the characters we see “mirrored” the depths of our own de-centred souls… there they are no longer seen as caricatures but as characters that mimic our own thoughts and feelings. As for ‘possible modes of resolution’, besides this suspension of disbelief, and the necessary (and equal) suspension of belief (in the illusion of its apparent reality as a ‘history’), our laughter invests these ‘personages’ with all the life they need for us to feel this ‘illusion’; that we are there ‘to hear them’ and ‘to hear what they have to tell us about themselves’ and, by extension, what they seem to say, in passing, about ourselves too! And well may we laugh…!
							        Noël Tointon, Sydney, 14.2.04.

A Selection of Highlights in this Section of Text (p. 483-599)

1.   A number of stories centred on the theme or motif of madness. Prologue to Chap. I.
2.   The author answers his critics in Chap. IV.
3.   The image of Lady Dulcinea sieving flour, etc. Chap. VIII (p. 533-534).
4.   The meeting of Lady Dulcinea in an ‘enchanted’ form, interpreted for the Don in this fashion by Sancho in Chap. X.
5.   Meeting the Wagon with the actors doing the Parliament of Death. Chap. XI.
6.   Meeting the Knight of the Spangle and his Squire with a big, purple nose. Chap. XII.
7.   The conversation between the two Squires (contrasted with the conversation of the Knights-Errants). Chap. XIII.
8.   Knight of the Spangles account of his lady Casildea (and beard – p. 578) and the fight with Don Quixote. Chap. XIV.
9.   The helmet full of curds. The Adventure with the lions. Chap. XVII.