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. Part II of Don Quixote is the far richer part for its metaliterary reflection on the novel itself as a genre and on life as such seen through the lens of self-reflection. The author has treated the problematic nature of modern self-reflexivity as originally theological in nature in previous publications (notably Dante?s Paradiso and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought: Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-Reflection, Routledge, 2021). The present endeavor expands this overall intellectual project, extending it into detailed consideration of what is recognizably another nodal great work inaugurating unprecedented forms of self-reflection in the early modern period. Reading the founding texts of literary and cultural tradition in this negative-theological key proves crucial to allowing them to release the full force of their religious vision in the present age, despite their sometimes obstinate secularity.

This reading absorbs and reconciles the religious and secular readings of Miguel de Unamuno and Jose Ortega y Gasset, two of Spain?s 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 critiques the limits of reason itself and opens toward an unfathomable (un)ground of All. Such speculative interpretation performs a synthesis of the secularizing and sacralizing tendencies that are both sublimely operative in the text of the Quixote. It thereby enables the work to emerge in the fully parodic and paradoxical vitality that other interpretations, governed by one paradigm or the other, access only partially. Rather than falling into one camp or the other, the proposed approach combines and resources both heritages, sacred and secular, in their deepest synergisms. 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

The 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

The Dialectic of Self-reflection and Negative Theology

Chapter 3 Negative Theology of the Novel

The Novel as Breaking Down the Separation of Styles—Auerbach

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

Fiction and Realization of the Ideal

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 Into 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 Role 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

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—Reason’s Self-undermining

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 Francesco de Dombrowski 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 Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology and the Study of Religions at the University of Salzburg. His books includeOn What Cannot Be Said (2007); Poetry and Apocalypse (2009);Dante and the Sense of Transgression (2013); A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014); The Revelation of Imagination (2015); Secular Scriptures (2016); A Theology of Literature (2018); The Universality of What is Not (2020); The Divine Vision of Dante’s Paradiso (2021); The Vita Nuova and the New Testament (2021); Dantologies (2024); and numerous others.