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Summary
CHOICE 1998 Outstanding Academic Book
Traces the history of chivalric fiction in Western Europe, from the earliest Celtic tales to the conflict between romance and realism in Don Quixote.
The Endless Text is the first study to trace the history of chivalric fiction in Western Europe, from the earliest Celtic tales to the conflict between romance and realism in Don Quixote. A set of specific rhetorical devices are traced through the development of medieval romance in the works of Chretien de Troyes, and a surprising number of these devices survive in Don Quixote: the troubled relationship between narrator and hero, the consistent image of the hero in contrast to the fluctuating portrayals of women, and the ways in which problems of retelling the story become part of the story itself.
An integral part of this rhetorical migration was the unstable referential value of the lexicon: for example, fish platters became holy chalices, and gods became heroes while goddesses and Otherworld women became evil enchantresses. It was this linguistic revolution that created the "hermeneutics of romance" and forced readers to interpret the unstable signs embedded in the text. Fear of how this played out in the reader's consciousness was the basis for the condemnation of romance by church and state. Ultimately, this critical approach provides a new formula for rereading Don Quixote, one that reinterprets the questions of what makes or unmakes a hero, what is free will in relation to destiny, and how the language of women differs from that of men.
"Don Quixote establishes in this book a dialogue with its own proto-history, namely, romance. What makes this study extraordinary is how its conclusions about the relations between romance and feminism, male canon formation, and others, definitely project the text, in a decisive way, toward the present and the future and less toward tradition. This uncovering of many elements from the past is elaborated as truly relevant to our postmodern condition, and presented as a challenge to traditional logocentrism and, in that sense, it is a true critical tour de force.
"I like both the originality and the readability of this book, the development of a new hermeneutic and the resulting new reading of a classic text. I would not be surprised if, as a result of the publication of this book, specialists begin talking of a new kind of identifiable interpretive stand, similar to the 'Castro reading' or the 'El Saffar reading'--a 'Dudley reading' of Don Quixote." -- Francisco LaRubia-Prado, Georgetown University
Edward Dudley is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at State University of New York at Buffalo. He has coedited El Cuento; The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism; and American Attitudes Toward Foreign Languages and Foreign Cultures.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
A Prolegomenon for Romance: In The Beginning There Was Trouble with the Word
1. The Endless Text
"I Read; Therefore I Am": The Romance Discourse of Celtic Storytellers, Chrétien de Troyes, and Cervantes
Arthurian and "Other" Stories
The Trouble with Texts and the Blindness of Institutional Readings
The Hermeneutics of Unbelief
Why Real Men Don't Read Romance
What Happened to Romance: Transformation as Literary Form
2. The Celtic Reserve
Ireland, Wales and France
Logocentrism versus Romance
Celtic Narrative as Knowledge
The Hidden Text in Romance: Ontological and Epistemological Arrangements for Heroes, Heroines, and Narratives
Peredur/Perceval and the Grail Configuration: One Hero Two Ways
Reading and Romance
Gods and Closure: Ritual as Logos in Peredur
Peredur: The Bifurcated Epistemological Powers of the Hero
Perceval, The Inner Text
Other Suppressions of the Grail Castle
Chrétien's Perceval: The Knight of the Marche /Border Lord
Chrétien and the Art of the Impossible
Prologue to the Challenge
3. Don Quixote: The Reluctant Romance
The Story of the Name and the Name of the Story: Quijote>Quijada/Quesada/Quejana/Quijana/Quijano, etc., or Paradigms of Referentiality
The God of Thieves and Tricky Texts: The Inn of the Pig
The Hero's Arrival and Reception into the World of Romance
The Language of Chiasmus
The Hidden Story of a Hero
The Song of the Singer and His Song
The Windmill of Hell
The Danger at the Mill
The Story of the Three Mills as the Story of the Text
Mills, Herms, Marks, Borders
Disguise and Explain but Take No Prisoners
The Romance of Hermeneutics
Hermeneutics as Eros
The Inn of the Two Genres
Ginés versus Cardenio
The Stolen Language of the Picaresque versus the Forgotten Language of Women
The Revenge of Romance
Entrelacement versus Logocentrism
The Language of Dorotea and the Discourse of Disjunction
Communicative Incompetence
Otherworld Languages
Sailing to Byzantium
The Micomicona Artifice
Errancy as Artifice
Rescued by Romance: A Feminist Hermeneutic
The Importance of Losing Your Head
Spelling and Un-spelling Languages
The Performative Power of Language: The Celtic Geiss and Other Traumaturgical Acts
The Riddle of the Name
Reading beyond the Apocalypse: The Riddle of Dorotea
Coda: The Dark Night of the Word—A Sign of Trouble
