Cervantes's Confidence Games and the Refashioning of Totality

Abstract

Georg Lukacs's correlation of the origins of the novel with the disappearance of transcendental values established a line of theoretical reflection on the importance of this genre for the understanding of Modernity. His treatment of Don Quijoteas the textual watershed in the configuration of the genre is laden with implications for the speculative or even normative significance of this work. Lukacs was not, of course, the first to accord Cervantes's masterpiece a historic-philosophical role or to consider its formative influence on the development of the novel, but he was the first to situate this work at the axis of a reflection on the historical necessity and the philosophic presuppositions of the genre. The Romantic forefathers of modern aesthetics (Schlegel, Schelling, Hegel) had already called attention to the concentration of new literary conditions in Cervantes's text, while two years before the publication of Lukacs's Theory of the Novel (1916), the Spanish philosopherJose Ortega y Gasset titled his first book Meditations on Quixote (Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914). Still earlier, the late Romantic essayist and religious thinker Miguel de Unamuno had made Cervantes's hero the object of a meditation in the manner of spiritual exercises. Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905) is an Imitatio of sorts, a subjective rewriting of Cervantes's novel filled with ad hoc harangues and a high-pitched lyricism typical of Unamuno's style. A rigorous and informative analysis of the philosophical relations between Lukacs and these Spanish authors, both with respect to their engagement of Hegelianism and their responses to the philosophical possibilities of Cervantes's work, is available (Cascardi 1987). My pur-