Don Quixote’s Impossible Quest for the Absolute in Literature
Fiction, Reflection, and Negative Theology
Routledge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literature Series

This book offers a reading particularly of Part II of Don Quixote embedded in a philosophical reflection on the revelation of religious truth in and through literature. It absorbs and reconciles the religious reading of Miguel de Unamuno and the secular reading of José Ortega y Gasset, Spain?s two outstanding philosophical luminaries. Both thinkers based their entire philosophies and their analyses of the Spanish national character and destiny on their interpretations of the Quixote. Negative theology deploys critical reason that is critical of reason itself and opens toward an unfathomable (un)ground of All. It performs a synthesis of the secularizing and sacralizing tendencies that are both sublimely operative in the text of the Quixote. It enables the Quixote to emerge in its fully parodic and paradoxical vitality, which other interpretations governed by one paradigm or the other can access only partially. Spanish baroque mysticism and contemporary post-secular thought are made to converge in highlighting the blessed, even sacred, donation that literature like Don Quixote preserves and transmits as our most precious and saving cultural heritage.

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Prologue Concerning Apophatic Theology in Literary Representation and Reflection

Chapter 1. The Revelation of Laughter: Cervantes’s Comic Christian Muse

The Power of Laughter—The Wisdom of Folly

A Negative Theological Reading of Don Quixote

Fool for Christ as Universal Sage

Don Quixote’s Contemporaneity and Universality

Holy Fool as Christian Saint and Crusader

Unamuno and Ortega: Dialectic of the Religious and the Secular

Chapter 2. Self-Reflective Dynamics of Revelation in Literature

A. Self-Subversive Mirroring between and among the Protagonists

The Knight of Mirrors and of the White Moon as Self-Reflection of Don Quixote

Don Quixote’s Ideal Reflected in Sancho—and Inversely

Self-Reflexivity as Self-Fulfilling Ideal

Becoming a Book and Reading One’s Life

B. Self-Reflection and Undermining the Authority of the Author

Self-reflective Questioning of Authorship

Cervantes’s Self-Representations in the Prologues

Authorship and Originality

Self-Reflexivity in the Narrative Structure of Fiction

Fictionalization of Author by Self-Reflection—Kafka and Borges

Dialectic of Self-Reflection and Negative Theology

Chapter 3. Negative Theology of the Novel

The Novel as Breaking Down the Separation of Styles

Recognition Scenes: Epiphanies and Theophanies

The Novel as Subjective Reflective Medium and Genre Reflecting Concrete Reality

The Novel as Subjectively Lived Experience

The Novel as a New and Comprehensive Genre

Dialectics of Wholeness

The In-Breaking of External Reality into Fiction

Mutual Contamination of History and Fiction and their Exposure to Externality

Maese Pedro’s Puppet Show and Unamuno’s Move through Fiction to Reality

Ortega on Literary Genre: From Epic Myth to Novelistic Formal Reality

Novelistic Creation of Formal Reality—Ortega and Maese Pedro’s Puppet Theatre

Chapter 4. Visionary Experience in the Cave of Montesinos as Revelation via Parody

The Vision of Montesinos, or the Part of Fiction

in the Construction of Prophetic Revelation

The Question of Truth Raised by the Vision in the Cave

Artifice and the Limits of the Control of the Author

The Reality that Our Fictions Become

The Ontological Argument for Dulcinea’s Existence

Real Costs of One’s Fictive Inventions

Repetitions of Visionary Revelation following Montesinos

Sancho’s Perversion of Visionary Experience—Clavileño

Visionary Revelation After the Cave of Montesinos—Its Translation to the Everyday

Chapter 5. Dialectic of Religious Truth and its Secular Simulation

Religious and Anti-Religious Interpretations of the Quixote: Religion versus Secularity

Velázquez’s Las Meninas: Self-Reflexivity and the Other

Camacho’s Wedding as Theatrical Artifice and its Sacramental Transfiguration

Baroque Aesthetics of Contrast, the Grotesque, and Theatricalization of the World

Feminine Beauty as Ideal and as Simulation

Transvestism, Love of Artifice, and the Transhuman

Formal Dimension of Reality—Names as Revelation—Antonomasia

Archetypal Image and Primal Naming—Spitzer’s Linguistic Perspectivism

The Epistolary Novel and the Scriptural Ideal

Dialectic of Self-Reflective Desengaño and Disinterested Dedication

Chapter 6. A Political Novel: Representation of an Idealized World versus Contemporary Reality

The Baroque Age: Aesthetics of the Ideal, Realism, and the Unrepresentable

Barataria as Anti-Utopia of a Perfectly Artificial State

Knowing One’s Limits and Becoming Oneself: Sancho in “Hell”

The Contemporary Expulsion Drama and the Apotheosis of Fiction

The Realistic Political Novel as an Overture to Modernity

Barcelona and the New Materialism

Chapter 7. The Passion of Sancho Panza and the Death of Don Quixote

The Wise Fool—like master like servant: Sancho’s Governance

Sancho’s Assuming the Lead Position in the Duo

Visionary Revisitations—Sancho in the Position of the Christ Figure

Altisidora’s Invention of a Visionary Revelation

Don Quixote’s Death and Bequest—The Heroism of the Common Person?

The Christian Death of Alonso Quijano—and Sancho’s Passion to Live

Chapter 8. The Metaphysics of Fiction

The Force of Fiction

Real Tragedy in Fiction—Carl Schmitt

Ambiguity of Fictive Truth in Epic Tradition and its Modern Parody

What Makes a Book of Poetic Literature Great—or Revelatory?

The Integration of Fiction into Reality and Vice Versa—Vargas Llosa and Borges

Self-reflection at the Juncture of Fiction and Ultimate Reality

The Apophatic in Literature—An Aesthetic Dimension of the Real

Chapter 9. Philosophies of Quixotism

Unamuno’s Quixotesque Turning of Philosophy into Religion

Ortega’s Cervantesque Philosophy of Desengaño as a Theory of Genres

Unamuno on Quixotism as the True Philosophy and Religion of the Spanish People

Unamuno’s Staging of the Battle between Reason and Faith

The Novel as Philosophy, Don Quixote as Tragicomedy

Towards Ortega’s Philosophy of Relations as a Type of Secular Revelation

Maria Zambrano’s Mediation of Two Philosophical Masters

A Parting Reflection

Index

William Franke is Professor of Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. He is currently Professor in Residence at the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence (Villa I Tatti) and Senior Fellow of the International Institute for Hermeneutics. He has been Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Macao, Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Navarra, and Fulbright-University of Salzburg Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology and the Study of Religions. His books include A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014); The Universality of What is Not (2020); Poetry and Apocalypse (2009);On What Cannot Be Said (2007); Dante and the Sense of Transgression (2013); Dante’s Interpretive Journey (1996); A Theology of Literature (2018); Divine Vision of Dante’s Paradiso (2021); The Vita Nuova and the New Testament (2021), and many more.